Clarisse Loughrey

Blighted by development problems and a star whose downward spiral has been widely dissected by all, this superhero blockbuster emerges just as confused as predicted.

Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.

Wish, clearly, has been made with care, but as its credits offer a whistle-stop tour through Disney’s history, it’s hard not to think – god, wasn’t it great when they made stuff as weird and fun and daring as, say, The Emperor’s New Groove?

Most of the callbacks are played for light humour, not self-importance. Yes, it’s easy to tell you’re being manipulated. But it’s just as easy to respond with: so what?

It’s well-performed and efficiently emotive. Just like the music of Take That, I guess.

Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.

The Boogeyman is conventional horror, comfortably elevated – the same old monster in a shiny, new hat.

The tension of Thirteen Lives is implicit, and ramps up like a vice – how long until all these people’s luck finally runs out? But I do wonder whether all this soberness has prevented a good film from being an extraordinary one.

In Sing 2’s defence, the film is at least enthusiastic about its own overabundance, and the new celebrity voice additions – Halsey’s mollycoddled, rich-girl wolf or Letitia Wright’s street-dancing lynx – fit nicely into the mix.

In The Idea of You, it’s actually fun to buy into the fantasy.

The Nun II, unlike Malignant or M3GAN, is unfortunately tethered to seven previous films of demonic activity, and suffers for it. There are too many established rules to follow. You can almost feel the film squirming around in those restraints, trying its best to claw at something new without violating any preexisting evil nun lore.

Beast represents the apex of low-expectation cinema.

It does, in its DNA, certainly feel like a part of the Wickiverse, even if Reeves’s inevitable cameo feels forced. And while it doesn’t add much depth to the world, it at least gives credence to the amusing suggestion that these films do, in fact, take place in an alternate dimension where every person on the planet is a professional assassin.

It’s a joy to watch Julia Roberts and George Clooney fall in love. It’s an even greater joy to watch them bicker.

All those technical triumphs only complicate what feels like an unanswerable question: how can a film look this good, feel so moving, and still come up lacking?

What’s frustrating about Romulus is to see that the reaction to unpopular ideas wasn’t to come up with more, but to simply recycle the old ones as nostalgia.

True, grief is universal – but To Olivia never embraces the fact that stories draw their power from specificity. It’s what makes them feel real.

The real selling point is a romance so dorky, sweet, and likeable that, well, maybe only Taylor Swift could have written it.

A great actor shouldn’t only be judged on what they can do with a masterful script, but also on how they can take a lesser work and still let it soar. Anthony Hopkins has achieved this with grace in One Life, a somewhat thin, reductively sentimental retelling of the life of British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, which its star has empowered with raw, much-needed complexity.

Ferrari drives determinedly in an uncertain direction.

Boxing Licorice Pizza inside the realm of juvenile memory more often feels like an excuse than a conceit.

Rebuilding, instead, is a lovely rendering of what feels like half a story. It’s not the action its title promises, but the preceding moment of retreat to lick one’s wounds.

No one involved in Murder Mystery 2 seems to have worked with any real sense of direction, since the film is more than happy to let Sandler and Aniston take the steering wheel. There’s an easy chemistry to the pair.

Young Woman and the Sea is pure Hollywood fluff – but it’s hearty, wholesome fluff, of a kind that makes immediate sense once Jerry Bruckheimer’s name pops up in the credits as a producer.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers sees fit to both indulge in nostalgia – largely through Ellie’s wide-eyed adoration of the old show – and poke fun at it.

Unfortunately, the further away from Tatum and Bullock you get, the more the film struggles.

What lends Dead of Winter its evocative chill is the way all three women here – kidnapper, kidnapped, and rescuer – are left with nothing but themselves to rely on. There’s no one out here to care for or support them, turning survival into a daily matter of physical and psychological endurance.

The Railway Children Return is part-sequel, part-remake, with a carefully selected smattering of callbacks for the fans.

The only problem with They Will Kill You is that it’s confused iconography with substance. It operates under the assumption that if it creates enough of a mystique around its protagonist – and there’s every trick in the book here, to the point it feels as if someone’s playing paddle ball with the camera – then everything else will fall neatly in line.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget may not quite rise to its predecessor’s level, but if this is the closest Aardman ever comes to selling out then, well, there’s still hope for animation’s future.

It’s not a matter of vengeance against the elite but survival. And Weaving bellows and grunts like a wounded creature trying to get the boot off their back.

We’ve seen all this before, but at least The Amateur finds its own way to get the job done.

Where in the public consciousness is the line drawn between thief and Robin Hood? Van Sant may ask the question, but his vision’s too narrow to answer it.

The film’s distractingly scattered in its attempt to capture the full breadth and width of its social commentary. In fact, it’s so stuffed with tangentially related ideas that even its timeline feels confusing and difficult to follow, signalled only by the erratic changes in McKay’s hair colour.

There’s nothing all that special about The Rise of Gru, but it runs like a well-oiled machine.

The film’s most interesting onscreen partnership is Ali and, well, Ali. He essentially delivers the same performance twice, but with variations so minute that you’re left to wonder whether you simply imagined them.

What’s worked before works here just as well. Tommy Shelby persists.

While Honey Don’t! prods at something new and quite poignant, an idea about how survivors see themselves and that loaded word “victimhood”, it ultimately struggles to make much sense out of itself and its oddball cast.

The budget’s been upped considerably. Hollywood’s own Andy Serkis and Cynthia Erivo have been air-lifted in for support. And it’s fun, in the patently ridiculous way these sorts of zhuzhed-up thrillers tend to be.

The Apprentice’s most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi’s portrait of the early days of the former president and current presidential candidate a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly.

It is a messy, convoluted affair with some very contrived plotting.

The Tender Bar is uneventful. But its performances have such an easy, lived-in quality that it wouldn’t be fair to call it inauthentic – just a little rosy in its outlook, perhaps.

It’s a bit much, to be frank. But at the time, the all-hands-aboard desire to take so absurd a premise and insist it be about something offers its Midsomer Murders-lite world a sense of weight and substance. The melodrama helps land the comedy. And there’s some real charm to be found here.

With Fraser as her figurehead, it’s certainly a work of broad and deep compassion. But there are self-imposed limitations that you’d wish Hikari and her co-writer Stephen Blahut would cross, if not purely out of curiosity.

It’s a handsome adaptation, albeit with an unnecessary bit of literary celebrity dragged alongside it.

These animated outings will always feel like a flash in the pan if they continue to rely on contemporary nods as a source of cheap humour.

No Sudden Move may be a fairly minor entry in his filmography, but it’s well-crafted and thrilling in a way that feels oddly reassuring.

Director Pascual Sisto has achieved something a little more clever than pure imitation. He takes his audience’s expectations, that his film can only lead to bloodshed and despair, and leaves them hanging in the air for as long as he likes – it’s both tantalising and deliberately unsatisfying. You’re never given the comfort of knowing what comes next.

The Duke reminds us once more, [Michell] knew how to get the very best out of his actors without forcing unnecessary dramatics.

That one already notorious sequence aside, Triangle of Sadness feels a little like gnashing at air.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die has learned a few valuable lessons from the Fast & Furious franchise – dumb and loud, executed with right enthusiasm, can feel like a warm hug.

This is about as graceful and fitting an endnote as you could hope for.

Thankfully, Quantumania coughs up a decent amount of the mania promised in its title – it’s done a far better job, at least, than last year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which was miserably sane.

In fact, all the ingredients are perfectly lined up here, and, in the right combinations, and with the pure wonderment of Michael Giacchino’s score, The Fantastic Four: First Steps does shimmer with a kind of wide-eyed idealism. And that’s lovely.

Behind the lazy, shock-tactic humour lies a streak of genuine humanity, something to carry the film beyond mere butts and boobs.

Kogonada neither wrote nor edited A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and so we’re largely lacking in the sophistication department, or the soft musicality he’s been able to construct in his earlier films.

Together, both actors rise above the most blatant of Memory’s manipulations.

Elemental overcomplicates itself. It’s a straightforward romcom that’s also about culture clashes. And the systemic racism in city infrastructures. And the expectations immigrant parents place on their children.

The most effective scenes in Flamin’ Hot prod gently at how disharmonious the relationship between the man on the floor and the man in the boardroom can be.

Michelle Yeoh comfortably steals the show in this starry adaptation of lesser-known mystery ‘The Hallowe’en Party’.

Branagh doesn’t seem as eager as Cuaron to interrogate his own memories, or to reckon with how the protective veil of one’s parents can shield a child from reality.

Birdy, in many ways, is basically a pint-sized Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s onscreen alter-ego and the de facto lead of Girls. Both wrestle with the insecurities that stem from never quite aligning with traditional expectations of femininity. Both refuse to ever consider that the blessings and burdens they carry may not be universally shared among their acquaintances.

The Bad Guys 2 has just enough wit and spirit that you can take your kids to see it without feeling like you’re doing a disservice to their intellectual development.

Despite the drip-fed reminders of contemporary history (the Cuban Missile Crisis! the Kennedy assassination! Weren’t the Sixties wild, man!), A Complete Unknown struggles to fully engage with Dylan’s relationship to that intersection between politics and music.

All emotions here are predetermined. The point is that we’ve simply been given licence to feel.

Sumotherhood is, at times, so overstuffed that it starts to wear on the nerves. Yet, Deacon has also found a wholesome, and funny, heart to his film, circling back to the awkwardly desperate performance of masculinity that drove its prequel, and simply doubling it up.

Belo and Birch, and their star Jodie Comer, breathe life and fire into the mothers typically left stagnant on the apocalypse’s sidelines.

The Toxic Avenger is funny and charming, with a joke rate as consistent as this year’s The Naked Gun, and snappy editing that mimics the Edgar Wright brand of genre parody.

It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. And it’s exactly as absurd as you could ever hope it would be.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye has done right by its subject, but only at the cost of shrinking down her world.

Steve is a thoughtful, impassioned film in practice. Yet it’s deliberately made itself secondary to its source material.

Moana 2 would have made for a very nice television series – as it was originally meant to be. But as a reskinned theatrical sequel to one of Disney Animation’s biggest hits, it’s a little harder to justify.

Conclave turns ritual into the hysteria of a murder mystery, the tension of a political conspiracy, the pressurised force of a criminal heist.

Cary Joji Fukunaga has made a smashing piece of action cinema with No Time to Die – it’s just a shame it had to be a Bond film.

It’s small in scope and may prove relatively minor in Cooper’s filmography. But, still, the intentions of Is This Thing On? feel worthy. Here’s a filmmaker fully invested in what divides the personal from the creative, and willing to look at it from all angles.

Nostalgia rarely factors into Lightyear, which makes the franchise connection feel almost like a bit of window dressing slapped on to an entirely unrelated sci-fi story. Maybe that’s the only way to get butts in seats these days. Especially to watch what is, at the end of the day, a film that does the job it needs to do but without a crumb of anything more.

Fire and Ash, I’m sure, will find its place in the canon. But that doesn’t excuse its flaws.

You, Me, & Tuscany is its own micro-miracle, a pure romcom where its protagonist isn’t jaded by romance, has no impulse to deconstruct the modern relationship, and isn’t forced through any preliminary Hinge date humiliation ritual. Here, all we need are two very charming and attractive people – Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page – and the soft, undulating hills of the Italian countryside.

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande showcase phenomenal vocal ability in this adaptation of the blockbuster musical, but they’re let down by a film that is aggressively overlit and shot like a TV advert.

The Substance doesn’t quite gel as it should, but it’s potent.

The Surfer is what you might call a slow-burn Cage. There’s the manic, hollering prize at the end (and even a line of dialogue worthy of a future meme), but also plenty of the actor’s more undervalued speciality – the expression of gargantuan helplessness, the look of a fish who’s been thrown to land and left to die

Considering every horror film these days seems to be “about trauma”, Smile suffers from never evolving past the basics – that trauma begets trauma and, if left unchecked and unexamined, can consume a person’s life.

As imperfect as Armageddon Time is, its director’s honesty is something to be appreciated.

Another Simple Favour has no aspirations beyond being a quick morsel. And a morsel it is.

As Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die gets weirder and weirder, it only further provides the evidence of its own thesis.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a patchwork quilt of familiar notions.

The conclusion that Chaplin remains inscrutable feels neither new nor substantial.

There’s an odd timidity here that borders on self-denial.

Paul Feig nods to ‘Rebecca’ and ‘Vertigo’ in this pulpy adaptation of the Freida McFadden bestseller, which has a secret weapon in the form of a quite brilliant Amanda Seyfried.

Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s impassioned and atmospheric direction really takes hold.

It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year.

It’s a busy catalogue of gruesome absurdities that’s more consciously surrealist than the Final Destination series’s Mouse Trap-style executions, akin instead to the bizarro corpses crowding the afterlife’s waiting room in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), with a splash of Peter Jackson’s early, gore-splattered horror-comedies.

There’s a surprising amount to enjoy here, with director William Brent Bell (behind The Boy franchise, with its equally ludicrous premise centered on a haunted doll), making the smart decision to turn the unintentional camp of Orphan into intentional camp, alongside adding a dose of satire about the corruptive pressures of the nuclear family.

The Equalizer 3 is about as good as the first film – it neatly counterbalances Fuqua’s baroque, blood-and-guts action with Washington’s ability to command attention while sitting perfectly still.

Most of Silent Night’s pleasures are to be found in the strength of its cast – Knightley, whose comic talent is frequently underused, can turn on a kind manic perkiness that’s as endearing as it is absolutely terrifying. It’s a smile that says, yes, if I ever were to murder you, they’d never find the body.

It’s a rare achievement contained within an even rarer type of film: a Black-led, British romantic comedy. But there are, unfortunately, limits to how new and invigorating Boxing Day actually feels.

Loach is so cohesive here, in accommodating the expansiveness of all these social ills, that characters have an unfortunate tendency to become mouthpieces.

While it pleads for us to reckon with the ugliest of truths, it shuts the curtains before its own reckoning is done.