Geoffrey Macnab

Franco provides a platform for his two leads, Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, to give blisteringly intense performances. But the film would surely have benefitted from a little more nuance and delicacy.

The brilliance of Adams’ performance lies in its subtlety and restraint, as well as its emotional rawness. Much of the dramatic tension here comes from her struggle to keep things together: to make appointments on time and to put her family’s interests ahead of her own for once.

This warped satire is ultimately neither as shocking nor as funny as you initially hope it’s going to be.

A House of Dynamite (which premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival) stands as a grim and timely warning about the renewed dangers of nuclear proliferation. Another way of looking at it, though, is as the most entertaining Hollywood movie on the subject of potential mass destruction since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.

The real way Safdie puts a chokehold on his audience is by examining Mark and Dawn’s physical and emotional weaknesses in such forensic detail. The Smashing Machine may not provide the pay-offs that audiences expect from more conventional sports movies, but this is the most raw and vulnerable that Johnson has ever been on screen. Once you’ve seen him this exposed, you won’t watch his typical action movie stunts in quite the same way ever again.

In what could easily have been a banana skin of a role, Law is surprisingly sure-footed. The British star has clearly studied his subject closely. He captures the Russian president with metronomic precision – his mannerisms, his cunning, his smirks and scowls.

For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.

A very cleverly crafted screenplay, co-written by Baumbach and British actor-writer Emily Mortimer, balances the in-jokes with perceptive observations about status anxiety, the vapidity of celebrity culture, and the fragility of family ties.

This is slippery, subversive storytelling that’s very hard to get any firm grasp on – but that is one of its main pleasures.

Alpha has some tremendous moments, but the movie is undermined by its own dense and impenetrable storytelling style. It would surely have worked far better as an immersive installation piece than as a two hour feature.