Benjamin Lee

Gracey’s involving and immersive direction sweeps us up and out of our seats, refreshing beats that have grown musty in this territory (does every musician have a bad dad and a drug problem?) with endlessly inventive transitions and montages that find ways to offer something unexpected.

There’s never the satisfying pleasure of problems being solved – just people frantically raising them and things magically coming together, a film that should be about process that doesn’t seem particularly interested in it.

Robles isn’t hard to root for but Unstoppable, a rousing yet overdone biopic, tries too hard to get us there anyway.

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.

The nature of the twist, together with the high volume score, some crowd-pleasing gotchas and some sinister vaping remind us that Conclave is a glossily transferred airport novel first and a deeper drama about the world of religion second.

Heretic might not be good clean fun but Grant makes it worth us getting dirty.

The commentary on gender and age feels easy and unspecific and the world of the Vegas showgirl created from too great of a distance to really ring true.

It’s all too silly and the writing too hokey for us to keep up and by the end, truly care about who survives or not.

It’s all smug pointing and nodding rather than anything smarter or more savage, its targets just and understandable – motherhood is hellish, husbands are thoughtless, wider society is misogynistic – but its overly didactic methods repetitive and ineffectual.

It’s such a joy to watch two such assured and natural performers allowed the room to exercise both movie star and actor muscles as well as showcase their ease with both comedy and drama.

The more accomplished the film-making becomes, the more we then expect the script to level up too.

There’s such electricity to Rebel Ridge – I just hope enough people get the chance to feel it.

It’s too sloppily written and edited for even the least discerning of horror fans to really enjoy, a patchwork of nonsense confusingly stitched together by someone, who at one point, knew better.

It’s genuinely startling just how utterly wretched the finished product is and how unfit it is for a wide release.

It’s about misogyny and abuse and memory and materialism and gender performance and many other things that would be a spoiler to mention. It’s therefore less of a plate and more of a buffet, and while it might be beautifully served, it’s a film about excess that suffers from it too, a case of too much leaving us with too little.

The life lessons being taught here about self-acceptance, self-love and self-worth might be a little pat and some of the darker elements could have afforded a tad more darkness, but It Ends with Us leads with heart first, everything else later. It’s a film of huge, sometimes hugely unsubtle, emotion but it has an effectively forceful sweep to it.

But as effective as the film might be in the moment, Singer’s increasingly sloppy plotting starts to get in the way of the bigger picture by the frantic last act, which is both strangely filled with exposition info dumps yet still lacking in much sense.

Trap is a thriller that incorrectly thinks it’s fiendishly smart. Maybe if it was more aware of how stupid it actually is, it might have been a lot more fun.

As a movie, Close to You feels too unfocused, a major win and a welcome return for Page yet an opportunity squandered.

Rob is turned from stereotype to person, thanks to Will’s incredible work and Ejiofor’s unwavering commitment to capturing a full life, supported by Rob’s mother off screen. It’s an involving yet troubling tribute.

As an inevitable plot twist leads to an inevitable showdown which leads to an inevitable makeup which leads to an inevitable, and unbearable, all-cast song-and-dance number, you’ll be left wondering how bringing together fabulous women has left us all feeling so utterly unfabulous.

While the story of an old flame coming alight again can be a very poignant one, especially with an older age attached, there’s very little here to move us; a crippling dearth of chemistry between two likable enough leads who are forced into thin, circumstantial conflicts and overdramatic reactions that feel unearned and at times baffling.

This isn’t Perkins’ first shot but it’s his biggest swing and ultimately his clumsiest miss, a grab bag of ideas and tricks that can’t be coerced into anything resembling a whole.

The uplift of a woman triumphing in a male-dominated Stem world isn’t enough to get us through a mess of grindingly unfunny dialogue, too-broad performances and an utter, movie-killing lack of charm.

Alba hasn’t always made the strongest impression as an actor but this mode works well for her, convincing both in her many hand-to-hand combat scenes (her weapon of choice is a knife rather than a gun) and as an old-fashioned movie star, light on emotional depth but heavy on charisma.

[Miller] is a far better director than he is a writer though, and the film is crisply, thoughtfully made, at the least looking like it belongs on the big screen.

While we’re compelled along by an urge to know the film’s secrets, convinced that like-father-like-daughter, a twist is on the way, it’s clear from the outset that we are being guided by far unsteadier hands.

While Hall’s script might keep us at a remove, her direction takes us closer to something that feels more real, managing to conjure the specific thrill of travelling from the airport to the city at night, the hum of possibility increasing with every mile and finding ways to make what could have felt like a static location come alive, putting us in the car right next to her characters.