Donald Clarke

There is always room for a post-Beatles doc if it’s this good and this original.

If any recent release has the potential to become a cult classic it is this melodic warning from beneath the earth.

Flow needs to make no specific points about human misuse of the planet. Its generalised sense of environmental dread reminds of something we all know and constantly pretend to forget.

The film does not quite pull off its enigmatic ending, but this remains a startlingly eerie debut that finds new angles to a familiar genre.

So joyous and inventive is each scene that it proves easy to disregard the ambling lack of plot.

No doubt the unrelenting archness will annoy many. But, honed to an economic 93 minutes, Black Bag beats all the current worthless streaming thrillers for wit, pace, style and commitment to the bit.

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

An astonishing, unsettling fable of hidden miseries.

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.

The dialogue in one pathetically desperate audition sequence is withering in its authenticity. But credit must go to Anderson for turning this staple of drama – like Olivier in The Entertainer, a hopeless victim of changing fashion – into a living, breathing human being.

Good old-fashioned disgusting fun. I had a blast.

Energy does not buzz around this film, but it swells with decency, humanity and quiet bravery.

This is an uncomfortable film, but one that sweeps you along in its momentum.

Mad About the Boy may take place in the safest of all worlds, but it is more connected to the greater sadnesses of life than we had any right to expect. Oh, and it’s still properly funny. Which matters a bit.

More than a few critics have suggested the film ends up losing the run of itself, but few would deny that it remains indecently entertaining up to the last frame. Odd, special, important.

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.

Blue Road is most memorable for its crisply edited evocation of unlikely triumph.

A knotty, rough-hewn marvel.

If The Brutalist were not so wedded to audiovisual effect, it might play like a lost Great American Novel.

Adaptations of Ivanhoe have imagined the past less romantically.

The risky focus that Leigh Whannell, the film’s director, puts on the psychological over the physical may alienate some gorehounds, but it makes for an original shocker with subtexts that linger.

A small film about great matters.

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.

The monkey conceit is a success on several levels. It presses home that sense of Williams being an agent of chaos in any environment.

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.

The film is at its best when incorporating text from the play with oddly appropriate gameplay.

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

Beautifully shot by Ranabir Das, a cinematographer who apparently revels in the variety of artificial light sources, those scenes welcome us into the last act with a warm, satisfying hug. It is, however, Kapadia’s generous polyphonic engagement with Mumbai that sits most memorably in the brain.

Does it all add up? The cleaved-brow Fiennes, who does inner torture better than anyone, makes something believable of Lawrence’s battle for truth and integrity. Isabella Rossellini works magic with a minute supporting role. But few will survive the final scenes without pondering the Italian for “magnificent hokum”.

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.

This is a bold, brassy entertainment that breaks new ground as it hugs venerable genres to its chest.

No purer entertainment has come our way this year.

A worthy, if workmanlike, tribute.

The cool, often static shots and unhurried editing are characteristic of a school of documentary film-making that allows the viewer complete freedom to shuffle significances. There is a beauty in the empty precision.

A superb family entertainment. Maybe even a future classic.

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.

A welcome oddity.

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.

You couldn’t sincerely argue that The Outrun brims over with plot, but its rough, maritime texture is never less than diverting. It needles. It provokes.

A film that is no less thrilling for its sober rigour.

All kinds of comparisons present themselves during Coralie Fargeat’s monstrous growl at the inhumanity of society’s response to the ageing process.

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.

James Watkins’s version easily justifies its independent existence, however. Four first-rate performances find new energies in the story. The shift in nationalities adds other interesting angles.

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.

Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned.

Sing Sing itself does us all good while delivering a compendium of engaging personal dramas. Domingo rules over all like the most benign of creative deities.

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.

Janet Planet plays a little like a memory piece from an unknown future – the assembled past life of an adult who, as a child, grasped only a bare majority of the tensions unfolding about her. A lovely, flawed idyll.

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.

The creators of Deadpool will argue, lamely in my view, that by admitting the puerile nature of the humour they inure themselves to criticism in that area, but no such excuses are offered for the onanistic self-regard. After two hours of this infantile mugging, one is left longing for the genuinely upending humour of the Batman TV series from 60 years ago. Awful. Just awful.

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.

If nothing else, this fine debut feature from Korean director Jason Yu – hitherto assistant director to Bong Joon-ho – counts as a small masterpiece of tone.

Yes, the pulpy mythologies sometimes overshadow that carefully maintained mood. But it remains quite a mood. Hokum as high art.

A grim thrill rounded off with a chilling last shot.

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.

The set pieces are well handled, but this prequel stands out most for its commitment to fleshy humanity.

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).

Most contemporary westerns end up mourning a vanished era of compromised freedom. The Bikeriders doesn’t quite believe in that myth, but it still finds time to dampen a handkerchief as its shadow recedes. A flawed, fascinating film.

There is, as there was in the first film, a profound sadness at the heart of Inside Out 2.

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.

Not everyone will approve of the big swing here. But few will resist the richness and fullness of [Arnold's] characterisation.

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

This is often a difficult film to watch. The subject’s physical frailty is palpable, and his resistance to even the least intrusive advice is infuriating. The atmosphere of fug, filth and peril is suffocating. But Chambers selects the footage cunningly to always allow whispers of charm to filter through the stubbornness.

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.

What keeps it ticking is the fiery gut-clenched romance between the two leads.

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.

A real stonker of an entertainment.

All You Need Is Death, craggy and rough-edged, may be in constant conversation with the distant past, but it also puts up signposts to the future for Irish horror cinema. It’s about time somebody found a name for this artistic movement (if it is yet that).

There is a sense here not just of Vietnam-era experimental cinema but of contemporaneous postmodern novels by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and the recently late John Barth. Smart and dumb. Fascinating and frustrating. An absolute blast.

Civil War is wan as satire. But it’s an action stormer for the ages.

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.

What we have here is a humanist matrix that spins calculations in good and ill from all sides. And then it is something else. The film looks to be heading to a place of reassuring compromise when it dramatically veers into something tonally and emotionally distinct.

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.