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The Five Devils can be read as a metaphor for the sixth sense of children, who are able to perceive things that remain hidden to adults, and as a reflection on entangled human relationships that cannot be rationally tamed. My partner and I may have a child that we love above all else, but that does not mean that we are meant for each other and must stay together until death. While the film does not stylistically approach the experiments that the notion of temporal flashbacks triggered by olfactory reactions conjures up, it does present a gripping story of one seemingly ordinary family whose members are given a second chance through slightly fantastical events. The ending is rich in interpretation and Léa Mysius works with supernatural motifs and humorous interludes in a natural and effective way. I was pleasantly drawn in all the time, and not only thanks to Adèle Exarchopoulos, with whom I managed to fall in love five times after Blue Is the Warmest Color. She’s like fine wine.

It started off very nicely, with dystopian science fiction interspersed with parody that applies film form and casting to the real world and its social stratification is imaginative and fresh. But then the joy of discovering an uncharted world gives way to an incredibly infantile and repetitive attempt at a cool meta-concept with a dull story in which one scene lasts subjectively longer than a train journey from Budějovice to Brno. Occasionally a good joke flashes through, but otherwise it's a film that totally fails to balance the functional arrangement of its world with the dynamics of its narrative and it is cruelly boring. Most of the time I preferred to fiddle with my accreditation card and count how many times it spun in an hour – and the next hour I tried to beat the record. I never expected the most boring Seymour Skinner-like entertainment to save me like this.

A maddeningly annoying, posturing and unfocused piece of filmmaking that promises a dense generational coming-of-age drama from the perspective of an ethnic minority in its opening, only to devolve into a repetitive attempt at nothing. The Instagram clips are incoherent, interspersed haphazardly with the classic film staging, and don't really move the story anywhere. Why the R.E.M. song was there in the first place is something I could not figure out. And that goes for pretty much every scene, with only the cool dad getting sympathy.

The feature debut of French director Emmanuelle Nicot balances on thin ice and chooses a topic that is still not talked about in public. In the hectic opening, the underage girl Dalva (Zelda Samson) is taken away from her father, with whom she has an overly intimate relationship – when she was younger, he took her away from her mother and sexually abused her. It's a thoughtful drama about the difficulty of understanding a youthful perspective, letting us interpret the action instead of including descriptive footage. Dalva enters the story looking and dressed like an adult woman and is integrated into a children's society in which her childlike qualities are again to shine through. Although the institutions have good intentions for her, it becomes clear that none of the educators can understand the complex life situation in which the immature and unhealthy girl has found herself. The first half promises a thoroughly depressing character and relationship study, which eventually gives way to a somewhat superficial climax where the author's message yields to a universal template. Nevertheless, it’s a thought-provoking portrayal of the issue, the pitfalls of which are far from ending with the arrest of the rapist, as the underage victims face a wide range of social, emotional and physical consequences.

If someone asked me to sum up Cronenberg's latest film in one sentence, it would probably be unattainable mission. On the one hand, it’s mysterious, unyielding and strongly allegorical, as it’s not psychologically interested in the characters, leaving them to wander around the austerely rendered dystopian setting and utter a series of existential or technical rather than mundane and plot-forming lines, but it’s also straightforward and dense. The introduction already uses simple means of communication to ask the questions we desperately want answers to. We are immersed in another distinctive Cronenberg world, where people hardly feel pain; it has become more of an aphrodisiac. Nobody is interested in "old sex" anymore, and instead people get aroused in public by cutting each other. Some transfer this ecstasy into art, which in Crimes of the Future defies all self-control. The show here is driven to extremes that may yet captivate an increasingly disfigured and mutated society. The boundary between artist and creation is disappearing, just as the role of the environment is changing, from a benevolent guiding force to a definitively beleaguered human instrument and, in a way, a feeding. Unfortunately, Cronenberg renders all these absorbing and big ideas too austerely and mainly descriptively, so it stands out painfully at times that the famous filmmaker triumphs mainly in the brooding arrangement of his original world, in which the "alien" coldness clashes with the organic warmth of the sprawling stump beds and chairs. It's time to listen, says the presenter during the performance of an individual studded with auditory organs, exhorting especially the audience, who must be able, as is traditional with Cronenberg, to interpret things in their own way. A film in which the protagonist participates in an inner beauty contest while growing a set of mutant organs may sound like cheap symbolism, but in the hands of a skilled filmmaker it offers many thought-provoking ideas. Often too descriptive and visually unattractive, but still poignant and worthy of reflection. 70 %

A brilliantly filmed and emotionally draining portrait of the separatist territory of Donetsk, Ukraine, which was shaken by the downing of plane with 280 civilians on board in 2014. For a full 100 minutes we are bound by perspective to a Ukrainian couple, Irka and Tolik, whose house is destroyed by a deflected missile and who find themselves in the unpredictable and ideologically ungraspable territory of war. Tolik takes a passive position and does not hesitate to cooperate with the Russian occupiers to ensure his and his wife's safety. His brother-in-law, on the other hand, is a strict anti-separatist, and between them stands a pregnant Irka, who must keep a rational perspective and cope with the unimaginable pressure with her head held high. Maryna Horbač uses long compositions with a slow-moving camera that breaks down the space in two planes – in the foreground we watch one of the characters and in the background the action unfolds, often only with sound, which gives goosebumps. The subjective perspective may not have quite the impact of the classic Come and See, but Klondike is nonetheless a confident and brilliant piece of filmmaking that renders the horror of war with cold-blooded intransigence. It doesn't need machine-gun salvos or manipulative twists to make us worry about the protagonists. The ending is too symbolically staged and pushes us to a clear reaction, but otherwise the knowledge that this is how things really happened (and are happening) wins out. 85 %

The creators spare no ambition and present a dense futuristic world in which the protagonist's paralysed father communicates via a flying drone and where, alongside mostly degenerate humans, there are also artificially created individuals. On the surface, the attractive theme is based on The Matrix, Alita: Battle Angel and other science fiction films in which only a chosen person from among the oppressed has the power to overthrow a mysterious absolutist government. Unlike them, however, Vesper focuses on an intimate story with several players and emphasizes the connection with nature, and thus the deepening relationship between man and his synthetic imitation. The actors are decent, the music expressive and the visuals at times on the level of Hollywood blockbusters, although the budget was apparently not enough for lavish attractions, and we mostly find ourselves in forests where life, except for a few technical gadgets, looks like from the distant past. Unfortunately, there is not a single memorable character and the directors copy the traditional overseas style more than they come up with original ideas and unpredictable twists. And shortening it by some fifteen minutes would only benefit this almost two-hour film.

The first act is brilliant in its own way. If I had to pick a film I thought was made on drugs, this would be among the first – the cheesy portrait of the perfect family, with a theatrical Reeves who seems to have no idea what he's in for, is priceless. Then the two soaked hotties show up to gently torture the exemplary and temporarily abandoned father with their throbbing clitorises, and it's bad. Daddy gets groped and the two sexy chicks turn into emancipated furies who make a big mess of their victim's perfectly ordered life. It's still a great parody, but somehow it dawned on me that Eli Roth was serious, and gradually I found myself internally debating which of the two invasive creatures I'd rather be tempted by. They both won in the end, unlike Reeves, who really can’t put this behind him – but at least his forced wailing is somehow iconic, not far from Nicolas Cage’s in The Wicker Man. The subversive ending was inevitable given Roth's lack of psychology and his Tarantino-like desire to pose. Eventually, though, it holds its own in that regard, and Knock Knock is beautifully goofy, rather than moronic and unwatchable. 55 %

In many ways this is a remarkable piece of work that shows its protagonist through the eyes of the antagonist, the music and the image of Elvis as a construct of the environment and the media, and also as the passion it held in one man, controlled like a puppet by every greedy little bugger who wanted to make a buck out of Presley, which eventually drove the whole world mad. Elvis's career was a ground-breaking show with an impact on pop culture that even the Beatles didn't have in Britain, so it's clear that Luhrmann opts for heavily pop-cultural filmmaking devices – from splitscreen to extravagant compositional continuity to flashbacks and flashforwards, with a narrator who is utterly reliable in all his guile and cunning. Tom Hanks may never have entertained me like this before, and as the manager, Parker dangerously steals some scenes for himself – as does Luhrmann, who dominates the fragmented but iron-clad and coherent plot much like Parker dominates Presley's life, reduced to a glittering pompous cliché. "I'm caught in a trap, I can't walk out....," Elvis sings in Casino as his manager makes a deal with the devil and takes absolute control. Luhrmann showers us with vivid scenes, but never leave us floundering, clinging to his increasingly fractured protagonist as the noose around his ill-fated life partner tightens. Everything is perfectly aligned, each act and each collage complementing each other in an almost constant spatio-temporal communication, which in Luhrmann's circus rhythm is almost dizzying. How long can a man be an attraction when he himself is denied pure joy? Countless motifs for comparison emerge from the film, which makes it easier to navigate the dynamic arrangement, and the fact that the director, with his perfectly calculated mannerisms, sometimes takes us too far away from Elvis can be forgiven – the final archive shots bring such lumps in our throats that not even the greedy Parker would take them. And I don't want to blame Butler at all, who was really amazing and blended so well with Elvis that after a while I didn't notice the actor, but only the character, something I couldn't do with Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody. Richard Roxburgh, my still favourite Sherlock Holmes from a not so favourite film, was also very enjoyable, and thanks for Little Richard. This is how you make biopics about cultural icons, through the lens of a culture that was crumbling before your eyes, and all it needed to be happy was a good wiggle in its hips. Again and again. 90 %

More Easter eggs than in Ready Player One. Though I didn't watch Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers when I was younger, this movie still managed to evoke some missing nostalgia, a longing for a time of film and TV series when original playful works were created instead of ripped-off or recycled. The main villain is an obese Peter Pan, who as a burnt-out star made a stupid reboot and used the money to start a factory for deforming animated characters to make cheap copies of old hits. That’s brilliant. On his heels are the heroes/actors from the original Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, one of whom underwent CGI surgery and is now 3D. The chemistry between Chip and Dale is still refined, but most importantly, they are part of a world so playful, dynamically arranged and filled with references, that even Roger Rabbit gets a run for its money. The pacing limps along around the middle, but the finale is an amazing whirlwind of ideas and references that doesn't stop lamenting contemporary filmmaking, and the characters only move forward by knowing their past stories. Seeing all the different animation styles together in a world that doesn't crumble under the creators' hands and is described in a sort of natural setting was really fulfilling and I would immediately green-lit a sequel with Chip and Dale facing the cast of the Avengers and Nic Cage, with Tom Cruise coming to the rescue. Please, please! 80 %