Cath Clarke

Calamy is utterly convincing, giving a performance that pulls us right into Julie’s inner world.

It’s super fun entertainment, which mostly disguises the fact it’s not going to stick in the mind for long.

Though she might have turned the dial up, Burkovska conveys Lilya’s depression and anxiety, and finally her resilience, with a muted, powerful performance. This might be one to file away for the future, when the current conflict has ended.

A Bunch of Amateurs is a thoughtful film about film-making and has some unexpectedly deep things to say too about camaraderie, community and male friendship – though there are a couple of women in the club’s ageing membership.

At times I wondered if the film is a bit too tasteful and tactful about the pain that Halim and Mina have to suppress, but still it’s a hugely compassionate and emotionally satisfying movie.

What a shortchanging of Af Klint’s extraordinary life and work this is.

The film offers a fascinating glimpse into the mystery of other people, especially other people’s marriages. Friends and family still look dazed that the Alters – Rita and Jerry! – were behind the theft.

While, yes, TCWSSF is a dreamy magical realist fable with an environmental message, Alegría weaves into her tale an emotionally satisfying, gripping family drama, with singing cows – and fish too.

That sweaty, close-to-a-nervous breakdown tense feeling of being trapped is nowhere in the film. And where the script goes in its pulpy nasty final twist felt to me like a disturbingly misogynist move.

It’s heartfelt and sweetly earnest, but humdrum and disappointingly unmagical. The animation doesn’t help: characters speak with blank paralysed faces as if they’ve had botched Botox.

This gentle, authentic-feeling coming-of-age drama from Ukrainian film-maker Kateryna Gornostai premiered at the Berlin festival in 2021. Released in the UK almost a year to the day since the Russian invasion, her film has become unbearably poignant.

What’s missing is a sense of what’s at stake – we never quite get a feeling for how desperate these men are, and for the most part they feel a bit too familiar from the Britcom playbook. That said, Burrows brings cheeky-chappie warmth to the character of Curly.

Nearly everything about Epic Tails feels a bit underwhelming, and limited imagination-wise.

At points I wondered if this is a film that tells us anything about anything. Some of its ideas feel a bit thrown together.

The film gives us a precious glimpse into LGBTQ+ life in the postwar period.

This is a film with a lot of charm, and gives cinema its most lovable rats since Ratatouille. But I did wonder at points who the audience is.

Chumbawamba split up in 2012. They’re still mates and come across here as extremely likable, not taking themselves at all too seriously. Scenes of them nattering together, having a giggle now, are lovely.

There is without a doubt something uncanny, almost seance-like, in the way Canadian film-maker Kyle Edward Ball evokes childhood fear of the dark.

The film sags a little towards the end, with a few too many implausible action sequences: characters jumping out of helicopters and fighting on top of speeding SUVs, the choreography glossing over the basics of gravity and physics. Still, the cheers kept coming.

It’s a film with a decent bit of charm, and it’s hard to argue with the greed-is-bad message.

The script gives us less about their emotional connection and to be honest, the will-they-won’t-they-stay-together drama is a bit of a snore. The best scenes are down the rugby club, portrayed with tremendous warmth as a happy-ish semi-dysfunctional family.

What an intimate, thoughtful film. I can’t remember the last time I watched a documentary so desperately wanting a happy ending for everyone – human and ocelot.

The impossibility of ever really knowing our parents is a familiar storyline, but it’s told here with real generosity and warmth. Malik slyly pokes fun, but never meanly. This is satire with the thermostat turned up to 22 degrees.

It’s a gentle and superbly shot film.

The clunky script feels like it’s been re-drafted and re-drafted to the point of incomprehension – blowing any chance of conveying a message. However well-meaning, it makes for a surprisingly dull watch. That said, my five-and-three-quarter-year-old (and clearly a few other younger people in the cinema) were a bit scared by some of the dicier moments of action-adventure peril.

This is a painful, important film, made more urgent in light of China’s tightening of religious freedoms and human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslims.

The film is expertly bolted together from archive newsreels, snippets of classic war movies and interviews with surviving airmen.

The will-they-won’t-they succeed in carrying out the poisoning plot makes for pretty flat drama, and for a film about people who have suffered so much, this really fails to make us care about the characters.