Donald Clarke

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.

DeVine gets away with a barn-door broadness that, nodding to the Jerry Lewis tendency, chimes with a film that works a surprising amount of explicit violence into its hectic slapstick.

It is not unreasonable to wonder if Mission: Impossible is moving into its Spy Who Loved Me phase. After all, Tom Cruise and the series itself are more than a decade older than, respectively, Roger Moore and the Bond Cinematic Universe at the time of that film. Have we reached cosy pastiche? Is it now all just one big guffaw? On balance, no. The exhaustingly titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is certainly aware of its own occasional ridiculousness.

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

Not everything works here. Too much is overfamiliar. But Run Rabbit Run retains a clammy grip throughout. Definitely worth a stream.

Cheap gags aside, The Super 8 Years comes together as an effective gloss on a life that has already been carefully examined.

Extraction 2, again co-produced by the Russo brothers of Avengers fame, is unlikely to be mistaken for anything other than barely recycled snuff trash. But there is a chutzpah to the action that defies complete dismissal.

It is still a thundering mess that ends with the usual boring battle in a CGI sky. But, on a scene-by-scene basis, The Flash passes the time better than Gunn’s own puzzlingly lauded Suicide Squad.

One yearns in vain for some acknowledgment that the creation being celebrated is nothing more than a bag of squashed organic matter coated in a modestly spicy mulch.

Some loyalists do still give a fig. They will still get something from the volume and the visual clutter. Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Even the most dedicated will, however, surely baulk at one of the stupidest final shots in the history of cinema. That surely doesn’t count as a spoiler.

None of these bits fit together. Each is tolerably entertaining on its own terms.

The main body of Across the Spider-Verse is, however, so endlessly, dizzyingly imaginative that few will lose hope at the mildly disappointing denouement. There is surely more to come, and the potential is there for endless variation. Excelsior!

It helps that the 1989 flick had a score to equal that of any contemporaneous Broadway hit. And, Bailey, who will surely profit from this opportunity, knows how to build the blowsier numbers through show-stopping crescendos. All that should be enough to satisfy indulgent fans.

Those who do stick with Killers of the Flower Moon – and you all should – when it opens later in the year will, however, be rewarded with the most ingenious of closing codas. There are issues here, but the great man has still got it.

A lovely, pastoral pleasure that admits its share of blood-drawing barbs.

Nobody with a brain in their heads will compare Dial of Destiny favourably to the first three films. There is a sense throughout of a project struggling to stand beneath the weight of its history. But Mangold, director of Logan and 3.10 to Yuma, knows how to keep his foot on the pedal. The recreations of the 1960s vistas are gorgeous. The agreeable cameos keep coming.

Beau Is Afraid is all clatter and stress and movement, but the director is in control throughout, engineering both comic set pieces and existential show trials with equal invention.

Pray for Our Sinners (clever title, incidentally) is not a shocker on the scale of clerical-abuse documentaries such as Mea Maxima Culpa or Deliver Us from Evil. It is a smaller story that connects directly with a tight community. Its power lies in its intimacy and, ultimately, in its cautious hopefulness.

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.

One of the more enjoyable dreadful films of the season.

It is the relationship between Grace and Cian that most engages. Galligan, seen recently in the TV series The Great and Kin, exhibits a rare charisma and a gift for dry comedy that should take her far.

For all the extravagant special effects and efforts to tug at our heartstrings, what we get is more of an epic variety show than coherent space opera.

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.

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.

Mid-grade comedy Drac at best. Diverting for all that.

The jokes are funny and weird. At its heart, there is a story worth caring about.

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.

There is much rushing to little purpose. Too many dull contractual glitches get in the way of the enthusiastic performances.

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.

A terrific, gripping drama that will cross cultural borders with ease. Every nation has such stories.

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.

No other British film has, in a generation, done such imaginative work in restructuring romantic comedy. It is one of those rare films the audience didn’t know it really, really needed.

Neeson is, of course, perfectly capable of chewing through the quips while carrying the city’s sins on his broad shoulders. But he needs more help from a rigid script to make sense of a character that seems defined by archetype alone.

The film fights hard to draw humour from the players’ often eccentric demeanours without holding them up to ridicule. For the most part it succeeds.

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.

Khan, like her documentarist heroine, clearly seeks to offer a balanced take on arranged marriage – opening non-Muslim viewers up to their own prejudices while admitting the restrictions. That balance proves, however, difficult to sustain in a genre that relies on a desperate, final rush to the airport (or whatever) as soul mates admit their attraction.

The thing is fun but, if we may be allowed an oxymoron, it is genuinely ersatz from ear to claw.

Imagine a Roger Corman film made with the combined budgets of every Roger Corman film and you are halfway there.

If you scrunch up your eyes and tilt your head you could imagine yourself watching an avant-garde animation at a Brooklyn art house. But there is also, about it, something of the charming work that Oliver Postgate did for British children’s television in the 1970s.

Last Dance is frightfully indulgent, but, this being Soderbergh, it is also studded with delightful outbreaks of invention.

Polley allows bursts of weirdness and humour to punctuate deliberation that, though often abstract, never becomes alienatingly cerebral.

This is a profoundly serious film, one concerned about our disregard for animals and our disintegrating ecosystems, but it is also restlessly alive.

The director of shockers such as Requiem for a Dream and Mother! has had his mainstream moments, but he has never before been quite so at home to tawdry soap opera.

The result is neither as sentimental nor as moving – if those adjectives can be separated – as the director’s more personal 20th century films. It does, however, feel complete in itself. Cleanly shot. Immaculately performed. And, no, you probably don’t need to know Spielberg from Carlsberg to have a good time.

The perfunctory attempts to address social issues do not really come off. But it works through its tolerable high concepts with a great deal of verve and charm.

For all its confusion, Babylon really does function as celebration of an increasingly threatened medium.

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.

The middle body of the picture, shot impeccably by Florian Hoffmeister, takes on the quality of an oblique ghost story as, struggling to prepare a performance of Mahler’s Fifth, she finds her fragile carapace creaking and cracking.

The film is sometimes too sleazy, but it is, more often, not sleazy enough.

The thing still works well enough as a middlebrow hankie dampener.

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

I Wanna Dance with Somebody plays by the rules of the TV movie to efficient, if scarcely groundbreaking, effect. It will change no minds about Whitney Houston.

No doubt millions will be have no difficulty ferreting out the emotional core and propelling The Way of Water to box office success. But the indulgence of it all causes one to yearn for the raw, propulsive action of Cameron’s first two Terminator movies.

The action is unsettling throughout. There is a pervasive sense of unspoken menace lurking just outside the frame (or somewhere in the near past or future). But it is also a celebration of uncomplicated human kindness.

Few film adaptations so awkwardly aligned deliver quite so many full-on belly laughs. It doesn’t exactly work but, no, we won’t throw “bore” at the filmmakers.

Though certainly at home to overcast misery, the film incorporates spooky, stop-motion animation and musical interludes that might have amused Ken Russell. It works in surprising ways.

The latest film from the Dardenne brothers, a heart-rending tale of misused immigrants in contemporary Belgium, arrives just two weeks after Frank Berry’s Aisha pondered similar misfortunes in Ireland. Both are roughly in the social-realist mode, but the tone and the perspectives are quite different.

Sadly, the unfunny, unexciting Violent Night fails to deliver on its substantial promise.

An exciting and often powerful piece of mainstream film-making that allows its heroes to emerge as normal people who make everyday mistakes. Highly recommended.

For all that self-aware fuss, Glass Onion works darn well as a mystery romp. It is a little smooth to the touch, but there are beautiful chicanes along the route to a satisfactorily clamorous conclusion.

What we really needed was something in the vein of the second Scream film – a sequel that, rather than just deconstructing classic Disney tropes, satirised emerging conventions of the streaming sequel.

Perhaps Gray’s best film so far.

Aftersun’s greatest achievement is to gradually reveal the imminence of a tragedy that, though never explicitly confirmed, feels inescapable by the already celebrated final shot. It is hard to think of another film that has pulled off this trick so effectively.

Coogler and his team have pulled together a functional time-passer in difficult circumstances. As before, the costumes are a gorgeous exercise in Afrofuturist chic. The music neatly works ethnic elements in with triumphant orchestral swirls. And the actors are consistently strong.

In some ways it is Cartoon Saloon’s most “normal” film, but, stuffed with visual elan and powered by good nature, it confirms the studio’s desire to stretch in hitherto unexplored directions.

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.

For all the plum-on-the-nose satire, Östlund does not, however, fall into the trap of making every target a monster.

Gleeson and Farrell play off one another in a perfect complement — sulky gorilla opposite enthusiastic puppy — that, as awards season kicks up a gear, has been entertaining premiere audiences on both red carpets and inside the auditorium.

Astonishingly, Black Adam does seem to have once had ambitions to say something big and important about the world. But any parallel with current unhappiness is drawn and then quickly dropped like the truly scalding potato it is.

Nobody could mistake All Quiet on the Western Front for anything other than an anti-war film, but the deafening, careering action — shot in predictably desaturated tones by James Friend — still works to create an unhealthy surge in the viewer.

Sadly, Prince’s estate refused the rights to the audio of Nothing Compares 2 U. That could have been a big problem, but her famous version’s status as the ghost that didn’t come to the feast adds mystery to an already hugely engaging film. For fans and the uninitiated alike.

You will learn something of Agojie, the all-woman Dahomean army, from The Woman King, but this is largely popcorn-friendly fantasy pitched at maximum volume.

Strickland has expressed a passion for This is Spinal Tap and Flux Gourmet has much to do with how close confinement causes creative types to claw out one another’s eyes. The characters here are every bit as cleanly drawn as the members of that fictional rock group and, even if they generate less open affection, they also encourage one to take sides.

Nobody could deny that Dominik layers sympathy on Monroe, but the reduction of her life to a catalogue of torments betrays the complicated, intelligent and — God forbid this were acknowledged — funny person we knew her to be. Defining her solely by misery feels like more postmortem abuse.

The costuming and production design are so crisp one can often overlook the vacuum within the packaging.

The jokes land with satisfactory regularity. The locations are lovely throughout. But a middle-ranking Working Title rom-com – more Wimbledon than Notting Hill – may not be enough to revivify a spluttering genre.

See How They Run is not quite so self-regarding as Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, but See How They Run is a delightful, shamelessly affectionate deconstruction of ChristieLand that outstays not a second of its welcome.

The picture doesn’t reach out and grab you. It doesn’t fling viscera in your face. It hangs around outside your house, half hidden in shadow, and gradually insinuates malaise. So, no, not comfort food.

Miller has, as directors often will, followed up a succès d’estime — this is his first film since Mad Max: Fury Road — with something of a personal folly. Better that than bland boilerplate, but Three Thousand Years of Longing grates as often as it charms.

They don’t make them like this any more. To be fair, they never made them quite like this. Passes the time very nicely (and occasionally horribly).

We bounce from one adventure to another without settling into anything like a rhythm. But the nuanced acting and characterisation elevate a film that feels securely connected to a particular place and time. The Bronx has rarely been so affectionately evoked.

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.

A perfect late-summer diversion.

Embarrassingly for a film that actually features a star of Pulp Fiction, Killing Field is still harbouring an undignified passion for early Tarantino.

[Peele] may never again make a film so elegantly structured as Get Out (who has?), but the ferment of interlocking ideas here is so diverting it hardly matters that the film is more at home to a meander than steady ascent.

We are left with a properly entertaining drama that gets across the technical details with great efficiency. A good job of work by a reliable Hollywood professional.

Sadly, the thing is so chaotically exhausting it proves beyond the talented actors’ saving. It plays like the last 20 minutes of a much-better action film stretched out to the length of a biblical epic.

A lovely comedy of the most serious hue.

There is nothing much to actively dislike here. Reynolds, a hugely experienced editor who won an Emmy for directing the superb documentary The Farthest, keeps the energy high and allows her fine cast to exercise all muscles. But Joyride feels like old-fashioned stuff.

Daisy Edgar-Jones does her best, but no actor could make sense of the insanely compromised protagonist.

The new film is a plodding affair, characterised more by fastidious set dressing than by narrative tension.

Cracknell’s romp is, despite what the purists say, a perfectly pleasant variation of a text that could endure worse, but it feels stranded between two competing approaches. An honourable effort for all the bellyaching.

Good news for both lubbers and sea dogs. The recent cutbacks in Netflix’s animation department came too late to condemn this lavish, funny, playful adventure to the briny depths.

A strange, strange film. Often in a good way. Sometimes not.

A remarkable piece of work.

The viewer may struggle with the continuing inconsistency — the film is more comfortable with the supposedly compromised Elvis than the barely seen roots artist — but the audience is, at least, propelled back into the street in something like an elevated mood.

As directed by Sophie Hyde, who made the recent Irish film Animals, the picture never fully collapses beneath its own compromises. Credit for that must go to Thompson and McCormack. You get a sense of actors from different generations relishing the opportunity to tug at the ragged screenplay like handsome dogs squabbling over an old blanket.

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.