It might be staged, but it has a scrappy, fly-on-the-wall feel.

The momentum really builds in the third act, but the film’s quieter moments of contemplation are its most striking.

Saint Frances expands the representation of women’s lives on screen in a way that is so casual you hardly notice it’s happening.

There’s plenty to enjoy, not least Layne’s terrific turn as the newbie with a fresh take on forever.

The film’s empathetic approach allows Dixon to explore her decision, peeling back the layers of complexity that racism brings to the burden of sexual abuse. A must watch.

Whether Irresistible is the movie we “need” in such testing times is open to debate, with some already accusing Stewart of having gone soft. But as a non-partisan response to the craziness of “this system, the way we elect people” (which is indeed “terrifying and exhausting”), it gets my vote.

This oppressive, atmospheric Austrian drama takes the kind of alpha female high achiever familiar from Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, but undermines her with splinters of Hitchcockian paranoia.

While the changing moods of BlacKkKlansman seemed bold and audacious, the warring elements of Da 5 Bloods appear bolted together rather than alchemically mixed.

All loose limbs and exposed emotional scar tissue, Davidson is persuasively raw in a performance that becomes increasingly textured and interesting as Scott finds a father figure in his mother’s ex-boyfriend. It’s his bruised charisma that compensates for a certain spaced-out lethargy in the storytelling and an overlong running time.

Characters and storylines appear to have been chosen at random by a Woody Allen meme generator.

Interlocking vignettes swing from laugh-out-loud comedy to piercing melancholia, but at the centre of it all there is a genuine sense of rebirth and renewal – no mean feat for a small movie with a big heart and a surprisingly wide-ranging vision.

That a film with such an apparently familiar narrative can keep us this intrigued is a credit to the film-makers – particularly Patterson, from whom we should expect to hear much more in the future.

While The High Note doesn’t serve up any real surprises, it’s a pleasant diversion, a sunny, slick production that delivers an upbeat refrain of dreams realised and talent appreciated.

What differentiates Sendijarević’s film, however, is the hot-blooded current of feminine lust that runs through it. Zorić’s Alma stomps, pouts and scowls her way through the film, aware of her sexual power and unafraid to use it to her advantage.

It shouldn’t work yet it does, underscoring the tragedy of corrupted innocence, constricting codes of masculinity and the aftermath of trauma.

Crisply British and deliciously no-nonsense, Kennedy is a wonderfully bracing character for Elizabeth Carroll’s deft documentary.

The film is all about the chase: it’s an aggressive seduction that teases with bold visual statements, with flesh and flame throwers. But does it satisfy? Not on any deep emotional level, certainly.

It’s a credit to Garner that, as a character who effectively has no voice, she manages to say so much about Jane’s predicament through posture, pose and gesture.

It’s tempting to view Selah and the Spades as a triumph of style over substance, richer in visual promise than thematic rewards. Yet there’s also something thrilling about Poe’s refusal to smooth the odd and potentially alienating edges off this very personal (and ultimately empowering) drama, suggesting a strength of creative purpose that will doubtless pay great dividends.

It won’t be for everyone, certainly, but if social distancing has you not just climbing the walls but contemplating punching a hole in them, this might just be the perfect cathartic lockdown movie.

The movie's final parting sequence, where Arletty rides away in a coach and Barrault is inexorably swept in the opposite direction by a swirling crowd, is among the peaks of romantic cinema.

The only bum note is the music itself, despite the presence of prestige pop stars including Justin Timberlake, Kelly Clarkson and Mary J Blige.

This should amuse the younger members of the family, but it's unlikely to offer much more to parents than a couple of hours' respite.

Gelbakhiani is commanding in his first acting role, metabolising heartbreak and moving with an irrepressible prowling sensuality.

Sci-fi wipe transitions, 70s-style CinemaScope photography, a drone shaped like a UFO, and a cameo from German actor Udo Kier are clever genre flourishes that playfully deliver the film’s anticolonial politics.

It’s not subtle, or particularly clever, though Glow’s Betty Gilpin is fun to watch as an ultra-violent ex-military veteran with a southern drawl.

Laxe has a masterly command of rhythm and pacing. The action feels unhurried, despite the film’s tight running time, and there is a spaciousness to the world-building; attentive sound design and 16mm photography capture Galicia’s damp, green allure.

The performances, especially the brittle Louis-Dreyfus, are admirably grounded, but the script’s comedy wastes time with lazy barbs about European brusqueness and American exceptionalism abroad.

Ruffalo optioned the rights to Nathaniel Rich’s original article and has an executive producer credit on the film; clearly, he has a stake in the material. The actor is excellent as reluctant hero Bilott, muting his natural charisma to create a character who is both taciturn and generous, determined but socially ill at ease.

This Kelly is motivated by an oedipal complex and wears dresses to distract his opponents; The Babadook’s Essie Davis is equal parts fearsome and magnetic as his enterprising sex worker mother. More enjoyable still are the film’s corrupt policemen; the louche, stockinged, pipe-smoking Constable Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult) and virile cartoon villain Sergeant O’Neil (Charlie Hunnam).

The parallels drawn between Fabienne’s life and the stories she’s drawn to are a little on the nose. “What matters most is personality! Presence!” she declares, determined not to fade into obscurity. Deneuve’s luminous performance ensures she won’t.

There’s enough visual and thematic invention to keep viewers gripped and unsettled, particularly in these unprecedented, isolated times.

Like Maryam’s approach to local politics, the film is well-meaning but occasionally naive.

Most essential is the central performance: Zengel’s oscillating wild joys and storming furies are painful to watch. A moment when she howls for her mother (always tantalisingly out of reach) brought me to tears.

Blessed with not one but two resourceful heroines, and painted with a glittering digital palette which conjures a spectacular backdrop for the romping action (Arendelle and its environs are part Norway, part Narnia), this is terrifically enjoyable – romantic, subversive, engaging and enthralling.

LaKeith Stanfield and Issa Rae light up a beautiful-looking movie that weaves together love stories from the past and present.

This crowd-pleasing comedy drama from the director of The Full Monty hits all the right notes.

A pacy screenplay, co-written by director Francis Annan and adapted from a book by Jenkin, rarely flags, but it’s the nervy camera, hugging the characters at hip height, the better to scrutinise each locked barrier to freedom, that most successfully builds the tension.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s generous documentary is a fitting tribute to the late, great author.

The emotional impact is true and clean. The fractious bond between the brothers and their aching anger at the loss of a parent are evoked with exquisite sorrow and clarity.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (the French title uses the less Jamesian “jeune fille”) seamlessly intertwines themes of love and politics, representation and reality. At times it plays like a breathless romance, trembling with passionate anticipation. Elsewhere, it seems closer to a sociopolitical treatise, what Sciamma has called “a manifesto about the female gaze”.

Subverting the original text’s point of view allows Whannell to privilege his female protagonist while continuing to explore the novel’s theme of untrammelled power.

Kasbe makes the most of his extraordinary access by presenting the film vérité style, preferring to immerse the audience in his characters’ lives to better make the case for each of their choices.

Captured by a camera that frequently rattles against the sides of the hurtling ambulance, the Ochoas’ night-time escapades are electrifying and urgent, doused in strobing emergency lights and powered by adrenaline.

It should please family audiences; it’s a handsomely mounted, stirring adventure. It’s just a little bit declawed.

As rambunctiously entertaining as it is crude.

For some, Little Joe may seem too sterile to engage emotionally, but I found it glassily unsettling – even more so on second viewing. Inhale at your peril.

Director Miguel Arteta, who brought a bracingly transgressive tartness to indie comedies Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl, delivers sloppily paced hack work here, while Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne, two fine comic actresses, are shackled to a screenplay so crassly tone-deaf, it makes you want to chisel off your own ears.

Eye-popping is one way to describe the prolific Japanese director’s 103rd film, a cheerfully pulpy Tokyo-set noir.

In the lead role, Anya Taylor-Joy creates an admirably spiky character who is less likable than some of her screen predecessors, and all the better for it.

Marsden is charming enough, summoning surprising chemistry with Schwartz, and so it’s not total torture spending an hour and a half with the pair. Yet for better or worse, it doesn’t linger.

This harrowing retelling of Norwegian rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 terrorist attack on the island of Utøya is less exploitative than Paul Greengrass’s brutal, Netflix-bound, English-language version, but the question remains: does a tragedy have to be turned into cinema for people to engage with it?

Erskine, with her earthy chuckle and precision-tooled comic timing, is the real discovery here. She’s a smutty, sniggering joy in the role and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

The murky cinematography further hinders a picture that looks as though it was shot through raw sewage.

Thrillingly played by a flawless ensemble cast who hit every note and harmonic resonance of Bong and co-writer Han Jin-won’s multitonal script, it’s a tragicomic masterclass that will get under your skin and eat away at your cinematic soul.

It’s the movie equivalent of a fairground ride with all the bolts loosened and the safety booklet blazed long ago when someone ran out of Rizlas.

Frat boy humour is dressed up in an expensive, arthouse jacket.

It’s a terrifically tactile film, full of the kind of deliciously observed detail that lingers in the mind long after the movie has finished.

It’d be easy to map Gilliam on to Grisoni, a film-maker dogged by his artistic misfires and the mess left in their wake. Really, though, he’s Quixote, stuck in a noble past and wilfully disconnected from a present that jostles uncomfortably close.

There is an elegant, even-handed character study buried within Clint Eastwood’s crisp procedural.

The cluttered parallel story structure – the fates of several different individuals over a period of two years are woven together – results in a series of mini-scares rather than a gradual build to a big one. And since we already know the fate of most of them, all the diseased yellow lighting and oppressive sound design in the world can’t engineer much tension.

Astutely amplifying the absurdist – and remarkably modernist – elements of his source, Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell conjure a surreal cinematic odyssey that is as accessible as it is intelligent and unexpected.

[A] fascinating, troubling but overlong documentary.

This contemporary adaptation of The Turn of the Screw takes the ornate enigma of Henry James’s gothic novella and whittles it down into something rather more flat and conventional.

The tone veers haphazardly from tense, high-stakes cat-and-mouse chase to ill-judged satire.

Trey Edward Shults’s bombastic third feature crashes and recedes, leaving few revelations in its wake.

Malick links the lonely labour of working the land with the thanklessness of sainthood, asking questions about devotion, tradition and individual acts of resistance. Mileage (and the film is three hours) will likely depend on your tolerance for the director’s signature poetic style.

As for Foxx and Jordan, their dialled-down discipline pays dividends, lending greater weight to those few moments (a courtroom showdown, a jailhouse breakdown) when Cretton briefly turns up the dramatic heat, with rousing results.

[A] remarkable documentary.

The film can’t square the fact that its protagonists are the victims of sexism and yet perpetuate it by sheer virtue of working for a rightwing news channel.

This portrait of a woman pushed to breaking point coheres around a fine, friable performance from Kristen Stewart.

For all the steel-trap visceral efficiency, it’s the more low-key moments that really pack a punch – those moments when we’re confronted with the simple human cost of war.

The film shies away from any kind of political commentary, and as a result feels oddly sapped of fire or urgency.

The result is enlightening and affecting, providing a missing piece in the puzzle of a life prematurely ended.

More than 70 civil and criminal charges have been lodged against the family. Marcos flaunted her wealth while her country’s living standards plummeted, and Greenfield’s portrait is damning.

I suspect the strangely good-natured feel of the film will win the hearts of many viewers, but my own head remained too muddled by its uneven and oddly indecisive approach to embrace whatever quirky virtues it may possess.

Guy Ritchie’s latest gangster comedy presents itself as a harmless romp, but behind its wink-wink-nudge-nudge humour is a bitter and dated worldview.

It’s an absolute joy.

This is beyond inept.

It’s dazzling, baffling and staggeringly ambitious.

What keeps it from top-tier animation status is that, while the relentless killer drone army usually hits its targets, the jokes don’t always connect.

By encouraging a merry chaos of overlapping personalities and performances – restructuring the timeline into a multilayered playground where the child and adult stories interact – and subtly foregrounding existing themes of female fulfilment and the economics of creativity, Gerwig creates something that is true to its roots and bracingly current.

Gibney struggles to psychologically penetrate his cold antihero.

Jumanji: The Next Level keeps things upbeat and lively, thanks in no small part to the introduction of two counterintuitively revivifying characters – curmudgeonly old codgers whose gripes and aches provide a jolly counterpoint to the teen angst that fired Kasdan’s previous instalment.

The camera’s canted angles and shaky closeups convulse with feeling that the actors can’t seem to summon. Ensemble dance sequences convey neither emotion nor information (except that the felines each have 10 fully articulated human toes). The film is rated U, but many of its uncanny images are sure to haunt viewers for generations.

The result is a handsome if creaky and oddly inconsequential final film that lurches around the galaxy at light speed without actually getting anywhere, as it steers a course between the inventive and the inevitable.

Motherless Brooklyn is a curious near miss that can be both applauded and criticised for its boundless ambition.

Directed with wit, subtlety and great emotional honesty by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (the co-directors of 2012’s brilliantly life-affirming Good Vibrations), it’s a singular story with universal appeal – striking a very personal chord with some viewers while finding common ground with the widest possible audience.

Lucy in the Sky is low on real insight and feels like a psychology column in a supermarket tabloid.

So measured is the pacing, so sinuous the timeline, so understated the subtle ache of the performances that you don’t immediately realise that Wang Xiaoshuai’s exquisite three-hour drama has been performing the emotional equivalent of open-heart surgery on the audience since pretty much the first scene.

This open-sore autobiography feels like the missing piece in the puzzle of this frequently brilliant, invariably self-jeopardising actor.

It’s a punishing watch; a harrowing film which boots home its message by gouging at the vulnerable soft spots of the audience. Like the world she depicts, Kent’s storytelling shows no mercy.

It doesn’t all work; the flashbacks are unwieldy and the pacing falters in the second half. It’s also rather coy in addressing some of the more damning elements in recent Catholic history. But there’s something disarming about a scene of papal bonding over beer and footy.

The picture comes armed to the teeth with slick action sequences . . . and genuinely funny lines. It’s just a pity that both the action and the dialogue are occasionally obscured by the frenzied editing.

It’s silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.

Built upon a wittily verbose script that delivers more laugh-out-loud lines than most of the year’s alleged comedies, Knives Out retains a beating human heart into which daggers are regularly plunged.

There’s a pulpy, comic-book noir to this highly enjoyable thriller, whose rules and parameters are clear.

The primary tone is gentle and melancholic – an almost existential evocation of memory, and the longing to be made whole.