Donald Clarke

Michael B Jordan, who bossed the previous two rounds as Adonis Creed, shuffles behind the camera for a film that intersperses soapy sentiment with first-class acting duels.

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

The film does occasionally struggle with getting England right. We are always aware that this is a French film-maker looking through the window at the crumpets on their doilies. But there is a mischievous intelligence at work that complements the embrace of sometimes broad misunderstandings.

The film certainly invites fists to be pumped in celebration. It is less certain Air offers any meaningful critique of the society that gave us the sacred gutty.

The directors do good work in conjuring up a remote era and teasing out still extant racial tensions. One does, however, end up yearning to hear a little more about how the legal team went about their work. A good complaint to have.

The two flawless performances, presented in the polite shades of prestige British cinema, make a winning case for the virtues of seasoned affection. An irresistible treat.

All this might be unbearable were it not for some lovely performances and, despite the familiar tropes, a commitment to treat Louis and his condition with respect.

A perfect late-summer diversion.

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.

It works as therapy. It works as an acting showcase. But the dips and flips we demand from narrative art are missing throughout.

Though it doesn’t have the complexity of Zodiac or the resonance of The Social Network, this may be Fincher’s sleekest and most uncomplicatedly entertaining film of the current century.

Taking place in an upmarket east London restaurant on a busy night during the Christmas season, the film gives a real sense of the frantic stress that underlies such operations. The lack of cuts presses home the real-time scenario and allows no escape from the hurtling momentum.

This is an awfully clean version of borderline anarchy. But the relationships are teased out so delightfully that few will feel it worth complaining. Even the sentimental denouement is forgivable.

This excellent debut feature from Ben Leonberg may be unique among horror films in fairly attracting the compound adjectives “deeply unsettling” and “utterly adorable”.

This is the kind of issue-driven cinema that used to win Oscars. That Dark Waters and Just Mercy weren’t mentioned during awards season is as troubling as it is perplexing.

For the most part, Hello, Bookstore potters along in anecdotal, amiably ramshackle fashion.

This charming, beautifully made drama gets about halfway (maybe a little more, maybe 60 or 70 per cent) towards confirmation as a classic of English reserve before a stunningly uninteresting subplot concerning less charismatic characters arrives to deaden the closing scenes.

Coda is an unqualified success in its relaxed, almost matter-of-fact treatment of how deaf families move through a largely uncomprehending society.

The two lead actors are strong. The conversations around the museum amusingly tease out tensions between factions in the LGBT community. But Bros fails to satisfactorily map out its own space. Passes the time well enough. Doesn’t quite pull down the barriers.

In short, the third best Christmas film ever.

We are left with a perfectly respectable, eminently professional slice of prestige arthouse. Nobody with even modestly open-minded sensibilities will walk away in a blind fury. Few will leave in an ecstasy of transcendence.

Appearing opposite Nora-Jane Noone in a film that twists the actors round each other like competing bindweed, McGuigan could hardly have delivered a more bracing final performance. So savage is her turn that you expect water drops to hiss off her broiling skin.

Revelling in bright fabrics and seductive horizons, the director, despite all the conflicts, is here to argue for both the warmth of traditional families and the excitement of contemporary youth culture. No film other than Sirat has, this year, made such compelling use of music.

At any rate, though loose in structure, Friendship offers a few minor masterpieces in the art of cringe.

Promising Young Woman nonetheless remains an entertaining, imaginative exercise in creative score-settling.

Alas, the film does slip towards industry-standard punch-ups in the last 15 minutes. But there is enough promise in this cheeky, witty, incisive shocker to let us look forward to inevitable sequels with something like enthusiasm.

Allegories are unavoidable. The walk is American capitalism. The walk is life itself. It requires, however, no such connections to enjoy the best King adaptations in many years.

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

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.

Extra Ordinary is not always subtle, but most viewers will yield to its mystic charms.

This remains a careering exercise in mid-ranking Yorgosia that just about justifies its many indulgences. We should remain grateful that a talent so odd remains somewhere adjacent to the mainstream.

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.

Nia DaCosta, young director of the fine Little Woods, is behind the camera and she shows a real gift for gruesome showboating.

This fine documentary on the Palestine solidarity encampments at Columbia University, in Manhattan, makes much of comparisons with student protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

Honour Among Thieves could have tidied away its plot more economically, but the leisurely pacing does allow us to connect with the surprisingly fleshy characters. It is no mean feat to make something so funny from such unpromising material. It is more impressive still to end on a genuinely moving note. A welcome surprise.

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

Hardcore fans will rejoice in telling us it is not for children. It’s not really for adults either. But the eternal inner adolescent that lives within us all will almost certainly have a swell time.

There is a lot here about how female sexual desire is repressed and sublimated. There is an implied, though not exactly hopeful, treatise on the promise of the later 1960s. Not every risk pays off. But all were worth taking.

Considered as an exercise in hushed mortal contemplation, The Shrouds, sombrely scored by Howard Shore, earns a spot beside Cronenberg’s best work. This is just the sort of unclassifiable oddity that the greatest directors, now less concerned with expectations, manage late into fecund careers.

Working from his own tight script, Whannell demonstrates an admirable ability to place the wet-yourself shocks where you least expect them. Benjamin Wallfisch’s insidious score complements later action, but the director is prepared to play out the opening conflicts with no music whatsoever. Great thought has gone into the architecture of this ingenious structure

Swelling the running time close to three hours, the story, though well worked, has ideas above its humble station. One longs for the strings to be tightened. One yearns for just a smidgeon of levity.

Destin Daniel Cretton, director of Just Mercy and Short Term 12, continues Marvel’s reasonably successful practices of unlikely hires from the indie sector. The dialogue is snappy. The action has real kinetic clatter. What a strange industry this has become.

It’s well-meaning. It’s lively. It’s moderately funny. But it is no Finding Nemo.

What makes the thing really fly – and it does still fly – is the witty energy of Jon Watts’s direction and the fizzy chemistry between the core actors.

Wildcat remains a tense, diverting study of a man struggling with internal demons while doing his best for an initially helpless creature.

For all its abundant flaws, The United States vs Billie Holiday is clearly the work of a man with hot celluloid running through his lymphatic system. I guess that is a compliment.

The set-ups are every bit as tense as before. The cast continue to throw themselves at the material with admirable gusto.

DW Young’s film, a study of New York’s independent and antiquarian booksellers, looks to have modelled itself on that aimless pleasure. Never aspiring to anything like a structure, it meanders from shelf to shelf, sometimes picking up a volume and placing it straight down, sometimes leafing more carefully through the pages.

There are some good ideas here. The overpowering prettiness is welcome in the windy months. But the characters are somewhat lost in a busy rush to find some new angle (any new angle) on a much-adapted text.

Beefed up with one too many musical numbers from the protagonist’s dad, The Perfect Candidate feels a bit slight on plot and character. But Zahrani’s performance and the urgency of the issues elevate it from the ordinary. A great last shot compensates for all deficiencies.

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

One is tempted to demand a dramatic movie based on these yarns, but Castro’s Spies tells its story so compellingly that no such compromise is necessary.

Theater Camp is itself shamelessly infatuated with the great American musical, but it also enjoys poking affectionate fun at the kids’ creative tunnel vision.

The high concept becomes a near irrelevance as we struggle with a humanist story that lacks the emotional zest Hirokazu Koreeda habitually brings to related material. The messages are inarguable. The means of delivery leaves something to be desired.

Adaptations of Ivanhoe have imagined the past less romantically.

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.

Murray and Watts make something genuinely touching of Iris’s quest to discover what prompted the writer to end it all.

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.

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

Dunne’s script, co-written with Malcolm Campbell, packs too much plot in its final 10 minutes, but it hits the emotional beats with gusto throughout. It was, when it was shot two years ago, an effective comment on an absurd crisis. Sadly, it is still that.

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

Alex Garland’s folk horror takes the broadest of swipes at various colours of toxic masculinity without opening up many new lines of investigation.

Sadly, the film itself is not quite as silly as it should be (something of an achievement given what you’ve just read). Everyone is taking it very seriously. We don’t get enough characters pulling their limbs together after being hacked to pieces by combine harvester. Some very good actors have been cast in the wrong roles. No matter. Theron makes it work.

Materialists has received the odd puzzled review in its home territory, but it has the welcome oddness of a future classic.

God’s Creatures doesn’t quite manage its daring blend of maritime realism and Greek catastrophe. The huge final gesture feels just a little too heightened for this otherwise everyday world. The effort was, however, worth making. A bitter, unforgiving entertainment.

Few will complain about the delicious perplexities of the opening hour. The film’s focus on the sadness of remote lives – everyone here seems alone – adds satisfactory emotional ballast.

A clever concept carried out with great invention and some emotional honesty.

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.

Evil Dead Rises is not quite so unambiguously comic as that early work, but Cronin never forgets we are here to have a bloody good time.

Night Shift does not go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria’s eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us compellingly through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday.

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.

Few so economical features – 80 minutes, with only three significant characters – have had such unsettling fun in the dark, dark woods. Don’t let it slip you by.

All this delicious incident has the makings of a gung-ho entertainment – Ian Fleming as mounted by Nasa. Unfortunately that’s not what we get. Even if we were brave enough to try, we would not be capable of spoiling a plot so wilfully obtuse it demands repeat viewings to disentangle.

The copious talking heads fail to open up the intellectual wiring required to derive pleasure from an activity that invites submarine asphyxiation. What we do get is lucid explanation of the sport’s mechanics and satisfactory celebration of two impressively unstoppable personalities. A smart buy for the streamer.

One Life breaks no new cinematic ground. But it tells a story worth hearing. And it allows an indisputable great one more chance to show us what he can do.

It remains, nonetheless, a pleasure to see a good yarn played out in such professional fashion. Just try not to think of the awful pun in the title.

Raiff is brave enough to not give us all we desire from the story. He accommodates a star in the ensemble cast without allowing her to unbalance the character dynamics. But the film is a tad too obtuse to capture the attention of awards voters. Oddball here wins out over mainstream.

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

Dupieux is flogging no message. He’s inviting us to take risks on a ride that is as unpredictable as it is spooky. And it’s all done in under 80 minutes. There is nothing else like it out there.

Nobody looks to have helped Affleck get to grips with the author’s signature sociopath and, rather than appearing coldly ruthless, this cuboid-headed anti-hero comes across as a bored man queuing for an uninteresting clerical formality.