Thai writer-director Lee Thongkham’s horror feature is a giddy, gory little treat

It’s a fierce, thoughtful drama.

The whole thing is a bit bonkers but very beautiful too.

Every shot, every scene, every exchange from The Harder They Fall is combat-ready and garishly tensed for violence – and Samuel certainly brings the freaky mayhem, with gruesome relish and high energy. My feeling, though, is that there is a diminishing return on it, and the big reveal at the end is slightly silly and somehow retrospectively discloses that we haven’t really found out enough about Rufus Buck’s backstory.

A good-natured love story, doomed to flower and fade in the space of a single holiday, leaving behind the traditional coming-of-age realisation that friends and family are what’s important right now.

This is a Rocky Horror Picture Show of cluelessness and misjudged Judy Garlandification. I can imagine masochists getting together for Diana: The Musical parties, just to sing the most nightmarish lines along with the cast. The rest of us will need a long lie down.

Life can be desperately embarrassing in your first year at university when you are trying out new identities and personalities. This film replicates that agonising discomfort.

The script feels completely devoid of ideas about what the future of AI might look like. But what it does prove is that Pearce adds a basic layer of credibility to any film simply by showing up.

It’s at least a short film, clocking it at around 90 minutes, Serkis chopping off any extraneous fat, but it floats by and floats on without ever causing us to sit up and pay attention. Let there be no more.

It gets turgid in its final third but backed by director Gigi Saul Guerrero’s cartoonish punch, Barraza’s cantankerous grimace and hair-trigger rejoinders are a pure pleasure.

Its history assignment comes out pretty jumbled but this breezy YA vampire flick shrugs “whatever” and gets back to nailing the undead.

Nitram is a hypnotically disquieting movie.

There are imperfections here, especially near the end, but it’s the work of someone striving to stand out, to do something that will linger in the memory rather than fade into the over-populated homepage background.

There’s a definite sense that the makers couldn’t keep up with an ever-shifting case but wanted to meet a deadline nonetheless.

No Time To Die is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and perhaps most of all it is big: big action, big laughs, big stunts and however digitally it may have been contrived, and however wildly far-fetched, No Time To Die looks like it is taking place in the real world, a huge wide open space that we’re all longing for.

David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations.

Birds of Paradise, then, settles into a weird, slightly unsettling middle-ground – beautiful yet hollow, intriguing yet distanced, skillfully performed without much of a beating heart. Like its principal dancers, its a portrait of contrasts, though the friction here doesn’t generate much heat.

The movie hits its stride immediately with a taut, athletic urgency and it contains some superb images – particularly the eerie miracle of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, with Malcolm’s soldiers holding tree-branches over their heads in a restricted forest path and turning themselves into a spectacular river of boughs. This is a black-and-white world of violence and pain that scorches the retina.

Even for those who know about the Auschwitz Protocols – a report to which the pair contributed that has a weighty legacy in Holocaust history – the film is still intensely impactful. Inevitably, it is profoundly upsetting and disturbing.

Walken keeps you watching thanks to his inherent charisma, still undimmed in his late 70s.

With Civetta ably dashing off a couple of desperate kidnap attempts, The Gateway manages to scrabble over the line.

The streak of perversity at Intrusion’s centre nudges it above the norm, briefly waking us up before we sleepily click on something else.

The film’s freakiness and wooziness might have been a bit grating were it not for the glacial authority that Ferrara brings to every scene and shot – centred, of course, in the craggy gravitas of Dafoe himself.

The film-makers’ enthusiasm for his clarity of purpose is all well and good, but it does leave the film prone to hyperbole, and perhaps a more measured, sideways look at the weird dropout culture around climbing would have been more interesting.

There are also some well-observed touches, especially concerning the fleeting friendships dog-walkers make with each other and the diversity of London’s population.

Michael Gandolfini is goosebump-inducing as the young Tony Soprano, amid race riots and antagonism towards rival African American gangs.

It’s a poignant and compelling Venn diagram of passion and heartache.

True Things is not a bad film, exactly. The actors play it like they mean it, while the drama itself carries a natural dry charge. But it’s unambitious, sometimes clunky and doesn’t wrong-foot us once.