Benjamin Lee

There’s a lot here to digest, a bitter cocktail with many confounding flavours and its abrasiveness will prove tough-going for some, especially those in search of a more polite and familiarly structured literary biopic. But for those willing to sink into the depths with Shirley, it’s a delicious journey down.

Buxton gains confidence as the film heads into the murky final stretch, neatly gliding around the, ahem, sharp corners that would have seen others crashing into the darkness. He leads his story to a knockout ending that’s both hauntingly downbeat yet crushingly inevitable without going to new, unnecessary extremes.

The Woman King is a sturdy, rousing piece of studio entertainment, that makes both the new feel old and the old feel new.

Rather like its central relationship, the film is messy and flawed yet painfully familiar.

Her story is obviously astounding in itself, but what makes The Fire Inside, once called Flint Strong, such an upper-tier sports movie is that Morrison and the Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Jenkins don’t rely solely on the facts of her life to compel.

Gere’s commitment to the role almost makes up for the film’s flaws.

Ford has a knack for making us sweat without relying on an over-egged score or over-stacked stakes. It’s a genre movie with its feet firmly on the ground, small in scale and tight in focus.

It feels like a short that was expanded without enough thought for how it might work as a whole movie and by the end, even that curiosity has faded too.

While the film does happen upon a real, and painful, truth of the problems that come from dating without a label, as things start to devolve, it becomes harder to understand how they ever found themselves here.

As usual it’s left entirely up to the beleaguered Johnson to make any of it even remotely watchable. She remains a compelling presence, trying her darnedest with lifeless words, but, again, she’s stranded by the energy-sucking vortex of nothingness that is Jamie Dornan. He’s better than this...but he knows it and his boredom is lazily apparent throughout.

It all remains refreshingly and unusually old-fashioned. A gentle film aimed at the younger end of young audiences that will also find the approval of those that much older.

There’s something refreshingly blunt about what Together is trying to say about the dangers of codependency, a film too busy having fun to waste time writing a self-satisfied dissertation.

While some of the beats might be a little too predictable and while the emotional wallop at the end might be more of a gentle tap, Raya and the Last Dragon works for the most part, a charming, sweet-natured YA-leaning adventure that acts as proof that Disney needs to focus on moving forward rather than continuing to look back.

Recovery is shown to be a tough, jagged process and while Rebuilding might not offer much in the way of specifics, it offers a wealth of hope which might be enough for now.

In writer-director Evan Morgan’s unusual neo-noir The Kid Detective, it’s not just a suspect or a motive that’s a red herring, it’s an entire genre, a strange rug-pull of a movie that starts in the middle of the road before ending up off a cliff, in a way that both works and doesn’t, a fascinating gambit nonetheless.

While it’s ultimately a little too messy to work quite as well as it could have, given the interesting and ambitious ingredients, On the Count of Three is proof that Carmichael is a director to be excited about, hoping that perhaps he finds time to write his next script himself.

There’s a surprisingly grand emotional punch, arriving suddenly and landing with force.

The Half of It is a strong, warm-hearted and quietly progressive addition to the expanding Netflix teen movie pack which treats its target audience with the respect they deserve.

It’s a fascinating and frightening stranger-than-fiction tale and is an unusual choice for Kendrick’s directorial debut. She makes a convincing first-time film-maker, capturing the feel of a time and a number of places with ease.

It’s a film that both looks and feels the part, a handsomely made love story that’s easy to fall in love with.

It’s pure hagiography and taken as that, it’s skillfully assembled, even stylishly so at times, and Kilmer’s insights into his art skirt just the right side of Inside the Actors Studio indulgence but as a portrait of a star known for his rough edges, it’s all far too smooth.

It’s an intimate portrait that at times borders on meandering but it remains free of judgment throughout, with Einhorn and Davis using their background as journalists to let the story happen without coercion or commentary.

A smart, often ingenious, new film ... What’s most exceptional about the end result is just how deftly [the director] weaves the enraging horror of a racially motivated police shooting into a zippy genre piece.

It’s a generous, sensitive study of allyship and what that really means in the day-to-day with Ferrell working out in different, often potentially dangerous, situations how to do the right thing.

Gal Gadot leads the streamer’s latest ambitious franchise-starter that delivers just about enough dumb summer fun to have us curious for more.

Eye in the Sky aims to thrill and covertly manages to inform simultaneously.

It’s a film of many, many high-volume arguments but Dynevor and Ehrenreich remarkably avoid even the slightest sign of histrionic excess, expertly carrying over their sexual chemistry to the couple’s more horrible moments – a pair you buy in moments of love as much as you do in moments of hate.

The Rocky spin-off series continues to dazzle with another knockout drama with the magnetic Jonathan Majors.