Based on the novel by Elena Ferrante, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s opening gambit as a writer-director is a brave charge at source material defined by flashbacks and far too many subplots.

Seydoux and Poupand bring plenty of emotional clout to their roles, even if the script straddles uncomfortably between verité and melodrama.

The film never attains the Shakespearean-sized tragedy of the Korean director’s Decision to Leave or the bludgeoning impact of OldBoy.

It’s certainly something to see – especially Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes and Jade Healy’s production design – and plenty to mull over but both the viewer and the film-maker should have guessed from the offset that there can only be one Barry Lyndon.

A perennially sun-dappled kitchen. Cast-iron pans. Belle-époque bustles. Gastroporn doesn’t come more XXX-rated than this insanely pretty, airily vacant livre de recettes.

There’s plenty of razzle dazzle here but little that passes for oomph.

Watching anonymous child after anonymous child arrive for treatment makes for grim and frustrating viewing. We want to know who these kids are, but the film does not. It’s the very antithesis of how hospital drama – narrational or otherwise – are supposed to function.

Occasionally frustrating, but worth getting frustrated about.

The new film, evocatively shot by Sean Bobbitt, feels like a trivial, if entertaining, diversion on the way to a more substantial closing fall.

It is 15 minutes too long and, with all the emotional and literal clamour, loses some of the intimacy you desire for a rural golden-age-of-crime lampoon.

A quiet character study pivoting around mum sex and elder care, it’s not the director’s best work but it’s streets ahead of this recent misfire.

The Eternal Daughter remains a dazzling double-header for Swinton, who, against all odds, disappears into both roles.

The film has its flaws, but worriers will find much with which to identify.

Straddling the current revival of the picaresque in US indie cinema (The Sweet East, Riddle of Fire) and cinéma vérité, this is a pleasing meander, skilfully directed, shot, and edited by the upcoming auteur siblings.

The camera dutifully records esteemed actors – including one Corrie veteran, as it happens – talking in beautifully appointed rooms, but it seldom finds the cinematic spark that might elevate the drama beyond a polished theatrical exercise.

Ultimately, we end up with an abundance of craft and a forest of lore wrapped around personal narratives too flimsy to sustain marching feet.

The seat-of-the-pants grit of the first film seems as distant as kitchen-sink verite.

As directed by Sophie Hyde, who made the recent Irish film Animals, the picture never fully collapses beneath its own compromises. Credit for that must go to Thompson and McCormack. You get a sense of actors from different generations relishing the opportunity to tug at the ragged screenplay like handsome dogs squabbling over an old blanket.

A lovely, pastoral pleasure that admits its share of blood-drawing barbs.

Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon features a luminous ensemble and arguably a career-high performance from Ethan Hawke, yet it’s hobbled by an aesthetic gamble so distracting, so patently absurd, that it nearly sinks the enterprise.

With looming grace and the fluffy heart of a Golden Labrador, Elordi, standing in for a departing Andrew Garfield, turns out to be the most swooning Goth heart-throb since Edward Scissorhands emerged from Vincent Price’s laboratory.

The sustained twitchy energy of the script amplifies the jangling nerves of Hanna’s fight-or-flight dilemma. But Liv’s weak-mindedness can feel implausible and the grandstanding denouement feels jarring and unearned.

We’re never properly spooked. The presence, ironically, lacks presence. An excellent cast and flashy film-making ensure we are entertained, nonetheless.

What is most conspicuously absence is a hint, in even the vaguest technical terms, of what made Bernstein such an admired conductor and composer. It is not enough to have people tell us (and him) he’s a genius. The film does, however, give us a dramatic tribute to the passion he put into his work.

Here is an interesting, beautifully acted if somewhat underpowered drama about the connections between the public and the personal in the life of a Ukrainian gymnast during the Maidan disturbances of 2014.

Not atypically for a portmanteau picture, this surprise winner from last year’s Venice film festival is intermittently arresting and wildly uneven.

A worthy, if workmanlike, tribute.

Anderson’s 11th movie is simultaneously furiously busy and curiously uneventful.