If you want to soak in what amounts to a concert film with an origin story, Becoming Led Zeppelin is sonically impressive and visually arresting.

Thatcher’s performance is mostly a marvel. She’s instantly sympathetic, the most deliberately “human” being in the film, and yet the genius of her characterisation as a robot is in the way she slightly over-enunciates her dialogue and walks with the odd shuffle of a Thunderbirds marionette.

It’s more funny peculiar than funny ha ha and, alas, doesn’t always work.

It could be seen as a cynical capitalist move by the best businesswoman in the game. And it definitely is — at least partly.

It’s all too obvious that The Smashing Machine has been conceived, among other things, as another Safdie-branded career boost for a pair of charming, charismatic actors who could do with a dash of Oscar magic. It’s just a shame that their film is a fugazi.

It’s always compelling, and a powerful first feature.

Fans are calling this the Brothers Grimm meets The Substance but it’s better than that sounds. And certainly harder to watch.

Nothing has dramatic impact. Nobody seems to believe anything they’re doing. Lawrence and Pattinson, two innately charismatic performers, are strangely self-conscious, and so many of their scenes seem like experimental improv or half-cooked rehearsals.

It’s not going to rock everyone’s world and neither is it a patch on Carol. But it’s competent, sometimes clever, film-making with ideas and lots of heart.

Coen has gone back to his happy place but this time he’s not taken the audience with him.

It’s not quite vintage Jarmusch (for that see Night on Earth and Broken Flowers), but it is light and compassionate.

It’s a decent film about an underexplored subject and adequately acted by a cast of inexperienced unknowns, but nothing we haven’t seen before from the determinedly low-key Dardennes.

No matter how many witty lines (there are a few) are placed into the mouths of postproduction beasties, they never seem real, nor do they interact credibly with their human co-stars (think Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars, but on all fours).

You can’t lie in a close-up, which is lucky for Stewart. Because her lead actress, on camera throughout, expresses the kind of deeply moving primal agony and preternatural resilience that never once feels false, and ultimately compensates for the ostentatious nonsense around her.

Solid on research, weaker on analysis, this is an affectionate celebration that keeps the northern soul campfires burning nicely.

The film plays like a well-leafed anthology of Irish folklore, handsomely enough shot but lacking the unifying conceit that has driven, say, the great Australian horror movies of recent years: The Bababook, Talk to Me, Bring Her Back. Hangings, hauntings, howling winds? For McCarthy, it’s all just good craic.

The writer-director Runar Runarsson makes a virtue out of this narrative simplicity, however, and delivers the equivalent of sweetly moving “slow” cinema, where we get to luxuriate in the characters for long, long, sometimes wordless takes, and to find in the exemplary performance of the relatively new and untested Hall a heartbreaking expression of hidden grief.

It’s when they return to Earth-828 that the film reverts to type: enervating action, platitudinous script, predictable ending.

Layton’s direction is powerful but patient and Berry brings real bite to her insurance agent, who at 53 is prey to the bitter realisation that the system is not built in her favour.

The last act has a disappointing inevitability, with little of the transcendent emotion of the first hour.

With Bader and Blyth on quietly charismatic form throughout, [Haley's] made a film that is eminently slick, consistently palatable and instantly forgettable. The perfect Netflix product.

Parallel Tales (Histoires parallèles) begins as an ambitious, metatextual, multicharacter ensemble drama, with various key cast members playing dual roles. But it rambles on too long, losing much of its early charm and focus in a ponderous, undercooked second half.

Personally, I gorged myself silly on the esoteric references, and appreciated profoundly the way that this ersatz Belmondo, just like the real thing, rubs his lower lip. But I’m not convinced that everyone else will.

Flawed to its core but never less than riveting

The poster might as well read “come see Orlando Bloom get put through the wringer”. It’s awesome on some level but it’s not much else.

Unburdened by narrative logic, there is a joie de vivre in the way Davis, 59, throws men over her shoulder, elbows them in the face and sprays them with machine-gun fire.

It’s loud, multicoloured and garish, like sticking your head inside a giant tin of Quality Street while someone whacks the outside repeatedly with a polo mallet. Only this time, for once, it’s slightly more pleasurable than that sounds.

The film is so dewy-eyed about the process that made him a star, it overlooks the more devilish bits of the bargain. In truth all biopics ought to have some aspects of a cautionary tale: there but for the grace of God go we.