While the tartness and wit is missing to elevate this anywhere near the romantic-comedy canon, the overall vibe is so cosy and frothy, you’d need a heart of steel to hate it.

Playwright-turned-fillmaker Florian Zeller continues his one-man war on the world’s tear ducts with another hard-hitting portrait of domestic life in extremis.

For all its freedom to reimagine her life and rescue her from cultural victimhood, Blonde is just a bit too willing to chuck her overboard and watch her flounder.

Sluggishly paced, stodgily scripted and curiously edited, it’s not so much a bullet ballet as a creaky dance across an abandoned saloon.

Even by the writer-director’s standards of naturalistic, middle-class restraint, it’s a ruminative experience that borders on slow-going. But The Eternal Daughter is also an ode to mothers and daughters that will leave a few teary messes in the stalls, and it’s beautifully acted by Tilda Swinton in not one, but two roles.

Burdened with an underwritten part, the curiously flavourless Styles struggles to match Pugh for intensity as husband and wife fly at each other – one’s ambition at risk from the other’s intuition – and the couple’s chemistry fizzles out. It’s a crucial flaw in a film that needs to sell us at least one thing that feels real in its world of artifice.

The Score doesn’t always strike the right notes, but it has its high points thanks to a simple, rewarding romantic arc.

What makes it work so well, aside from a rollickingly funny but never smirky McDonagh script that arms every member of its small ensemble with killer moments, is the reuniting of In Bruges’s two leads, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

It encapsulates the power of a community to protect the environment.

Kormákur creates some effective jump scares and considerable suspense as the lion stalks its prey with blood-chilling growls one minute and deadly silence the next. The CGI budget can’t always quite match his ambition, however, and perhaps as a result, his timing sometimes seems off.

A fitting tribute to a life well lived in spite of the overwhelming odds stacked against her, it is surely a sign of a remarkable woman that we are left wanting more.

Think of it as if it’s an adaptation of good Austen fan fiction. It might not have the quality of the real deal, but it has plenty of the same charms.

The Forgiven takes the harder road, and actually proves more engrossing and haunting in retrospect than when you’re actually watching it. In an era of instant gratification, that, for all the film’s evident flaws, is still worth chin-stroking respect.

Capably directed by debut filmmaker Lee Haven Jones, The Feast won’t challenge Midsommar for the modern folk-horror crown. Like a Welshophone episode of Inside No.9 stretched to feature length, it’s more of a sinister little snack than a full-blown feast.

The future of the murder-mystery looks bright with movies as bold and boundary-breaking as this.

Every scene is shot in Pine Ridge, and the cast is entirely comprised of first-time actors from that community – and it’s these factors that really give the film a raw authenticity rarely found in film depictions of reservation life.

Sick of Myself is, for all the dark themes and unsettling imagery, deeply watchable – a perfectly executed black comedy accompanied by humorously viscious counter-culture commentary that cannot be overlooked.

A little over-extended – it has its origins in a festival short – and only partially successful in developing the bizarre, humanising bond between filmmaker and subject, as well as suggesting the moral quagmire of Melbourne’s social underbelly, it’s nevertheless memorable for its spasmodic moments of sublimely black humour.

Aided by a forceful performance from relative newcomer Midthunder, this Predator movie is full of surprises and that makes its alien monster actually scary again.

What’s missing is a bit of heart to make you care, or at least, a sense of knowing how to wrap it up quickly enough, and smartly enough, for it not to matter if you don’t. An amped-up Friday night audience might have fun with Bullet Train once, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to ride it again.

If you’re able to look past the police’s bizarre inaction, Mully’s implausibly excellent driving skills and the schmaltzy score, there are moments of fun to be had.

The screenplay offers limited room for character development – Akilla arrives pretty much fully formed – and what we’re left with is an uneven puzzle, eye-catching in pieces but not entirely convincing when put together.

Notre-Dame on Fire is really good at conveying an iconic building’s place in a nation’s soul, and the grief that its potential loss can provoke. Most of its symbolism is well-earned and resonant.

You can appreciate the effort, but this falls just short of doing justice to the emotional stakes and claustrophobic terror of the traumatic events themselves.

Selected readings from novels and short stories are imaginatively visualised, and the final sequences are profoundly moving. Vonnegut would have been proud of the finished film, although he did not live to see it.

But what comes before [the ending] is so overflowing with ideas – about the erasure of Black culture, our relationship with past traumas, and the underseen side of the moviemaking business – and so brimming with visual flair, it puts most other blockbusters in the shade. Spend two hours watching it and a couple more unpacking it – with or without that know-it-all mate.

Where the Crawdads Sing is more aesthetic than film. The dresses are summery and cute, Kya’s cottage is shabby chic and everyone has perfectly tousled hair, at all times. But trying to find anything deeper than interior design inspiration in this film is a futile exercise.

Are we watching Mrs Harris Goes to Paris for realistic narrative unpredictability or to see Lesley Manville wear stunning Dior recreations in an idealised dramedy about class? For much of this film’s target audience, the answer to that question is the latter and their expectations will be met. The rest will find Manville’s reliable magnificence more than enough to sustain their interest.