It has that rare and unmistakable look of an event movie that was huge fun to assemble. Whether you’re watching in Hindi, Tamil or Telugu – or reliant on English subtitles – much of that enjoyment does translate.

At two hours, the film feels a little long, but this is a heartfelt and human drama with the texture of truth and characters to care about.

It’s a gentle, charming study of loneliness.

This is the sort of British movie that I can imagine being made by Michael Reeves or Robin Hardy back in the 60s and 70s, drama that’s all about strong characterisation and heady atmosphere.

There are some riveting revelations here.

After India decriminalised homosexuality last September, many wondered anew: what would a Bollywood romcom look and sound like with a non-straight protagonist? The answer, it transpires, is: much the same as any other Bollywood romcom.

The combination of WTF casting and glaring technical limitation proves so distracting you can barely focus on the script’s new intel.

If gym buff Henry Cavill really is quitting the role in the movies, as has been rumoured, the film-makers could do worse than to follow the direction here, opening a vacancy for a skinny, long-haired Superman with an earnest hipstery vibe that screams Adam Driver.

It really is such a blatant copycat job, ripping off Cars note for note and lifting so many elements – from talking driverless cars to the dim-witted, buck-toothed sidekick – they might as well have called it Carz.

With its clifftop bullfights, expansive Pritam songs and squillion-rupee budget, nobody is likely to come out feeling short-changed. Yet the sight of multigenerational superstars navigating a messily unravelling plot suggests Kalank’s lasting value may be as a carefully colour-graded selfie of an industry – and, in this election year, perhaps an entire nation – in flux.

Cheung shows promise as a shotmaker and stager of blunt-force action. If somebody cares to arm him with a script editor and production grants, we could have a discovery of sorts on our hands.

This intelligently performed film is still a welcome look at a vital and underappreciated duty of state.

Bharat’s Achilles heel is its desire to pack so much in, at headspinning pace, tossing causality to the wind. Zafar reduces history to one damn thing after another, resulting in a 150-minute fire sale of period costumes and abandoned story beats.

After a lax first half, Palm Beach slowly settles into a groove, growing in complexity and nuance. However, Ward’s laidback approach is not remotely cinematic (this feels more like a filmed play), and never is there a sense of urgency or stakes.

Our kids deserve storytelling that has more wit, and animation with better design, but I suppose this will do at a pinch.

The best of this is Yorke’s music, which is fierce and propulsive. But, as visual spectacle, there is a strong so-what? factor.

A whimsical, good-natured romp, sure, but one that’s only mildly amusing.

The gusto and pace put many of 2019’s American blockbusters to shame, and – right through to a wildly overcranked final act that throws up surprises like spindrift – Lee balances vertiginous, windswept set-pieces with satisfying character beats.

With well-timed rhythms and backchat, the ensemble is quite credible as a gaggle of slightly obnoxious, mildly likable millennials on the brink of middle age.

It’s cheesy, it’s stupid, but it’s also really quite charming.

With Hewlett Jr often chronicling events in cool monochrome, shooting in close proximity if not exactly total intimacy, this snappy scrapbook tips the hat to the infectious creativity of Albarn’s travelling circus.

Scalpello’s film is livelier pulp than the absence of advance fanfare would suggest.

There’s a puppyish charm here.

The result is as long and as lavish an advert as has ever been produced for the Chinese emergency services. It’s just you might reasonably want your films a little more stirring and challenging, and not quite so obviously rubber-stamped.

The hits comes thick and fast, tightly arranged and slickly performed, but this lineup of well-preserved mostly male musicians gives the show the bland atmosphere of a celebrity tribute band.

Dyer’s intelligent and sensitive performance does wonders for a character who, on the page, looks like a male fantasy: a cool-girl psychiatric case, fun-loving, free-spirited and up for anything.

Virtually laugh-free, so-so looking with a seriously drippy musical number, it feels like a film slipped into cinemas over summer to sucker parents desperate to do something, anything, to fill a couple of hours.

The story has the makings of a gripping adventure, but something is lacking.

If you’re looking for a definitive Dalai Lama documentary, this narrow-focus film about his lifelong passion for science probably won’t cut it.

Here’s a modestly entertaining stop-motion family film with a fuzzily retro homemade aesthetic and a warming gentle Englishness: decent enough, but stretched perilously thin.

It is commonplace to say that some films are scary and mad. But this really is scary and mad.

Offering a set-piece every 10 minutes, a twist every 30, it’s pure pulp, but Vega knows how to sell it, and there are pearls of wisdom amid the nastiness. You’ll flinch, you’ll squirm, you’ll learn how to increase your survival chances should you be doused in gasoline and set alight.

The action is relentless and laboured with the odd pause for a sentimental lesson or moment of personal growth. StarDog may work its slight charms on young children, but older kids will feel they’ve seen smarter, funnier and cleverer before.

What propels us past the cliches of Intuition is a desire to see just how it all ties together, an assumption that a story as busily plotted as this must have an ace up its sleeve. But the last act is all fizzle, played out predictably with a mundanity that no amount of sweeping aerial shots can disguise.

We all share universals like hurt and hope, it’s just that their expression differs for McConnell. Like the act of childbirth itself, something that has happened trillions of times and yet always feels intimately personal, he’s one of us and one of a kind.

It is opaque, sometimes eccentrically comic, but intriguing.

Despite such a heavy context, the tone of the film is soft and pensive rather than polemical, constructed with a lightness of touch. It is often inspirational, in a quiet sort of way, and this is derived almost entirely from Hoosan himself.

For all its rough edges, there’s a pure-hearted passion for movie-making evident here, that’s often awol in slicker productions.

A very absorbing and valuable documentary about the creation of this artwork, which relates to Ai’s honourable record of using art as memorialist-activism.

Rogue isn’t offering nature-documentary realism, but director MJ Bassett is a former wildlife presenter whose interest in the South African grassland goes beyond mere backdrop.

Look beyond the lifelessly choreographed shootouts and you keep catching glimpses of ghosts: those of American industry, yes, but also those of the American action movie, once manufactured with a skill, verve and wit wholly absent from these painfully long 98 minutes.

It’s a movie whose subtle thoughts are in danger of being upstaged by a potent and erotic love story that surfaces and then disappears, leaving you uncertain whether finally to be more interested in that romance or the ruminations it has interrupted – or enlivened.

Here is a strange, opaque but interesting piece from Vietnamese film-maker Minh Quý Truong: an ethno-fictional essay movie.

What an emotional, satisfying film this is – and a whopping oversized calling card for everyone involved.

Some might find her style, leaving no thought unexamined, a bit rambling, but Paula is doing something interesting here.

Given how much CGI has come along since 2010, you’d expect a more convincing presentation of moving animals’ lips and eye muscles mimicking human expressions, but clearly the budget didn’t reach much beyond the tea budget for Tenet.

Slow paced and deploying minimal sound – apart from gentle bursts of voiceover and the sound of wings and planes taking off – this Swiss-set quasi-documentary about a bird sanctuary is relaxing to watch, like one of those machines that plays the sound of waves breaking to help you fall asleep.

Deadwyler’s soulful performance really grounds The Devil to Pay even as it cranks into revenge-movie mode. That said, if you want a slice of grim Americana to hunker down with, I’d go with Winter’s Bone or Frozen River.

An intriguing, somewhat abstract drama about a country descending into chaos.

The directing is serviceable, but some rote imagery – especially the ominous crow of death – also likes to hit us over the head. Reddick should have concentrated on giving the characters that kind of treatment.

It’s watchable, but don’t expect your mind to be blown – more gently prodded.

You could just as easily picture this film playing on the white walls of a gallery as a cinema – if either were open.

More like 92% generic.

Luridly coloured, handheld cinematography seems designed to distract from the shabbiness of the sets, while the muffled dialogue and too-loud backing tracks make it nigh on impossible to work out what the hell is going on.

With the addition of some decent jump-scares, Smiley Face Killers might have passed muster as a gender-swapped slasher flick, but it’s too under-researched to take seriously as true crime.

The twin storylines should undermine the film’s pace and focus. They don’t. There are some impressively spectacular shootouts in the streets and a Bourne-level rooftop chase, together with some very crunchy close-quarters martial arts.

Apart from anything else, it’s a spectacular action movie that begins with a shot that had me gasping: a Hong Kong protester on a rooftop is cornered by police and, in an attempt to escape, he tries climbing down the unstable scaffolding on the front of the building, with other protesters at street level screaming their alarm. The result is heartstopping.

The family dysfunction stuff is sensitively handled with some originality.

The Sinners’ sexy-schoolgirl-corpse aesthetic – part Twin Peaks, part Ariana Grande music video – is too ineptly executed to truly offend.

Chock full of delightful narrative surprises, imaginative genre tweaks, and warming performances from its two leads, this low-budget romcom-horror story is worth seeking out.

In all honesty, the path towards the film’s final feeble twist is as discernible as a neon pink jacket on the ski slopes. But Let It Snow is well put together, from the spectacular location work to the strong use of sound to the sort of arresting imagery that recalls the haute body horror of Midsommar.

The acting and directing are entirely terrible, the editing and pacing are so sluggish you’ll feel as if you’re going into a persistent vegetative state, the plot is tiresomely unthought-through, the split-screen shots don’t work and the musical score is so pointless and undifferentiated it sounds like elevator muzak.

It’s rare that a film captures so acutely the strange yet exhilarating feelings of two foreign bodies learning to adapt to each other, plus the difficulty of quickly disrobing your new lover of their jeans.

The script is full of such daft coincidences you keep expecting there will be a clever twist to explain – but no, it really is that lazily written. At least the cinematography (by Andrew Wheeler) has atmosphere and the Parisian shots are pretty.

Here’s a tale of chest-puffing courage and one-dimensional heroism from Russia during the second world war: an old-fashioned patriotic epic with slo-mo action scenes, intestines spewed on the battlefield and a soppy sentimental romance.

Strictly in terms of generating jumpscares and gross-out moments this is efficient enough as a cinematic machine, but the script credited to four different people including Lauder hasn’t got a lot of finesse or subtlety.

It’s a solid evening’s entertainment, assembled with an assurance rare at this budgetary level.

The daft title tries to promise splatterhouse brazenness, but actually fesses up to the film’s lack of imagination.

There’s no doubting that this film was more fun to make than it is to watch, although there is a sort of guilty pleasure in the spectacle of ruins and decay and wondering whether the film-makers actually found a real abandoned resort, or if it’s all a set.

The gags don’t always land, and some of the line deliveries plod painfully on, but there are moments that nail the strange comedy of sexual manners that must be navigated these days.

An illuminating, affecting piece of work.

The whole shooting match is pretty bloody, and as cheesy as the dairy aisle, but decent fun to watch.

Despite a few modish touches, this feels fundamentally very old-school, and not necessarily in a good way, right down to the repeated shots of people running away from fireballs in the background.

It’s a dry and somewhat lifeless tableau.

Ellie & Abbie celebrates queer love – romantic, familial, and intergenerational – in all its distinction. It’s nice, it’s different, and it’s delightful.

Not just a valuable crash course in digital-age hermeneutics, this is a gauntlet thrown down to film-makers with an old-fashioned belief in the truth.

This is a documentary about Australian motor sports legend Jack Brabham that aims to finesse the usual greatest-hits highlights by including some darker material: family strife, on-track bad behaviour, behind-the-scenes fallouts.

There’s nothing quite so naff and depressing as a British comedy misfire, and Me, Myself and Di is the real deal: a miserably unfunny romcom about Bolton’s answer to Bridget Jones.

It’s a shame that, for all of its unnerving tonal registers, not to mention a gorgeous score, Agony winds up with a painfully predictable ending.

Director-producer team David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky are past masters at putting this kind of film together, and Sunflowers has the usual mix of smoothly impressive visuals and authoritatively informed comment.

The deft camerawork showcases a dynamic Ethiopia – from tiny villages to the gritty underbelly of bustling Addis Ababa – and, let’s face it, everyone loves a good training montage.

This is engaging, intelligent film-making and Navas’s performers relax into the space that she creates for them.

The keynotes are anger, confusion and despair, and to some degree the film could have been opaque or contrived but its malaise ultimately finds expression in a truly horrible #MeToo moment, one of the most brutally plausible and unsettling I have seen in any film recently.

To begin, there are a couple of genuinely repulsive horror moments, but things get silly very quickly.

There’s a fair bit of posturing and radical chic happening in this movie and it’s sometimes a little glib. But the droll double-act chemistry between Paterson and Swinton is unexpectedly great, especially considering the enigmatically childlike and lovably humourless demeanour that Swinton often projects.

It all feels very dated and artless, like someone’s grandpa wrote the script 50 years ago and it was found in a drawer, then financed and made with a not inconsiderable budget for extras, vintage tanks and lots of old uniforms.

Like the drilling operation, this was a script in sore need of a clean-up operation.

This underdog, coming-of-age sports movie has a big heart but lacks the competency to execute its aspirational premise.

There’s now a well-trodden route for such musical travelogues, laid down by the likes of Buena Vista Social Club and Searching for Sugar Man, and while this lacks the polish or drama of either of those, it’s an engaging and uplifting journey.

The film squanders one or two promising plot ideas, and winds up making a hamfisted paean of praise to the idea of “open carry” gun ownership.

Night Drive doesn’t quite have enough time left to build on sharp interlocking performances by Dalah and Bowen and give their characters the full noir shadings the suitcase coaxes out of them. But it’s still an intriguing alternative routeing for LA night-owl cinema.

The film feels more like an authorised biography than a documentary, and for that reason it’s a little dull.

Plurality could have put a fresh twist on big-budget Hollywood efforts, but falls flat on both the production design and the narrative front.

Boarders is baggily structured, and feels overlong as a result. But it’s still an absorbing look at day-to-day involvement in a sport that’s a combination of dynamism and hyper-precision as an activity, but paradoxically nebulous and uncertain as a long-term career.

Partly set in the Mumbai underworld, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s boxing drama aims at Raging Bull grit but has an unfortunately irresistible drift towards late-Rocky melodrama.

The acting is daytime-soap standard and the tasteful, softcore sex is shot in such a way as to not look like actual sex. It’s unerotic, unsweaty and performed with expressionless faces. It feels like the film-makers know they have to do the sex bits, but don’t really want to actually do them.