Donald Clarke

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

Even an actor as good as Craig struggles to make sense of that more sensitive, more sharing version of Bond. Too many opposing cogs are creaking within a psyche that has never been much at home to contradiction. Then, towards the close, it comes together in such stirring form that only the most awkward customer will leave unsatisfied.

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.

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

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.

Made within the communities it satirises, I Blame Society thrives on its own crotchety energy.

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.

If anything, The Unbearable Weight is not quite tricksy enough.

Already established as a wizard with buried irony, Pugh politely steals the film with a witty performance that makes sense of even the silliest moments.

It has the precision of retooled memory. It speaks to experienced time and place.

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.

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.

A rare historical epic that is connected to contemporary crises.

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.

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

The Surfer, for all its unpleasantness, offers encouraging evidence that there is still room for existential awkwardness in contemporary cinema. No better, odder man than Nicolas Cage to act that out as the catechism of surfism gains another worthy chapter.

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.

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).

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.

Full marks for character and setting. Less enthusiastic hurrahs for narrative arc.

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.

Jurassic World: Rebirth plays, nonetheless, as a refreshing blast of matinee exuberance after the pomposity of the previous three films. Yes, third best in the series. For whatever little that is worth.

A gentle, complex film that will pay rewatching.

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.

A fine yarn that arcs towards a memorable denouement.

Arriving somewhat under the radar, Marley Morrison’s enchanting comedy makes something convincingly British of a form that the American indie cadre has exploited to near exhaustion.

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.

A glossy package. Not quite enough inside.

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.

Though there are some clunking flaws... Cicada has the compact shape of an elegant short story – open-ended, yet not incomplete.

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.

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

Wonka is not any sort of disaster. It is made with enormous professionalism. It abounds with good nature. And it does offer at least one fascinating titbit about the protagonist’s background.

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.

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.

For all its undeniable pleasures, Dumb Money, derived from Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network, feels just a little shallow.

A real stonker of an entertainment.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 film does feel a little thin in its later stages, but the inventive performances – Rylance’s in particular – keep the film aloft throughout. No bogie. Comfortably a birdie. Not quite an eagle.

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

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.

Almost entirely plotless, it consists mostly of the characters pointing guns and wracking their brains for the next terrible line. Yet they had enough money to pay Willis whatever he asks to sit in two different chairs for a few hours (and he may charge by the chair). Nothing adds up.

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.

McConaughey and Ferrera prove the most delightful endangered bus companions since Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Speed, exhibiting just the right balance between tension and comradeship.

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

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

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.

Now 85, Scott again proves there is nobody so efficient at pressing contemporary technology to the limits. He also draws heroic performances from fleshy human beings

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.

Moving from his standard New York neurotic, Eisenberg does a convincing job of moving from frustration to a violent, active mania. Poots is better still as someone who can’t find the words to communicate her growing despair.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Adults and smarter kids will enjoy the digs at the pomposity of professional saints. Everyone else can laugh at the genuinely funny talking guinea pig.

The Creator sticks to a strong, pulpy narrative that never lets up in pace. There are vast action sequences and intimate, scruffy fight scenes. The film is, however, as memorable for its cinematic texture as its twists and turns.

Though Dawn of the Nugget is not on the same plane as a masterpiece like Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, it delivers zippy good-hearted jokes at a cracking pace without outstaying its welcome.

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.

Had we seen none of Cumberbatch’s earlier troubled intellectuals, we might embrace his performance with enthusiasm. But there are a few too many familiar manoeuvres for comfort in a performance that treads water throughout.

For all the moral compromises and narrative confusion, you couldn’t say A New Era is boring. There is a constant sense of excellent actors making the best of indifferent material.

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

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

Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned.

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.

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.

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

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.

Branagh’s decent performance and Christie’s indestructible reputation may just be enough to see the film through to a modest profit and, later, decent figures on Disney+. But A Haunting in Venice feels like a misguided experimental sprig from an already compromised operation.

In Lana Wachowski’s defence, much of Resurrections does play like a sincere conversation with herself. She and her sister invented this extraordinary world, and they have the right to analyse and deconstruct it. But she is a victim of her own early success.

Rather than just pushing the characters through their familiar beats, the well-judged narrative arc takes them on something like a proper journey.

Adaptations of Ivanhoe have imagined the past less romantically.

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.

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.

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.

The film’s failure is a shame. The straight romantic movie deserves to thrive and African-American talent deserves an opportunity to play out its stories in the mainstream. But The Photograph is too nice, too leisurely and too lacking in friction. Oh, for more of the briefly glimpsed satire that, in scenes set in the 1980s, sees Mae’s mom competing for a job against an unending line of banal, primped, Upper East Side princesses. That’s what we’re looking for.

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

There is a fair degree of fun to be had before the script gets too caught up in its own mythology.

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

No sensitive viewer could deny the spirit of the original remains, but Jeremy Sims’s charming cover version reverberates with unmistakably Australian harmonies.

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.

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

It doesn’t exactly subvert expectations, but the sharp writing and subtle acting make for a more satisfying experience than a bald synopsis promises.

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.

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.

It hardly needs to be said that the film will not be for everyone. But even those frustrated by the knotted plotting will admit that Hadžihalilović masters the crucial trick of presenting the narrative as if it makes sense to itself.

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