Clarisse Loughrey

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

There’s a through line, buried in here somewhere, about how it’s harder to be creative, easier to destroy. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie proves its own point. Creativity took too much effort. Easier to destroy the spirit of the video game instead.

Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.

There’s no room for the sentimental here. No Grinch hearts suddenly grow three sizes. That’s not how it works in the real world, and Oppenheimer is interested instead in the smaller, more subtle shifts.

Holland, with its floral wallpapers and porcelain figurines, and scenes that consistently end with a flare of violins, gestures aggressively towards kitsch. But Sodorski’s story is plain, dry melodrama. There’s not a lick of the camp, the satirical, or the demented in sight.

What’s most disheartening about it all is how predictable Disney’s choices have become. With Snow White, they’ve finessed their formula – do the bare minimum to make a film, then simply slap a bunch of cutesy CGI animals all over it and hope no one notices.

Pileggi’s screenplay and Levinson’s scattershot direction, like De Niro, make little out of the clash of ideologies at the film’s centre. What could be biblical, feels passionless.

There’s not much about Opus, really, that fully convinces.

One of Them Days is funny as hell, but it also speaks to something sharply honest when Dreux sighs and mutters, “It shouldn’t have to be this hard.”

The director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer.

The Electric State is somehow both punishingly obvious and completely incoherent.

While the supporting cast are impeccable across the board, it’s really Blanchett and Fassbender’s film to command, with performances that drip with old-school star power.

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.

Torres, in her masterfully controlled performance, offers up all we could possibly require.

In Christopher Andrews’s stark, haunted debut – anchored by two soulfully frayed performances by Abbott and Keoghan – violence becomes the only language left to speak when shame, resentment, and desperation have stripped the words right out of these people’s mouths.

The idea that it serves a film like September 5 to tell its story through an apolitical lens isn’t just wrong: it’s laughable.

The Fire Inside is a sports biopic with the nerve to ask, “What happens after the win?” It’s a simple shift in emphasis, but an unexpectedly transformative one, which forces us to reckon with how shortsighted we can be in our assumptions that victory creates a certain kind of immortality.

For all the cruelty and buffoonery that might surround his hero, Bong lets us in on a revelation: what we’re really watching is a man learning that it’s OK for him to be happy.

When it comes to Mad About the Boy, it’s less that Bridget Jones has finally matured, and more that she’s shown us how human she really is.

Hard Truths withholds catharsis, instead choosing simply to let the shutters swing open on its protagonist’s psyche for a brief interlude.

Presence’s greatest feat, and presumably Soderbergh’s main interest in the project, is in how alive and defined a character our ghost is.

It’s not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There’s such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity.

Whannell has the right idea. Wolf Man just needed a little more time in the lab.

It’s bold in theory, a struggle to sit through in practice.

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

A feat of full-bodied immersion, using a point-of-view camera, finely tuned sound design, and cinematic illusion to create a reality that takes hold of and then never quite leaves its audience’s souls.

Eisenberg fills that anxious blank space with genuine questions seeking genuine answers, delivered by the comforting typewriter patter of his own voice, and a poignant, wrecking ball performance by Culkin.

Nothing is off the table, really, ethically or psychoanalytically. Yet Babygirl isn’t guiding us confidently to some fixed destination. It’s simply feeling its way forward, orgasm by orgasm.

The unexpected advantage here is that, when Williams wants to be truly upfront about his struggles, that veneer of fantasy shields us from the more harrowing details of his life, so that we can confront them yet still enjoy that “right f***ing entertaining”.

The Oscar-winner behind ‘Moonlight’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ can barely be found in this dreary and anonymous bit of franchise mining.

It’s a feverish, agonised document of addiction and abortive passion, into which the director has weaved further elements of the author’s life.

Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway’s script is profoundly scattered, and there’s such a ruthless amount of re-recorded dialogue inserted that there’s little cohesion between or even within scenes.

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.

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

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.

It’s a film that feels like a long exhale, the moment of unburdening after a tight embrace. It’s beautiful.

When its conclusions end up so tidy and emotionally pat, you can’t but wonder what it’d be like if Nightbitch were actually allowed to run free.

Depp does magnificent work in embodying the sense of existing out of place, not only in the violent contortions and grimaces of supernatural possession, but in the way Ellen’s gaze seems to look out beyond her conversation partner and into some undefinable abyss.

Audiard’s efforts don’t always pay off, and in Emilia Pérez they come across as impassioned but featherweight.

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.

Gladiator II, in short, shows us how to make cinema with a capital “C”.

Bird is for every lost child who wishes someone would have stood up and defended them. It’s a fragile but beautiful vision, and marks the strongest blend yet of Andrea Arnold’s primary directives as a filmmaker.

Really, all you can do is take what joy you can from Paddington in Peru, because its pleasures are rarer but still sweet.

It’s hard to say how these films will be remembered in the grand scheme of comic book history, but, with The Last Dance, we can at least be reminded that sometimes they actually managed to have fun with these things.

While Beck and Woods flirt with convention in the film’s later stages, as it grows wilder and more gruesome, Heretic is a wordy horror that holds up surprisingly well under scrutiny.

Madison takes a character trained by life to always pounce – on an opportunity or a threat – and subtly, but consistently, reveals to us her softness and her soul.

Vengeance Most Fowl sees Aardman return to their tried-and-tested formula. Yet, it’s also the source of the studio’s continuing brilliance – somehow, the familiar always feels new, and the craftwork never tires.

It preserves DreamWorks’s broad, direct appeals to sentimentality while weaving in a little more of the thematic maturity and subtlety you might see over at Ghibli or Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon.

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.

The Outrun’s true tether, however, is Ronan, and here she works to all her greatest strengths. The film wraps entirely around her, yet she’s far too honest an actor to ever play up to the audience’s expectations of a woman in crisis.

Timestalker certainly puts on a show.

A Different Man layers idea onto idea, then inflates them to the point of satirical absurdity.

It’s a war picture, in the more conventional mould, that feels new and revelatory purely because it’s being viewed through the eyes of its singular director – expressionist yet rarely sentimental, disquieting in its terrors yet tender in its hope, and profoundly interested in the ordinary lives of others.

Jacobs delicately toys with the boundaries between truth and artifice, between dishonesty and vulnerability. Our intimacy with these characters is earned by their own efforts to shed their steel-built defences. And it’s all the more rewarding for it.

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

The Critic – adapted by Notes on a Scandal’s Patrick Marber from a novel by former Independent film critic Anthony Quinn – is, ultimately, a story about power. I wouldn’t expect relatability in this case, but I do expect substance. Here, it’s largely absent.

Not many friendships are tested because somebody decides to dress up as a literary detective in public. But it’s refreshing, in a way, that Will & Harper doesn’t try so hard to trumpet relatability. It doesn’t need to. Its heart remains true.

While this might be a flashy, American production (courtesy of Blumhouse, behind the Insidious movies and Get Out), it’s also the distinctly observational work of a British writer-director. And then there’s McAvoy, delivering one of the most impressively repugnant performances of the year.

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.

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

Maria is a tragedy, but not because of one of life’s piteous events. Instead it’s the tragedy of a woman’s failure to heal her wounds with her art.

For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience.

Cuckoo isn’t a horror movie for people who dislike unanswered questions, since Singer, who also wrote its script, is far more interested in emotional logic than the literal kind.

It’s a film that not only signals a major musical arrival, but ends up feeling a lot bigger than the conventional (and often confining) boundaries of the “music biopic”.

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.

Wildly miscast actors and an impenetrable script make this long-delayed actioner alienating to fans of the game and incomprehensible to the casual viewer.

It Ends with Us is capable of poignancy. Yet it’s also entirely ill-equipped to square such sensitive material up against scenes of diamanté boots being sensually rolled down, an out-of place but very funny Jenny Slate rocking up in a string of Carrie Bradshaw-worthy outfits, or Lively simply revelling in that deep, half-laughing voice that made her an icon of casual cool on TV’s Gossip Girl. This film’s good intentions feel misplaced.

In the end, Dìdi favours sentimentality, but it doesn’t strictly feel as if it were shot through the distanced, nostalgic lens of a filmmaker in reflection.

I Saw the TV Glow speaks so powerfully to the curse of denial that the words “there is still time”, scrubbed in chalk on a suburban street, can have an almost magical effect on the viewer.

Hugh Jackman’s return as Wolverine is appropriately intense – but shortchanged by the fact that the character went through the exact same emotional beats in 2017’s ‘Logan’.

The emotions in Janet Planet creep up on you.

Nicolas Cage stars as a Satanic serial killer in a movie that is nasty, precise and as subtle as a magic trick.

The callbacks, thankfully, are fairly minimal – but it’s still a comfortingly old school affair, in which its CGI feels at home next to a host of traditional practical effects, including that old gem of a slowly collapsing water tower. No bulging-to-the-point-of-bursting muscles needed.

While the newer Bad Boys films have delicately sidestepped the contemporary conversations around law enforcement, Axel F seems happy to offer up its protagonist as a figurehead for the active endorsement of police misconduct. I’d argue you could just let Harold Faltermeyer’s earworm of a theme song drown out that noise – but, alas, for a certain generation, that’s also been ruined by the crazy frog on the invisible motorcycle.

A Quiet Place: Day One can’t boast the freshness of concept of the first film, but, in pure emotional payoff, it’s the most satisfying of the series.

This film is nasty, funny, and cogent about the era it’s set in.

The future presented in The Beast, Bertrand Bonello’s mesmeric blend of sci-fi, horror and romance, feels frighteningly plausible.

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.

Sure, there’s nothing in the film that matches the pure heartbreak of the first, when Riley’s imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) disappears into nothingness. But Inside Out 2 proves that it’s ludicrous, at this point, to accuse the studio of having run out of ideas.

Sure, there’s a kind of “gotcha” twist here that tethers The Watched back to M Night’s work, but Ishana’s real focus is on where Mina’s sorrows take her, deep into the old, pagan world and its stories of slippery natures and shifting identities. Do we define ourselves or are we defined by others? It’s a pertinent question for the director, as she takes her first promising steps into the future.

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.

The Garfield Movie is stuffed with enough tragic backstories to make a therapist rich.

Arjona matches Powell’s passions, while Linklater, with a touch of his signature nonchalance, sprinkles in a few of Gary’s classroom musings on whether people can truly change.

It’s intended to be disarmingly sincere – yet the director-writer-actor is so single-mindedly intent on delivering “wonder” that what he’s ended up with isn’t so much a film but a series of emotional cues. It’s the same experience, really, as sitting down to watch an hour-and-a-half video loop of dogs being adopted.

There’s something to this film, and to director Alice Rohrwacher’s work at large, that feels as delicate, as enigmatic, and as spiritually charged as these millennia-old artefacts. It stirs up a fierce protectiveness in the viewer. Treasure this now, hold it, turn it, and examine it from all sides, or it may slip beyond your grasp.

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

Love Lies Bleeding bottles that hot, feverish, salvatory desire, only to shake it like soda pop and then ping off the cap.

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

If the film results in stunt performers gaining a little more respect from the public, that’s the ideal. If it merely reminds them how likeable Gosling is, that’s good, too.

The Scargiver is at least basic enough to feel relatively inoffensive; the first film’s uncomfortably vague deployment of racist and sexual violence has been reduced to a single reference to the empire’s hatred of “ethnic impurity” (never to be picked up again).

We’re never told what this conflict is about, who might be oppressed, or what freedoms have been stolen away. All we’re given is violence.

It’s the most gripping sports movie in years.

The film is also bold and clear cut about the way women’s bodies are made into objects of both reverence and shame – but its pièce de résistance is the shot of a vagina during birth, an entirely natural part of human existence that, in America, caused such a fuss that The First Omen was nearly slapped with an extreme NC-17 certificate. What a way to prove this film’s point.

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

It’s Road House by name, but certainly not by nature.

Frozen Empire is a notable improvement on Afterlife – funny, silly, and a little scary, with its pockets full of hand-built doodahs and the occasional excursion into the realm of pseudo-mythology and parapsychology.

It’s hard to imagine what anyone could get out of Damsel that isn’t already liberally covered by Brown’s other projects. There’s a sweetness to Stranger Things’s Eleven, and a wit to Enola, that offer the actor a hell of a lot more to do than Damsel’s mean-mugging to camera.

Good comedies, of course, can make the tragic feel bittersweet, but Ricky Stanicky bungles its tone to the point that the whole affair comes across a little depressing. It’s like watching a bedraggled widower perform close-up magic at his spouse’s funeral.