Cath Clarke

It all adds up to a serviceable horror that at times feels like a B-movie without the fun, containing scenes that could almost work as a spoof.

The script steadily goes about its mission of freeing its characters from all forms of oppression – but it’s generous and unpatronising too.

For good to prosper, it seems, all it takes is enough good people to take action. It’s an uplifting message in a watchable movie.

Goat lacks heart and soul, and a sense of genuine emotions.

The movie is about how people ruin everything with their destructiveness, but also about the beauty of the human heart. It’s so inventive and imaginative that I wanted to love it more, but in the end found it a little bit psychologically uninvolving, perhaps because of its nonstop swirl of ideas and stories.

At times, it feels hopeless. But eventually the victories come, sometimes from unlikely quarters.

The plot pings about hyperactively, so dizzying that Cosmic Princess Kaguya! may leave audiences over 15 years old feeling more ancient than the original tale.

Flower herself remains elusive – which is the point, perhaps, since the perspective here is mostly lovers’ projections written on a delirious high, reconstructed from the letters.

Poekel’s style is far too authentic-indie and unaffected to get slushy or sentimental about Christmas; through his lens Christmas tree lights blink like police lights. But in its own low-key way, he pitches his film just right for a little squeeze of festive warmth.

The film is essentially a legal procedural: solid, mostly entertaining and occasionally gripping.

This is a family film with an IQ higher than the average – though before you book your half-term tickets, ask yourself if your little one is ready to watch a kid take a DIY flamethrower to the face of a scary monster.

Any of Dahl’s gruesome sense of fun is obliterated by a bulldozing message of empathy and kindness, thanks to a plucky orphan Beesha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and her pals pulling together an opposition to the Twits. This is vile and revolting in all the wrong ways.

This film really is a sunny delight as the weather turns cold.

Incredibly principled and brave, the librarians talk about their vocation and standing up for the young people for whom libraries are a safe space where they can discover their identity in the pages of books. They really are superwomen.

This is muscular stuff, with a firm grip on your attention.

This isn’t meant unkindly, but Vice Is Broke will be essential viewing for anybody who ever worked there, with its details about who had what job title and when.

Deadwyler’s performance is the driving force here. Without her, the audience’s attention might drift to the predictability of a plotline that hinges on Manny’s adolescent rebellion against his mum.

There’s more wit and energy this time around, and a genuinely sweet message about friendship. Even the fart joke (every kids’ movie must have at least one) was a cut above and had the adults giggling.

The movie is not lacking in adventure, perhaps what’s missing is a sense of fun.

Afterwards, everyone smiles reassuringly – then one man pipes up: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but …” and a begins a pretentious intellectual takedown. Like the film it’s a funny-smart moment, witty and grownup.

The comedy takes a bit of an IQ dip when the film crosses the Channel and the dialogue switches to English. Still, it glides along on Rutherford’s performance as Agathe – witty, warm, keenly observant, a bit clumsy and Bridget Jones-ish, but never, not even for a moment, cringy.

Making her feature-film debut, Elliott handles their story gently, with patience – though it might feel a bit slow for some.

The two women’s scenes together give the film its most interesting moments.

With a blend of archive footage and re-enactments the film-makers skilfully recreate the urgency, passion and energy of their protest.

Holy Cow is sentimental in the best of ways, with its warmth and hope in human nature.

As visions of apocalypse go, it’s rather lovely: a world lush with nature, animals learning to get by together.

Her poems, read by Giovanni herself and the actor Taraji P Henson, made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

It’s perfectly adequate for little kids but with little character of its own and a straight-to-download-style blandness.

Dog Man is packed with goofy gags that whizz past, with no let up from the hectic pace.

It would be grating were it not for Kinnear, and some nicely performed supporting roles.

The trouble with Nick Frost’s knowingly cartoonish and silly comedy paying homage to folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar is that Frost has done this kind of movie before, and better.

Kerr’s script doesn’t always match the quality of her interesting, layered lead performance.

There are some lovely playful moments: his favourite elf eats a magic shroom and grows to monstrous proportions. But there is a lot of padding and the decision to stick with the book’s rhyming scheme becomes annoying.

This documentary about [Moth's] life, directed by the actor Lucy Lawless, is a fascinating portrait of a woman who had two mottoes: “no regrets” and “don’t be boring”.

Strangely, this film keeps to the speed limit; it’s like Formula One with enhanced health and safety, slow-paced and a little low on adrenaline.

The film, with its clanging score, felt to me slightly tactless in its approach, like a Hollywood-ised version of a human interest story.

This is a shameless heartstring plucker. But it’s charming and sometimes very funny.

[An] affectionate, nostalgic documentary.

It’s stylishly shot by first-timer Louis-Seize, a bit reminiscent of an early Jim Jarmusch movie with its deadpan sense of humour, never trying too hard, just a little bit too cool for school.

It’s a quiet film, and Panigrahi plays Mira with such poise and intelligence, conveying her innermost thoughts with a slight lift of the chin here or lingering look there.

It slips just a little too easily into the generic pigeonholing of first generation south Asian narratives, but rattles along with fun and energy.

In Camera is the kind of ambitious intelligent cinema that invites your most mulled-over theories. It will exasperate some; others will be engrossed by an intriguing movie.

I didn’t feel the movie maintained the dramatic tension enough to work as a lean thriller, but as a portrait of a toxic man who thinks he could be a contender it’s funny and disturbing, with an impressive lead performance by Aldokhei.

The upside to casting Bea in a comedy is that she’s an absolute hoot. When Hollywood stars play ordinary civilians, there’s often a slumming-it quality to their performances, but Bea is funny and real, sarky and very likable as Gemma, who’s feeling guilty after Nathan dies.

The tension leaks away in the second half; the film could have done with being snipped by a good 20 minutes.

It’s a tender, painful, intimate film, made over several years as we watch four girls in the months before the dance.

The original delivered some big laughs, scenes that were an absolute joy. This is less good-natured; it is a film with streak of misanthropy, more likely to leave a sour taste in the mouth than a smile on your face.

There are some nice enough performances, particularly from Ken Jeong as JJ’s CIA boss and Anna Faris playing the high school deputy principal leading the choir trip. But tonally the movie is all over the place.

Co-directing Unicorns with James Krishna Floyd (the star of My Brother the Devil), who wrote the script, El Hosaini brings a streak of hopefulness to gritty social realism, with the added attraction of superstar drag queens.

Knepp is a heartwarming speck of biodiversity good news among the depressing headlines.

Àma Gloria is a small-scale film, barely over 80 minutes, but it leaves an almighty impression.

Like I say, there’s nothing new here for even casual followers of the food crisis. But it will make you think twice about what you put in your supermarket basket.

I warmed to its sensitivity; it possesses an insistence that these difficult boys are vulnerable and scared kids (undermined only slightly by the fact that the actors playing them look well into their 20s).

Sting, black with a lethal red stripe, is never silly looking, though some of horror references feel a bit obvious and fanboy-ish.

It’s as if director Warren Fischer has forgotten to write jokes in his script. No one says anything remotely humorous; instead there’s just a parade of lowest-common-denominator gags.

It’s perhaps less fun than you might have hoped for, though Shatner is undoubtedly charismatic, and a pretty decent raconteur. He’s often entertaining, if not always necessarily in the way he intended.

The script seems so focused on the family’s resilience it never really confronts the horror of surviving, and being alive in a world with no oxygen, where nothing grows.

ISS does deliver one knock-out terrific death in space: a screwdriver to the neck, perfect little bubbles of blood floating prettily away in zero gravity.

The cinematography here, capturing the fierce beauty of the craggy landscape, raises the quality an inch or two above hokey cheapness. In the end though, this is movie with right on its side but not a scrap of believability.

It’s a hurricane of slapstick (some of it in fact very funny) and age-appropriate energetic fight scenes, but lacks the sweetness and charm of the franchise at its best.

Without a doubt this is easy entertainment, never dull, and it has some shrewd things to say about class and money – though the satire might have been sharper and the running time shorter by a good 20 minutes.

This is a sweet, fuzzy movie, possibly a little soft-hearted. Still, I dare anyone to watch the final moments without a lump in the throat.

The Persian Version feels a bit soft focus some of the time, but it takes on real depth and force when the action hops further back, to 1960s Iran, where Shireen is a 13-year-old girl (now played by Kamand Shafieisabet).

Each new sentence adds more: more complexity, more woman.

Miraculously this film is never silly. The recreation of stone age life feels unexpectedly convincing – partly I suspect, because of the sensible decision to have the actors speak a made-up stone age language instead of English (bolted together, apparently, from bits of Arabic, Basque and Sanskrit).

A perfectly acceptable family animation.

In the end, this is a shallow drama passing itself off as saying something meaningful.

This is a respectful film, but it does pick a little at the myth of the Johnny’n’June love story.

More than a little suspension of disbelief is required and, increasingly, I felt as if I was watching a video game. It’s a movie with a fairly low IQ too – violent, boring and a bit soulless, always on the edge of running out of steam from the 45 minute mark.

If this documentary doesn’t make Hite a household name among a new generation of feminists, the biopic that should really follow it certainly will.

Leung Chiu-wai has a predatory glint behind the salesman’s grin, and Lau has the beaten look of a man bested for much of the movie. What’s really missing is a Leung/Lau face off, an epic confrontation.

Brie and Cena look lifeless and blank-faced; they’ve got no chemistry, and the objectionable dynamics of him manfully rescuing her shrieking from the clutches of the bad guys on repeat feel like a satire of the genre – which this isn’t.

Both Kerr and Burchill come across as unpretentious, down to earth and likable.

The script is mostly tasteless, a buffet of blandness. Instantly forgettable.

It’s a silly horror that’s not as good, or as bad, as you’d hoped: neither funny enough nor ever properly scary. That said, there are some cheerfully gory bits and a smattering of decent culture clash gags.

The film is a surprisingly gentle, touching story about acceptance, though it is less than sizzling as a romance.

It’s a disorientating, unrelaxing two-hour experience, but rewarding.

The dogs give the film a touch of class, but as a whole this is forgettable.

The Tower is a hellish vision of isolation that must surely have been dreamed up during the pandemic lockdown; it made me want to switch on The Road for a bit of light entertainment. Not easy to recommend, this.

It makes for some fun moments and a funny showdown with the baddies. In the old days this would probably have gone straight to tape, so straight-to-download feels like the right place.

The question of who gets to tell stories is discussed (spoiler: mostly white men, until recently), and for a 97-minute film, Subject squeezes in a lot of ethical biggies.

It’s sentimental, though the way Kirsty is helped by women boiling with fury at the injustice does feel modern.

Cage dials it down nicely, keeping his freaky at a gentle 6 out 10. The film cruises along on his charm; it’s otherwise a totally disposable but mostly entertaining action comedy drama with a really stupid plot and a few good laughs.

The film too has a meditative effect, with its soothing, gentle rhythms, watching the seasons changing, and sense of time passing.

Silva packs in more penises in five minutes on the beach than I’ve seen on cinema screens in a decade of movie-watching; his representation of hedonistic gay culture feels nicely casual and natural.

The focus is on his star quality and the qualities that made him a pioneer: sunniness, grit, passion for his sport, the unconditional love and support of his mother, and his unbreakable confidence to be himself. It’s undeniably heartwarming.

The documentary’s director, Oscar Harding, explains that his grandfather was a neighbour of Carson’s in the wonderfully named village of Huish Champflower, and he was first shown A Life on the Farm age six. Stretching this curiosity of a man and his work into a full-length documentary is perhaps pushing it.

The cleverness of Kingsley’s performance is the twinkle in his eye that leaves you wondering whether Dalí has disappeared entirely up his own myth. How much of the eccentricity is a put-on, brazen self-publicity to maximise sales? Disappointingly, the script invents a fictional art school dropout to be our guide to Dalí’s universe.

It’s an intimate portrait combined with increasingly shocking footage as his opposition movement comes under attack.

It’s a broad, enjoyable, lighthearted movie with a fair few not-insignificant plot holes, but a genuinely surprising storyline that keeps you guessing to the end.

What follows is a race against the clock, cleverly constructed by director Maximilian Erlenwein and co-writer Joachim Hedén. Their script throws in plenty of calamities to nobble the diver’s escape, but didn’t quite manage – for me at least – to spark a vertiginous clammy terror.

It’s a measured, quietly powerful film with a performance from Virginie Efira that seems almost telepathic at times; in scenes where she doesn’t say a word, barely twitching a muscle in her face, yet somehow you know what she’s feeling.

Without a doubt, it is an impressive debut from director Thomas Hardiman, even if his script doesn’t quite pull off a first-class whodunnit.

With Ladybug doing as much mooning as superheroing the girl power message feels more afterthought than heartfelt.

A smarter, sharper film might have explored what happens next in an otherwise happy marriage when the spark goes out. Instead, the comedy here is as broad as it gets, with some wildly unconvincing and unhilarious set-pieces.

It’s the only documentary I’ve ever watched with a reading list in the credits – what a treat this film is.

It’s a political thriller that tells the story matter-of-factly, and is perhaps a little lacking in the pace department. But Isabelle Huppert carries it along with a performance every bit as gripping as you’d expect.

It’s a striking, ambitious film, but there is something about the tone – both glossy and grittily real, stylising everything to mythic proportions – that left me a bit cold.