The Irish Times

The film occasionally feels as though it is stretching a short-film premise to feature length and its denouement perhaps lacks the devastating pay-off promised by its patient build-up. But even when the narrative falters, the rumination remains compelling.

There are certainly good times to be had in Brand New Day. Jon Bernthal offers gruff entertainment as his version of Bronsonian vigilante The Punisher. Holland’s sweet charm generates real poignancy as Peter negotiates a world that knows him only in his super-powered incarnation.

A deserving winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes, A Useful Ghost announces Boonbunchachoke as a film-maker of extravagant imagination.

A stomach-churning parting tableau snipes at a culture that monetises insecurity and conflates self-erasure and self-improvement. Don’t bring popcorn.

Manoj gives a beautifully internalised performance, carrying grief, exhaustion and decades of self-censorship in his hunched stances, while Suman provides an earthy, quietly confident counterpart. Save for a noisy outburst from Balya’s dad, who remains determined to marry his son off, Kanawade resists melodrama throughout, puppeting heartstrings with intimate gestures and dreams.

Maybe the film, as is sometimes the case with Nolan, lacks an emotional core. But the sensory overload is so enormous that it proves hard to care. Shot fluidly on 70mm Imax cameras by Hoyte van Hoytema, and scored with symphonic wit by Ludwig Göransson, this take on the epic return of the sometime Ulysses should wear away even the most passionate resistance.

Alas, the film is a corrupt mess of blaring music, mawkish soppiness and (you’re ahead of me) supposedly comic flatulence. Not all films are equal, but few are less equal than this.

Sossai favours digressions over plot, allowing recollections, landscapes and chance encounters to coalesce into a shaggy hair-of-the-dog story.

Those hoping for a return to the “splatstick” of the possessed hand in Evil Dead 2 or the cartoon medieval capering of Army of Darkness will be disappointed. Instead, Evil Dead Burn brings a convincing new-French-extremity energy to the Deadites. Regrettably, that’s not really who they are. Where did the groovy go?

Rosebush Pruning looks absolutely beautiful. (The scenery is working hard.) The anger at vulgar excess is justified. But here is a film too smug in its own show-off depravity.