Clarisse Loughrey

Ferrari drives determinedly in an uncertain direction.

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron contains multitudes. It is beautiful, tortured, whimsical, and stoic.

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.

It’s a film populated by some of the Justice League Snyder Cut filmmaker’s worst impulses: a mess of imagery, some of it attempting to shock, congregated largely around the idea of what might look good in a trailer.

Esmail goes big and bold with his Hitchcock allusions and showy camera work, not unlike M Night Shyamalan. At times, he’s a little on the nose, also not unlike M Night Shyamalan. It suits his vision.

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.

The Oompa Loompas are still problematic, but director Paul King’s follow-up to the Paddington movies can’t help but charm.

The thrill of Eileen lies in how McKenzie plays off the film’s inciting spark, a blonde-bobbed enigma played by Anne Hathaway.

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?

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

In short, it’s the life of Napoleon as only Scott can tell it, full of verve, spectacle, and machismo. Its battle scenes are thrilling, a throwback to the sort of spectacle no one in Hollywood – save, well, Ridley Scott – is interested in anymore. But it can be equally dispassionate, in a way that duly and accurately captures the man one contemporary described as “a chess master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity”.

Caine, as Bernie, allows his natural, domineering presence to carry most of the performance.

By the end, Cat Person has killed any hope of a real conversation about modern love.

Despite the performative feminism, and beyond the black eyes and broken noses, the girls still work naturally towards clique-defying female solidarity. It’s the small, sincere thought behind the joke: you don’t have to master the theory to know that women are stronger together.

What isn’t said in How to Have Sex, and what isn’t openly felt, is the stuff that really hurts.

It’s hard not to be drawn in. That’s the trick of Anatomy of a Fall. Sandra is a fascinating, one-woman puzzle box, thanks largely to the strength of Hüller’s performance.

Jason Schwartzman, as “weatherman and amateur magician” Lucretius Flickerman, lands some surprisingly good one-liners. Their performances hint at the true narcissism of Panem – something you’ll struggle to find in any of the limp, neutered romantics of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

While Marvel’s been busy flooding us with endless, exhaustive content, DaCosta’s movie offers us the one thing that made this franchise work in the first place – heroes we actually want to root for.

The film magnificently frames modern life as a world of illusions, where a busy life equates to a successful one and the gamble always pays off. It’s an almost punishingly chaotic film, though each line of overlapping dialogue and jittery camera move is carefully orchestrated.

Lovely, immaculate, and extremely faithful.

What should’ve been an intricate, twisted, and absurd treat is demoted to generic horror movie sludge, in no way discernible from any of the other spooky titles lining the October release schedule.

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.

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

Fair Play is not the erotic thriller Netflix’s algorithm so desperately wants it to be. There is sex, yes, and a psychological duel, but very little perverse desire. It’s ultimately a very ugly film. That’s not its failure, but its intention.

Any desire to see two of Ireland’s bright, young things – Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal – finally united on screen will be swiftly drained by Foe, a sci-fi drama desiccated of meaning.

The Miracle Club certainly seeks to capture a feeling of “home” – but it’s not entirely clear for whom.

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.

This is a toned-down, more limply palatable iteration of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic: the projectiled pea soup is gone, the verbal abuse has been whittled down to a single ‘c***ing’, and any and all acts committed with crucifixes barely register a shock.