Clarisse Loughrey

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.

The Card Counter is claustrophobic, certainly – but not always in the right ways.

The irony of Eternals is that, despite its characters explicitly tussling with their own lack of humanity, Zhao has delivered one of the most emotionally grounded entries in the entire franchise. She puts into full view the kind of moral quandaries that Marvel’s only ever really danced around in the past – the cost of individual life, or whether humanity is even worth saving in the first place.

There’s a playfulness there, and a real burst of imaginative thinking, but Gyllenhaal has regrettably pulled a Frankenstein herself. All those ideas, yet they haven’t quite stitched up together to make a beautiful corpse.

It is, at the very least, far more interested in words than ideas – perhaps the defining feature of Sorkin’s work.

Returning director Kevin Greutert knows what’ll satisfy his audience: a few buckets of blood and the gag-inducing sound of crunching bone. Here, they’ll get exactly what they want.

The film’s so plain in its ambitions – in its sense of giddy, well-intentioned fun – that it feels a little pointless to scorn its more superficial choices.

Cameron, at this point, seems interested less in being an artist than a cinematic frontiersman. That’s the point of The Way of Water – it’s not about what the film has to offer us now, but what it tells us about the future.

It’s only regrettable that the film itself didn’t heed one of cinema’s most important lessons – when you put Nicolas Cage in a movie, it’s guaranteed no one will care about anything other than Nicolas Cage.

Fire Island is a true, escapist romcom at a time when audiences are still undernourished when it comes to queer romances that don’t end in death and despair.

Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle’s still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.

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.

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

So much time in The Legend of Ochi is spent traversing these beautiful landscapes looking for something to grab onto – a thought or an emotion – but there’s nothing really here other than the simple conflict between nature and the men quick to whip out their shotguns when faced with the unknown.

True Things isn’t quite as effective as the director’s 2018 debut, Only You, which tracked the fluctuating desires of a couple (played by Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor) undergoing IVF treatment. But it does reiterate Wootliff’s fluency in the unvarnished, messy spaces of female desire, operating in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the actual sexiness of her work.

There is something pleasantly nostalgic about the film’s straightforwardness.

Audiences may spend the running time of All My Friends Hate Me waiting impatiently for the shoe to finally drop. But Stourton and Palmer’s script points heavily at a secret that’s far less satisfying in the reveal than it is in the build-up. Maybe that’s the point. Here’s a film that leaves you with the same sickly, hollow feeling you might get spending time with the ghosts of your own past.

Pretty Red Dress reaches out gently to a few untouched corners of British film – not only in how it tackles gendered expectations, but in how it finds in Candice neither hero nor villain.

It was Gyllenhaal, here in a producer role, who initially bought the rights to Gustav Möller’s Danish film. You could call this a vanity project, but at least his presence adds a dose of originality to this carbon copy remake.

There’s enough warmth to Guerrero’s script, co-written with Shane McKenzie and Perry Blackshear, to paper over the odd rickety effect or wooden performance.

When the real shock occurs, it doesn’t feel cosmic so much as deliberate manipulation by a filmmaker’s hand. The rhythm feels off.

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.

Even when Leonard’s chatting away with his semi-captors, his words seem rather weightless, as if they were something simply to fill the air while his mind quietly calculates his next move. He’s like a chess master, in a way, and few actors could maintain that magnetic stillness quite like Rylance, who always seems to express so much while doing so little.

The Last Duel is perfectly engrossing as a slice of historical intrigue, a clash of iron wills and iron swords, all muddied on the battlefields of medieval France. But there’s a tendency here for the film to present basic facts about contemporary gender politics as some earth-shattering revelation.

When all roads lead back to Evan, and to Platt’s misstep of a performance, the film becomes one giant gamble that’s quite disastrously failed to pay off.

The 355 is a mark of progress only in how wholly unremarkable it feels.

Does the fact the film largely ignores the book’s treatise on nature and virtue absolve it of all connections to Owens’s real-life controversies? It certainly doesn’t, on an artistic level, improve what’s already contained on the page. Newman’s vision of rural South Carolina is scrubbed so clean you might as well call it #swampcore – the Spanish moss looks bright and pristine, the flower petals on the water almost consciously arranged.

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

There’s a lot, in fact, to Uncharted that feels haphazard or under-considered.

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).

And I hate to ask for this, in a world where an excess of lore has been the downfall of so many projects, but Day Shift lacks any sense of context to what exactly this vampire hunter union is or does.

Clooney and his screenwriter, Mark L Smith, tell their story with rousing traditionalism, reinforced by Alexandre Desplat’s idealist score, but little more.

At no point here – or during the last film – does it feel like anyone actually figured out how Sonic works as the centre of a live-action movie.

A Good Person has a tendency to approach moral complexity as a checklist.

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.

It’s hard to treat Joyride just as a pleasant but easily disposable romp, especially when Reynolds loads up the film with so much cheap symbolism.

Meg 2: The Trench is enthusiastically married to the idea that you must eat your vegetables before you get your dessert. But, really, it’s too little, too late.

While the calibre of star voices here is superb, it seems odd to centre the entire film around Johnson and Hart. So much of their chemistry in Jumanji or Central Intelligence was rooted in odd-couple physical comedy – a guy who’s always cracking jokes about his own short stature versus the closest we have to a living demi-god.

Gadot remains Gadot, and there’s no hope that she might transform into something new because Heart of Stone can’t imagine its existence without her star quality.

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

Marley, as played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, is presented as a centrifugal force in Jamaican art, culture and political thought, but the film also threatens to flatten him into just another tortured male genius.

Apologetic sequel brings back franchise veterans Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren and ups the violence from ‘Expendables 3’ – but that’s not enough.

Though Dominion marks the end of the Jurassic World trilogy, I can’t imagine this is the last we’ll see of the franchise. As they say, life finds a way. Hopefully next time they’ll have actually figured out what they’re doing.

I guess we should at least be thankful we’ve been spared the monstrosity of a CGI-rendered Judy Garland as Dorothy (that said, there is some extremely disconcerting use of de-ageing tech elsewhere). But, as those witches might say, one good deed hardly changes things for the better.

Their film is so stuffed with incident – all of it preposterous, and occasionally insulting to the intelligence of its central quartet – that it sours what could (and should) have been a joyful celebration of desire and indulgence at any age.

How to Make a Killing is too timid to either defend his actions or to render him genuinely unlikeable, leaving Becket as nothing but a formless pile of dough.

The bigger crisis at the heart of the film is its inability to justify why we should have come back here in the first place.