Robbie Collin

Serraille, whose debut feature Jeune Femme won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2017, has returned with a film that feels like a jewellery box of telling moments: there is precious stuff here, and real sparkle too.

Close is a great film about friendship, but perhaps an even greater one about being alone.

Stars at Noon is at its best when it has Trish and Daniel suspended in horny limbo, with Denis building an atmosphere of sultry languor that makes the film feel as if it’s constantly stretching and circling, like a sleepy cat.

Yes, it’s a bright and splashy jukebox epic with an irresistible central performance from Austin Butler . . . But in that signature Luhrmann way, it veers in and out of fashion on a scene-by-scene basis: it’s the most impeccably styled and blaringly gaudy thing you’ll see all year, and all the more fun for it.

It wouldn’t be quite right to describe Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men as a horror film. Rather, it’s the kind of thing the victims in a horror film might watch, just after pulling it from the cellar of a derelict harbour cottage, and shortly before succumbing to some blood-curdling maritime curse.

Seydoux gives the film’s best performance: even wrenching moments are played at a glassy remove. But unlike Cronenberg’s Crash, which shook Cannes to the core in 1996, there’s no shock of the new in Crimes of the Future – a crucial requirement for every true festival coup de scandale.

The points of Östlund’s Triangle are far from subtle. Vanity is toxic; fortunes corrupt; everyone loves to see an Instagrammer getting their comeuppance. But across its well-earned two-and-a-half-hour running time, epic schadenfreude keeps edging into genuine sympathy, and we feel just sorry enough for these awful people for the next humiliation to sting just as hard.

While Swinton and Elba make smooth work of the fairy-tale-toned dialogue, they simply lack the chemistry to make their tryst convince as romance. And the fantasy flashbacks too often sink into chintz.

Much as it would be nice to report that the film lived up to its director’s triumphant return, it’s unfortunately a swaggering chore: watching it feels like competing in a sort of art-house cinema Krypton Factor, with a barrage of interpretative dance interludes, unflinching full-frontal male nudity, pulverisingly bleak mise-en-scene, and writhing mental collapse.

For shoestring charm, One Cut of the Dead remains unbeaten, but Final Cut brings off the same hugely satisfying Tetris symphony of emotional and narrative blocks falling into place.

Thrilling, moving and gloriously Cruisey, Joseph Kosinski's sequel to the 1986 hit is unquestionably the best studio action film in years.

It’s the sort of film that rattles you in three ways at once: through the grim candour of its themes, the chill precision of its craft, and the nightmarish throb of its images.

But the idea that Raimi’s signature touch amounts to rewarming old flourishes from his work over the last four decades is a wildly embarrassing and juvenile way to think about filmmaking: what you actually get here is the Marvel house style with Raimi flavouring sprinkled on top, and anything that feels outrageous only does so in the context of the franchise’s fussily restrictive rule set.

Vitally, Wandel doesn’t ramp up the misery here for dramatic effect, but rather successfully makes the fairly everyday unpleasantness feel as chest-clutchingly hopeless as it would to – well, a seven-year-old.

“We have to be able to enter the 1930s with our heads held high,” Dockery says – another hint that further Downtons may just keep roaring down the road, Fast & Furious-style. But it’s hard to believe that any could serve as a better send-off than this.

The Lost City is what could be described as knowingly dated: it’s a film designed to make you regret they don’t make ’em like this any more, even when “this” means escapist Hollywood fluff.

So many sequences here feel like free-floating trailer fodder: surplus to plot requirements, but too expensive to cut.

Some of the jokes here are so bad they may be legally actionabubble, even prosecutabubble, and will cause toes to curl on the feet of the hitherto unembarrassabubble. There are scenes now seared upon my memory through sheer force of murderous un-funniness which I fear may prove to be unscrubbabubble.

High-speed antics have never felt this slow.

Leto throws himself into the role with a steely commitment that would be easier to understand if the film surrounding him weren’t so thuddingly generic.

Speeding vehicles are clunked and donked into one another with xylophonic zeal, while the camera snakes and tears between them faster than seems physically possible. I mean it as a compliment when I say there are entire sequences here which look as if they might have been shot by a monkey in a jetpack.

Deftly adapted by director Audrey Diwan from a novella, Happening is a period piece, but it’s acted and shot with a shivery immediacy.

It works as beautifully as it does because the film’s comedy has been machined with Swiss precision, and all of its characters written with obvious love.

The two stars generate an astonishing sensual charge in a brilliant addition to the Batman canon that refuses to behave like a blockbuster

At least Watts’s bright-eyed charisma and obvious commitment passes the time – while director Phillip Noyce, who also had Angelina Jolie running for her life in 2010’s Salt, does his best to keep things visually fresh.

The Duke is that rarest of things: a comedy that knows that a twinkle in the eye and a fire in the belly needn’t be mutually exclusive.

It’s less a film than a compound disaster scenario for comedy: to say I didn’t laugh once is to understate the sheer volume and vehemence of not-laughing I was doing during each of its 106 agonising minutes.

With Kimi, director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp have dazzlingly updated Rear Window for the work-from-home age: their film puts a thrillingly contemporary spin on a vintage paranoia-drenched premise.