The sheer unsparing intimacy of Gyllenhaall’s film gives its thrills an excitingly illicit quality. Watching it feels like reading someone else’s diary – and then finding yourself mentioned in its pages.

Despite the strenuous effort, this glass slipper just doesn’t fit.

Wright is both a gifted stylist and master technician, and Soho moves as smoothly as a Maglev train, gliding on an invisible cushion of its own meticulous craft. Its pristine pop-art finish occasionally feels at odds with the grit of its milieu; as it barrelled along, I felt a constant contact-high, yet little contact grubbiness. But the high is rich and giddying, and the weaving of allure and horror gleamingly assured.

The 31-year-old Stewart – who will be instantly and justifiably awards-tipped for this – navigates this perilous terrain with total mastery, getting the voice and mannerisms just right but vamping everything up just a notch, in order to better lean into the film’s melodramatic, paranoiac and absurdist swerves.

Denis Villeneuve's new adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel – starring Timothée Chalamet – is an awe-inspiring piece of work.

Its icy conviction and unblinking Bressonian rigour generate their own particular, intoxicating strain of doom-laced excitement.

Sorrentino and his cast make these teenage recollections twinge with freshness. Like our own sharpest memories of adolescence, the haze of nostalgia doesn’t dull their edge.

The film is often hard to watch, but Campion and her uniformly excellent cast leaven the discomfort with a constant sense of prickling intrigue around what precisely we are watching play out here, and how far the ritual will go.

Even when Almodóvar plays on easy mode – and nothing about Parallel Mothers could be described as difficult – the results are irresistible.

As beautiful as some of the landscapes are, and as brilliant as Spall is in repose, there is only so much sitting on a bus looking wistful that one actor can do. Other than Spall’s steady gaze and some mood-book photography, The Last Bus has little to recommend it.

The Nest is good on a first viewing and special on a second, when its cramped horizons and avoidance of full-bore tragedy are strategies for which you’re prepared. Durkin’s use of Kubrickian dissolves makes the passage of time feel like no one’s friend.

For all its occasional fumbling, Mogul Mowgli fully justifies its existence in every bristling detail of Ahmed’s performance, which never plays as self-pitying so much as impatient and hotly aggrieved.

This follow-up to the acclaimed 1992 horror film of the same name has far more substance than your average popcorn chiller.

The best thing about Destin Daniel Cretton’s blockbuster is how confidently it goes its own way: these call-backs to surrounding Marvel lore are sly without being smug, at least until the obligatory end-credits gesture ushering Shang-Chi into the fold.

It’s a film about memory which itself feels like the kind of thing you vaguely remember seeing 25 years ago. I’m not sure future slow-burn classic status awaits, but at a time when few studio films even seem to be striving for it, you have to applaud the attempt.

There’s an inevitable and perhaps unavoidable hitch. People in sitcoms generally don't change at all, while people in films can rarely afford not to – and a movie-sized plot, with its multiple emotional crests and dips, isn’t the kind of environment these characters were built to thrive in.

CODA is way too busy playing things cute.

The engagement with JM Barrie’s themes here is palpably sincere, and I found myself pulled along, not only by Zeitlin’s tugging showmanship, but the ache he manages to create around childhood as an enchanted space.

Cooke’s sturdy, old-fashioned approach to staging and shooting pairs well with his leading actor’s precise, engaging performance, and makes scenes like this anxious backstreet exchange – or Greville and Penkovsky’s two visits to the ballet, each one serving as a clever psychological pivot-point – all the more fun and absorbing.

The film needs no excess melodrama even at its bleakest, because the visual language Sharrock has constructed is inhospitable enough. It’s his concentration on these faces, in the 4:3 ratio of Nick Cooke’s gravely beautiful cinematography, that gives it all a redemptive glow.

Wright seems determined to bring in some new blood, and his film is a thrillingly persuasive recruiting tool. For existing fans, it’s a fond and nerdily comprehensive celebration – or perhaps vindication – of the siblings’ extensive, courageously eccentric output.

It’s consistently absorbing as well as evocative to the harsh finish, with mordant plot surprises Connolly keeps smartly tucked away.

At the very end of Janicza Bravo’s Zola, just as you’re struggling to comprehend what on earth the film is supposed to amount to, there is a wonderful moment when you realise that’s the entire point.

If there’s a chink in your emotional armour, there’s simply no resisting what this film has to offer.

Levy ultimately wants to yank the heart-strings more than poke the grey matter. And as Free Guy breaks free from his programming and explores the world on its own terms, the film has lots to say about loyalty, friendship and love.

The Suicide Squad (note the definite article) is such a drastic improvement in every respect that you almost – almost – feel sorry for the earlier version: it’s dazzlingly colourful and riotously crass, but also emotionally alive

We’re all aboard, and there’s certainly some enjoyment to be had. It’s just a pity that the ride is a bit of a con, at times. It’s a template without spark, a formula which seldom takes the risk of experimenting with anything fresh. It needed some of that old Spielbergian magic.

Hamaguchi has made a profoundly beautiful film about making peace with the role in front of you, and playing it with all your might.

The recurring fungal and archeological imagery suggest a conception of consciousness as a kind of mushroom patch, with human experience blooming from and feeding on the experiences that came before, all the way back to its unknowable cosmic beginnings.

There is something utterly perplexing about this British comedy, in which three middle-aged women go on an Interrailing trip with the daughter of a recently departed friend: it’s as if the cast and crew were planning to make a musical, then got to the set and decided they couldn’t be bothered.

This supernatural thriller has a wild conceit about a time-bending beach, and every creaky device to hand gets thrown in to keep it going.

Like the muddled plotting, risible climax and wearisomely foul-mouthed script, Jolt’s budgetary shortcomings might have been endurable if its action scenes passed muster. Alas, they’re barely community theatre standard.

This foursome’s lives intersect in consistently thrilling and surprising ways, thanks in no small part to the fundamental volatility of contemporary young urban lives.

The acting quartet of Jones, LaPaglia and double Davis is just immense.

Casablanca Beats just about gets by on restless teenage energy and its bustle of winning young faces. But it’s a new arrangement of a very familiar old song.

Belle is a beautifully observed, dazzlingly animated sci-fi fairy tale about our online-offline double lives – it’s Hosoda’s finest film since 2012’s Wolf Children, and perhaps his best to date.

Admirers of Baker’s earlier work will have a journey to go on here, first in missing the rowdy companionship of protagonists who weren’t wholly out for themselves. As spectacle, this study of a dirtbag running out of extra lives falls into the category of crowd-baiting, not crowd-pleasing. Mikey, repeatedly, is just the worst.

The action always feels rooted in the greater story of the city of Shiraz itself: even a scene as simple as Rahim walking through a shopping centre becomes naturally soundtracked by a musical instrument salesman tuning a dulcimer in his booth.

Titane is the kind of film that makes quibbles over plausibility seem foolish: you just have to sit back and enjoy being ridden over, or at least accept that’s what the exercise is about.

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch feels like four films in one, and contains enough ideas for at least another six.

The Velvet Underground is not the kind of music documentary that dutifully walks the viewer through the greatest hits and bitterest feuds. Instead, it re-conjures the moment that made the hits possible and the feuds inevitable, via a whirl of archive footage and interviews new and old.

The film could have been an indulgent memoir, a scrapbook of a major (if stunted) leading-man career. But seeing so much of it through Kilmer’s own viewfinder gives it both focus and poignancy.

A late narrative gambit made me worry that Hansen-Løve was pushing her conceit a little too far into the realm of the meta, but it pays off with thrilling clarity and elegance.

There’s so much distinction here, and maybe just a slight vagueness about theme as Husson nears the finish line: it’s a tough ask to end a film well which is so given over to memory, and this becomes a bit of a waft in the general direction of closure.

It’s the silent allegiances of sisterhood, a near-underground network operating to safeguard women’s rights, which exercise Haroun’s imagination throughout this excellent piece.

This controlled unveiling of a fuller picture is certainly engaging, but the film has the respectful air of a tribute – to Bernheim, as opposed to her father – and its sheer seemliness means it lacks the intellectual and erotic fizz of Ozon’s best work.

Dylan and Penn do share a few lovely scenes . . . . In such moments, the project suddenly and charmingly perks up. The rest of the time, ‘flag’ is about right.

It’s a real tea-drinker’s piece, wanting you to sit down and let its hushed insights, like some earthy infusion, linger on the palate. The incentive is strong to see it again – not immediately, perhaps, but just when it’s just starting to fade on you. The second time, the flavours here can only deepen and unfurl.

McCarthy keeps dragging the film away from thriller and procedural territory and back to this blossoming domestic setup – but while Damon and the kid share some cute scenes, it simply isn’t that interesting, and all the would-be colour (see: Virginie’s acting career) adds nothing but extraneous detail.

As a statement, Benedetta won’t win any awards for coherence, but there’s just Too Much Verhoeven going on here for sensation hunters ever to feel short-changed.

Where Part I had a shimmering poignancy as a tragic love story, this is busy and dazzling: Hogg has never made a funnier piece of work or come to us with such fresh provocations.

I mean, it’s really dumb: steroidally dumb, dumb not in a charming, laughter-provoking way but just in a clunking, vulgar, relentless, random smutty jokes about handjobs way.

Here is a documentary that is simple but contains multitudes.

Carax has an unparalleled knack for constructing scenes that feel like vividly remembered dreams – some of the images here carry such a strange dual charge, by turns eerie and drily comic, that you find yourself wondering afterwards if they actually happened, or if your subconscious has been playing join-the-dots.

It’s the kind of format that works as long as the characters aren’t all completely unbearable – which is, alas, not the case here.

Even if it springs few genuine revelations, this loping sine wave of a film still lands as an honest take on the high highs and low lows of a sodden Scandinavian lifestyle.

When it’s in the mood, horror can be a sexually subversive genre; it can also be a flagrantly non-PC one. Freaky treads a treacherous line between the two with aplomb.

There’s an unmistakeable timidity to director Leigh Janiak and Phil Graziadei’s screenplay: it feels odd to watch an 18-rated horror that feels as if it’s going out of its way not to offend.

For the most part it’s as briskly enjoyable as the studio’s output tends to be, with likeable characters trading polished repartee while large computer-generated objects explode convincingly in the background. Yet perhaps for the first time, the briskness often doesn’t sit right with the material at hand.

When the film gets up to speed it remains dependable fun, but the steering’s spongy, the acceleration sluggish. The journey continues, but the saga is running out of road.

In place of Bay’s provocative humour and unparalleled eye for destructive spectacle are brain-numbing quantities of strong language, action scenes that look as if they were edited with a knife and fork, and a blasé attitude towards violence that renders every shootout pointless, since the bad guys are invariably mown down in seconds while the heroes saunter off with barely a scratch.

Monster Hunter is silly, it’s loud, and it has a synth score by Paul Haslinger that pipes away addictively, manoeuvring the film’s tone into an optimal space for this sort of junk. It achieves a kind of jokey bombast.

In all kinds of ways, Luca is the smallest film that Pixar has made, but it’s also unquestionably one of the studio’s loveliest.

It feels like summer on film – the thing radiates Factor 50 good vibes, and boasts a cast so preposterously attractive, and with such sweltering chemistry, that a couple of hours in their company may make you feel as if you’ve had a holiday fling by osmosis.

For all the emptiness of Nobody, it’s sleekly watchable.

Seligman’s command of the flow and swell of comic tension is thrillingly intuitive – she knows exactly when to let it well up, and when to pop it for maximum effect.

This is Sachs in Éric-Rohmer-abroad mode, and some way off top form. Frankie suggests a gloriously civilised shoot more than it coheres into much of a film.

Here and elsewhere, you sense the film knows more than it’s prepared to share, which gives it the queasy sheen of a PR exercise.

Even while making a heartfelt statement that will put Khan deservedly on the map, the film cries out for a different shape, so that these three could grieve, bond and come to an understanding without the plot’s cloak-and-dagger machinations.

The believability of this fractured family is clinched by Machoian’s casting.

There’s fun to be had here of an undemanding sort – but anything fresh, or memorable, or remotely unexpected? Neigh, neigh and thrice neigh.

Michael Chaves, proves himself again to be a shrewd replacement, somehow inviting the viewer to buy into a frankly wacky screenplay by dint of decent acting and committed style.

The mood is one of acid-tipped wackiness, and both Stone and Thompson understand exactly what’s required to bring it to life.

This is his and Swinton’s first film together: in fact, it is the Spanish master’s first English-language production. But the two are an obviously good creative match, each one well-versed in the interplay of depth and surface, and capable of switching moods from ripe to heartfelt in a blink.

If the original films owed a blatant debt to David Fincher’s Se7en, this one remortgages from the same lender.

What sense there is of big ideas being thoughtfully chewed over stems largely from Rapace’s steely, wounded central performance, which often feels like a decade-later echo of her work in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films.

There’s bad fun to be had in the final stretch – if you go in fully aware that the production flew off the rails.

The film’s a little wobbly on actual charm; stronger on smarm, in-jokes and Bond-riffing action pastiche. Yet whatever their niggles, families can flock to it, relieved to be getting brand new entertainment that entertains.

The trouble is, Rare Beasts lacks the razor wit, merciless candour and stylistic panache of Fleabag and I May Destroy You – not to mention Piper’s own Sky Atlantic series I Hate Suzie, made after Rare Beasts with the playwright Lucy Prebble, and broadcast last year.

You could hardly ask for a sharper reminder of blockbuster cinema’s charms than the crescendo from swelling dread to snappily choreographed chaos that comprises the film’s tremendous 10-minute prologue.

As a gently exploratory portrait of adolescence, Spring Blossom is tender, amiable and sweetly played, but it doesn’t risk (or say) all that much.

This tale of a Welsh dairy farm that became an unlikely haven for rock stars was an absolute joy from start to finish.

Billed as a “survival thriller” and starring a weirdly underutilised Angelina Jolie, this is a musty amalgam of fire-fighting action flick, John-Grisham-esque conspiracy hokum and outdoorsy bonding adventure. All it lacks is a web search using Ask Jeeves.

Army of the Dead is a kindred spirit of, rather than sequel to, Snyder’s earlier film – but it still cleaves faithfully to the Romero template, with its gaggle of abrasive, slippery lead characters that don’t obviously qualify as heroes, and its generous dousings of vinegary cynicism and apocalyptic dread.

While occasionally too muted for its own good, Apples does benefit from not pushing its quirk factor too hard – that would only have set up a barrier between us and Servetalis’s hollow detachment. It’s a braver choice for Nikou to invite our empathy.

To call the film “repellent” would do it too much credit. The combat itself (sorry, kombat) is so clumsily shot and edited that the fights have no discernible dramatic shape or flow, while the fatalities are rendered in bland, businesslike computer graphics that have you yearning for the honest, artisanal gloop-by-the-bucket of a Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street.

The Mitchells vs the Machines is like an encounter with a sentient doodle pad, crammed with ideas that might be the cleverest things anyone’s ever thought of, or the most ludicrous, or probably a jumble of both.

Director and co-writer Nick Stagliano tries to wax serious about the business of killing, but the trouble is, he hasn’t written any characters who scan as real people.

A film so frivolous and twee I felt as if my brain were leaking out of my nostrils as I watched.

He remains a master of composition, subtly guiding your eye towards details that reveal the kind of stories we might usually overlook – in life as well as in the cinema itself.

Childlike vulnerability hasn’t been something Hopkins has opened up to show us in a long, long while, but he seems ready for this role, hungry to do it, and you may not be prepared for how deep he goes. Zeller’s writing, and his shockingly naked acting, peak at the bitter end.

Love and Monsters is mercifully zombie-free, while serving up a refreshingly different vibe from the word go. It’s not mock-heroic in a winking way; it doesn’t seem so pleased with its own punchlines. It’s rueful and shrugging.

Despite a spirited score and a few other redeeming features, The Reckoning is too clumsy, overlong and generally miscalculated to add up to an intelligent commentary on misogyny, or a satisfying riposte to it

Nothing about the sound in Sound of Metal is ordinary.

Via breezy metaphysical farce, Palm Springs identifies this very recognisable strain of millennial malaise, before skewering it with merciless accuracy.

Disasters: well, they said it. The new film from Dennis Dugan is a frighteningly inept stab at a romantic comedy in the Nancy Meyers style.

The film is like a cheeky seaside postcard with swastikas and cryptography on the reverse.

Essentially – astonishingly – the Tom and Jerry sections of Tom & Jerry are a sideshow, used to punctuate the human scheming and blundering around Preeta and Ben’s forthcoming nuptials.