Happily, Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi put in mountain-sized performances to offset the film’s silences and propensity for postcard shots, bringing heart and guts to the chilliest scenery. A worthwhile hike through many obstacles to friendship.

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.

A bruising character study that challenges the audience to sift genuine catastrophe from psychic projection.

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.

Away is as unique as it is lovely.

O’Connor, who caused a stir with his breakthrough turn in God’s Own Country, and Catalan actor Costa, share an easy and natural chemistry. They don’t blaze up the screen: they simmer and charm.

The film is a genre entertainment and, like all such beasts, it honours certain conventions and allows certain compromises.

All kinds of comparisons present themselves during Coralie Fargeat’s monstrous growl at the inhumanity of society’s response to the ageing process.

The first half of the film is spellbinding; Eggers and his cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, brilliantly redeploy the grammar of German expressionism to make Dracula (or thereabouts) scary again.

The script, written by the director and Tibério Azul, occasionally fumbles its dystopian framework. But the journey has enough vigour, underpinned by ideas on autonomy and ageing, to sustain its adventure.

As the band explains in this excellent documentary from Frank Marshall (whose odd career has taken in Arachnophobia, Congo and Alive), it took them five months to go from obscurity in Australia to careering about swinging London with The Beatles.

Against the odds, Iannucci has delivered a minor miracle. Somehow or other, he has managed to touch all familiar elements over 119 consistently delicious minutes without allowing the slightest whiff of compromise.

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.

Shot in perennial murk, relentless in its cruel focus, Obsession is, at its heart, a deathly serious film with a troubling message to convey. Well worth enduring (if that’s the word).

[Peele] may never again make a film so elegantly structured as Get Out (who has?), but the ferment of interlocking ideas here is so diverting it hardly matters that the film is more at home to a meander than steady ascent.

Yes, the pulpy mythologies sometimes overshadow that carefully maintained mood. But it remains quite a mood. Hokum as high art.

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

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

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.

It would be wrong to describe A New Generation as a mere coda to The Story of Film. Clocking in at a weighty 160 minutes, the documentary travels to every corner of cinemaspace.

At the heart of the film is 11-year-old Lidia, raised within this fiercely loving queer household. Through her eyes, Céspedes captures the tenderness and volatility of a family under siege.

It’s a recipe for an emotional journey to match the trajectory of the title, but director Charlène Favier’s script, co-written with Antoine Lacomblez and Marie Talon, is as chilly as the permacold of its surroundings, and punctuated by DOP Yann Maritaud’s serene, snowy tableaux.

Dickinson plays a small role as Mike’s antagonistic friend, but everything rests on Dillane’s powerhouse turn and the writer-director’s compassionate, daring script.

Bentley, whose father and grandfather rode, has done an exemplary job in recreating that world.

The monkey conceit is a success on several levels. It presses home that sense of Williams being an agent of chaos in any environment.

Celeste Cescutti leads a parochial cast that is largely unprofessional, with a fierce performance that bosses and grounds the film’s magic realist themes.

This handsome Nordic demi-western, inspired by real events and adapted from Ida Jessen’s 2020 novel, The Captain and Ann Barbara, is powered along by Mikkelsen’s rugged charisma and various rustic and maggoty scene partners, including the married runaway serfs Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin, quietly expressive) and Johannes (Morten Hee Andersen), and the self-possessed Romani orphan Anmai Mus (Hagberg Melina).

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