This (will’o-the-)wisp of a film is a beauty depending on the eye of the beholder; frustratingly slender yet with moments of profundity.

As glossy as any of the surfaces that Alice polishes so diligently each day, it’s a feminist film that asks viewers to evaluate their own social complicity in oppression, while not skimping on really great costumes, gorgeous cars or horny sex scenes.

Quibbles and conversation starters aside, The Whale is Aronofsky's kindest work to date, a film that asks its audience to practice acceptance, understanding, empathy, and forgiveness.

Though it’s not Schrader’s finest work and requires political leaps of faith that can be compared to American History X and could be called simplistic, Master Gardener is still an auteur operating at the top of the league.

McDonagh’s latest is a worthy In Bruges reunion: smart, funny, deeply felt.

Clever, violent, and wicked, with a fabulously unhinged turn from Goth, West’s period psycho tale truly does have the X Factor.

Nodding to Badlands, Natural Born Killers, My Own Private Idaho, even The Lost Boys, Bones And All is as interested in loneliness, connection, self-identity, and fiscal invisibility as compulsion. Who misses the murdered if they don’t ‘exist’? And what adolescent hasn’t felt the creeping dread that their needs or bodies are out of step with society?

Recalling the likes of All About Eve and Amadeus, TÁR asks pertinent questions about cancel culture, artistic integrity and gender, while also providing a primer on orchestral politics and musical history.

Though ambitious and visually stunning (gorgeous cracked deserts, beautiful beaches, houses filled with sand), it’s willfully elusive and unwieldy to the point of frustrating.

Like marriage, White Noise might not be exactly what most expect going in… but there’s fun to be had in the many surprises it throws your way.

For his part, Trachtenberg has resolved how to give the Yautja its due. Best post-Arnie Predator variant? Undoubtedly. Best Predator movie per se? Tough call, but trust this: Prey gets the job done.

Ending up in a CG mess that tries to say something about karma, Bullet Train isn’t the Pulp Fiction on rails it thinks it is. What it is, though, is a whole dollop of fun. Buoyed by Leitch’s expert eye for action as well as one of the most hilariously disposable A-list casts around, the film has Friday night written all over it.

Peele is three for three. You’ll spill out into the night jawing with your friends and gazing at the stars.

Favoring charisma over character, this action-espionage thriller hangs lots of action – some solid, some ace – on a threadbare plot.

Unashamedly absurd, wildly entertaining and face-achingly funny, Love And Thunder makes Ragnarok look like Bresson. Another classic Thor adventure.

Andy’s favourite sci-fi movie won’t be yours. But it’s a fun adventure with animation that sucks your eyeballs from their sockets.

In narrowing his film’s field of activity, director Colin Trevorrow dispiritingly winds up reducing it to the tried, the tested, and the numbingly familiar.

It has an unpredictability that keeps you on your toes and a bitter pathos that gives every laugh (of which there are many) a note of tragic despair.

Guileless performances, understated direction and bucolic Belgian scenery combine to create a quiet gem of a film.

Reichardt and Williams reunite to muted effect to create a portrait of an artist that feels a little unfinished.

At two hours and change Hunt definitely outstays its welcome, while it’s disappointing Lee has room for only two notable female characters. If you are up for some robust, relentless, blood-splattered mayhem, though, it’s well worth hunting down when it makes its way into cinemas.

The toe-tapping beats of this full-throated biopic will be familiar in more ways than one but Baz Luhrmann, like Elvis, knows how to put on a great show. Butler’s Best Actor chatter starts here.

Unconventional, almost to a fault, Brett Morgen’s impressionistic, experiential Bowie documentary is an electrifying oddity.

Sex, violence and surgery: the king of body horror is back, but the script could do with a scalpel.

A master filmmaker mines cinema’s glamorous past in a nostalgic neo-noir you don’t so much watch as surrender to.

An intense and gripping dramatization that, a few liberties apart, does justice to a disturbing true story.

The director of The Square gives a new shape a whirl with hilarious, scathing and sometimes jaw-dropping results.

George Miller combines myth, magic, and romance to mixed effect in a visually dazzling adult fairytale starring a committed Swinton and Elba.