Here is a niche drama about one of the most important chapters in the history of experimental jazz. It is however watchable, well acted and avoids the music-movie cliches – though I could have done without the fourth-wall-breaking lectures about the nature of jazz improvisation.

You can feel the struggle of trying to cram everything in and even at an unforgivably bloated 143 minutes, it’s both busy and hollow.

There are times when the writing and staging lay it on a little thick, though Beast never becomes too heavy-handed or on-the-nose, marking a significant step up for Atkins after his cheesy, Byron Bay-set 2022 drama Bosch & Rockit.

Its scope might be small but I found its emotional impact to be surprisingly big.

Director Eric Appel has worked on plenty of funny TV series, yet in place of slick professionalism, this movie feels Scotch-taped together.

Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.

Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure.

Leo Woodall’s breakout TV roles in The White Lotus and One Day offered a megawatt charisma, but for his biggest film role to date he dims it to a soft glow with gentle performance opposite Dustin Hoffman as one of a pair of New York piano tuners. And what a pair they are; they are a real pleasure to watch in an easy, unforced drama that mixes romcom moments with a relaxed crime thriller.

Despite a few sparky face-offs between the actors, Pressure feels destined for a less notable fate: to cause plenty of armchair naps once it hits streaming.

Far from reiterating tired binaries – tradition versus modernity, elders versus youngsters – the film embraces the beauty of contradictions with open arms. Even when the possibility of reconciliation appears out of reach, it is the effort to communicate – whether through words or art – that brings peace.

An absorbingly intimate, novelistically detailed procedural about the day-to-day, moment-by-moment lives of the Vichy administrators after the fall of France, mostly shot conventionally, sometimes jolting into an anachronistic dreamlike scenario on video.

The tension is capably managed and Magimel is a gargoyle of menace.

Teaching scenes in films always have a fascination for me, and these are tremendous; Mercier patiently, sometimes angrily, tries to get the students to appreciate the complexity, nuance, eroticism and social commentary in the frescoes and artwork.

With warmth and heartfelt passion, and a quintet of outstanding performances from young actors shot in looming closeup for so much of the time, Clio Barnard has created an absorbing and moving social-realist picture.

There is archival interest and historic drama in what Lennon has to say – and especially for me in his generous, open-minded comments about newer bands such as the B-52s and the Clash. But this is a disappointment.

The Dreamed Adventure is clearly the work of a director with a fluent, distinctive film-making language, but what she is trying to tell us is elusive.

The Esiris have created a seductive, mesmeric picture.

One for the fans … but some nostalgic entertainment here.

There is much that is valuable and interesting in this movie, although it is a little predictable in what it has to say and how it says it, though Campagne and Macchia give committed performances as secret lovers in the shadow of war.

For a film so unashamedly silly, it’s also incredibly, tiresomely un-fun and, by the end, laughably earnest, as if we should all be learning a very important lesson.

The Black Ball is handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed, bringing the puzzle pieces together in the edit and contriving an elegant, poignant cameo for Lorca himself, a kind of incidental choric figure who seems to intuit all the future triumphs and disasters of love and war. It is a rich and rewarding movie.

The Man I Love is an honestly intended and conceived movie, but that faintly baffling and strenuous lead performance sits uncomfortably.

The only mildly jolting sequence is the cold open, setting up a previous haunting with two friends, something the marketing team was clearly aware of, having essentially shown it in full in the first teaser trailer. It’s downhill from there, as we’re stuck with an anonymously written couple we struggle to root for as they face off with an antagonist we struggle to understand.

The results prove middling at best, not on any level dealing the knockout blow that religious conversion practice deserves; nor is it ever the campy scream the set-up might have licensed.

The film is an amazing feat of animal training and deft editing, and it’s all so weirdly cheering.

Fares’s gaunt, handsome face so eloquently conveys vanity, but also a poignant emotional woundedness, anxiety and self-pity.

Finding Emily shares DNA with Richard Curtis’s comedies – the same warm heart and charm, plus levels of cheesiness that some may find cringe. In the end I found it impossible to hate, though one or two performances felt a bit lacking in comic flair.

A sweet, odd diversion – more eccentric, maybe, than Travolta intended.