Sarah-Tai Black

It is a highly entertaining romp that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is unapologetic in both its self-awareness and sense of humour.

It is a constraint of cinematic vision that flattens the potential of the figures, the speech, and the movements of Women Talking. It is less about what is being said here – flawed yet fierce as it is – and more that, in order to realize the full impact of its meaning, what is being said needs to fight through the film’s own lacklustre veneer to be able to convey itself with any sense of spirit.

The labour the filmmaker undertakes here is similarly personal and intimate; it is clearly an act of healing as well as an offering for others who see their lives echoed.

Rare archival footage is intertwined among the film’s historical narrative with an all-too-rare grace — the images we see here lend themselves to a deep and nuanced understanding of Lowndes County at the time; not just the shared, communal efforts but the mapping of both community and anti-Blackness as it materialized through the everyday.

A glossy and breezy summation of Black cinema history this is not, and thank goodness for that.

Even if the effect of watching two mega-screen icons banter back and forth for an hour and change doesn’t add up to much, Clooney and Roberts still have a sort of sparkle between them. It is the exact sort of wholly inoffensive, if bland, charisma that’s perfect for low-key, weekend watching (made even better in your pyjamas and on your couch).

There is a sincerity here that is unafraid of itself and – in what is most certainly a love letter to the beguiling and tumultuous affair that is girlhood – Catherine Called Birdy feels unique and special in a way that speaks directly to Birdy and other uncontainable girls like her.

With a story this well-trodden, exhausted even, the contributions that “On the Come Up” makes are too limited. It feels dated, both in scope and in form.

What Cregger best accomplishes with Barbarian is an unhinged sort of storytelling that nevertheless feels calculated in its design. It knows that comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin, and synthesizes both while also playfully knocking loose a screw or two.

A first feature that is fresh as it is concise, “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” presents a toothy vision of evangelical life without losing sight of the feeling that remains when the facade of it all finally falls.

The Black Phone is an enjoyable watch, for sure, but it lacks a certain agility, which keeps it from being as great as we want it to be.

It’s an edge-of-your-seat crowd-pleaser that cares enough to develop its story world and characters just as well as its jump-scares and tension.

While the tone and feel of Nope is wonderfully atmospheric and expansive, it also feels as if it comes at the expense of characters possessing deep interior lives or a story world that is well and evenly plotted.

The film itself feels as if it has emerged fully formed from the mind of its author, for better and for worse. It is a study of women’s sexuality, desire and autonomy that succeeds just as much as it stumbles, a method of feminist storytelling that privileges the pursuit of desire over an evenness of narrative. It cares not for the customary, but instead for the messiness of real life, which here is inextricable from its own means.

While its issues with pacing can be overlooked in favor of its welcome sincerity and full heart, everything that Marks’ film offers us is well-trod territory.

Official Competition is a coy satire that makes welcome use of biting meta-commentary and self-reflexive critique.

The biggest disappointment of Williams’ film then is not the ordinariness of its style and narrative mechanisms or even its safe and easy politics in search of a similarly broad audience, but its unwillingness to disrupt, with full and heavy weight, the exact things that it critiques.

While par for the course in terms of its premise as well as much of its plotting, “Marvelous and the Black Hole” is still somewhat refreshing in its visual style and experimentation.

Paris, 13th District is not a revelation of a film, but it is a charismatic collection of moments worth spending time with.

It is a film that asks audiences to take the plunge into chaos and confusion, so that we’re able to fully see the innate humanity of what remains when the dust of it all settles.

The film’s greatest achievement is the ease with which it traverses the delicate territory of its characters’ lives without losing the sense of a past both shared and fractured in memory.

While Topside is without a doubt a film that lives within its own immediacy, it also feels somewhat entrenched within the hopeless inevitability of its own story.

Ver Linden has the potential to twist and upend expectations – to play with genre and character in a way that reworks and remixes both film history and storytelling. Instead, she spends the majority of her film’s runtime vaguely approaching those intentions rather than actually materializing them. It is a tiring series of runarounds that viewers will lose patience for.

West’s direction is exacting and rigorous. From the filmmaker’s more formal experimentations right down to the soundtrack, which is perfect, X feels like the exact movie its maker set out to create. Also on the money is Mia Goth’s performance as Maxine, a starry-eyed ingenue who is equal parts ordinary and glittering in her ambition and sexuality.

It doesn’t just offer up the most palatable aspects of horror as a genre; instead, it pushes it to its limits through a complete, and undoubtedly satisfying, reworking.

The beauty of a film such as Dog is that it is one of many, omnipresent in its ordinariness and commonplace in its undertaking – a brain holiday, if you will. It’s another notch in the filmography of a crowd-pleasing A-lister, another run-of-the-mill movie to emote with when we can’t feel much else.

While The Unmaking of a College stands as an important document of Hampshire history, it lacks the practical skills and vision needed to allure outside audiences.

That “Catch the Fair One” can’t imagine more for its characters, for the world it shapes, is its most glaring fault, and one that will likely leave many taking a deep breath as the credits roll.