David Jenkins

It’s a decently constructed piece of fluff that is way too soft to exert any real lasting impact. Yet the reason to see it is for Bardem’s masterful, completely committed lead turn. The real comedy gold comes from his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it expressions and mannerisms that usually come when he’s listening to other people talk.

As a feature, it all feels very rushed and dramatically inert, with the outcome of Abe’s predicament visible from many, many miles off.

It’s by no means horrendous or offensive, but it’s just a chronic bore, another film that will likely join the Billion Dollar Box Office club, but not a single person will be able to tell you how and why it managed to get through the front doors.

It’s an engaging movie about being able to control one’s destiny, but the wait continues for when this director will pull something truly heartfelt out of the bag

It’s a magnificent piece of work, completely beguiling from end to end and one which wears its immense philosophical profundity with admirable lightness.

Occasionally, the film does lack ambiguity, and there are a number of characters who, just through the casting, make-up and dress, come across as one-dimensional extremes of “goodies” and “baddies”. Yet Molly herself, and the seemingly endless string of physical and psychological trials she endures . . . makes for a satisfying emotional core.

This is not a politically didactic film, nor a lapel-shaking polemic, but a film whose obligation towards fine dramatic authenticity succeeds in convincing that this is the correct way of thinking, and any alternatives are incorrect.

It’s a model of old school screen storytelling, where the robust individual elements coalesce into the exact sum of their parts and not a single ounce out either way.

Apollo 10 ½ is about the subjective intimacy of history, and how all events are just an equally-sized, vibrantly-coloured fragment in the kaleidoscope of our mind.

Harari’s film is a practical, simple and saddening document of everyday madness.

There’s a joke where people say, “This film’s plot could’ve been written on the back of a napkin!” Yet for Sonic 2, a napkin seems like the equivalent of multi-volumed antiquarian tome, as there is so little of substance to this depressingly rote endeavour.

A jolly throwback to a time when flip, breezy British comedies came freighted with substance, and lots of charismatic performances to boot.

There are numerous moments where all the signposts point towards a saccharine dirty bomb, and thankfully, the film seldom allows those to detonate.

Every shot, every narrative beat, every decision exudes not merely confidence, but the touch of a master.

A wildly ambitious, idiosyncratic and very English domestic horror story baked in the mould of Clive Barker’s seminal S&M gore wig-out, Hellraiser, from 1987.

Licorice Pizza is a slow-release product, something that creeps up on you, inveigles its way into your conscience. It’s silky-smooth filmmaking perfection, bolstered by a full hand of remarkably charismatic star supporting turns.

Visually and dramatically, the film doesn’t reinvent any wheels, nor does it set out too, instead happy to splice together a satisfyingly intense period drama with some nice moments of genre pay-off.

It’s a rare, backwards looking misfire for this director who has always been at the vanguard of cinematic innovation. The care and attention that has gone into the making of this film is undeniable, though at times it feels misplaced and others overwrought.

At times it’s a little too ponderous, and sometimes struggles to bring variation and surprise to its runtime. Yet this laconic, meditative drama muses on the nature of time and the revelation that, even though Muzamil’s predicament seems highly unlikely to the rational onlooker, the knowledge he accrues is pertinent to all mortals.

Drive My Car is endlessly fascinating and rich, the type of film which you could spend hours analysing and come no closer to feeling as if you’ve landed on its true intent.

It’s perhaps one or two increments too obscure, too puzzling and too unwilling to give anything away that it seems to end mid-sentence, without any traditional closure. Yet it’s still a bold work that puts great faith in its cast to play along with this game of chilling insouciance.

Sometimes the filmmaking doesn’t quite do enough to elicit the requisite intensity from some key conversations, but it certainly lands its most important punch, which arrives at the devastating climax.

On paper Stewart seemed like an eccentric casting choice, yet she slinks into the material with grace and ease, and her trademark arsenal of half-met glares and anxiety-dashed grimaces perfectly express her desperate yearning to be free of prettified toff prison.

It’s a supremely compelling tale leavened by its wry humour and a subtle commentary on the essential emptiness of American life.

What’s interesting about Eternals is how genuinely down to earth most of it is, rejecting the time-honoured duality of the flashy superhero who also has to contend with the banality of domestic life. This is more like reality, in that it is about coming to terms with smallness and impotence in the face of so much cosmic sprawl.

The film is at its best when holding back details and sculpting fine character details, but the intensity is ramped up far too early and it becomes increasingly tough to take the plot seriously, or build an emotional connection with its climactic revelations.

The important scenes are allowed to play out in a way that allows for a slower, more satisfying reveal of character motivation, as well as adding necessary ballast to the emotional foundations for later in the saga.

Tseden directs with a low-slung commitment to a dramatically heightened form of social realism, and this deceptively simple story ends up speaking volumes about how love, sex, marriage and parenting sit at a paradoxical remove from the dictates of the state, and the parochial attitudes of the older generation.