Donald Clarke

At its best, The Devil Wears Prada 2 engages saltily with the social and economic changes that have set in since the 2006 original. One yearns for a little more of Miranda’s amusingly half-hearted attempts to accommodate woke restrictions on her acidic put-downs.

The film exists to give Lopez an opportunity to bring the house down. She does that, but it’s not quite enough.

The screenplay blows it at the close with an absurdly clunky flashback that ties up every loose end with improbable neatness, but this remains a decent class of red-meat actioner for a now underserved audience.

All sincerely intended. All a bit rickety. Still, The Bride! does just about get by on suave style and committed performances.

What follows is a reasonably ingenious meld of new-generational tomfoolery and the unearthing of ancient characters whose identities we shan’t spoil. There is little original here, but, as has always been the case in this treatise on repeated tropes, that is precisely the point. They can have that get-out clause on me.

Sadly, the film’s sardonic edge is dulled by a reliance on stereotypical depictions of philistine self-interest.

We don’t demand hard realism from such a project, but a little more edge would have been nice. Solid, middlebrow entertainment, nonetheless.

The problem – and it is no small one – rests with the leads. Elordi is fine as an unthinking hunk of abusive resentment. But the script cannot make sense of this Cathy as someone of Robbie’s age. At least one sarky crack confirms the character is no longer supposed to be a teenager (or anything close), but the dialogue does not satisfactorily retune Cathy to a woman in her 30s.

This remains a sincerely felt piece of entertainment that, unusually for current mainstream cinema, treats the audience and its characters like adults. Worth indulging.

Here is a perfectly respectable – if ragged at the edges – attempt to engage with a sporting story that wove triumph and pride in with regret and disharmony.

For all that flash and bash, it does feel as if we spend a lot of time staring at Chris Pratt looking worried and a Rebecca Ferguson increasingly bored of sounding increasingly boring. Too much dialogue plays like a conversation with an automated phone service only marginally more animated than the one that fails to direct you to customer services.

It could be enormously clunky, but the quiet warmth of Fraser’s performance, the delicacy of Hikari’s direction and the ravishing location work just about distract from the teeth-smarting sentimentality. Soothing balm to kick off the cinematic year.

The new film, evocatively shot by Sean Bobbitt, feels like a trivial, if entertaining, diversion on the way to a more substantial closing fall.

It is all very on the nose. It’s all shamelessly manipulative. Mind you, a cynic might argue you could say the same of Diamond’s best songs. And there’s nothing wrong with a hatful of Neil.

Rarely has anything looked simultaneously so spectacular and so monotonous. It’s like being drowned to drunken death in a lake of curaçao.

Goodbye June is messy, humanistic and shamelessly sentimental.

It is 15 minutes too long and, with all the emotional and literal clamour, loses some of the intimacy you desire for a rural golden-age-of-crime lampoon.

The problem is that, until the closing 15 minutes, the film traces the same path as too many (sad and true) stories before it. Happily, the inevitable redemption is handled with great vim and a shameless determination to cause audiences to punch air and dab eyes. Only those with the coldest of hearts will be able to resist.

Yet, through sheer insistence, Erivo and Grande, who deserve the bump in status they’ve received, almost pull it back together with a closing duet that makes a virtue of emotional incontinence.

No sensitive person watching Anemone could fail to be intrigued about where Ronan Day-Lewis will go next. This grandiose, inventively operatic project is no ordinary film. But it is not quite a good film either. Too monotonous. Too self-regarding. Showy to the point of meretriciousness.

Hoover fans will know that, early on, a catastrophe looks to upset the order. Nothing in the film-making suggests, however, this dilemma will not be tidied away by the time of senior prom. Who would want to live in so dull a fantasy?

Every scene, like the effusions of the worst social-media bore, dares different bits of the audience to get righteously furious. Few will be minded to bother.

A classy film that doesn’t entirely make sense.

For all the bustle, flow and noise, there is little here we haven’t seen before.

For all the good work, however, the film fails to fully capture the madness of the response at home.

The film is never boring, but, once that delightful opening winds down, the action clunks where it should purr.

The Cut is ultimately too broad, cliched and preposterous to take the belt. Still, it was brave to go where it went.

So Three Days is no great shakes, but it is rarely embarrassing either.

The film does indeed reflect how megastardom goes about its business. The script, by the director and Emily Mortimer, piles on the irony with admirable diligence. But this is about as cutting-edge as making fun of Donald Trump for being orange.

Like all the director’s films, it never allows a boring shot when an unusual one is possible. It has compelling momentum. It features charismatic actors. What a shame it is so tonally chaotic.

That first (third) act functions effectively as a bewitching enigmatic short that gets away with its downbeat denouement. The audience can fill the gaps in whatever enigmatic way they see fit. Unfortunately the movie continues backwards into increasingly mawkish territory.

One remains puzzled as to what these films want to be. Not nearly enough is done with the animal natures of the heroes.

Coming after the exhaustingly overstuffed Superman, First Steps rattles along with a refreshing clarity of purpose.

Only a monster could object to the delightful pairing of Byrne and HBC (whose accent isn’t too bad). Get them back together in a better film as soon as possible.

The cartoonish closing battles make it clear that, not for the first time, Gunn is striving for high trash, but what he achieves here is low garbage. Utterly charmless. Devoid of humanity. As funny as toothache.

F1 really is too thuddingly familiar for words. Drop a bowling ball off a cliff and you would be less sure of its trajectory.

One could bang on all day about how familiar so much of this seems. But it is only fair to acknowledge that, judged as an independent entity (if such an assessment is possible), the current How to Train Your Dragon works as sleek, charming, funny entertainment.

Ultimately, for good or ill, one has to accept that Bono’s compunction to spill his emotional innards is, for fans, more of a feature than a bug.

Bloodlines, after that first-class opening section, isn’t quite so clever in its constructions as were the earlier episodes. There is more reliance on out-of-nowhere splatter than on amusingly inevitable disaster.

Too murky. Too little access to the character’s face. It takes a long, long time for the film to redeem itself with the biplane stunt you’ve seen on the poster.

Thunderbolts* works best as a jokey romp at home to tolerable quips amid mounting chaos.

Mickey 17, adapted from a novel by Edward Ashton, feels like a rickety compromise bolted together from incompatible parts.

This is pure pulp, but it’s good, honest pulp that keeps in time with the backbeat throughout. Good support from Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran. Not for the squeamish, though.

When film-makers aren’t asking people to read their films as westerns they are asking for them to be read as Greek tragedies. For all the commitment of the actors and brooding ambience of the film-making, Bring Them Down can’t quite sustain that comparison.

Adaptations of Ivanhoe have imagined the past less romantically.

Many worse horror titles will make it to cinemas throughout the coming year. This is pulp as pulp should be.

Many will be won over by the emotional surge of the closing moments. Others will wonder if there is a word for a manipulative drama that fails to satisfactorily manipulate.

Carrey’s antic madness – elsewhere often too much to digest – is just what the Sonic films needed to balance out the digital gloss.

There is little character, no visible emotion, just endless show-offy technical competence.

There is nothing here to win over those habitually ill disposed to sword and sorcery, but anybody half on board should have a decent time. It is certainly a heck of a lot better than the over-extended Hobbit trilogy.

For all the richness of the tales told, So This Is Christmas remains an enormously peculiar project.

Adams, as usual, gives it her all, but it’s as if Kafka’s Metamorphosis had been adapted as frivolous comic operetta.

It is hard to gripe at a movie that sends one out in such buoyant mood. Job just about achieved.

This is a deliberately puzzling, oblique affair that never runs when it can sneak.

The narrative parallels with Gladiator – taking in soft-edged shadows of the earlier characters – only press home the current project’s second-hand status. It’s no Gladiator. It’s no Asterix the Gladiator.

Many will roll their eyes when Williams is praised for supposedly ground-breaking collaboration with luxury brands. But the real problem with this tolerably diverting film is that he isn’t really that interesting.

The interaction between these fine actors – John David Washington, the director’s brother, continues his rise – keeps the production tasty even as, in later stages, it gives into something like desperation.

A worthy, if workmanlike, tribute.

What we have here is something like a supervillain origin story, with Cohn spelling out almost every negative trait that now defines the former president. That makes for momentum, but the approach – supposing a man is made by other men alone – is also inherently trivial and reductive.

A strong set of performances from a top-flight cast help close Malone’s deal.

The book may not show its age, but this adaptation feels more ancient than the oceans.

For all the disappointments, McQueen has delivered a grand mainstream entertainment that puts pressure on the tear ducts as it uncovers unspoken truths.

Even if such a proposition didn’t quite work out it would surely be the right sort of failure. Maybe a gloriously camp Jailhouse Rock. As it happens, we have ended up with a drab affair that never gets properly started.

Will & Harper, a natural Netflix entertainment, oscillates between sincere openness and painful artifice.

By the close, one is left befuddled. Is this a tragedy? Is this a comedy? Is it a moral fable? Cruelty to Homo criticus is the least of its problems.

There are reminders of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and Sean Baker’s incoming Palme d’Or winner Anora in that urban chaos, but Watts’s bland style washes out all the grime to leave us with, well, something you might expect from a streaming release.

Though immaculately made in every respect, Paradise Is Burning never quite finds its narrative rhythms. The story is happily fussing over here and then gets distracted by something over there. But Sine Vadstrup Brooker’s lovely cinematography, drifting in the liminal spaces between city and country, keeps the viewer uneasily gripped throughout.

A glossy package. Not quite enough inside.

The only distinguishing feature of this exhilaratingly bad film is its apparent close association with London’s tourism authorities.

Alien: Romulus remains a shapeless beast that never so much as hints at the disciplined elegance of Scott’s founding text. The action progresses rather than builds.

Unfortunately, the longer the thing goes on the less it ceases to be good honest rubbish and the more it expects us to care about the stupid, stupid plot. Console junkies will find themselves involuntarily hammering an imagined X button in the hope of getting back to the gameplay. No good. You’re stuck with this wacko BS.

With little of Crockett’s original charm remaining, the audience is left with a generic entertainment struggling to find a reason to exist beyond the need for more “content”. As soon seen as forgotten.

Nobody will walk away from Skywalkers: A Love Story raving about its soap-opera shenanigans. But as an exercise in physical unsettlement it could hardly be bettered.

Twisters feels no need to offer footnotes and variation on its predecessor. It’s a big fat summer movie in its own right. And that’s something these days.

Though largely for already-persuaded aficionados, Blue Lock The Movie: Episode Nagi has enough imaginative zing to make up for its somewhat monotonous storytelling. This is football reimagined as a heightened form of futuristic warfare. Those who already know they like it will like it very much.

Murphy reminds us, albeit at a lower temperature, what caused so many heads to laugh themselves off shoulders during his pomp.

It is plainly the work of talented individuals, but it ultimately leaves you with little to show for your patience other than a pounding headache.

Unfortunately the characterisation is so thin and the dialogue so clunky that the thing plays more like one of those 1960s surf horrors – Cannibal Martians at Wipeout Cove – that invited drive-in audiences to speculate about which beach denizen deserved to get eaten first (usually a hard question to answer).

The miracle is that most of it sticks. Kane is a fine craftsman.

The downside to all this is that it reminds us that video games tend to manage cleaner storytelling than the makers of Bad Boys: Ride or Die do. The film plays as a muddle of set pieces – some impressive, most unintelligible – that fail to form any kind of coherent line. One almost longs for Bay’s return. His satanic mayhem at least had a consistency to it.

The film has its flaws, but worriers will find much with which to identify.

All in all, a diverting entertainment that, unlike so much contemporary horror, is prepared to have a good time. Fun for all the family.

The seat-of-the-pants grit of the first film seems as distant as kitchen-sink verite.

If comes together nicely in a moving denouement that almost makes sense of the fantastic clutter. Often touching. Often infuriating.

The film is good enough to deserve the sequels towards which it there gestures.

Oh, well. Perhaps the best response to junk food is junk cinema.

If the film has a significant flaw, it is that it doesn’t get the room to breathe. Another 10 minutes to flesh out plots and subplots would have been nice.

Sure, you will learn more – and hear more of the original recordings – in Asif Kapadia’s great documentary Amy, but Taylor-Johnson does a decent job of making a tight drama from the same tragic yarn.

It hardly needs to be said that, as it goes on – and it does go on – the film loses coherence and slips into rampaging chaos. But, coming a year or so after that catastrophic Exorcist sequel, The First Omen feels a lot better than it needed to be. That may have to do.

The plot is rubbish. Nobody seems comfortable putting tongue anywhere near cheek. If the costumes were any more heightened you’d demand a song and dance number. All of which makes it hard to look anywhere else. But good? Probably not. Bad? Maybe not that either.

What we have here is an efficient compilation of the hoariest sporting cliches given a breath of life by some charming actors.

The film is (like its predecessor) no classic, but it would play well enough to a packed Friday-night audience in Megaplex 3.

Drive-Away Dolls is no disaster. Matt Damon has fun as a hypocritical politician in a last act that cannot be faulted for chutzpah. But nobody will mistake this yellow-pack Coen flick for the real thing.

For all its flaws, however, Origin does have power as both didactic treatise and drama of recovery. There is something reassuring being said here about the restorative power of work.

Ultimately, we end up with an abundance of craft and a forest of lore wrapped around personal narratives too flimsy to sustain marching feet.

Reviews will be mixed. But it has every chance of being resurrected as a cult classic.

Sadly, the film runs out of steam as it develops into a detective story with a solution that will surprise nobody.

Like the Whitney film, One Love suffers greatly from a looming whiff of authorisation.