Cath Clarke

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 trouble with the film is that beneath the surface lurks … well, perhaps not quite enough to keep the momentum going.

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.

What keeps this out of Nicholas Sparks bumper-paperback territory are terrific performances and Reitman’s control of the drama.

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 entertaining enough, but certainly didn’t have me reaching for a jumper.

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

Like a fridge whose door’s been left open overnight, the film doesn’t feel chilly enough. It’s not terrible, but fans of the book may well be disappointed.

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.

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).

The pressure for minimalist Simons to succeed in the ultra-feminine world of Dior is intense.

The film gives us a precious glimpse into LGBTQ+ life in the postwar period.

A fascinating film.

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.

In Firth’s every grimace and flinch you feel the torment of Lomax’s private world, but emotionally ‘The Railway Man’ feels trimmed and tidied up.

Moretz is unnervingly talented, but Carrie is not a role she was born to play. She hasn’t a victim’s bone in her body and fluffs the early scenes when the mean girls pick on her.

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

At 88, Raven is still performing – perched on a stool – as his alter ego Maisie Trollette. In this affectionate if slight documentary, he tells a story or two, though perhaps not enough to fill a book.

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.

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.

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

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

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

It’s a thoughtful, well-acted and perceptive drama. However, for a film about a love triangle the sparks don’t exactly fly.

While, yes, TCWSSF is a dreamy magical realist fable with an environmental message, Alegría weaves into her tale an emotionally satisfying, gripping family drama, with singing cows – and fish too.

Talley strikes you as a man of sincerity and depth behind all the air-kissing and lamé.

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.

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).