Clarisse Loughrey

Downton Abbey: A New Era is whatever the opposite of a French Exit might look like. Rather than a party guest slipping out quietly, it’s the bumptious visitor making their final, sluggish turn around the room.

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

As light as McAvoy’s touch might be – this is a film, after all, that features a James Corden cameo – there’s more to do here than simply cheer the boys on and hope they get one over on the Oxbridge elite. There are bigger questions to ask, and California Schemin’ is willing to ask them.

With barely a twist to speak of (at least in the traditional sense), his latest film Knock at the Cabin feels like a repudiation of the past.

H Is for Hawk concerns itself less with the healing of wounds, but rather with the prying open of them. Can we look so deep into the pulp that the fear of it eventually washes away?

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

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.

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.

Affleck and Damon, at least, try to pump a little crotchety humanity into their characters. But any hope of suspense, any genuine mystery over who (if anyone) is on the path of betrayal, is swiftly dashed by how poorly defined these suspects are.

To the film’s credit, there’s also real style tucked into the periphery, as characters breeze past Richard Quinn florals and Lady Gaga, still in her Tim Burton demon era, performs on a runway of models in loose, patterned Seventies gowns and oversized hats. It’s a compromise. But, then, that’s what The Devil Wears Prada 2 has turned out to be all about – it’s artistry snuck in beneath the commerce.

Beau Is Afraid is an Oedipal farce hysterically outsized in its execution.

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

The fourth ‘Matrix’ film offers a volcanic cluster of ideas with ambition – and a reminder that long black coats and tiny sunglasses are, indeed, very cool.

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.

Whatever the genre, Aronofsky tends to oscillate between two modes: the savagely harrowing or the savagely sentimental. And it’s all there in Caught Stealing, but at such a low simmer that the film feels almost vacant.

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.

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.

The irony of being intimately connected while desperately lonely can be a hard one to digest. Yet director Mia Hansen-Løve prods at the concept with the same tenderness that she applies to all her films – each of them united by the pains and pleasures of interconnectivity.

Plane is stifled by just how ordinary it is, and how closely it hews to the standard tropes of action films with longer, more descriptive – yet less ridiculous – titles.

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 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.

Scrapper is a solar system of a film, with Campbell’s playful and defiant Georgie shining bright at its centre. You’ll not find many characters this year quite as likeable.

All that’s really changed is that How to Train Your Dragon is now distinctly less charming and less playful than before, with even its pièce de résistance Toothless losing some of the cute factor (he looks real mean when he growls).

Run Rabbit Run is certainly fluent in the visual language of eerie, effective horror. Its metaphors, though, are all mumbled.

It’s surprising how much the film can flit between clangingly obvious bits of exposition – aha! The source of the floppy red hat! A reindeer that happens to be named Blitzen! – and more mature perspectives on the holidays.

The problem with this brand of Hollywood tale is that, by excessively romanticising their subjects, they diminish their humanity.

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

The film’s vision of the Twenties may be propelled to the very border of believability, but it’s rarely inauthentic. This is a work of studious imagination.

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.

This project should have been relatively straightforward: to provide a worthy showcase for Hudson, who is tremendous in exactly the kind of way that grabs the attention of awards show voting bodies.

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

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

It’s both wholly satisfying and ridiculously fun.

As a class satire, it reaches no conclusions. But it’s filled to the brim with darkly funny, bile-slicked revulsion.

No matter how enticing the prospect may sound on paper, and even with the efforts of director Chris Columbus (of Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire fame), the whole affair is so flimsy you’ll lose nothing from watching it on an iPad while cooking dinner.

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

It turns out that the point of the multiverse, and of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, isn’t its creative potential. It’s its cameos. A million universes could exist, and they’d all contain surprise appearances by people and things fans can hoot and holler over, before being purchased as toys on the way out of the cinema.

The talent of tomorrow has to play second fiddle to a generation’s inability to let go of the past. And that’s something a quick body swap can’t solve.

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.

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.

The Many Saints of Newark is both instantly recognisable and somehow unplaceable. It’s fierce and brilliant, too – a work that both expands on and complicates the cultural legacy of The Sopranos.

It’s a little metatextual analysis served up with a generous side of guts and gore, stabbing its cake and eating it with gleeful abandon.

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.

What’s surprising is that, though Miller’s imagination remains entirely untarnished, Three Thousand Years of Longing stands in defiance of all of Fury Road’s sagest lessons. The film sags where it should speed; it mumbles when it should pronounce; it narrows when it should expand.

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.

Gaga plays the film’s early scenes with a winking, playful innocence, consciously mirroring Patrizia’s story with that of Ally, her character in 2018’s A Star is Born – another ordinary woman plucked from relative obscurity.

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

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

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

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

Deliver Me from Nowhere’s Springsteen is untouchable and untethered – little more than a bundle of hurt feelings floating aimlessly across the Garden State.

It’s conflicted, messy, ambiguous, and imperfect, but it’s treated with enough of a delicate, scrupulous hand to test the moral waters and not degrade itself in the process.

It’s obvious why this cast were attracted to The Forgiven – an actor’s most thrilling challenge is to find the brokenness hidden in between the cruellest of words. Fiennes and Chastain have always excelled in this area, as they do here. But the ugliness quickly wears thin.

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.

Nice casting can’t cover up the ugly visuals and lack of creative risk.

The pair operate at a low simmer of hysteria that feels farcical without ever losing believability, while treating sincere emotion like the bursting of a dam that threatens to drown them together. They love as they hate in The Roses, decadently and without restraint.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a devilishly smart and self-aware take on the current trend for Eighties horror homage, lovingly adapted from Grady Hendrix’s 2016 novel of the same name.

If there are no other pleasures to Wicked Little Letters beyond the tome’s worth of expletives launched by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, then so be it. That’s plenty enough to sustain this witty, joyously written piece of forgotten history, scripted by comedian Jonny Sweet.

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.

This is exactly your mother’s Mean Girls – just repackaged with a bunch of TikTok cameos and some of Fey’s B-tier jokes.

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.

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.

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.

Then again, could a film in which a band of elder statesmen consider a loose collection of half-baked thoughts to be art itself be a satire of how some music legends like to conduct themselves? Maybe. But then you’d think under those circumstances I’d be laughing more.

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 are measured performances here by both Russell and Plemons, two unfailingly talented actors, and a host of well-crafted practical effects that explain why producer and horror veteran Guillermo del Toro would take such an interest in the project. But all the trickery in the world can’t conceal how inauthentic Antlers feels at heart.

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

Of course, Ragnarok’s distinctive humour is carried over, and there’s a blissfully dumb running joke about a pair of giant, heavy metal-screaming goats. But, really, it’s the heart that matters here.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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’.

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.

While Marcellus, an ageing octopus feeling stifled in his imprisonment, is meant to act as a spiritual mirror to Tova, the film ultimately isn’t all that interested in the more delicate work of making peace with what can’t be brought back.

No, there are no dinosaur cameos, but this 10th lap – now with added Brie Larson – is relentlessly fun.

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

The eerie prescience of Stephen King’s dystopian source material – written in 1972 and set, of all years, in 2025 – has been wiped from this bland reboot, which also seems to know it’s miscast its leading man.

Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.

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.

Everything Everywhere All at Once exists in the outer wilds of the imagination, in the realm of lucid dreaming and liminal spaces. It bounces off familiar representations of altered states, whether it be The Matrix or the phantasmical films of Michel Gondry, while feeling entirely unclassifiable. It’s both proudly puerile, with a running joke about butt plugs, and breathlessly sincere about the daily toil of intergenerational trauma.

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

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.

With The Mandalorian and Grogu, Star Wars has lost all sense of wonder.

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.

The tone here aims for a vague combination of time-travelling romps like Back to the Future and Flight of the Navigator plus time-travelling weepies like Forever Young and The Lake House. It wears both those tones unconvincingly, like a serial killer in a skin suit.

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

Beast represents the apex of low-expectation cinema.

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.

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 film has a tendency to circle around the same jokes like a dog chasing its own tail (the film reminds us that they like to do this, too).

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