Vogt coaxes impressive, carefully calibrated performances from his creepy young ensemble.

There is always room for a post-Beatles doc if it’s this good and this original.

Lawrence Michael Levine’s blisteringly original, provocative, often hilarious screenplay lurches between familiar tropes – “I saw the way you were looking at her!” – and jagged edges. It’ll keep you guessing long after the credits roll.

Jessie Buckley’s determination to stop her slippery part from wriggling out of her clutch is positively heroic. The Kerry actor becomes Everywoman and Nobody. Her sorrow is bottomless. Her uncertainty is painful. One can imagine no better guide through these mysterious swamps.

In common with Jude’s scathing attack on the gig economy and toxic online culture in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 takes a scattershot approach to various targets: anti-Semitism, capitalism, nationalism and religious hypocrisy. The incomparable writer-director’s dark comedy doesn’t care to resolve its heroine’s quandary; it’s out to poke with ethical heft and barbed wit.

A welcome oddity.

In his impressive feature-length debut, the Irish documentarian Gar O’Rourke offers an immersive and mesmerising portrait of life in a still recognisably Soviet institution.

In short, Kosinski and his team have accomplished their odd, hybrid mission more impressively than should have been possible. Most importantly, they have, in an age of cartoon computer graphics, delivered action sequences that appear to be taking place in the real world.

Pitched somewhere between The Social Network and The Thick of It, BlackBerry brings a welcome touch of anarchy to the corporate drama.

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.

McCarthy’s directorial precision is complemented by wit and an imaginative backstory that deserves an expanded universe.

Many will retain understandable uneasiness about the project, but few could deny the technical brilliance and dedication to an austere brief. An essential watch. Though maybe just the once.

It was riveting, not for any great insider insight, but because Carville turned out to be a much more interesting, more complex and more "authentic" character than Clinton himself. The cliches real, messy candidate and ersatz, cold-eyed handler - were reversed. Clinton made brief, bland appearances on the sidelines. Carville was the - heart of the drama: intense, passionate, emotional, funny. Carville laughed, cried, shouted. Clinton just smiled and waved. [10 Nov 1993, p.12]

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

Servants confirms the director as a major talent.

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.

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

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

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

Reflection in a Dead Diamond cares not a jot for the confines of conventional narrative and identification. This is cinema as bombardment, as fetish, as swooning fan collage. Who needs a new Bond film?

The ensemble remains electrifying against the damp.

The Card Counter – executive produced by Martin Scorsese – revisits Schrader’s twin preoccupations with despair and salvation, powered along by tart political urgency, a magnetic central performance from Isaac, and no little style.

This is an exciting, surprising treatment of a story many of us have heard only in half-understood whispers. Well worth settling in for.

Mulligan brings heart to Basden’s wistful folk compositions, and Key babbles amiably, as this crowd-pleaser salutes the redemptive power of a singsong.

More than 100 artists contributed to the homeschool green screen and rough-hewn post-Minecraft animation. The anarchic and imaginative world-building around Batman’s hood is impressive.