Few will complain about the delicious perplexities of the opening hour. The film’s focus on the sadness of remote lives – everyone here seems alone – adds satisfactory emotional ballast.

Dragon 2 feels like a proper film, not just a cartoon.

We’ll say one thing for Boss Baby 2: its untidy, unpredictable, and unmannerly form does, indeed, evoke the exhausting, mucky business of baby tending, albeit with nothing like the familial rewards.

Steven Levenson’s book is all about normalising common mental health issues. But the film also reduces the dead character to a cypher and lets the protagonist off the hook too easily.

The French Dispatch is a lovely, lovely thing. But it is as impossible to grasp as a handful of water.

Has Denis Villeneuve succeeded where others – most notably Alejandro Jodorowsky – have floundered? Given the extensive runtime, it’s impossible not to think of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s alleged assessment of the French revolution: “Too early to say.”

As with its frantic copyright-countdown predecessor, Venom 2 is, by any metric, a bad movie. But, gosh darnit, it’s going to be the baddest bad movie of the year.

A rare historical epic that is connected to contemporary crises.

The emotional pyrotechnics that scaffold most cancer dramas, give way to something that is as honest as it is understated.

Two directors and four credited screenwriters signed off on a lazy screenplay that a starry cast and an Oscar-winner can do little to enliven.

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.

A hugely entertaining record of a person no novelist could have invented.

If you have ever experienced acute anxiety, panic attacks or any other nervous disorder, then watching Anne at 13,000 Ft – presumably through your fingers – will bring a sense of representation and horror in equal measure.

Just as Youri fashions outsider art – or survivalist dreams – from his doomed banlieue, Liatard and Trouilh craft an imaginative debut feature from the rubble.

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.

It’s certainly something to see – especially Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes and Jade Healy’s production design – and plenty to mull over but both the viewer and the film-maker should have guessed from the offset that there can only be one Barry Lyndon.

There are plenty of reasons to yell at The Starling. The pile-up of dreary sub-country songs eventually takes on the quality of something the CIA would have played outside General Noriega’s compound.

A fine yarn that arcs towards a memorable denouement.

There’s enough drama to hold the film together for the uninitiated, although many fleetingly introduced characters suggest that – for all David Chase’s protests against streaming – we’re watching a pilot rather than a truly standalone project.

Peter Bebjak’s disciplined film is forever reminding us of arbitrary cruelties and absurd outrages.

With the best will in the world, this is thin stuff. The dialogue is written in the awkward, stilted style of a radio play – first-person pronouns dropped in a fashion that never really happens in everyday speech – and the confrontations are too often clunkily contrived.

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 director and star deftly juggles social commentary, genre tension, spookiness and some fabulous period costumes (courtesy of designer Maïra Ramedhan Levi).

Occasionally frustrating, but worth getting frustrated about.

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, for all its razzle-dazzle, never loses sight of its northern working-class roots.

Dunne’s script, co-written with Malcolm Campbell, packs too much plot in its final 10 minutes, but it hits the emotional beats with gusto throughout. It was, when it was shot two years ago, an effective comment on an absurd crisis. Sadly, it is still that.

Technically impressive and anchored by two terrific turns, Copilot walks a fine line as it attempts to delve into the humanity under extremism.

What Respect does have going for it is Jennifer Hudson and some stirring musical sequences. Just as these films have become loaded with cliches, the reviews have too often lazily argued that “[Lead Actor X] just about saves the day”. Well, here we are again.