Time Out

By stripping away anything even remotely extraneous, [Chiarella's] achieved a palpable sense of gothic anguish. And by casting his leads so perfectly, he’s also made one of the most touching romances of the year.

The message of finding balance between analogue and digital, old-school toys and tech, may seem woolly to some. But balance feels like the solution to this 21st century parental quandary – and maybe to Hollywood’s legacy sequel problem: play to your old strengths, but have timely purpose in doing so. Toy Story 5 strikes that balance nicely.

The Birthday Party is too languorously paced to keep the tension levels high and a ridiculous, biology-defying third-act twist doesn’t help. Still, there’s just enough chills here for anyone who prefers their trauma to come with a rural French flavour.

Popping off with primary colours and phallic imagery, I Want Your Sex isn’t quite as explosive as Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy and could have used a tighter edit, but it’s still a real good time.

An icebound travelogue and haunting photo essay, given voice by a lovely electronic score from Dan Deacon, Time and Water is an often dispiriting but at times transcendent look at the death of an Icelandic glacier, and the ways we process loss.

Bold, brutal yet surprisingly sensitive, it’s about as far away from Errol Flynn’s Technicolor tights or Kevin Costner’s mullet as you can imagine.

Revered Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki adheres to the concept of ‘Ma’, or intentional emptiness. Likewise, Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s equal-parts effervescent and unsettling third feature, Rose, sings with thoughtful silence and enriching stillness.

Kreutzer threads a fine needle through difficult material in a film that, even if it occasionally pulls its punches, will niggle on in your mind.

Not a flat-out fizzer but definitely nowhere near the ludicrously high standards he’s set for himself, Steven Spielberg’s return to sci-fi goes down as a mid-tier entry in his personal canon – albeit one elevated by Emily Blunt and a couple of the type of nuts action sequences that few others could pull off.

There’s not a great deal that’s new here, though the idea of the zombies rapidly evolving with the aid of fungi-like mucus and an ant colony’s hive communication is well deployed. But what makes Colony a fun night out is how well the mayhem is staged.