Watching this sturdy, sensitively acted Old West drama, it’s easy to wonder how many westerns Viggo Mortensen would have made if he’d been kicking about in the ’50s and ’60s.

It’s a bleak, brooding tale, steeped in folk mythology and infused with so much atmosphere you may feel the fog closing in around you in the cinema.

The film is at its most entertaining when it’s a showcase for Smith and Lawrence’s easy chemistry, whether improvising a Reba McEntire country song to appease some rednecks or bantering about Burnett’s bad eating habits during a convenience store hold-up. They’re eminently watchable. Then again, when the highlight of an action movie fourthquel comes with the two stars watching a younger man do his stuff, it might be time to call it a day.

With his energised 2021 breakthrough Sweat, von Horn followed a young influencer grappling with the dark side of online life. This period piece offers a very different kind of female odyssey through a lonely and forbidding world. The result is harrowing but seriously impressive.

It clocks in at three hours but not a scene feels superfluous as its central quartet – dad, mum, two teenage daughters – squabble, fall out and finally implode in a subversive final act.

Santosh positions its protagonist as a fundamentally decent woman in an impossible situation, rather than a crusading cop on mission. If ‘Training Day with more grey areas’ sounds dull, it’s anything but.

Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi epic-cum-period-romance-cum-stalker-thriller is absolutely teeming with ideas. That they don’t all come together in an entirely convincing way doesn’t spoil the overall effect of something thought-provoking, very handsomely made, and appealingly weird.

Motel Destino never deviates radically enough from that tried-and-tested Postman template to throw up too many surprises. The result is frisky but fleeting.

Sorrentino is clearly trying to move with the times – even if he’s still most comfortable in the decades he’s depicting here on screen.

Imagine Pedro Almodóvar directing Sicario and you’re close to the tenor of this exuberant cartel-thriller-stroke-musical – which, as if those elements weren’t heady enough, comes with a tender trans twist.

Rumours is a strange brew, but there’s a lot of fun to be had if you like its flavour.

It shouldn’t all be so funny, but it is, and it’s to Baker’s huge credit that he’s able to inspire laughs and huge enjoyment from this madcap story without leaving you feeling that the woman at the heart of this mess has been short-changed and exploited for our pleasure.

A cinematic Rorschach test, it’s more likely to reaffirm your views on the man than challenge them.

As a storyteller Cronenberg usually tells stories with more verve and storytelling power than this.

Its bitty flashback approach to Fife’s earlier life feels shallow, and the dynamics around the recording of his memories too often feel bogus, with Thurman’s character’s complaints feeling especially repetitive and one-note. But the sting of mortality is felt just strongly enough, and Schrader offers an unsentimental, clear-eyed view of the near-impossibility of finding a neat closure on life’s mistakes and failures.

Some who found his last two films an eccentric romp might end up feeling like some of the unfortunate folk in this – bruised, battered and stuck – but anyone who shares Lanthimos’s pleasure at swatting his humans like flies will surely extract wry pleasure from it.

As a supernatural chiller, In Flames finds itself undermined by its own everyday horrors.

As history, I’d take this account with a pinch of salt – it feels too enamoured by certain elements of its antihero’s story and blinkered to others – but as an exercise in capturing the man’s self-engineered legend, it’s energetic and engrossing.

Still, if his doc is as toothless as Cookie Monster 2.0, it’s still a nostalgic treat to spend time with the man who gave us Kermit, Big Bird and the Goblin King.

Caught by the Tides is more a montage of music and miscellaneous episodes than anything representing a traditional drama. It’s strongly propelled by music – from Chinese classical music to techno to rock – and it’s a heady visual mix of styles and formats: from grainy, phone-like footage in a documentary style, to much more pristine and considered imagery.

The tone is incredibly specific – darkly funny, exuberant, sad and enraged – and the small cast nails it.

Given the ingredients (the deeply personal vision; a cast including Driver, Aubrey Plaza and Laurence Fishburne; the big budget; the years of gestation), it’s fair to wonder why it ends up being, one, so little fun, and two, so deadening on an intellectual level.

If ever a film puts its arm round a kid and says: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got you’, that’s Bird and Bailey. She’s a character you feel Arnold would lie on railtracks to protect – and that’s a powerful, moving instinct to share.

A near non-stop cycle of batsh*t stunts, slathered with enough grease, oil, fire and sand to leave you gasping for air.

It’s just a shame we couldn’t go further into his universe to lift this portrait further out of the landfill of mediocre concert documentaries. For now, you may need to stick to Instagram Live and TikTok for a deeper glimpse into who Montero is.

If co-directors Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom paint a sometimes confronting picture of the price of ‘free love’, that never tarnishes their subject. You’re left with the sense that she was a butterfly neither the Stones nor any of the other men in her life could ever trap – a fitting epitaph to a mercurial life.

It also benefits from some engaging supporting characters.

With The Fall Guy, stuntman-turned-filmmaker David Leitch and his bang-on-form stars, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, have nestled a frisky, winsome romantic comedy inside the framework of an old-school, full-throttle action movie and conjured up a pretty perfect Friday night at the movies in the process.