The Vigil

 A just about adequate horror story set during an overnight vigil to watch over a recently deceased Jewish man before he's taken off for funeral rites. It's slow, lore heavy and lacks an interesting payoff, though it does have a few decent creepy noises and concepts for the undemanding

Babyteeth

 A rich group of characters centred around Milla, a young girl who's cancer diagnosis means she starts looking into other choices in her life. Eliza Scanlan absolutely centres this film in a performance simultaneously childishly vulnerable and richly lived in, and everybody around her matches her (in particular Essie Davis and Ben Medhlson as the parents). I saw the play version of this about 8 years ago and enjoyed it, but this feels weirdly richer and stronger - there's truths about youth and experience and life through every frame.

Follow Me

 This is sorta the bad version of last year's "escape room", as an American bunch of youtubing assholes go to Russia for an escape room experience and end up over their heads in danger. The trouble is there are no interesting or likeable characters - people are either douchebags or without personality- and the room challenges offer no particular surprises either. The ending comes up with a reasonable genre twist but it's not enough to fix the flaws

The Burnt Orange Herasy

 This is a fairly familiar europudding of a film, set in the art world as a critic (played by Claes Bang from "The Square" and Netflix's Dracula, so you know early on he's dodgy) is called in to help a collecter (played by Jagger in very much a "I'm just popping over from my lake Como house, I'll be back at the end of the movie to wrap things up" way) get a painting from an elusive master (Donald Sutherland playing a sweetie pie). Elizabeth Debicki gets the short straw as Bang's lust interest and she never really gets the full character arc the writing seems to try to convince us she's going to get. It's the usual things about art as a metaphor for truth and forgery and inward honesty and it's all fairly familiar stuff.

Where'd you go, Bernadette?

 This is a weird case of a film that was clearly given funding on the basis of its "white woman disappears in mysterious circumstances, based on a novel" setup, but it avoids most of the cliches of the material (except for the plot largely involving the super-wealthy-and-with-lots-of-free-time and an undertone of suburban satire) in order to look more deeply into the personal milleau of a woman whose life has slipped out of her grasp while she wasn't looking. It's a bit messy, with the tone somewhere between broad satire and personal neurotic drama, but I liked the vibe of it, particularly the specific take on Seattle's aspirational tech class and the climax (presaged early on so it's not a spoiler) in Antarctica.

Waves

 Story of a young black high school athlete and the tensions that build up with him to a dramatic act - odd structure means that the climax sorta lands around 60% of the way through the movie and the swerve that follows ends up being, inevitably, anti-climactic. But there's true film-making verve shown here, with committed performances throughougt (okay, maybe Lucas Hedges is the whitest of all white boys when he shows up during the back half of the movie, but he's engaged) and vigorous use of montage and virtiuoso filmmaking. Captures the attention and does not let go, though the back 40% is a bit WTF.

Bellbird

 Nice enough piece that never really cuts deep into the network of damage between three different kiwi men. A bit like Hunt for the Wilderpeople without the travel

The Personal History of David Copperfield

 A clever Dickens adaptation taking the disguised-autobiography approach of Dickens original and capturing most of the high points (allowing Patel to step out and narrate and capture the moments in his story as he goes through them) - with a superlative cast of scene-stealers to play the various Dickensian eccentrics. It perhaps slightly downplays the melancholy and melodrama in favour of the comedy and rompish elements, but there's enough there to streamline a very rambling novel into a fairly tight film.

Monos

 A group of young soldiers in a rebel gang in the mountains of Columbia are left in charge of a hostage and a cow - nobody comes out very well. This is sorta a lord-of-the-flies but with military indoctrination preceding it - it's a great delve into a world wildly unlike my own, where the kids operate entirely by their own set of not-too-sensible rules and shifting alliances, surviving inhospitable circumstances and each other as best they can. Inevitably in a largely child-and-teen cast, not all of them register entirely as characters, but those that do work well.