Working from Julia Cox’s agreeably prickly script, the Oscar-winning filmmakers revel in Nyad’s reputation as a thundering wagon. They are aided in no small way by Annette Bening’s fierce performance, work that trumpets the arrival of awards season.

Had we seen none of Cumberbatch’s earlier troubled intellectuals, we might embrace his performance with enthusiasm. But there are a few too many familiar manoeuvres for comfort in a performance that treads water throughout.

For all the moral compromises and narrative confusion, you couldn’t say A New Era is boring. There is a constant sense of excellent actors making the best of indifferent material.

An appropriately monstrous hit with audiences at London’s Sundance and Dublin’s Horrorthon festivals, this is not quite a fairy tale, but it comes close enough to cast a spell.

The film exists to give Lopez an opportunity to bring the house down. She does that, but it’s not quite enough.

At 76, more than 20 films into his storied career, Paul Schrader can still deliver a sucker punch.

The problem here is not insight but narrative stagnation. Too often H Is for Hawk confuses slowness with contemplation, repeating emotional beats and trumpeting parallels between Helen and Mabel.

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

Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned.

When film-makers aren’t asking people to read their films as westerns they are asking for them to be read as Greek tragedies. For all the commitment of the actors and brooding ambience of the film-making, Bring Them Down can’t quite sustain that comparison.

At its best, The Devil Wears Prada 2 engages saltily with the social and economic changes that have set in since the 2006 original. One yearns for a little more of Miranda’s amusingly half-hearted attempts to accommodate woke restrictions on her acidic put-downs.

Not everything works in the admirably bizarre In the Earth, but nobody can deny Wheatley is back in his freak-folk wheelhouse.

Beau Is Afraid is all clatter and stress and movement, but the director is in control throughout, engineering both comic set pieces and existential show trials with equal invention.

Branagh’s decent performance and Christie’s indestructible reputation may just be enough to see the film through to a modest profit and, later, decent figures on Disney+. But A Haunting in Venice feels like a misguided experimental sprig from an already compromised operation.

In Lana Wachowski’s defence, much of Resurrections does play like a sincere conversation with herself. She and her sister invented this extraordinary world, and they have the right to analyse and deconstruct it. But she is a victim of her own early success.

For all that emotional content, Amanda is a pleasingly unsentimental film, never more so than in its understanding of children.

This is a rather conventional artist’s biopic for an unconventional person and it’s a film that ends as suddenly (and frustratingly) as it begins.

Rather than just pushing the characters through their familiar beats, the well-judged narrative arc takes them on something like a proper journey.

It’s fortunate that Dylan O’Brien has just enough goofy charm to hold all the plundered Build-a-Bear bits together.

Prentice Penny directs her own script with verve. Mamoudou Athie, who’s been knocking on the door for a few years, is good enough to suggest that he’ll be unavoidable in a year or two.

It’s just a great story, you wonder why nobody thought to make a movie before.

For a film that depicts the discovery of the Holocaust, Lee is curiously flat and uninvolving. Miller and the images she captured deserve better.

There is a sense here not just of Vietnam-era experimental cinema but of contemporaneous postmodern novels by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and the recently late John Barth. Smart and dumb. Fascinating and frustrating. An absolute blast.

The film, which always feels like classy telly rather than a pioneering effort befitting its subjects, might have made more of this dilemma.

Amulet has been billed as a feminist revenge horror. It’s a savage one, powered along by the same metaphorical heft that made The Babadook such a sensation.

It remains a fascinating, stylish, uncompromising thriller for all its repugnant prejudices: punk rock movie-making for the ruling elite.

All this might be unbearable were it not for some lovely performances and, despite the familiar tropes, a commitment to treat Louis and his condition with respect.

The parallel father-and-son storylines may feel a bit too tidy, but Nabulsi’s film is powered along by terrific performances and palpable fury.