Adam Woodward

Marching Powder is neither interesting nor relevant enough to warrant being discussed within a wider cultural or socioeconomic context.

With the emotional stakes having been spelled out in giant, razor-sharp claw marks, all that’s left to do is squirm at Blake’s slow, agonising change and wait for the inevitable to happen.

As a director, von Horn is smart enough to recognise that even the most heinous crimes have a human culprit, and as such his sensitive, unsensational film retains a sense of poise and never strays into soap opera territory.

Kingdom certainly has its moments, but the rougher, darker edges of predecessors Dawn, Rise and War have been smoothed out, leaving us with an over-long, relatively low-stakes instalment sorely lacking in originality.

It’s a competently made and compellingly acted film which will hopefully lead to us seeing a lot more of both filmmaker and lead actor.

These stories are already the stuff of cinematic legend, but that doesn’t make their retelling any less compelling.

This is also a film that benefits from occasional glimmers of lightness, which contribute to a more rounded sense of who Winton was as a person while providing some respite from the weighty subject matter.

This is a film that has been double dipped in lavish spectacle and then generously sprinkled with all the charm, silliness and wit found in Roald Dahl’s source novel.

If it’s pure action you’re after, there’s plenty to set your heart racing here. Cruise and his long-time directing partner Christopher McQuarrie have once again engineered some truly staggering set-pieces

Where Thor: Ragnarok was unpredictable and unruly in the most thrilling way, Love and Thunder by contrast feels safe and formulaic. Waititi is too preoccupied with trying to land the same jokes, and he burdens the film with a wishy-washy love story which even by the MCU’s low standards feels shallow and perfunctory.

The film keeps us guessing to the end, although a lack of character development and some ponderous plotting means it’s hard to care too much about the fate of Pete and the others.

Owen wrote several other poems about the horrors of war before his untimely death in 1920, and there is one which Davies does not feature here whose title nonetheless captures the mournful spirit of his film. It’s called ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’.

If this is Noé at his most compassionate and vulnerable, it’s telling that Vortex ultimately lacks the raw emotional impact of Michael Haneke’s Amour, another brutally honest, skilfully acted chamber piece about dementia and death, or Florian Zeller’s more recent The Father.

Don’t call it a throwback though. Despite bearing certain similarities to high-concept action-adventure romantic comedies of yesteryear (namely Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile and Six Days, Seven Nights), this is a thoroughly modern romp.

It’s undemanding, dramatically inert and, although class is very much on its agenda, one-dimensional in its depiction of the golfing establishment’s stuffy elitism.

Maybe he doesn’t have the cunning of Keaton or the brawn of Bale, but in his own unique way Pattinson’s Batman feels perfectly adapted for the uncertain and unjust times we are living in, where greed and impunity are the order of the day. And if the film itself isn’t totally original, it at least spreads its latex wings in some fun and surprising ways.

For all its reliance on gore and good old-fashioned jump scares, the film rarely raises the pulse.