Cath Clarke

It’s watchable, but don’t expect your mind to be blown – more gently prodded.

There’s nothing quite so naff and depressing as a British comedy misfire, and Me, Myself and Di is the real deal: a miserably unfunny romcom about Bolton’s answer to Bridget Jones.

There are some nice touches here and there, like the whirling little demons with batwings who are devoted to Mandrake. But the script ignores all the interesting bits of the story – who are the witches chasing Earwig’s mum and how does she shake them off?

It’s a blow-by-blow account in measured – but nailbiting – detail, told by the American diplomats in charge of the high-stakes negotiations. You could imagine John le Carré basing a character on one of these polite, ferociously bright people.

Director Lance Oppenheim takes a gentle approach, capturing some hilarious moments, but there’s nothing patronising or mean-spirited about his film.

Brilliantly acted but never entirely credible and not quite the force for feminism it wants to be.

A strong whiff of phoniness hangs over the whole thing.

The film’s big experiment feels only semi-interesting.

The film left me shaking with anger more than fear.

There’s a kind of blunt brute force to [Bloom's] performance – and he looks almost unrecognisable, as if he’s using certain muscles in his face for the first time.

An unthrilling, bland drama.

Here’s a tale of chest-puffing courage and one-dimensional heroism from Russia during the second world war: an old-fashioned patriotic epic with slo-mo action scenes, intestines spewed on the battlefield and a soppy sentimental romance.

The real chemistry here is with the four-legged ass, not the human one.

Miller is at the heart of the film; her natural and believable performance touches so many emotions, and makes them all look so real.

The result feels a bit like being fed a plate of arthouse vegetables, a collection of not always easy-to-watch films, randomly connected and with a total running time of 58 minutes that, to be honest, is a bit of a slog.

The denouement when it comes is meant to be shriek of pure sci-fi horror; but really, you’d find better entertainment – and more energetic acting – watching a fish tank.

Ben Hozie makes his feature debut with this semi-insightful, uncomfortably funny indie drama about a man who becomes obsessed with an online sex worker. It’s a film with a slackerish mumblecore vibe, and Hozie is refreshingly grown up about sex. But it’s hard to see how his film adds much to the conversation about intimacy in the internet age.

It’s a preposterous plot, with a damp-squib ending, and like an episode of Dallas, the dialogue gets phonier and phonier.

Compassionate and honestly told, it is a real empathy machine of a movie.

Dyer’s intelligent and sensitive performance does wonders for a character who, on the page, looks like a male fantasy: a cool-girl psychiatric case, fun-loving, free-spirited and up for anything.

Robin’s Wish is not a wide-ranging documentary about Williams’s life. It only briefly sketches in his career, from early ambitions of serious acting at the Juilliard drama school in New York to standup stardom (“he drained every scintilla of laughter out of the crowd”) and Hollywood.

It’s a throwaway film that perhaps I shouldn’t have enjoyed as much as I did, but Mandy is such a deliciously sour character.

There’s nothing to fault in the performances, but the characters are filo pastry thin and slightly bland-tasting – like less complicated, less interesting versions of actual people.

What the film does very well is show how doping became so normalised. It’s as much a part of the team’s routine as a post-race rubdown.

In the end the story is told rather blandly, the edges sentimentally smoothed down.

What an engrossing film – and the gender reversal of a male muse inspiring a female painter has got to be one small step for art-world equality.

More like 92% generic.

Semen cocktails, broken testicles and dancefloor laxatives are among myriad reasons to avoid this grim grossout comedy.

You could just as easily picture this film playing on the white walls of a gallery as a cinema – if either were open.

It’s a forgettable film, with a fair few gags that strike a depressingly sexist note.

It’s a film that may be a bit sugary for some tastes, but it’s made with real care and craft.

It’s intense but not unwatchably painful, and so much more than an issue film or portrait of a victim. I really hope Knight finds a place in the film industry; with her terrific performance here she’s earned it.

A fascinating film.

Tragedy and slapstick run through the film and it is very funny.

It’s all very spectacular – but nothing much happens in the second half, and back on Earth, the movie’s message about loss and the power of letting go feels over-sweetened, more Disney than Disney.

An intriguing, somewhat abstract drama about a country descending into chaos.

This documentary makes a pretty convincing case for the admission of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint into the boys’ club of abstract art, alongside Kandinsky, Mondrian et al.

It is a personal film – and political, too. There is emotion and urgency in that familiar soothing voice.

Becky’s crazed kills get more and more gimmicky, and there’s nothing in the script to indicate what has turned her into a pint-sized death-dealer.

With so much intense focus lavished on the action, there’s none to spare for the characters’ emotional lives, and it’s hard to care much about who lives or dies.

It is something of a letdown: a funny but conventional glossy romcom. But there is no messing with Viswanathan, who is undoubtedly the main attraction.

A smart and satisfying movie, although the crashy-bashy deafening score is so loud you can probably hear it in space.

The movie falls apart with some moral handwringing that will likely infuriate genre fans, and for everyone else, feel like a tired airing of the debate around violence in movies – all the more objectionable in a film with its fair share of mutilated female victims.

Spree is meant to comment on the shallowness of social media culture; the trouble is, it’s a film with the depth of a puddle.

Some might find her style, leaving no thought unexamined, a bit rambling, but Paula is doing something interesting here.

What an emotional, satisfying film this is – and a whopping oversized calling card for everyone involved.

This is paddling-pool-level entertainment.

As the daughter of director Ron Howard, widely regarded as one of nicest men in Hollywood, Howard is herself blessed in the dad department; he is very likable here. His only parenting crime seems to have been to film the birth of all four of his kids. But the rest of the Hollywood contributions are irritatingly platitudinous.

The action is relentless and laboured with the odd pause for a sentimental lesson or moment of personal growth. StarDog may work its slight charms on young children, but older kids will feel they’ve seen smarter, funnier and cleverer before.

After a lifetime reporting on conflict, Fisk reflects on the capacity of human beings to cause chaos on such a scale. Is there something deep in our souls that permits it because it feels natural? His painful, deeply serious question about the inevitability of war sets the tone of this documentary about his career.

It’s a mouth-puckeringly tart movie that’s tonally in a world of its own – darkly disturbing, absurd, brutal and silly, with a batsqueak of bonkers.

Weirdly prudish about the intimacy scenes, the sex addiction storyline is a cheap attempt to spice up the romcom formula, but this movie is as vanilla as they come.

If you’re looking for a definitive Dalai Lama documentary, this narrow-focus film about his lifelong passion for science probably won’t cut it.

Here’s a true story about a young soldier’s exceptional bravery and sacrifice made into a pretty average war movie, insubstantial and TV-ish despite the appearance of some decorated Hollywood veterans.

If you’re a parent whose screen-time rules have crumbled in lockdown, under no circumstances watch this film until normal service resumes.

The story has the makings of a gripping adventure, but something is lacking.

Here’s a modestly entertaining stop-motion family film with a fuzzily retro homemade aesthetic and a warming gentle Englishness: decent enough, but stretched perilously thin.

The Grand Bizarre is a film that will alienate many with its video-artiness but the focus here on looking and looking again with wonder at the everyday stuff around us may strike a chord at the moment.

The film is, I think, just as Cunningham would have wanted it: cerebral, highbrow and mildly frustrating, with nothing so conventional as talking heads or context.

The whole thing looks as if it was dreamed up under the influence of a quality batch of LSD. I laughed out loud at the hokiest bits. But I’ve got to admit I was sucked in and genuinely scared, too.

The film is gorgeous to look at, all alpine meadow flowers and glorious green mountains. But the drama loses momentum pretty early on.

Virtually laugh-free, so-so looking with a seriously drippy musical number, it feels like a film slipped into cinemas over summer to sucker parents desperate to do something, anything, to fill a couple of hours.

The hits comes thick and fast, tightly arranged and slickly performed, but this lineup of well-preserved mostly male musicians gives the show the bland atmosphere of a celebrity tribute band.

It’s full of plot holes but compulsively watchable for the first hour, before the whole thing falls to pieces as Mortimer chucks in a load of well-worn horror-movie tropes.

The story is a real-life political chess game with the makings of a gripping race-against-the-clock thriller; but here it drags out into sluggish, dull and unconvincing melodrama.

Forget about chilling to the bone, The Grudge barely drops below room temperature.

Like Your Name, it’s thrillingly beautiful: Tokyo is animated in hyperreal intricacy, every dazzling detail dialled up to 11, but it’s less of a heartbreaker.

A little of the personality has been lost in adapting Shaun’s world for sci-fi (the Wallace and Gromit movie Curse of the Were-Rabbit pulled off horror with a little more finesse). It’s a minor quibble; Shaun is by no means past his prime.

I can’t help thinking Gillan’s superpower as a writer and performer might actually be comedy. Still, always a compelling screen presence, she’s now a film-maker to watch.

To say The Cave would break anyone’s heart feels flimsy. Like Ballour, it has a purpose: to focus the world’s attention on the suffering of Syrian people.

Harvey is mostly a watchful observer with a notebook; sometimes she reads lines of poetry she’s jotted down on the voiceover. But we barely see her interacting with anyone on the ground, which gives the whole thing an impersonal feel.

Like watching a statue for two-and-a-half hours, there’s nothing to do but sit back and yawn.

It’s a film with charm and sweetness but a twinge of anxiety, a little gravitational pull to darker places.

A little of the intimacy is gone, and I have to admit to not being 100% sold on the cowboy-inflected songs, which feature quite a bit of dime-store sentimentality. But Springsteen is undoubtedly magnetic, his voice a honeyed growl.

Despite featuring big-name actors – Miller, Paul and Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks as Debra’s sister – American Woman is a film with a lived-in authentic feel. And Miller plays it beautifully with psychological depth and not a jot of actorly condescension.

The ending is unforgivably mawkish, though, and the running time of two-and-a-quarter hours is simply too long.

Even with an intelligent, credible performance by David Oyelowo, the daftness and utter implausibility of a smartphone so smart it can make calls to the future is overwhelming.

Honeyland really is a miraculous feat, shot over three years as if by invisible camera – not a single furtive glance is directed towards the film-makers.