A wild detour chock-a-block with wild detours, Drive-Away Dolls comes from an artist regaining his capacity to take pleasure in the process, no matter if that means slackening the laser-focused perfectionist streak evident even in his earlier comedies. Contrary to its easygoing casual gait, this is an essential work in the Coen corpus, an evolution more than a regression or sacrifice. It’s the rare case in which a preponderance of dick jokes heralds a newfound advance in maturity.

You’ll Never Find Me builds a profoundly creepy and spiralling momentum before everything comes together in a shockingly brilliant final act with twists that nobody will see coming – or be able to forget.

Little Wing is overall an odd, unaffecting mess, other than, again, the pigeons, who look majestic on camera.

This film opens up the storytelling throttle with a throaty growl, delivering the doomy romance of an old-fashioned western and the thrills of a mob drama.

Mooney and Winter’s horror comedy may be all over the place, and unserious to its own detriment, but at least they commit to the bit.

Cabrini’s story is rather absorbing and the film offers a lushly mounted portrait of life in 1880s New York, when immigration was just as much of a contentious issue as it is today.

You come to the Road House for a good time and some knuckle-cracking fights, and on that front, this film delivers, owing to some truly impressive stunt work, a fully convincing performance from Gyllenhaal in Southpaw form, and a crackling screen debut from UFC champ-cum-entertainer Conor McGregor.

If Damsel doesn’t exactly rewrite the storybook, it makes for a competent rework of it, a rousing revenge saga that provides a thin yet encouraging message for its younger female audience and a balm for those older viewers who grew up being spoon-fed the same old gendered cliches.

Aiming for more fun is no bad thing but Imaginary is far too dumb and ungainly to move at the pace required and bring the thrills it should, a theme park ride that should be closed for repairs.

The happy ending redemption narrative is not entirely earned.

Copa 71 is a revolutionary political parable that goes beyond football.

There are a few laughs but, at nearly two hours, Ricky Stanicky far outstays its welcome.

Each new sentence adds more: more complexity, more woman.

The rhetoric here is slippery as a Pentecostal snake bathed in holy snake oil, to the point where you almost have to admire the film-makers’ tenacity – especially when it comes to swirly-whirly visual effects showing near-abstract pearly gates and deities presenting themselves as rays of luminosity, like celestial lightbulbs.

The camera’s gaze isn’t pitiless but there isn’t a scrap of sentimentality – just an unflinching willingness to look at all of life straight on, without blinking.

It’s shallow and insouciant, adding up to precisely nothing at all, but carried off with panache.

The panoramic intelligence of this film is a wonder.

The stupidity of it all is certainly diverting but it’s all too scattershot and at times stiflingly portentous to cross over into pure camp.

It is an invigorating and enlivening film.

Director Gonzalo López-Gallego creates a strong frame around the characters in both visual and narrative terms, while a lovely score credited to Remate, mixed with well-chosen soundtrack cuts, creates a limpid poignancy.

It’s a depressing seaside postcard of a film.

It’s a spaceflight to nowhere.

The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s monumental Dune adaptation lands with a sternum-juddering crash; it’s another shroom of a film, an epic sci-fi hallucination whose images speak of fascism and imperialism, of guerrilla resistance and romance.

Matt Vesely’s impressive debut ably stakes out its own territory, not least in the vast distances covered by a single on-screen actor and a handful of vocal performances.

Miraculously this film is never silly. The recreation of stone age life feels unexpectedly convincing – partly I suspect, because of the sensible decision to have the actors speak a made-up stone age language instead of English (bolted together, apparently, from bits of Arabic, Basque and Sanskrit).

It is entirely gripping and a witty and unnerving way of representing the mysterious silence of animals and a future world in which human beings can no longer exist.

It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.

A Different Man is a slog, made worse by the fact that it seems to mistake darkness for insight.