This is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain.

It’s a lovely slice of life, a heartfelt New York story – and judging from the brief burst of writing that we are permitted to hear, the postman can rest easy whether he is on stage or at work.

The Wizard of the Kremlin just feels pointless in its knowing cynicism, right up to the silly, unearned flourish of violence at the very end.

Basically, there is a contentment and calm here, an acceptance and a Zen simplicity that is a cleansing of the moviegoing palate, or perhaps the fiction-consuming palate in general. It is a film to savour.

I still can’t be convinced that Megalopolis is anything other than an (honourable) failure. But Figgis’s documentary is an absorbing success.

Finally, inevitably, at the end of the protracted tale, we get to the question of which of the two is the “real” monster. The answer, in this high-minded and eventually rather sanctified romance, would appear to be – neither of them.

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions.

The movie is clenched with its own sense of contemporary relevance and risky blurred lines, saddled with an almost deafening score that often grinds straight through the dialogue; the drama becomes an atonal quartet of self-consciousness.

This isn’t meant unkindly, but Vice Is Broke will be essential viewing for anybody who ever worked there, with its details about who had what job title and when.

Cine-narcissism like this is always tiresome, and it isn’t any more palatable in a European setting.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre and amusing new film has a predictably strong performance from Emma Stone, an intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score from Jerskin Fendrix and, most importantly, a wonderful montage finale – but frankly it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump.

Maybe this film, concluding as it does on a distinctive note of euphoric sentimentality, does not add up to quite as much as the director thinks; but it intrigues, it exhilarates and it shows that Sorrentino is Italian cinema’s heir to Antonioni.

Caught Stealing is a very enjoyable spectacle.

It’s bold, it’s shocking – and it’s utter nonsense.

The movie has a high gloss and sheen, like something by Nancy Meyers, which creates a diverting disconnect, yet it flinches from the recognisable, tragicomic reality of a bad marriage.

There’s a fair bit to enjoy here, with the club sometimes resembling a kind of senior-citizen X-Men group whose collective superpower is invisibility; old people can do things without people noticing them.

The film is a mildly diverting yet strangely dated caper, a watered-down Tarantino rip-off without a soul of its own.

It’s hard to stay mad at a movie for refusing to add things up, or resolve its mysteries in any traditionally satisfying ways, when getting lost with Qualley can be such a pleasure.

This solid roster of acting talent can’t do much about how frankly uninteresting and unfunny The Toxic Avenger is most of the time. As satire or spoof of both superhero movies and scary movies it is abysmally obsolete, and on its own terms as horror-comedy it achieves neither scares nor laughs.

It’s the audacious austerity of Farsi’s film-making that really makes the material sing.

It uses its supernatural premise to explore some very human behaviour.

Sex is earnest, but cerebral and challenging.

That Splitsville stays on track to the finish is mostly credit to chemistry – that ineffable, unpredictable thing between two, or three, or maybe four people, with just enough variation for each relationship here. Splitsville may take shots at the loose-boundaried, but they’re laced with truth: partnered or single, open or closed, we’re all working with the same raw material.

Trusty hands help in making the film feel grander especially when the emotion of the story, adapted by Dante’s Peak’s Les Bohem and Don’t Make Me Go’s Vera Herbert, can’t quite get us there.

If this hymn to love’s persistence wobbles occasionally, it’s good to see an independent British film going for broke.

Sadly, this tonally shaky and borderline-sociopathic outing doesn’t have the class or skill to be part of the much-needed renaissance for the genre.

Night Always Comes tries to be both seat-edge action thriller and searing social issue drama and while Caron is able to squeeze suspense out of the early, frenetic moments, there’s not enough emotional weight to the more human final act.

This sequel from Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto, co-written by the writer of the original, Derek Kolstad, really doesn’t have much of the humour and the storytelling chutzpah of the first film.