Donald Clarke

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

Along Came Love (which has a deceptive title) does not torture the emotion or tax the brain, but, well acted and easy on the eye, it just about delivers on its early promise of knotty personal drama. It also has important things to say – implicitly for the most part – about the unjust expectations placed on women in French society.

Philippe brings few stylistic flourishes to the film, but the fascinating conversation, punctuated by delving into her personal archives, should be more than enough to satisfy the serious cinephile. She is kinder about Hitchcock than some of his other female leads. She is realistic about the rigours of the studio system.

This is ultimately an inspirational yarn focused on the value of standing by convictions.

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

It must be admitted that, against the odds, the team do a largely satisfactory job of reanimating the corpse. I’m not sure audiences will have quite as much fun watching the thing as the writers plainly had getting it on to the page. But they have certainly stuck to the brief with admirable diligence.

The Palestinian submission for international picture at the incoming Academy Awards is a handsome, old-fashioned production that, even when it is telling us things we didn’t know, confirms all our worst suspicions about the British colonial experience in the Holy Land.

Before Amongst the Wolves resolves itself into a familiar genre (I was much reminded of a particular British film from the noughties), we get a grim survey of stubborn urban discontents.

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.

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

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.

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.

The unreal feels real. The real feels even more real. A decidedly decent slice of bog horror.

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

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

Happily, the screenplay is a model of design and economy. The dilemmas remain clear. The solutions mostly make sense.

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.

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.

The Cellar does sag just a little in the middle, but its spooky beginning and apocalyptic denouement set it aside from the horror pack.

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

Some of the stylistic flourishes are delightful. Others work too hard for their own good.

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

The amiable big-screen spin-off will satisfy fans but – unlike, say, The Inbetweeners Movie – is unlikely to win over those unfamiliar with the show’s pianissimo pleasures.

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.

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.

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

Are we supposed to be scared or are we supposed to be laughing at the absurdity of it all? Happily, the actors throw enough energy at the screen to deflect any incoming frustration. An odd beast.

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.

Not everything works in the admirably bizarre In the Earth, but nobody can deny Wheatley is back in his freak-folk wheelhouse.

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.

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

Adaptations of Ivanhoe have imagined the past less romantically.

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.

With the best will in the world, this is thin stuff. The dialogue is written in the awkward, stilted style of a radio play – first-person pronouns dropped in a fashion that never really happens in everyday speech – and the confrontations are too often clunkily contrived.

Occasionally frustrating, but worth getting frustrated about.

The film does a good job of dragging us from the darkest valleys of tragedy towards the gently sunlit uplands.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Williams and her contemporaries are excellent. The senior actors do, however, steal the show. It’s lovely to see both having such a disreputably good time.

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).

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.

There’s not much formal romance here, but there’s a great deal of love.

And yet. Howard is so irrepressibly charming that Argylle proves hard to wholly resist. Her inherent warmth and charm add interesting balance to the violence she ultimately gets to inflict on circling maniacs. One must also grudgingly acknowledge Vaughn’s dedication to an epic mayhem that strives towards a blend of Bollywood, Hong Kong action and Golden Age musical.

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.

What is most conspicuously absence is a hint, in even the vaguest technical terms, of what made Bernstein such an admired conductor and composer. It is not enough to have people tell us (and him) he’s a genius. The film does, however, give us a dramatic tribute to the passion he put into his work.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Cowboys nonetheless gets by on goodwill and a passion for compromised Americana. Only a lowdown dirty heel would cuss it out.

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.

Almost entirely set in the island community, The Road Dance delivers on its mission to entertain without defying any long-standing conventions. A pleasant slice of afternoon telly for the big screen.

Clocking in at just over an hour, Get Back: The Rooftop Concert turns out to be simultaneously too much and not quite enough.

Once Upon a Time in America remains the most “problematic” of Leone’s major pictures. It is enveloping, operatic and slightly mad. We can forgive the confusion and the non- synchronised dialogue. But to this day the misogyny remains indigestible. [2014 re-release]

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

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.

The longer it goes on, however, the less fun and more earnest it becomes.

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

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.

We should celebrate Winterbottom’s determination to get these points made in a mainstream entertainment. Greed is good enough (sorry). But we still deserve something better.

If the writers were really doing it by the numbers there’d be a drunk one, a foreign one and a mad one. Cattaneo gets the digits back into the formula, however, for a rousing finale that – as we all knew it would – bounces back from a last-minute setback.

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.

The French Dispatch is a lovely, lovely thing. But it is as impossible to grasp as a handful of water.

For all the cast’s best efforts, however, Foe never seems more than a theoretical exercise, a sketch for an uncompleted project.

There is both too much and too little going on. It passes the time busily, but leaves us lost in copious allusion and unfinished narrative.

Prentice Penny directs her own script with verve. Mamoudou Athie, who’s been knocking on the door for a few years, is good enough to suggest that he’ll be unavoidable in a year or two.

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.

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

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

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

What really makes Bruised worth sticking with, however, is the epic closing fight sequence.

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

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.

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.

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.

Its backwards glances serve only to remind us how transcendent Disney animation once was – as recently as Frozen – without offering any hopeful signposts to the future. But, yes, cracking songs.

A worthy, if workmanlike, tribute.

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.

It is impossible to watch the picture without meditating on the way video games have changed action cinema. Similar thoughts kicked up during the very different 1917, but the loop is more dizzying here.

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

Bombshell is entertaining throughout, but it offers little more nuance than a morning spent with Fox & Friends.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.