Cath Clarke

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.