Perhaps the strangest aspect of Doctor Strange, within the lockstep rubric of these things, is how non-Marvelly it manages to feel.

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

Serraille, whose debut feature Jeune Femme won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2017, has returned with a film that feels like a jewellery box of telling moments: there is precious stuff here, and real sparkle too.

Elliot is a talent eccentric enough to make Nick Park look like an office drone, and the serious sadness underpinning his vision only makes the humour work better.

It’s extremely moving in the gentlest, most linear way, and the other performances are sterling, too.

The backdrop to this very English marriage – soot and grit and survival, and that basenote of touching bafflement – means all the tears are earned.

It has a whistle-stop quality, and you sometimes wish it would slow down to savour more personal details, rather than dishing out brisk bullet points from this amazing life.

The film is all feints for an hour – elegant feints, but far from kick-starting the dramatic motor, they have a habit of stalling it.

The Shrouds has potential to be morbidly hilarious, deeply twisted and strange, or rather moving: the fact that it only feints in those directions, while prioritising several less fruitful ones, makes it the steepest disappointment of Cronenberg’s late career.

Leigh Whannell’s film – one of the smartest and scariest yet to roll off the production line at horror specialists Blumhouse.

The two stars generate an astonishing sensual charge in a brilliant addition to the Batman canon that refuses to behave like a blockbuster

This is Penna’s debut feature, and he has set himself a high bar which he just about scrapes over, with Mikkelsen giving the entire project a super-strength leg up.

For all The Falling’s period trimmings, its uncanny power resides in these ellipses and blackouts – in elements that cannot be easily rationalised.

Portraying an instantly recognisable reality with a raw, utterly uncompromising intensity.

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.

The Imitation Game is a film about a human calculator which feels... a little too calculated.

An artistic spin on tragedy that’s deft, witty, very well-acted, and more diverting than it is profound.

Writer-director Alan Parker's utterly delightful, tongue-in-cheek love letter to the gangster genre.

Hyper-violent it may be but there is beauty in its brutality.

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.

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.

The script makes a heavy meal of Naru’s personal growth, where a concentration on pure survivalist reflex would have made it leaner and meaner. But when the film knuckles down in sequences of wordless action, it slays.

Parts of The Menu taste familiar. There’s a dash of Michael Haneke’s winking mercilessness; a soupçon of Midsommar’s black-hearted mischief; the sheeny satire of super-wealth comes straight from Succession. But the cast and filmmakers’ commitment to nasty delight is unswerving, while the dinner ends in the most gratifying way imaginable: just deserts.

One of the great pleasures of the collection is watching human ingenuity at work almost in real time, as each filmmaker in turn fathoms what’s possible, then keeps pushing, to regularly thrilling effect.

Arrogance may be the Achilles’ heel of all Grant’s baddies, including this one, but a tip-toeing aversion to risk makes Heretic end with a whimper.

Serving as an allegory on post- and antenatal depression, Prevenge is a kaleidoscope of violence and humour, a tense tale that wickedly extracts laughs through the banality of its suburban setting.

It is what these films always are – source material for its own advertising campaign – but in this instance, it’s little more, which might have been a problem if said campaign hadn’t already proven such a roaring success.

Skilful photography boosts a standard-issue love triangle into one of Hitch's own favourite films from the period. [14 Jul 2012]