Save the Cinema is the kind of plucky underdog feelgood slop that the British film industry churns out on a regular basis, largely to the indifference of audiences.

The film takes a fantastical leap that viewers will find either breathtaking or ridiculous – probably a bit of both.

While this is the smartest, funniest and stabbiest film since the 1996 original, it does feel as though Scream has come full circle, an ouroboros serpent of a franchise that is destined to endlessly devour itself until those testy toxic fans finally lose patience.

It is a heartbreaking story, tragic, unsentimental, but suffused with a belief in the ability of decency and dignity to survive under the most terrible circumstances. [02 Dec 2007, p.18]

Mya Bollaers is a magnetic presence in this Belgian-French film that approaches the story of an adolescent trans girl and her estranged father with good intentions but a thuddingly unsubtle directorial approach.

The film is obsessed with deconstructing good screenwriting, the way a line lands, and ensuring clear character motivation.

The smug asides plastered on screen, and the hyperactive inserts of nature documentary footage do nothing to raise the film’s real-life stakes.

Jóhannsson teases the possibility of a monster, but waits to reveal his hand. When he does, there’s more than a touch of gallows humour. I laughed out loud at his audacity, and had nightmares later.

The film is best when it sticks to children’s caper mode, jostled along by gentle toilet humour, bad-tempered barnyard animals and a scene of two kids driving a van across Manhattan.

This thoughtful documentary about Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win Wimbledon in 1975, understands that representation is only one step towards equality.

The film is a utopian riff on the apocalyptic source material, a Technicolor reimagining flooded with light and optimism.

Some will be repelled, many will be bamboozled. But for those with an appetite for cinema that gets you in the gut, Ducournau delivers the goods.

The film has a cold, abstract beauty.

The film can’t resist revelling in a conservative conclusion outside Buckingham Palace, with a victory banner fluttering against a smattering of St George’s flags.

The result is a spicy nerve-jangler served with a chargrilled side order of jet-black gallows humour – a divine comedy barrelling towards inevitable tragedy, played out in hell’s kitchen where someone is bound to get burned.

The film’s bluesy woodwind score has a teasing, goading quality that feels tinged with melancholy; the spectre of Aids hovers around the film’s edges.

Film-maker Jamila Wignot pays particular attention to the specificity of Ailey’s black influences: the church, blues music and his southern upbringing, all of which informed his best-known work, Revelations (1960).

Refreshingly, Farhadi is ambivalent towards his “hero”, and his control over the film’s tone is masterful; what begins as funny and almost farcical, soon shifts into something much sadder and more sobering.

MacKay is muted; his character is teased for his reserve, a quality he shares with the film. Niewöhner gives the sparkier performance, as a passionate German nationalist whose loyalty has flipped.

Simon Kinberg’s film feels aggressively focus-grouped for the girl-boss crowd.

The Humans struggles to escape its theatrical origins.

Like all the best evocations of times past, Licorice Pizza has no answers – only an enraptured sense of awe that makes Anderson’s joyous film feel like a very personal memory.

Like Wain’s art, the film is superficially twee – characters are referred to as “nosy poseys” at one point – but under the kitsch is something more rewarding: an affecting portrait of a creative but troubled man.

As always, Colman manages to express deep wellsprings of emotion with few words and fewer gestures – her face telegraphing great swathes of anguish beneath polite smiles and annoyed glances.

Nine Days is, in its subdued way, a profound and powerful commentary on life.

It’s fair to say that this amiable but almost farcically uneventful adaptation of the 2005 memoir by JR Moehringer is also postcard-thin in its plotting and insight.

Ali is tremendous in a dual role that takes in everything from a beguiling meet-cute with his future wife (Naomie Harris) to a third act consumed by grief and doubt about whether he did the best thing for his family after all.

It’s all very meta and self-referential; screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers hoover up memorable lines from past movies and serve them with a flourish and an exaggerated wink to the audience. It’s also a good deal of fun.

Where Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s version comes into its own is in the moments where it dares to find its own distinct voice – nowhere more so than in placing Somewhere in the hands of Rita Moreno.

It’s a bouncy, grin-inducing romp through Caribbean takeaways, designer boutiques stacked with Moschino streetwear and one ill-advised trip south of the river.

The story is a little flat, but the gorgeous, hand-crafted puppets and sets give the film dimension.

What’s interesting and unexpected is the film’s subtle acknowledgement of culturally specific generational trauma and displacement.

For better or worse, House of Gucci is a little too well behaved to become a cult classic. But Gaga deserves a gong for steering a steely path through the madness – for richer, not poorer; in kitschness and in wealth.

It’s not badly made, necessarily, just entirely unsurprising. The saving grace is British theatre actor Sheila Atim, arresting and intriguing in a key supporting role.

Petite Maman is short and sweet, yet fearlessly profound. A mix of fairytale, ghost story and rites-of-passage journey, this is at heart a cinematic parable about healing intergenerational wounds, about breaching the barriers that inevitably grow between parents and children.

With its eddying, fluid score and judicious use of silence, its satisfying layers of storytelling, this is a supremely confident piece of film-making from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, albeit one that, at three hours long and with a rather Chekhov-heavy second half, will certainly require the right mindset.

The weathered earth tones of Campion’s subdued colour scheme conceal a vivid and full-blooded emotional palette.

It’s a very watchable picture, but one that, like the plan that Williams famously wrote for his daughters, feels at times like a checklist of challenges overcome and decisions vindicated.

The film’s main appeal is not what it appropriates from other Ghostbusters pictures, but that it’s a nostalgic nod to the Spielbergian family adventures of the same period.

It’s the more deceptively restrained and poetic elements that strike home.

Alexandra Shipp is a grounding presence as Larson’s girlfriend, Susan, while Garfield fizzes with energy and outsize emotion. He’s a fabulous crier and pitch-perfect as a shrill, preening narcissist who manages, against the odds, to remain resolutely likable.

In theory, natural light is more forgiving than its artificial counterpart: in photographs, it makes the subject look less harsh. Less so here.

Sudanese film-maker Amjad Abu Alala’s radiant drama dares to wonder if death could inspire courage rather than fear.

There’s something touching about seeing the 91-year-old Eastwood in such a reflective mood.

What could have been a disaster in the hands of a less sensitive film-maker ends up an extraordinary feat of care, collaboration and creativity.

In Oscar Isaac’s enigmatic blackjack player “William Tell”, with his wary hooded eyes and closed book countenance, the film has a broodingly commanding central performance. It’s a pity, then, that much of its promise is squandered by sloppiness, both in the writing and elsewhere.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams is a furiously visceral force behind the camera. His knuckleduster direction goes beyond mere muscularity and takes on the daunting persuasive power of a mob enforcer; his storytelling is both thrilling and utterly terrifying.

The rather on-the-nose storytelling grows increasingly complex and interesting the further that the protagonist ventures into morally ambiguous territory.

Playing out over three excruciating days at Sandringham – from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day – and carried shoulder high by a note-perfect Kristen Stewart, Spencer (the very title of which seems to present a challenge to the House of Windsor) dances between ethereal ghost story, arch social satire and no-holds-barred psychodrama, while remaining at heart a paean to motherhood.

Reportedly the most expensive Netflix original production to date, Red Notice would have benefited if some of its $200m budget had been spent on untangling the screenplay.

For all the effort that has gone into ensuring representation in the casting, the storytelling, with its forced flashbacks and synthetic sentiment, lets the whole thing down.

For all its scattershot reference points, however, Last Night in Soho still emerges as Wright’s most personal film – you can feel how much he loves the material. Frankly, I felt the same way.

As far as the plot is concerned, almost nothing happens, and yet Andreas Fontana’s sinewy debut teems with unseen threat. He crafts an atmosphere of grubbiness despite all the polished surfaces.

It’s satisfyingly gross – there’s plenty of black bile, crunching bones and half-chewed bodies. Russell, best known for her radiant portrayal of a domestic abuse survivor in Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress, is clever casting too.

Hall emphasises the moral grey area by shooting in black and white, an ingenious choice that allows her to light Clare as black or white.

This is film-making that really tests the elasticity of its story strands, but it largely manages to keep the audience from teetering into disbelief. For the most part, that’s thanks to persuasively solid characters and casting.

It’s the cinema equivalent of rubbing cut onions in the eyes of the audience: film-making that is cynically and artificially engineered to make the audience weep.

The pro-family, anti-tech messaging is designed to play to the parents, but while not entirely unwatchable, the film’s demented levels of energy will recommend it to younger audiences and may trigger stress headaches in anyone over 12.

Sara Forestier is likable enough as the somewhat hapless Sophie, who dreams of working as an artist but whose main preoccupation is finding a man.

Right now, Villeneuve is riding the sinewy worm of Herbert’s sacred text with aplomb.

Anderson’s backdrop, a kind of steroidally enhanced Frenchness reminiscent of films such as Belleville Rendez-Vous and Amélie, is rather lovely, if ultimately as far removed from reality as is the film’s romanticised view of journalism.

Despite a spirited performance from Comer and an impressive roster of supporting turns (including a scene-stealing Harriet Walter as Jean’s withering mother, Nicole), The Last Duel has a tendency to mirror its central battle’s attempts to address complex issues with the blunt tool of rabble-rousing spectacle.

The debut feature from animation studio Locksmith is cute but familiar.

In an improvement on the film’s predecessor, director Andy Serkis dispenses with detailed explanations and instead amps up the humour, leaning into the goofy, flirtatious dynamic between Venom and Brock.

A more conventional director might have chosen to focus on their most famous member, Reed, but Haynes smartly structures the film as a group show, giving space to the women in the ensemble.

If the result sends viewers scuttling back to Armitage’s uniquely accessible version of the source text, then that would be marvellous indeed. But there is enough here that is dazzling and enthralling for Lowery’s movie to stand proudly as a grand work of poetry in its own right.

Provocative and challenging, if not the most subtle piece of political commentary, the film certainly cements Kaouther Ben Hania as a name to watch in Arab cinema.

The latest film from the acclaimed writer-director Pema Tseden casts a typically wry eye over the collision between modernity and tradition in 1980s Tibet.

A portrait of a man who, as one of his contemporaries remarked, feels almost too comfortable on the side of a mountain.

A collision is inevitable, but even so, the film’s climax is unexpectedly devastating.

While the result may not be quite as deep as the cavern at the centre of the story, it has an enticing sliver of ice at its heart.

A singularly unattractive animation style, jokes as flat as roadkill and a score that could be used as an instrument of torture are just some of the problems with the latest attempt to squeeze yet more blood from the Addams Family mausoleum.

The film’s actual pay off – the truth exhumed from this tainted earth – is ultimately not quite as satisfying as the picture’s elegantly constructed mood.

Though Brühl is an affable and witty screen presence, there’s no getting round the fact that the film is a vanity project.

This is where the film slips up. With a Bond as dangerous but dour as Craig’s, the onus is on the villain to inject a little levity, hence the ham-tastic turns from Javier Bardem and Cristoph Waltz in the most recent outings. This film’s main bad guy is Rami Malek’s lacklustre Lyutsifer Safin.

Perfectly pitched and sensitively played, this is truthful, powerful and profoundly moving fare from a film-maker at the very top of her game.

It’s undeniably entertaining stuff, but this choppy collage-style portrait of the formative figures in the life of the young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini) is better suited to the needs of existing fans rather than those of Sopranos neophytes.

There’s a strong element of Greek tragedy underpinning Rose Plays Julie.

Much of the film’s appeal comes from its star, newcomer Max Harwood, who, despite a chiffon-wisp of a singing voice claims every frame with his knife-sharp cheekbones and charisma to match.

Tiresome stuff.

It’s almost worth watching just for the way that Cage delivers the word “testicle”: it sounds as though all the syllables got caught in a combine harvester and then had to be reassembled, with the accents and emphases in the wrong places. It is, like much of the film, utterly barmy.

This thorough and informative documentary, from the team behind RBG, shines a light on a brilliant and uncompromising firebrand who paved the way for generations to come.

As a portrait of friendship, viewed through the compound eye of a mutant insect, it is multidimensional and rather moving.

Vividly rendered, and filled with tangible yearning, it strikes a balance between romantic passion and mundane domesticity, as the skin-prickling attraction of new love is tested by the day-to-day tribulations of real life.

[A] tender observational documentary.

Parental indifference is not attuned to the looming tragedy in this horribly compelling fable.

Despite top-notch period production design and a couple of convincing studio workout sequences (I was reminded of the brilliant Love & Mercy as Aretha tells her bassist to ditch Alabama for Harlem), the drama rarely has the fiery spark its subject demands.

Alexis Louder holds her own as the heroine of (and sole woman in) Joe Carnahan’s lean, mean, 70s-inspired action thriller.

The director treats the film as an empathy exercise, hoping to complicate and humanise a terrorist. Yet this is undermined by the obvious red flags that she plants in each section. Saeed’s flight path becomes a foregone conclusion.

The film’s abrupt tonal shifts are jarring.

A puzzle box of a structure reveals fresh angles to the story with each new contributor, but the woman at its core – the discredited author Misha Defonseca – remains silent and unaccountable, to the film’s detriment.

It’s a film that sets out to tackle the impact of degenerative disease, but, barring a few moments of confusion and a forgotten name or two, is infuriatingly evasive when it comes to showing the realities of the condition.

While Shorta is certainly a propulsive piece of action cinema, which makes effective use of its acid yellow, cement grey and burnt umber palette and warren-of-concrete location, there’s a crudely schematic quality to the writing.

Savagely powerful, directed with an unshowy but acute eye (the use of the colour red is a simple but searingly effective device), this is a terrific feature debut from the writer and director Cathy Brady.

By comparison with 1999’s Pola X and 2012’s Holy Motors, Annette (which Carax tenderly dedicates to his daughter Nastya) is surprisingly accessible fare: adventurous, anarchic and unexpectedly heartfelt.

Cretton negotiates potential cliches such as flashback sequences and that hoariest of old chestnuts, the training montage, with a gravity-defying lightness of touch.

The journey is a nice excuse to paint Tom into a cheerily cosmopolitan portrait of the UK.

Though this stolid drama, based on a true case, begins as a procedural, about systems, processes and deadlines, it is most absorbing when it zeroes in on one man’s moral arc.