David Jenkins

One thing to emphasise is that this is a very funny film, yet the humour doesn’t ever come from jokes or contrived set-ups. It’s more a sense of looming realisation that this caper – explained and justified over a single pint in a pub – is even more flawed that we ever might have imagined.

Everything about the film is undercooked and lazy, and one is led to hope that this franchise is put back in the deep freeze for a very long time.

While the film extends a certain empathy towards its subject’s mighty fall from grace, it does not let him off the hook, and it ends as a multi-dimensional study of a man who has lived a life of such extreme entitlement that sincere contrition simply does not compute with him.

What’s sad about the film is that the feather-light comic tone seems to preclude any deeper insight into what are, on paper, a set of potentially fascinating and psychologically deep characters.

The first half of Dune: Part Two is among the best things that Villeneuve has ever done, though the sheer eventfulness of the plot and a bustling retinue of side-players (Austin Butler upgrading Sting’s cod-pieced ninny from the 1984 film into a hairless psychopath is worthy of mention) means that the final act does feel rushed.

It’s a film with some decent feel-good credo (if that type of thing floats your boat), and there’s certainly value in having a film about mature characters that isn’t horrendously winsome and patronising.

The film doesn’t strain for meaning or metaphor, instead just showing us the events over a certain period and allowing us to sample and chew over them as we would heaving plate of delicious food. Just a wonderful film.

This is the western as a dried, coruscating corpse, left out for the buzzards to feed on.

It’s a biographical film where, to ask “why?” in regard to Marley’s sometimes obscurely-motivated actions would risk placing him in an ambiguous light. And so we instead trot through a series of highly manicured and stage-managed Wiki hit points and pause every few minutes for a musical interlude.

There are some great things in this film, yet its intentions are swept up in a mire of tonal indecision and cynicism masquerading as irony.

Migration is not an ambitious film, and doesn’t seem to have anything important to say about why one might migrate and the lessons we can learn from this rather arduous but necessary endeavour.

Director Blitz Bazawule does well to draw out multifaceted performances from his cast, particularly Barrino and Brooks, and with them the big emotional beats all manage to land well enough. Yet the musical flights of fancy feel creatively bound by the stage adaptation and lack a certain eccentric pizazz.

The film is a celebration of her life and work, but for such a controversial figure it would have benefited from some dissenting voices on the panel of interviewees, or at least gone a little deeper into her homespun methodology.

It’s a strange, disjointed film that lacks a clear structure and a satisfying denouement, even if O’Neill excels at channelling her prior years in the emotional doldrums via her stern, seen-it-all-before manner.

This is an exhaustive and lively document of a cult scene that you’re very happy it existed, but maybe don’t want to be a part of yourself.

Driver is very good in the lead, pulling back some of the favour lost on his futzed stereotypical take on an Italian in House of Gucci. But it’s Cruz who adds the real nitro to this film.

It’s an intriguing set-up which comes to a surprising head, and while some of the twists are a little contrived, the film as a whole works as a fierce admonishment of western nostalgia for its colonial past.

What we have is a completely fumbled, cobbled-together movie-esque collage of unwatchably fuzzy CGI in which ten thousand percent more effort has been put into making floaty underwater hair look authentic than it has to the script, story, characters, drama, attaining a sense of basic logic, meaning, etc… So no, it will not do.

It’s precision-tooled in terms of structure, almost to the point of airlessness, but you’d be hard-pressed to knock back the final 45-minute showdown as anything less than an impressive feat by a filmmaker orchestrating and charting the fine processes of an epic battle.

On the evidence of the astonishingly-assured debut, Earth Mama, we’ll be seeing work from writer-director Savanah Leaf for many years to come.

The 3D aspect is often used to mesmerising effect, and dovetails perfectly with an artist whose work often demands the viewer inspect it from multiple angles and vantages.

With the verve of a master classical storyteller, Citarella stages the unfolding of this eccentric mystery while processing the dizzying flow of information with a grace and precision that will have you hanging on every frame.

It’s compulsive and completely absorbing, and Laura’s dedication to this ad hoc investigation which may have no conclusion is echoed in a performance that empathetically redefines tired cinematic notions of obsessive behaviour.

It’s a wonderful film with not an ounce of fat on the bone, and Kaurismäki still manages to thread the needle between a style of ironic detachment and emotions that are big, bold and instantly affecting.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes outstays its welcome big time – a serviceable B-movie which replays the series’ inherently-quite-exciting fight-to-the-death storyline, but then inelegantly bolts on an extra hour of vapid soul searching and lore expansion that made this viewer want to bludgeon himself with his own keep cup.

It’s a pleasant film, albeit one which makes its point fairly early on and then restates it in various, sometimes sentimental ways. The film lacks for a strong narrative arc, and instead opts to filter stories and histories through the present moment.

It’s confident, classical filmmaking, yet despite its many formal and thematic pleasures, doesn’t offer a whole lot that’s new.

What’s most important here is how Philibert captures the patience of the nurses and attendants, who never ever interrupt or talk down to the people whose conditions and wellbeing are L’Adamant’s raison d’être.