Leslie Felperin

The way Friedland subtly works in these little touches is truly impressive. But her finest achievement here may be casting Chalfant, who gives an astonishingly nuanced, considered and graceful performance.

Barnard has always coaxed layered, thoughtful performances from her cast and knows this kind of battered but unbowed community like the back of her hand. But the drama here feels too diagrammatic, foretelling a tragic fate from the first scene onward as everyone parties down like their lives depend on it.

For sports fans, especially those worshipful of King Eric, this is pure cinematic cocaine, neatly chopped out, electrifying at first although too much of it could leave you feeling jaded and jangly.

Some may see in the final gore-splattered climax a simply expedient way to wrap things up, but both Stewart and Harrelson’s performances — all in by this point, or at least tonally in tune with Dupieux’s antics — somehow sell it all emotionally.

The film is an amazing feat of animal training and deft editing, and it’s all so weirdly cheering.

This rigorously well-made, grippy-as-a-live-squid, toska-steeped work is Zvyagintsev’s most openly critical commentary on the motherland’s current political, spiritual and moral malaise, a denunciation never said in so many words but expressed with intricate layers of irony.

This not-quite-a-feature is basically harmless, a wallow in nostalgia so innocuous that it’s hard to begrudge its aviation-crazed creator with connections sufficient to indulge his whim.

The climax is all airborne dragons and fireworks; the fact it makes little sense doesn’t matter because it’s all about sensationalism, stimulating the amygdala with bright colours and noise to the point of overload.

Like a photograph developing in a bath of chemicals, Kreutzer’s strategies and themes slowly become clearer, and the scene isn’t pretty.

It is immaculately performed by Zischler and especially Hüller, grounding the film throughout with an uncanny, expressive stillness.