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.

Calamy gets to show off her astonishing dynamic range as an actor, adept at comedy, anxiety, maternal rage and kittenish coquetry, all in the space of a single scene.

The film would be in the general neighborhood of irresistible if not for the wonky mechanics of story and character that convey a conflicted impression of Hart’s onscreen persona.

It’s a fresh spin that feels awfully stale, a Samaritan less good and more mediocre.

Jones skilfully cranks up the creepiness a notch at a time with an ominous soundtrack and stylish lighting, until the dial is way past 11 and into grand guignol territory by the end.

At 88, Raven is still performing – perched on a stool – as his alter ego Maisie Trollette. In this affectionate if slight documentary, he tells a story or two, though perhaps not enough to fill a book.

It’s a very funny film, sending-up human absurdities without being too mean. Cruz is a talented comedian, but she smartly plays it straight-ish here. You never doubt for a moment Lola is the real deal. Nor that Cruz is either.

This tale of freelance underworld fixer Akilla Brown, played with careworn wisdom by Saul Williams, doesn’t live up to its sharp tailoring and has too much faith in fatigued beats from the gangster-film locker.

Mr Malcolm’s List has no great ambitions other than to amuse. But that is always harder than it looks.

The director is Christopher Nelius, himself a surfer, who has done a brilliant job with editor Julie-Anne De Ruvo of assembling the archive to capture the sport at a moment in time, all youth and energy. Smartly, he lets this exceptional group of funny, tough, talented women surfers, now in their 50s, do the talking.

This is a well-made film and nice looking, but there’s a tiresome predictability to a few too many scenes. It is a franchise that feels like it’s hit the rocks.

Bonneville’s performance will linger, the film not so much.

August might be a washout so far for the industry but Beast couldn’t be arriving at a more apt time, a thrilling, if throwaway, reminder of the fun to be had while watching a B-movie bringing its A-game.

Super Hero gamely tries to explain the backstory a bit at the beginning, but trying to keep up as we are plunged into a world of bad guys with outrageous quiffs, super-skilled preschoolers and green-skinned martial arts masters with droopy forehead antennae is quite futile. If, however, you can relax and just let it wash over you, Super Hero’s eye candy animation is mesmeric.

Here is a documentary for anyone who’s ever suffered from impostor syndrome or ever fantasised about going back in time to their school days, to reverse all those heartbreaks and humiliations. In other words: all of us.

Its affect is warm and reassuring, its methods for affirming that everything’s gonna be all right are cozy and tame, especially in regards to young motherhood.

This romcom set in a Manhattan publishing house is about as bland and as easily consumed as a cone of soft-serve ice-cream on a hot day. It’s essentially a sticky extrusion of sugar, trans fats and trapped air in cinematic form.

The whole thing is performed with relish and high spirits, and the digital fabrications of the Tower itself, rising out of the ground in stages with hair-raisingly dangerous structural work, are entertainingly contrived.

Fizzy and bubbly, the film feels like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day, leaving us with a pleasant reminder of the thrills that summer can bring.

What makes the film so engrossing is how much attention the film-makers give to Lee’s complicated life after prison.

This is the cinematic equivalent of the stopped clock telling the right time twice a day: a film full of stylistic overkill suddenly runs into the material that justifies it.

The most disappointing thing about the film is that it has none of the spark or originality of the first one and just parasitically drains its source material, incorporating details like the creepy black-light drawings and the borderline paedophilic subtext without adding anything substantial.

The most surprising among them being Gary Oldman. The actor, an English emigrant to California like Muybridge himself, makes some acute observations about Muybridge’s style, technique and mien and adds a bit of Hollywood pizzazz to a story that’s crying out for a biopic.