Mid-grade comedy Drac at best. Diverting for all that.

The jokes are funny and weird. At its heart, there is a story worth caring about.

Elliott Crosset Hove and Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson make for compelling adversaries in a wonderful terrible contest.

It is unfortunate that two directors and a screenwriter (Matthew Fogel) felt the need to shoehorn in an extended family and – groan – Oedipal crisis for both Mario and Donkey Kong. Despite this misstep, the film belts along with an assault of candy colours and a commendable command of canonical detail.

The film certainly invites fists to be pumped in celebration. It is less certain Air offers any meaningful critique of the society that gave us the sacred gutty.

By relocating a Parisian crime to the French Alps, Moll and his cinematographer Patrick Ghiringhelli visibly stifle Yohan’s frustrated inquiries. The comings and goings among the gruff, macho unit are not particularly interesting. But The Night of the 12th, which was nominated for 10 César Awards, winning in six categories, including best picture, is otherwise absorbing.

There is much rushing to little purpose. Too many dull contractual glitches get in the way of the enthusiastic performances.

Honour Among Thieves could have tidied away its plot more economically, but the leisurely pacing does allow us to connect with the surprisingly fleshy characters. It is no mean feat to make something so funny from such unpromising material. It is more impressive still to end on a genuinely moving note. A welcome surprise.

It’s not for everyone. Please Baby Please often forgets that it’s a musical, and the action is increasingly chaotic.

A terrific, gripping drama that will cross cultural borders with ease. Every nation has such stories.

Léa Mysius’s accomplished second feature is the time-travelling, olfactory-driven LGBTQ romance and family melodrama you couldn’t possibly have seen coming.

Extravagant horrors and psychological torments ensue. James Vandewater’s edits and Karim Hussain’s phantasmagoric visuals add to the anxiety and chaos.

It’s not world-building; it’s world-sprawling. Imagine Harry Potter. But with head-stomping.

God’s Creatures doesn’t quite manage its daring blend of maritime realism and Greek catastrophe. The huge final gesture feels just a little too heightened for this otherwise everyday world. The effort was, however, worth making. A bitter, unforgiving entertainment.

With its lurid libidinous action and over-the-top murders, Pearl is a jokey spin-off of a jokey film. Imagine – and we mean this as a compliment – the slasher equivalent of The Naked Gun 2. Offsetting the self-indulgence, Goth sinks her teeth into the goose-killing heroine and spits out all the feathers.

No other British film has, in a generation, done such imaginative work in restructuring romantic comedy. It is one of those rare films the audience didn’t know it really, really needed.

The kind of kids who hide behind the couch during Scooby-Doo may well feel emboldened by the fuzzy feelings, silly quips and toothless villains. But it all feels rather pointless for the non-meek community.

Neeson is, of course, perfectly capable of chewing through the quips while carrying the city’s sins on his broad shoulders. But he needs more help from a rigid script to make sense of a character that seems defined by archetype alone.

It is often argued that The Strokes are the last rock stars and that their Manhattan peers are the last great bohemians. It’s an Americentric view, but it’s gospel truth for this appealing if impressionistic time capsule.

It seems churlish to complain that a film about a global serial killer is unnecessarily brutal and nasty. But between blackmail victims splatting on the pavements of Piccadilly Circus to bodies frozen under snowy lakes, Luther: The Fallen Sun is as distasteful as it is silly.

The film fights hard to draw humour from the players’ often eccentric demeanours without holding them up to ridicule. For the most part it succeeds.

The film is not as taut as Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov’s similarly themed 2015 thriller, The Lesson, but its freewheeling authenticity gives it charm and momentum.

Michael B Jordan, who bossed the previous two rounds as Adonis Creed, shuffles behind the camera for a film that intersperses soapy sentiment with first-class acting duels.

The winner of the Ecumenical Jury Award at the 2022 Cannes Festival finds warmth and empathy in the unlikeliest and most unethical places.

Mostly, Joyland is a film of huge heart and empathy. Mirroring the hapless hero’s journey, it’s an unexpected romance.

Khan, like her documentarist heroine, clearly seeks to offer a balanced take on arranged marriage – opening non-Muslim viewers up to their own prejudices while admitting the restrictions. That balance proves, however, difficult to sustain in a genre that relies on a desperate, final rush to the airport (or whatever) as soul mates admit their attraction.

The thing is fun but, if we may be allowed an oxymoron, it is genuinely ersatz from ear to claw.

The powerful current Palme d’Or favourite features terrific performances from youthful leads Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele, claustrophobic cinematography from Frank van den Eeden, weepie-worthy orchestrations from Valentin Hadjadj, and meaningful musings on how we hide behind small-talk, and internalise pain and gender norms.

Playwright Florian Zeller’s third instalment – and second film – in a cycle that includes The Father is a muscular, devastating drama that ought to have featured more prominently in the protracted “awards conversation”.

Imagine a Roger Corman film made with the combined budgets of every Roger Corman film and you are halfway there.

If you scrunch up your eyes and tilt your head you could imagine yourself watching an avant-garde animation at a Brooklyn art house. But there is also, about it, something of the charming work that Oliver Postgate did for British children’s television in the 1970s.

Last Dance is frightfully indulgent, but, this being Soderbergh, it is also studded with delightful outbreaks of invention.

An elegantly structured film composed of clever, delicate movements, every aspect of Georgia Oakley’s debut feature – from Izabella Curry’s editing to Kirsty Halliday’s period costuming – is as restrained as Rosy McEwen’s excellent performance.

Polley allows bursts of weirdness and humour to punctuate deliberation that, though often abstract, never becomes alienatingly cerebral.

There is a lot to like here, not least Ray Winstone’s Papa Bear. The forests are Skittle-coloured. The set pieces are wild and kinetic. But it is Banderas’s star power that saves the day.

Despite the claustrophobic setting, Diop crafts an evocative modern retelling of Medea, with detailed notes on femininity, immigration and race.

This is a profoundly serious film, one concerned about our disregard for animals and our disintegrating ecosystems, but it is also restlessly alive.

The director of shockers such as Requiem for a Dream and Mother! has had his mainstream moments, but he has never before been quite so at home to tawdry soap opera.

Poitras’s biopic of Goldin is powered along by righteous fury: an engaging portrait of both the artist and her activism.

The dialogue is yellow-pack, the set-up is so silly you wonder why they didn’t parachute in a dinosaur or set off a volcanic explosion for good measure, and the sparsely populated commercial flight screams budgetary constraints. Still, it ticks along, makes merry, and everyone works hard and sweatily to put the “AAAAAAH” back into action.

The result is neither as sentimental nor as moving – if those adjectives can be separated – as the director’s more personal 20th century films. It does, however, feel complete in itself. Cleanly shot. Immaculately performed. And, no, you probably don’t need to know Spielberg from Carlsberg to have a good time.

For all Joachim Philippe and Virginie Surdue’s handsome cinematography, this lyrical documentary lacks focus and, more disappointingly, historical context. A missed opportunity.

The perfunctory attempts to address social issues do not really come off. But it works through its tolerable high concepts with a great deal of verve and charm.

It’s a cracking, effective thriller, powered by uneasiness, and made all the more potent by the recent death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old killed in police custody after being detained for violating the Islamic Republic’s dress code for women.

For all its confusion, Babylon really does function as celebration of an increasingly threatened medium.

The film arguably shares DNA with the psycho-geographical works of Pat Collins and Alan Gilsenan.

Alas, the film does slip towards industry-standard punch-ups in the last 15 minutes. But there is enough promise in this cheeky, witty, incisive shocker to let us look forward to inevitable sequels with something like enthusiasm.

The middle body of the picture, shot impeccably by Florian Hoffmeister, takes on the quality of an oblique ghost story as, struggling to prepare a performance of Mahler’s Fifth, she finds her fragile carapace creaking and cracking.

Mendes’s script, though it contains some memorable scenes, tries to do too much, as it takes on racial and sexual inequality, mental-health issues and, incongruously, the romance of cinema.

Against the distress, Chukwu and Deadwyler find purpose in Mamie’s transformation into a hugely influential civil rights activist. This is a woman’s account of striving for racial justice in the era of Jim Crow laws.

The film is sometimes too sleazy, but it is, more often, not sleazy enough.

An entirely non-professional cast makes it seem as if the director-editor Ana Pfaff and cinematographer Daniela Cajias simply happened upon every beautifully composed sequence. The effects can be slow-burning and occasionally a little shapeless, but they cast their dappled spell as the summer wears on.

The thing still works well enough as a middlebrow hankie dampener.

Wildcat remains a tense, diverting study of a man struggling with internal demons while doing his best for an initially helpless creature.

Corsage shares some obvious DNA with Pablo Larraín’s Spencer and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, but where those films swoon for their put-upon heroines, Krieps brings an unapologetic flintiness.

We’re accustomed to Dumont leapfrogging from one genre to another, but he has seldom attempted so many swerves and shifts as he manages here.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody plays by the rules of the TV movie to efficient, if scarcely groundbreaking, effect. It will change no minds about Whitney Houston.

The Pale Blue Eye is beautifully shot and absurdly plotted.

Working on a small budget, writer-director Alison Locke puts the confinement of one location in service of her claustrophobic script. A promising first feature.

No doubt millions will be have no difficulty ferreting out the emotional core and propelling The Way of Water to box office success. But the indulgence of it all causes one to yearn for the raw, propulsive action of Cameron’s first two Terminator movies.

The action is unsettling throughout. There is a pervasive sense of unspoken menace lurking just outside the frame (or somewhere in the near past or future). But it is also a celebration of uncomplicated human kindness.

Few film adaptations so awkwardly aligned deliver quite so many full-on belly laughs. It doesn’t exactly work but, no, we won’t throw “bore” at the filmmakers.

Though certainly at home to overcast misery, the film incorporates spooky, stop-motion animation and musical interludes that might have amused Ken Russell. It works in surprising ways.

It’s a lovely thing to behold, but who exactly is this for? Unlike Matteo Garrone’s sublime 2019 fantasy, a version that managed to be faithful, wildly imaginative and all-ages in appeal, this brooding musical veers wildly between primary school scatology, repeated journeys to the underworld and darkest history.

Between Kurtz and Stigter – a Dutch journalist who authored Atlas Of An Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 – no stone is left unturned.

The pretty pictures and silhouetted, sanitised sex will do well enough for Bridgerton fans, but the material has strayed so far from the source, one wonders why they kept the title.

The latest film from the Dardenne brothers, a heart-rending tale of misused immigrants in contemporary Belgium, arrives just two weeks after Frank Berry’s Aisha pondered similar misfortunes in Ireland. Both are roughly in the social-realist mode, but the tone and the perspectives are quite different.

Sadly, the unfunny, unexciting Violent Night fails to deliver on its substantial promise.

Save for some Skittle-coloured CG and cartoon violence, the original West End director Matthew Warchus puts a filmed version of the stage show onscreen. Theatre fans will be delighted; movie fans will wonder where the wide-angle chorus lines went to.

An exciting and often powerful piece of mainstream film-making that allows its heroes to emerge as normal people who make everyday mistakes. Highly recommended.

Bones and All deftly segues between teenage romance, hinterland tableaux and genuinely unsettling encounters.

For all that self-aware fuss, Glass Onion works darn well as a mystery romp. It is a little smooth to the touch, but there are beautiful chicanes along the route to a satisfactorily clamorous conclusion.

What we really needed was something in the vein of the second Scream film – a sequel that, rather than just deconstructing classic Disney tropes, satirised emerging conventions of the streaming sequel.

Perhaps Gray’s best film so far.

Named for a Buddhist concept referencing the transition between birth and death, Bardo may transport the viewer to a dream space but not perhaps the one Iñárritu intended. Zzzzz.

Aftersun’s greatest achievement is to gradually reveal the imminence of a tragedy that, though never explicitly confirmed, feels inescapable by the already celebrated final shot. It is hard to think of another film that has pulled off this trick so effectively.

Defiant, endlessly resourceful and gripping cinema.

Coogler and his team have pulled together a functional time-passer in difficult circumstances. As before, the costumes are a gorgeous exercise in Afrofuturist chic. The music neatly works ethnic elements in with triumphant orchestral swirls. And the actors are consistently strong.

In some ways it is Cartoon Saloon’s most “normal” film, but, stuffed with visual elan and powered by good nature, it confirms the studio’s desire to stretch in hitherto unexplored directions.

Living, which is composed entirely of delicate movements and earnest pleasantries, maintains a quietude and stiff upper lip in the face of tragedy.

Pugh’s emblematic, muddy-hemmed blue dress — designed by Odile Dicks-Mireaux — marks her out against the windswept exteriors. Not for the first time this year, she’s the standout in a film that, given the remarkable personnel involved, really ought to pack a greater punch.

The two lead actors are strong. The conversations around the museum amusingly tease out tensions between factions in the LGBT community. But Bros fails to satisfactorily map out its own space. Passes the time well enough. Doesn’t quite pull down the barriers.

Taking a leaf from Parasite, Barbarian both literally and figuratively plays with the idea that however unpleasant things seem there’s always a scarier, lower level.

For all the plum-on-the-nose satire, Östlund does not, however, fall into the trap of making every target a monster.

Another director might have fashioned Basic Instinct from such voyeuristic clay. Park dances with the material. Eschewing sex in favour of simmering sensuality, Decision to Leave coalesces into an intricate ballet between the main characters, Park’s careful choreography and Kim Ji-yong’s acrobatic camerawork.

The cast is fun. And any addition to the Henry Selick canon is a welcome addition indeed. A future Halloween classic.

Gleeson and Farrell play off one another in a perfect complement — sulky gorilla opposite enthusiastic puppy — that, as awards season kicks up a gear, has been entertaining premiere audiences on both red carpets and inside the auditorium.

Astonishingly, Black Adam does seem to have once had ambitions to say something big and important about the world. But any parallel with current unhappiness is drawn and then quickly dropped like the truly scalding potato it is.

A compelling and hopeful insight into the turbulence leading up to the 2021 coup.

Mackey, in particular, is a powerhouse. The young star is matched well with O’Connor’s carefully calibrated, appealingly earnest script, which approximates a modern sensibility without striking a false note or straying from Emily’s contemporaneous moors.

Nobody could mistake All Quiet on the Western Front for anything other than an anti-war film, but the deafening, careering action — shot in predictably desaturated tones by James Friend — still works to create an unhealthy surge in the viewer.

A winning cast, mostly drawn from the ranks of Gen Z, ensures that Rosaline’s spurned, sulky plans to steal Romeo back from Juliet can be fun.

Sadly, Prince’s estate refused the rights to the audio of Nothing Compares 2 U. That could have been a big problem, but her famous version’s status as the ghost that didn’t come to the feast adds mystery to an already hugely engaging film. For fans and the uninitiated alike.

A good-looking waste, but a waste nonetheless.

You will learn something of Agojie, the all-woman Dahomean army, from The Woman King, but this is largely popcorn-friendly fantasy pitched at maximum volume.

All of these parties try hard with a script that, while credited to Jen D’Angelo, doesn’t appear to have been entirely written as yet.

Strickland has expressed a passion for This is Spinal Tap and Flux Gourmet has much to do with how close confinement causes creative types to claw out one another’s eyes. The characters here are every bit as cleanly drawn as the members of that fictional rock group and, even if they generate less open affection, they also encourage one to take sides.

Colin Farrell’s central turn, a lovely, soulful study of melancholy, is one of his best performances to date.