Following on from Harry Wootliff’s infertility romance, Only You, this confirms the British writer-director as an unmissable talent.

It falls to the charming cast to outshine the flimsy material. Gladstone and Tran are as warm and well-worn as a much-loved bed sweater. Bowen Yang thrums with millennial angst. Joan Chen steals scenes as Angela’s loudly gay-positive mother.

The zingers could be zippier. But what makes the film feel radical is its welcome and unwavering confidence in 2D animation as a comedic anvil. Sight gags pile up, frames stretch and snap, and the fourth wall is wobbly. In a genre increasingly marred by CG realism, Looney Tunes revels in its cartoonish artifice.

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.

F1 really is too thuddingly familiar for words. Drop a bowling ball off a cliff and you would be less sure of its trajectory.

In common with LeMond’s career, during which the interloping Yank won over spectators and rivals alike, The Last Rider proves a charm offensive.

The set pieces are well handled, but this prequel stands out most for its commitment to fleshy humanity.

We don’t demand hard realism from such a project, but a little more edge would have been nice. Solid, middlebrow entertainment, nonetheless.

Even an actor as good as Craig struggles to make sense of that more sensitive, more sharing version of Bond. Too many opposing cogs are creaking within a psyche that has never been much at home to contradiction. Then, towards the close, it comes together in such stirring form that only the most awkward customer will leave unsatisfied.

For all the good work, however, the film fails to fully capture the madness of the response at home.

Just Mercy is commendably restrained in its courtroom scenes – there is none of the contempt-baiting wailing and gnashing of teeth that too often characterises legal procedurals.

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

The cartoonish closing battles make it clear that, not for the first time, Gunn is striving for high trash, but what he achieves here is low garbage. Utterly charmless. Devoid of humanity. As funny as toothache.

Made within the communities it satirises, I Blame Society thrives on its own crotchety energy.

The picture doesn’t reach out and grab you. It doesn’t fling viscera in your face. It hangs around outside your house, half hidden in shadow, and gradually insinuates malaise. So, no, not comfort food.

If anything, The Unbearable Weight is not quite tricksy enough.

Already established as a wizard with buried irony, Pugh politely steals the film with a witty performance that makes sense of even the silliest moments.

More analysis of the films would have enriched this entertaining chronicle, but it remains a rollicking account of the most important movie partnership since Powell and Pressburger.

Recent cinematic representations of Jehovah’s Witnesses, notably in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, Richard Eyre’s The Children Act and Daniel Kokotajlo’s Apostasy, have not been kind to the Christian denomination. This compassionate story of puppy love – co-written and codirected by the former Witness Sarah Watts – shows more understanding towards the community, through conversations.

Working from a blackly comic script by Austin Kolodney, Van Sant fashions a shouty standoff in the tradition of Network and Dog Day Afternoon.

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.

Are we supposed to be scared or are we supposed to be laughing at the absurdity of it all? Happily, the actors throw enough energy at the screen to deflect any incoming frustration. An odd beast.

Director McLeod — another of Lee’s fellow students — has fun with contradictory accounts, tall tales and faulty memories in a film that pulls the rug just as effectively as its subject and inscrutable star do.

A rare historical epic that is connected to contemporary crises.

For all its cleverness it remains a dubious exercise...If none of this strikes you as very funny, even in the blackest of comedy, just wait for the rape scene later in the movie - not only is this not remotely funny, it is simply repulsive and indefensible whatever the context...Ultimately shallow and unconvincing and the result is a movie that is even more acutely disturbing than it was meant to be. [12 March 1993, p.11]

Baumbach’s characteristically barbed wit too often makes way for self-indulgence and sentimentality. Ruminations on fame as a hollow, unfulfilling enterprise have all the depth of a disposable contact lens.

It is equally a solid genre effort, characterised by gory set-pieces, discombobulating scenarios, and welcome lashings of feminist revenge.

Working from a libretto by the cult band Sparks, cult director Leos Carax’s English-language debut is unlikely to please mayonnaise mainstream tastes. But for those seeking surprises, spectacle, and shadows, Annette is a marvel like no other.

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 Surfer, for all its unpleasantness, offers encouraging evidence that there is still room for existential awkwardness in contemporary cinema. No better, odder man than Nicolas Cage to act that out as the catechism of surfism gains another worthy chapter.

That first (third) act functions effectively as a bewitching enigmatic short that gets away with its downbeat denouement. The audience can fill the gaps in whatever enigmatic way they see fit. Unfortunately the movie continues backwards into increasingly mawkish territory.

All You Need Is Death, craggy and rough-edged, may be in constant conversation with the distant past, but it also puts up signposts to the future for Irish horror cinema. It’s about time somebody found a name for this artistic movement (if it is yet that).

Too murky. Too little access to the character’s face. It takes a long, long time for the film to redeem itself with the biplane stunt you’ve seen on the poster.

Full marks for character and setting. Less enthusiastic hurrahs for narrative arc.

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.

The oppressively neon musical numbers and ominous pastoral pronouncements that “secular government was a mistake” are more convincing than the film’s late swerve into Giallo terrain. But the writer-director’s ideas about women as religious enforcers, complicit in their own subjugation, are fascinating.

An engaging chronicle, nonetheless.

A gentle, complex film that will pay rewatching.

The appearance of Malik Zidi rounds off a fine cast and introduces intriguing echoes of the amnesiac romance of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That and decent tech specs, including some nifty shots from veteran horror cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, offset the slightly cobbled-together feel of the material.

A fine yarn that arcs towards a memorable denouement.

We bounce from one adventure to another without settling into anything like a rhythm. But the nuanced acting and characterisation elevate a film that feels securely connected to a particular place and time. The Bronx has rarely been so affectionately evoked.

Arriving somewhat under the radar, Marley Morrison’s enchanting comedy makes something convincingly British of a form that the American indie cadre has exploited to near exhaustion.

The Palestinian submission for international picture at the incoming Academy Awards is a handsome, old-fashioned production that, even when it is telling us things we didn’t know, confirms all our worst suspicions about the British colonial experience in the Holy Land.

A glossy package. Not quite enough inside.

James Watkins’s version easily justifies its independent existence, however. Four first-rate performances find new energies in the story. The shift in nationalities adds other interesting angles.

Brian and Charles themselves, meanwhile, make for an irresistible two-step in a delightful tale of friendship and loneliness, dramatised and written in beats that make one think of Wallace & Gromit without the clay.

The central father-son plotline feels a little too modest to accommodate Wyatt Garfield’s impressively shot action set pieces, Nathan Parker’s ambitious production design and scathing social commentary, but this remains an impressive and visually innovative directorial debut for the film-makers.

Though there are some clunking flaws... Cicada has the compact shape of an elegant short story – open-ended, yet not incomplete.

The dialogue in one pathetically desperate audition sequence is withering in its authenticity. But credit must go to Anderson for turning this staple of drama – like Olivier in The Entertainer, a hopeless victim of changing fashion – into a living, breathing human being.

Hang in there and it’s rewardingly novel, touchingly human and agreeably nutty.

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.

Cowboys nonetheless gets by on goodwill and a passion for compromised Americana. Only a lowdown dirty heel would cuss it out.

In an ideal world, it’ll do Greatest Showman box office business. Mind you, in an ideal world, Dinklage’s forlorn turn would be nominated for an Oscar.

Wonka is not any sort of disaster. It is made with enormous professionalism. It abounds with good nature. And it does offer at least one fascinating titbit about the protagonist’s background.

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.

Mirrored and paired scenes abound in Cleary’s clever screenplay.

It’s a fascinating delve or “kaleidoscope” as the film-makers have it. The film is as complete a portrait as we may ever get.

For all its undeniable pleasures, Dumb Money, derived from Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network, feels just a little shallow.

We are left with a properly entertaining drama that gets across the technical details with great efficiency. A good job of work by a reliable Hollywood professional.

Husbands longueurs and wobbly shots of improvised tangents never congeal into anything as satisfying as Cassavetes s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Gloria or A Woman Under the Influence. But, in contrast with director s mean-spirited inheritors, the film does own that husbands even rubbish ones are people too. [28 Sep 2012, p.13]

At its best The Return recalls Pier Paolo Pasolini’s sublime, pared-back Medea, even if the gritty realism of Uberto Pasolini (no relation) does leave one yearning for the magic of that earlier film and the source material.

The film is good enough to deserve the sequels towards which it there gestures.

Elio is a half-formed thing. The basic story beats suggest that subplots and jokes have gone missing. Even the buddy comedy between Elio and Glordon is curiously marginalised. The candy-coloured character designs will please younger viewers, but the all-ages pleasures of peak Pixar are in short supply.

Fans of the playful meandering of the Romanian auteur Radu Jude will likely enjoy the haphazard storytelling and epic travelling shots.

For all the bustle, flow and noise, there is little here we haven’t seen before.

Affleck has made no secret of his struggles with alcohol and has talked about the catharsis he experienced shooting Finding the Way Back. It’s a career-best performance, one that marries hulking physicality and internalised demons, as Jack battles grief and addiction.

The final act descends into chaotic silliness, but watching Dinklage and Pike attempting to out-villain one another is never dull. Deborah Newhall’s costumes would look intimidatingly power-hungry on a clothes hanger, let alone Ms Pike. And there’s a terrifying subject lurking under the dark humour.

Anne Robbins’s costumes are dazzling. The production designer Donal Woods makes a dull country-fair storyline look magical. But for all the nostalgic gibberish about passing the baton, this latest instalment stalls and curdles.

A worthy contender in a British revival characterised by eerie cult classics as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Lee Haven Jones’s The Feast and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men.

The visual gags are fresh, the jokes are funny, the world-building is disarmingly buoyant, and the musical cues, from Holiday in Cambodia to Carmina Burana, are playful.

There is both too much and too little going on. It passes the time busily, but leaves us lost in copious allusion and unfinished narrative.

Fine lessons about good manners and decency are wrapped up in fun and fur.

By focusing on human-sized and domestic drama, The End We Start From can’t match the escalating jeopardy and horrific narrative punch of such similarly themed, bigger-budgeted fare as The Road or I Am Legend.

Mr Malcolm’s List plays like Jane Austen fan-fiction, which isn’t the worst subgenre in the world, even if nobody could ever confuse the plot with that of Lady Susan, let alone Pride and Prejudice.

A trinity of exceptional performances from Booth, Mellor and Starshenbaum work to convey a moral knot as exceptional circumstances and extremism become normalised.

Inspired by a real-life Sandusky, Ohio legend, writer-director Todd Stephens crafts an impeccable odyssey that ponders love, loss, and attitudinal changes.

Like all the director’s films, it never allows a boring shot when an unusual one is possible. It has compelling momentum. It features charismatic actors. What a shame it is so tonally chaotic.

Alex Garland’s folk horror takes the broadest of swipes at various colours of toxic masculinity without opening up many new lines of investigation.

Sean Byrne’s third feature is neither as gripping as The Loved Ones, his prom-night horror, nor as intriguing as The Devil’s Candy, his supernatural heavy-metal thriller, but it rattles along as effective B-movie gore.

Twisters feels no need to offer footnotes and variation on its predecessor. It’s a big fat summer movie in its own right. And that’s something these days.

It lacks the wild provocations of Schrader’s scalding recent trilogy, but Oh, Canada pokes and probes in quieter, sneakier ways.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movie has a strange, magical aura for cineastes.

Hawke and Thames respectively give two big performances to enact a compelling cat-and-mouse game, in a film wherein even the supporting characters are richly drawn.

Full of sound and fury, signifying something. If only we knew what that was.

If any recent release has the potential to become a cult classic it is this melodic warning from beneath the earth.

It hardly needs to be said that, as it goes on – and it does go on – the film loses coherence and slips into rampaging chaos. But, coming a year or so after that catastrophic Exorcist sequel, The First Omen feels a lot better than it needed to be. That may have to do.

The film does feel a little thin in its later stages, but the inventive performances – Rylance’s in particular – keep the film aloft throughout. No bogie. Comfortably a birdie. Not quite an eagle.

Blunt works hard to flesh out an underwritten role, but Safdie seems more interested in Kerr’s silences than his partner’s complaints. The relationship is too ill-defined to land an emotional punch.

Coming after the exhaustingly overstuffed Superman, First Steps rattles along with a refreshing clarity of purpose.

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

Alien: Romulus remains a shapeless beast that never so much as hints at the disciplined elegance of Scott’s founding text. The action progresses rather than builds.

The final reveal is as unnecessary as it is predictable, and the pace can be as glacial as the setting. No matter. The Damned is powered along by suspicion, atmospherics and an unforgettable landscape.

Goth remains fiercely committed to the bit. West, a talented, ideas-driven film-maker, makes merry with contemporaneous tropes, yet falls well short of the substance or sleaze that defined Cruising, Hardcore, or the other films referenced throughout.

Taking cues from the lively cast, Nabil Ayouch’s third feature to make it to Cannes is scrappy, occasionally messy, prone to distractions, and never less than diverting.

It could be enormously clunky, but the quiet warmth of Fraser’s performance, the delicacy of Hikari’s direction and the ravishing location work just about distract from the teeth-smarting sentimentality. Soothing balm to kick off the cinematic year.

The coda veers into the conceptual chaos of weaker, later Paranormal Activity instalments, but it’s a promising start for the director’s proposed trilogy. Keep ’em coming.

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.

McConaughey and Ferrera prove the most delightful endangered bus companions since Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Speed, exhibiting just the right balance between tension and comradeship.