The miracle is that, from tragicomic opening up to a closing blast of Fontaines DC’s In the Modern World, Nino remains an affirmative experience throughout. Highly recommended.

The animation, nodding to anime, web cartoons and DIY punk aesthetics, has a rough-hewn, heartfelt charm. Not every joke lands, but the generous, camp sensibility buoys the material.

It acknowledges loss without overshadowing its protagonist, passionately insisting on personhood and dignity even as the heroine’s awareness drifts away.

The gags are plentiful. Old pals are still upright. But the sense of a finger wagging throughout can’t help but temper some of the fun.

Dosa and her editors resist catastrophising, allowing cracking ice, flowing water and silence to shoulder the film’s emotional weight.

At its best, this classy production reminds us why any film by this director deserves to be treated as a major event.

Stripped of the bells, the whistles and the cheering crowds, what remains is impossible to romanticise: an exhausted, tortured animal, a man performing hypermasculinity to the point of self-annihilation, and inexcusable barbarism.

Unfortunately, the film takes too long to get to a destination – a festering hive of human corruption – that’s inevitable given the first 20 minutes of boozing, humping and double dealing. The dialogue feels inauthentic. The decadence is forced. Nothing about this is very much fun. Mr Barry Lyndon need not beware.

At just 71 minutes, Erupcja is more sketch than statement. But its potent snapshot of roads not taken stays long after the credits have rolled.

All solid good fun. All professionally honed. A minor miracle.

For all the unfortunate messiness of the film’s later stages, Tuner, shot energetically by Lowell A Meyer, remains engaging throughout thanks to consistently original performances and notably witty dialogue.

Scoot McNairy gives Steve a dog-eared appeal that makes his irresponsibility inseparable from his warmth.

What keeps Power Ballad flowing is the juice of the dialogue, the comic humanity of the plotting and, above anything else, that charmingly ingenuous belief in pop music as something that truly matters. Good work.

Ejiofor cleverly manifests a character caught between psychic dislocation and male privilege; Reinsve’s wounds are deeper but palpable beneath her collected facade. Mark Duplass deepens the mystery as a cryptic scientist. The bigger stars, however, are Danny Vermette’s production design and Parsons’s exquisite direction.

The film’s musical flourishes and takedown of gay and straight cliches are always amusing, if old-school end of the pier.

The friendships feel equally authentic, even when the source material, largely composed of inner monologues, can sound polemic transposed to the big screen. Enda Walsh’s script compensates with beautifully constructed interpersonal relations between swipes at capitalism, landlords and generational decline. Simon Tindall’s fluid camerawork adds to a textured sense of place.

Minotaur works best as gallows humour: a chronicle of a selfish, privileged class trapped in systems they helped create, trying to bury bodies while pretending nothing has happened.

Shot in icy widescreen compositions against the stark beauty and avalanches of Norwegian precipices, Fjord sustains nail-biting tension across its lengthy running time through meticulous pacing, confirming the Palme d’Or laureate as one of contemporary cinema’s sharpest moral observers.

Visually, Paper Tiger recreates grimy late-1980s New York with exquisite period detail. Gray’s long-standing questioning of masculine braggadocio and the fallacy of the American dream remains one of the richest seams in US cinema.

At times the film-within-a-film structure is busy and overcomplicated. Almodóvar gradually pulls the threads together into a sharp and unexpectedly brilliant punchline. If only he had let us in on the joke a little earlier.

It’s an improvement on the 2022 movie, but Tom and Jerry have become supporting players in their own film, pushed aside for an assortment of flimsily sketched newcomers who absorb most of the screen time.

Mundane routines acquire a creeping dread, with barns, kitchens and farmyards becoming landscapes of unspoken terror as the heroine clucks her way through a compelling story.

The actors are unlikely to be confused with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur from the Capra flick, but they have a spring-fresh charm that remains pleasing throughout.

The Unknown reworks the body swap, a trope favoured by goofy romcoms, as elevated horror.

Though the final act regains some manic energy with ambitious, large-scale action, the composer Michael Abels’s relentless strings, overly extended gunplay and an unkillable creature become exhausting. And that’s before we are promised a sequel. It’s fun. But make the fun stop.

The film ultimately amounts to not much more than an empty distraction of the old school. That is not altogether a bad thing. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away we were happy with that on a rainy afternoon.

Shot in chiselled light by Lukasz Zal, who was behind the camera for the first two films in the trilogy, Fatherland also becomes, as the car moves eastwards, increasingly taken up with the ravages of grief and the responsibility of the artist. Those themes come together in a beautiful, sad epiphany that closes out a terse film with divine economy.

This picture is, in part, an attempt to assuage guilt at enjoying the teen-camp slasher at its most misogynistic and transphobic. It is also, as the director would admit, an amusing send-up of where they now find themselves.