As before, the act of watching with an audience is part of the fun, with each pin-drop-silent sequence playing as a challenge to viewers to maintain their collective hush at all costs. This is the pleasant surprise of the summer so far. See it. Don’t bring crisps.

The style is impeccable. The substance, not so much.

This is pure filmmaking-by-paycheque: you can virtually hear the clock card machine crunching at the start of every scene, as cast and crew punch in dutifully for another shift.

Hopkins’ performance isn’t good, exactly, but it’s certainly interesting to watch, as the actor seems to swipe his lines of dialogue from the shelf in passing, as if playing a script version of Supermarket Sweep. Goode is restrained by comparison, but then the film does a lot of restraining on his behalf.

First-time director Brewer was the visual effects supervisor on Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s this department that’s his forte, rather than marshalling actors, or stitching scenes together with functional continuity.

Crucially, Kelsey Mann’s film, co-written by returning screenwriter Meg LeFauve, gets Pixar back to doing what they always did best: juggling big concepts in fun and ingenious but also surprisingly wise and moving ways.

The star’s comeback isn’t quite as entertaining as his 2022 Oscars punch-up – but it comes close.

Square, lacquered, and livelier than you’re expecting, Joachim Rønning’s film obviously adheres to all the formulae a doughty sports drama needs, starting crucially with the backdrop of adversity.

The film itself is a mesmerisingly gripping and controlled parable-thriller in which the paranoia, misogyny and rage of the Iranian state are mapped seamlessly onto an ordinary family unit.

Poignantly lyrical as a city symphony, it branches out for a sequel, when the characters abscond to the coast to figure out what to do: at once a respite and a reckoning, ghostly and mysterious.

Atlas is a preposterous rollercoaster directed in workmanlike fashion by Brad Peyton (San Andreas, Rampage). However, it is helped hugely by the fact that Lopez (a co-producer) takes it all so seriously.

It’s a black-and-white period piece invested with a supremely eerie folkloric edge – a bleak historical chapter made timeless, and all the more troubling for it.

It’s just a product that behaves like one – which is a pity, since studio animation is now bolder and more dynamic than it has been for years. Not hellish – but pretty purr-gatorial.

The film’s forgettable fluff, but perfectly genial, and it’s hard to imagine many hardcore objections to curling up with it.

Every character in Anora might be an utter nightmare, but they’re also a joy to spend time with, and the cast understand them down to their smallest behavioural tells.

The premise sounds as though it must invite a satirical reading, and there are many well-aimed ironic jabs at aspects of the leaders’ national character and the box-ticking rigmarole of modern politics. But directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – three beloved cult Canadian experimentalists – also poke fun at the notion that their intentions could be so clean-cut.

We’ve had two-hours-plus to leaf through this empty life, but Sorrentino makes it amount to almost nothing, except his usual love letter to Napoli, and an added ode to side-boob.

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.

The main problem with Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice is that the film is a character study with very little character to study. ... Still, what the film lacks in revelatory insight into the Trump psyche, it makes up for in enticing context.

Audiard’s trick is to make the overblown mélange into something amazingly confident – it’s clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful and absolutely bonkers. It’s hard to believe he pulls it off, but he does.

It’s the casting of Moore, though, and her willingness to denude herself at 61 – emotionally, as well as physically – that gives The Substance a startling connection with its themes. Not for 30 years has she owned a film with anything like this certitude. Watching her confront the Demi Moore in the mirror, and do it so mercilessly, is extraordinary.

The film is earnest yet hopeful, with crisply drawn characters - but perhaps its full grandeur won’t be fully realised until part two.

Cage commits, again, to his latest malcontent on the verge, without troubling himself with an Aussie accent in any way, which is classic Cage. It’s a performance that belongs quite high up in the canon.

Schrader is a million miles from the potent anguish of First Reformed, the 2017 film that won him an Oscar; rather, this nearly rivals his 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan, for bewildering tedium.

Personally, I couldn’t follow Arnold over the dotted line into violent magical realism, however situated it might be in a young girl’s sense of fantasy. It’s a miscalculation, like playing your weakest suit mistaking it for a trump.

Getting along with Hoard requires playing along with it too. But it’s easier to warm to than you might imagine, thanks to how well it captures the half-dazed tone and flow of early 1990s teenage life.

As for kindness itself, I can’t say much jumped out on a first viewing, unless it was of the you-have-to-be-cruel-to-be sort. But it’s exactly the sort of film that makes you want to look again.

Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in this full-body sensory bath movie which follows a struggle for power among the elites of New Rome.