Spiced up with some wry wit, cool music moments (Foals, Fontaines DC), a memorable cameo from Mathieu Amalric, and a touching-sexy use of Anaïs Nin erotica, this one’s a real keeper.

By stripping away anything even remotely extraneous, [Chiarella's] achieved a palpable sense of gothic anguish. And by casting his leads so perfectly, he’s also made one of the most touching romances of the year.

Popping off with primary colours and phallic imagery, I Want Your Sex isn’t quite as explosive as Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy and could have used a tighter edit, but it’s still a real good time.

The Birthday Party is too languorously paced to keep the tension levels high and a ridiculous, biology-defying third-act twist doesn’t help. Still, there’s just enough chills here for anyone who prefers their trauma to come with a rural French flavour.

The message of finding balance between analogue and digital, old-school toys and tech, may seem woolly to some. But balance feels like the solution to this 21st century parental quandary – and maybe to Hollywood’s legacy sequel problem: play to your old strengths, but have timely purpose in doing so. Toy Story 5 strikes that balance nicely.

An icebound travelogue and haunting photo essay, given voice by a lovely electronic score from Dan Deacon, Time and Water is an often dispiriting but at times transcendent look at the death of an Icelandic glacier, and the ways we process loss.

Bold, brutal yet surprisingly sensitive, it’s about as far away from Errol Flynn’s Technicolor tights or Kevin Costner’s mullet as you can imagine.

There’s not a great deal that’s new here, though the idea of the zombies rapidly evolving with the aid of fungi-like mucus and an ant colony’s hive communication is well deployed. But what makes Colony a fun night out is how well the mayhem is staged.

Revered Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki adheres to the concept of ‘Ma’, or intentional emptiness. Likewise, Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s equal-parts effervescent and unsettling third feature, Rose, sings with thoughtful silence and enriching stillness.

Kreutzer threads a fine needle through difficult material in a film that, even if it occasionally pulls its punches, will niggle on in your mind.

Not a flat-out fizzer but definitely nowhere near the ludicrously high standards he’s set for himself, Steven Spielberg’s return to sci-fi goes down as a mid-tier entry in his personal canon – albeit one elevated by Emily Blunt and a couple of the type of nuts action sequences that few others could pull off.

Perhaps it was too much to hope that we’d have a little bit of food for thought as well as the eye candy on display, but this will still wile away a dull evening very pleasantly.

This is a real return to form from Wilde, who finds her Booksmart groove again after the misstep of Don’t Worry Darling. Cue it up and get the neighbours round. Or not.

Enzo is a haunting reminder of what it is to be young – a fitting epitaph to a filmmaker who understood young people better than most.

At a slight 71 minutes, it nevertheless manages to be an engaging misadventure with a wanderlust spirit, replete with a jolly voiceover narration from Jacek Zubiel, constantly reminding us life is one big joke.

Where other reboots lean into dour origin stories, this one is as brightly coloured as a bowl of e-numbered breakfast cereal.

Wigon executes the bloody splurges with flair but fails to build up to them with stakes or tension.

Ultimately, Carney has constructed a crowd-pleasing wedding band of a movie, but a high-quality one, with a strong lead singer and solid backing. And who doesn’t want to celebrate good times? Come on.

Backrooms is hard not to recommend as a genuinely surreal horror experience. It has shades of the two Davids, Lynch and Cronenberg, but with its horrifically rendered malformations, both architectural and organic, it also feels like a commentary on the risible rise of AI slop art.

Pressure is less of a traditional war flick than a satisfying chamber piece about how people use and communicate information when the stakes are sky high and groupthink is kicking in.

Its urge to find beauty in the wreckage of war has a forced quality, a romanticism at odds with this grim world. Still, with LGBTQ+ stories so rare in the filmography of World War I, it’s a rare and welcome perspective – as well as another showcase for a gifted young filmmaker.

Full Phil is a 70-minute short story of a film with a few good jokes, some touching moments, and two Hollywood stars really going there (Stewart’s food consumption is heroic). It’s fun but, like Mr Creosote’s mint, only wafer thin.

It’s a striking debut from writer-director Maria Martinez Bayona with a fearless performance from Hall, as Claire rebels against convention and reflects on her life.

Director László Nemes (Son of Saul) returns to World War II to force two real-life foes – French Resistance chief Jean Moulin and Nazi interrogator Klaus Barbie – into a grim dance macabre in this elegant and viscerally intense wartime thriller.

Zvyagintsev has made another remarkable film full of moral clarity that will get up the nose of all the right people. He may just be the greatest Russian filmmaker since Tarkovsky, and he’s definitely the ballsiest.

The Romanian filmmaker has tackled similar themes before, most recently in 2022’s Transylvanian xenophobia drama R.M.N., but it’s extra punchy to see him casting a steely glance at a society other than his own. His latest is another chilly but gripping effort, that surges from cosy to traumatic in a heartbeat.

The storytelling doesn’t quite live up to the craft and performances.

Overall, though, this is a timely drama from a director with a growing canon of eloquent humanist work – a melancholy torch song to the stories that play out beneath our changing skylines.