This is an enjoyable rollercoaster of absurdities and poignancy, and a marvellous showcase for Stafiej’s talent.

Here is a film that accomplishes the difficult task of capturing the heroic trials of its subject without overly valorising and mythologising the real person.

It can be overwrought and even absurd but lively and heartfelt.

In narrative terms it never really develops any of its characters or relationships, yet its two utterly heartfelt lead performances make this a grimly authentic spectacle.

No one could doubt the technical mastery of this movie and its formal audacity. But for all that, I found something unliberating in its mercurial restlessness.

I’m not sure that Les Olympiades says anything too profound about any of its cast of characters, but Audiard achieves something very watchable and entertaining in anthologising them. This is a connoisseur date movie.

Nitram is a hypnotically disquieting movie.

In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.

Dumont’s secular crisis-of-faith drama has much to say about the corrosive effect of our 24-hour news culture. But it is also indecisive and compromised and plays out as a prolonged admission of defeat.

This is a well-intentioned film with some forthright performances, although there’s a fair bit of actorly shouting going on and the smiley spaciness of Bruni-Tedeschi can sometimes feel a bit affected.

It is all presented earnestly and engagingly, though self consciously, and if the political debates are unsolved, well, that could be because they are unsolved in real life. It’s certainly a heartening demonstration that new ideas can flourish in a religious society.

Neither of the two worlds of the film’s English title is illuminated clearly enough

Noé’s extraordinary film unfolds as a tale of murmured terrors and nameless dread, creeping softly around a cramped Paris apartment like a cinematic Grim Reaper.

Janiak has found a way to add new life to old material, gifting us with the rare horror franchise that makes us want more rather than less, the prospect of an expanded universe seeming less like a curse and more of a blessing.

Partly set in the Mumbai underworld, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s boxing drama aims at Raging Bull grit but has an unfortunately irresistible drift towards late-Rocky melodrama.

There is just too much going on, and the movie doubles in hecticness with every minute that passes, which may have you rummaging around for a couple of paracetamol.

Even when it’s trying too hard, the very fact that it’s trying at all makes it hard to dislike. The rules might not make any sense but you’ll have fun playing along regardless.

The core issues of the film – its numbing swirls of rainbow light popping out every which way, the excruciating pop-culture catchphrases passed off as humor, LeBron’s stilted, if game, acting, the half-assedness with which it delivers the dusty moral to be yourself, the fact that it is unaccountably one half-hour longer than its predecessor – all seem minor in comparison with the insidious ulterior intentions that power this fandom dynamo.

With Red Rocket, Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine.

The graphic novel-inspired world of Gunpowder Milkshake isn’t unique, but it’s admirably committed and Papushado edges his film away from the danger of pastiche thanks to an equally committed cast.

The richness and strangeness of the comedy is somehow simply down to Dujardin’s frowningly serious and haughty face.

It’s tender and poignant, but might be a bit cloying were it not for Norton, who underplays it beautifully with a performance of tremendous depth and empathy.

What is invigorating about The Story of Film is that each new clip, each new comment, is an exercise in back to basics, an exercise in looking, and looking again and looking harder – something that’s even more difficult when it feels like we’re drowning in content.

Odd though the film is and full of peculiar needle drops showcasing classic tunes that don’t especially fit the action, the whole thing looks pretty good thanks to cinematographer Sean Price Williams.

For its sheer silliness and towering pointlessness, Julia Ducournau’s gonzo body-horror shaggy-dog story deserves some points.

Boarders is baggily structured, and feels overlong as a result. But it’s still an absorbing look at day-to-day involvement in a sport that’s a combination of dynamism and hyper-precision as an activity, but paradoxically nebulous and uncertain as a long-term career.

Where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur.

A Hero is an engaging and even intriguing film, but I wonder if its realist mannerisms are concealing a slightly unfocused story.