There’s a brutal efficiency to the storytelling, swiftly, heartlessly propelling us up and down the building, forcing us to bear witness to a great many horrors.

The film is at its most intriguing in its earlier half, when it simply takes you through the growing excitement within the scientific community as the reality of Crispr emerges.

I was sometimes captivated but often frustrated by this epic essay-film, a meditation on Germany and his own family history that is stark, fierce, austerely cerebral and almost four hours long.

Aside from the singular brawn of its leading man, this would-be springboard has nothing much worth launching. It’s a stack of wormed-over action tropes, and to make matters worse, the movie knows it – and yet does not know enough to spare us its missteps in the first place.

In making the worst stereotypes of America’s political poles as extreme as possible, and America’s divide as literal and violent as possible, The Hunt feigns a viewpoint rather than actually having one. It takes aim at everyone, redeeming no one. Which feels circular, and queasy, and right back where we started: some empty talk about a divided nation, and a film thats probably not worth this much conversation.

A clumsy, unfunny adaptation of a much-loved literary crime series

An odd attempt at genre-surfing that ends up well out of its depth.

Beneath the bro-friendly, fantasy-art trappings, Onward finds a little bit of that old Pixar magic.

Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis and Morrison herself explore her work and legacy in this fascinating documentary completed shortly before the Nobel-winning author’s death.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan saddled with a by-the-numbers script in a well-meaning but hackneyed Brit flick.

Vitalina Varela stars as herself in Pedro Costa’s bleak but beautiful film about a woman discovering the hidden life of her late husband.

It is a watchable, insouciant love story with some great incidental performances, although there is a sense of the shark being jumped 30 minutes from the end.

It is possible to come away from the film less than convinced, but very impressed by the sheer force of Petzold’s film-making talent (recently so stunning in his drama Transit) but which has been here deployed for something which is a bit flimsy and silly.

Charlatan is a film that does not quite satisfy the curiosity it arouses.

It is a deeply personal drama about culture, family, community and what it means to represent – though it can also be self-indulgent and even a bit self-involved, though this is arguably a function of the story.

Minamata is a forthright, heartfelt movie, an old-fashioned “issue picture” with a worthwhile story to tell about how communities can stand up to overweening corporations and how journalists dedicated to truthful news can help them.

Haley, who last directed the sweet and underseen Hearts Beat Loud, gives the film a stronger aesthetic than most Netflix teen offerings, and Fanning and Smith work hard at charming us into submission, but their hard-to-buy relationship isn’t quite the immersive ride-or-die love connection it needs to be, given the melodrama of the last act.

For all that this film has something exasperatingly opaque and inert about it, it has an uncompromising insistence that ideas matter. These people’s thoughts, although debatable, are not simply presented as absurd. Malmkrog is a long, demanding experience – a real festival event. But that bizarre dreamlike eruption lives on in the mind.

This is not animation which is there to exalt, or soothe, or celebrate human loveliness: it is animation which takes a fiercely miserable satirical stab at the world and itself, a language which is unreconciled, unaccommodated.

The whole thing looks as if it was dreamed up under the influence of a quality batch of LSD. I laughed out loud at the hokiest bits. But I’ve got to admit I was sucked in and genuinely scared, too.

Dark Waters is a movie that works marvellously well within its own generic terms, and perhaps after the fey disappointment of Todd Haynes’s previous, rather insufferable fantasy Wonderstruck, this tough, clear movie was what Haynes needed to clear his creative palate.

What DAU. Natasha shows is the bizarre way that, in totalitarian societies, the normal and the abnormal, the banal and the grotesque, and the human and the inhuman live together side by side.

As ever with Miike, the sheer profusion of material, the torrent of wacky creativity, means that there is always something to hold the attention. It’s bizarre and very unwholesome. But weirdly inspired.

Somehow Lorentzen shows that it is not the Ochoa family who are the bad guys, but the whole rotten system.

I’m not sure that I was completely on board with this film, which appears to have smoothly carpentered its narrative in the edit. Is it almost too good to be true?

It is a film with its heart in the right place, but the dialogue and characterisation are both plonkingly unconvincing.

The film is gorgeous to look at, all alpine meadow flowers and glorious green mountains. But the drama loses momentum pretty early on.

[A] bafflingly insipid, zestless, derivative film.