This pious work is clearly designed to send believers into a state of ecstasy, but it may be a bit of a slog for the secular.

This schematic but sweet-natured comedy drama drives down a narrative track as straight and comfortingly predictable as an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine.

In short, this is not very good but there are worse things you could be watching as you fall asleep on the sofa after a heavy night’s drinking, which is exactly what it feels like this was designed for.

Saloum does not stop at simply reinterpreting the tropes of the western but wholly retools its influences with local flavours.

The movie noodles along amiably, but in the cold light of day, its quirks begin to feel like flaws.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, it superciliously pinches ideas from other films without quite understanding how and why they worked in the first place. It spoils its own ending simply by unveiling it, and in so doing shows that serious script work needed to be done on filling in the plot-holes and problems in a fantastically silly twist-reveal.

There are plenty of genuine laughs in this movie, but each of them seems to dovetail into a banshee-wail of pain.

Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.

It is a thoroughly intelligent production, a film festival event that could not exist in the rough-and-tumble of regular movie distribution but will I hope find a home on streaming services.

In a world marred by political hopelessness, Dry Ground Burning literally and figuratively sets the landscape on fire, and out of the ashes there is hope for a new order free from oppression.

Maybe there is a kind of saintliness in the film which is occasionally difficult to take, but it’s an accomplished, tremendously shot piece of work.

The film itself is terrifically accomplished and horribly gripping, with golden-age movie pastiche and dashes of Psycho and The Wizard of Oz.

Baker, with his scrawny frame and ratty features, can actually act, although he’s consistently upstaged by young Reid, as the stronger performer and the one with the more interesting character story here.

It’s spectacular and immersive, with a sensational opening. But it gets bogged down in its own one-note, one-tempo uproar and open-ended parkour camerawork – impressive though that is – and suffers from a number of sneaky false-flag get-out clauses that feel like a cop-out.

Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism.

Black church is all about feeling – the building, the people, the message. But Honk has none of that soul. At best, the film is an abstract commentary on a culture it doesn’t fully understand; at worst, it’s half-hearted creative license. And at this late stage, sadly, not even Jevus could save it.

Ava is made with superb technique and real style.

Pushing its luck at two hours, this eventually collapses in a heap of its own symbolism, barely unpacking the missing-persons intrigue it started out with. Nice views en route, but it’s a tale scribbled in haste on the back of a postcard.

In a way, it is amazing that Flatley is able to fulfil a 12-year-old boy’s fantasy of being a secret agent, with a 12-year-old’s idea of what a secret agent actually does. The acting and writing are like the non-sexy bits that come between the sexy bits in a porn film made in 1985.

It is made with real panache – so much panache, in fact, that you can forgive much of the film’s outrageous narcissism. Iñárritu could, if he chose, tell us an equally painful but less grandiose and auto-mythic story about his own life – but he has exercised his prerogative as an artist and given us this confection instead. It is certainly spectacular.

Love in the Villa is feel-good, not try-hard. Nothing ever rises to the level of unwatchable, but nothing has any distinctive staying power, either – you may catch the whiff of romance here and there, like passing by a bakery storefront, which constitute the most alluring shots of the movie.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is guileless, open-hearted, like an antiquarian bookseller’s dream of The Thief of Baghdad. It’s so defiantly out of step with fashion that there’s finally something faintly glorious about it.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.

The package is all tightly assembled but sticks to the traditional talking heads and archive clips format.

Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

The lowish-budget production values, gestural performances and blunt moralism of the scriptwriting puts this very much in the heightened dramatic tradition of mainstream Nigerian cinema, but Emelonye has an accessible style and has picked the topical subject of cybercrime, an approach which might broaden the film’s appeal.

There’s plenty of white-knuckle footage from the archive, as well as reflections of old muckers. Fiennes says that in his darkest, diciest moments in peril he imagined his heroes – the father and grandfather he never met – watching over him.

The film is grimly depressing in places. I covered my eyes during Google Earth time-lapse sequences showing the pace of deforestation in the Amazon; the violence of it is too much. And yet, there is Bitaté: still a teenager, he’s already a skilled communicator.