Christina Newland

Honey Don’t! is another misfire, feeling bizarrely like an ersatz Tarantino. Given the Coens’ track record of making some of the smartest crime films in recent memory, it’s troubling how flat this one feels. I sincerely hope Ethan Coen hasn’t lost his knack.

Caught Stealing’s zany mix of comedy and drama tests your patience at times – though its crackerjack sexual tension is hard to argue with, and Austin Butler is a genuine, stop-and-take-notice screen presence. His charisma may well hold the whole inchoate package together, as he stammers and shrugs his way through the electric energy of the city.

It quickly becomes difficult to care about any of it.

There’s too much focus on disturbing the viewer rather than illuminating anything for them. Bring Her Back is a film that knows how to provoke, but not how to provide much insight.

Boyle still has an eye for suspenseful action, and much of it is breathtaking.

There is monologuing, there is pacing the floor, there is possibly too much wordiness for what is ultimately a visual medium. But its characters and the performances are intriguing enough to keep the suspense going.

The twisty machinations are a bit too familiar, the pacing a tad too glacial before Odysseus’s revenge finally happens, the performances uniformly good but rather self-serious.

Even if the film can feel airless at times, with long, solid shots of the survivors’ banal everyday lives, it does have much to say on the foibles of mankind – and the way society may very feasibly backslide into, well, The End. That, to me, is worth giving a chance.

The Monkey is surprisingly lacking in any good ideas. In fact, it’s the worst thing a horror film can be: boring.

There is a lot to garner from Anderson’s performance as a woman who has spent her life as the vessel of other people’s lust and projection; that is the main attraction of The Last Showgirl. But without the narrative scaffolding or depth to surround her character, Coppola’s film can often feel like a message in search of a movie.

This is not some deification story, even though it often regards Dylan’s capacity for musical storytelling with something akin to worship. Mangold steers the ship into harbour competently, even if I have some niggling questions about why the Dylan myth requires yet another movie.

Jenkins is the kind of talent who can turn his hand to almost anything and Mufasa is a respectable film as a result.

I didn’t want this movie to be dull – I would have settled for enjoyably bad – but unfortunately, it doesn’t even manage that.

When Heller is metaphorically exploring the potentially horrifying physical transformation of pregnancy and post-partum life – and the personal sacrifices of identity, career, and self that women face when they become mothers – Nightbitch has a lot of smart, real things to say.

Joy doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it satisfyingly brings these stories to the screen in a typically prosaic, no-fuss British manner.

The film’s inability to find a single tone – comic, cathartic or otherwise – makes it feel like a failure on all fronts, and the constant intrusion of loud, obvious pop needle-drops (and even a full disco-dancing sequence) don’t help.

A fresh Stephen King adaptation should be exciting. It’s a shame, then, that Salem’s Lot – a small-town vampire chiller set in 1970s Maine – has absolutely zero new ideas or even a particularly frightening take on the old story.

Glossy, grotesque, and intriguing even as you hate yourself for getting sucked into it, this isn’t an awful film. It just shouldn’t exist.

There’s a sense of tinkering originality to the film that feels unlike anything else being made at the moment.

For every engaging character-driven moment or bit of warm humor (Giovanni angrily shouting “I’m going to call Martin Scorsese” certainly got the audience in Cannes laughing), there’s unearned, even irritating quirkiness.

Most of the movie’s machinations seem merely in service of deepening the central gambit, which is to follow Mona’s journey and to look cool while doing it. On that front, it succeeds, but the movie’s charms are limited when the originality it purports to offer only feels like a bit of a costume.