Donald Clarke

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

Here is an interesting, beautifully acted if somewhat underpowered drama about the connections between the public and the personal in the life of a Ukrainian gymnast during the Maidan disturbances of 2014.

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.

In short, Kosinski and his team have accomplished their odd, hybrid mission more impressively than should have been possible. Most importantly, they have, in an age of cartoon computer graphics, delivered action sequences that appear to be taking place in the real world.

The two performances, rather than playing in a continuum, work as contrasting sides of a fractured psyche.

Unfortunately, the longer the film goes on the more blankly didactic it becomes.

This is an exciting, surprising treatment of a story many of us have heard only in half-understood whispers. Well worth settling in for.

The film is not a dead loss. The sheer chaos of the thing is welcome in an age when big-budget films travel along too-straight lines. Raimi is allowed a few moments of characteristic invention. But nothing here suggests there is much room to manoeuvre within the Marvel straitjacket. A disappointment.

It is made with respect. It has educational value. But the film-makers, working with a modest budget, have made sure to include much head-splitting action.

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.

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

Detailing the cold shoulders offered to a young woman after she becomes pregnant in 1960s France, the film works evocative period detail in with implicit warnings against contemporary backsliding on reproductive rights. The relentless clockwork of human biology lends it an awful tension. The actors give in to no cheap options.

Sure, the film borrows shamelessly from Romancing the Stone, but that film was itself slip-streaming behind Raiders of the Lost Ark. Everything about The Lost City is yelling “fun, fun, fun!” in your lughole. You are being dared not to have a good time.

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

Perhaps Eggers has lost some of the horrible intimacy we savoured in his earlier work. But he offers us compensation in scope, intensity and pure bloody ferocity.

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.

Through it all the technical work remains of the highest quality. It seems a shame that Stuart Craig and Neil Lamont’s lavish production design and Colleen Atwood’s gorgeous costumes – both leaning into unreal golden-era Hollywood – are wasted on such an emotionally unengaging slog.

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.

Most ruinously, there is too much Jared and not enough Matt. No harm to Leto, who wears less makeup as a vampire here than he did as a human in House of Gucci, but he appears to be taking the silly role absurdly seriously. It’s not Willy Loman, dude.

At the risk of damning with the faintest praise, this is easily Bay’s best film in more than 25 years.

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

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.

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.

Turning Red remains a charming film that will win friends and trigger worthwhile conversations. The right sort of feel-good.

For all the sinister undercurrents, Red Rocket is hilarious throughout.

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

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.

Studio 666 is not exactly a good film. It is not a particularly enjoyable one. But it is cheering to know it is out there in the world – merrily not being a tortured autobiographical tale of ghetto life or a compilation of musings on the singer’s sociological concerns.

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

Too many bad ideas are juggled in too small a space.

Death on the Nile remains the sort of harmlessly enjoyable entertainment they used to make when … well, way back when they made this film.

Hogg has created her own universe and explored it with relentless vigour. Few final shots have so satisfactorily summed up such a magnum opus. Sod the detractors.

Bentley, whose father and grandfather rode, has done an exemplary job in recreating that world.

There is nothing special about the animation. The lead characters are reasonably easy on the eye, but too many of the secondary players look like human beings with animal heads crudely jammed on unwelcoming shoulders.

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.

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

A gorgeous, proudly unreliable glance over the shoulder. A tribute to an often maligned city.

There are implicit arguments here about the monetisation of motherhood and about the human capacity to shut out unattractive truths.

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.

It is better to create original action roles for women than to lazily alter the gender of already familiar characters. But there is no other reason for this humdrum film to exist.

One can scarcely imagine a more enjoyably chaotic way of welcoming in the new year. What a blast.

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.

This is a Macbeth for the head rather than the heart, but no less beguiling for that.

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.

After the so-so Kingsman: The Secret Service and the unendurable Kingsman: The Golden Circle, one might reasonably assume that Matthew Vaughn had nowhere else to go with the secret agent pastiche. This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink prequel deflates such pessimism in disreputably enjoyable fashion.

It would be wrong to describe A New Generation as a mere coda to The Story of Film. Clocking in at a weighty 160 minutes, the documentary travels to every corner of cinemaspace.

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.

There are decent jokes all the way through, but, even at a groaning 145 minutes, the film feels overstuffed.

Not every tweak and shave works — there is a brief, unfortunate vacuum in the closing scene — but Spielberg has given us more than most of us deserve. Here is a fitting, accidental tribute to Stephen Sondheim, whose lyrics still crackle above Leonard Bernstein’s score, a few weeks after his death.

Paolo Sorrentino’s soothing, funny, occasionally infuriating The Hand of God sits somewhere between the irresistible sentimentality of the Branagh drama and the more complex harmonies of Cuarón’s bildungsfilm.

The main thread of the script is efficient enough, but the loosely connected subplot concerning a terminally ill acquaintance strains the boundaries of good taste past breaking point.

Nobody can doubt the filmmakers’ diligence. The interviewees seem like serious-minded people. But, as has been the case for close to 60 years, we are left with a jumble of loosely connected discrepancies that will do little to persuade those who expect everyday existence to be just that chaotic.

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

This is a straight-edge, inspirational sporting film of the old school – closer to Rocky than Hoop Dreams. Taking all the inevitable compromises on board, it could hardly work better within its chosen parameters.

Working halfway round the world, Campion has fashioned a startling translation of later chapters in the American creation myth.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s translation of the late Jonathan Larson’s semi-autobiographical musical, a cult hit off-Broadway in the early 1990s, asks a lot of even the most indulgent audience.

Even those who find themselves unable to warm to Cry Macho will surely admit that the film’s presence in 21st century cinemas is a marvel.

Kristen Stewart is inspired casting as a woman on the brink of escape from a superficially comfortable prison. Who better to play a person remembered for her perceived shyness than the current maestro of hooded introspection?

We like that someone is allowing Chloé Zhao, recent Oscar-winner for Nomadland, enough money to build her own solar system. But the sluggishness and drabness is unforgivable.

Passing is, in some ways, a slender story. But Hall’s feel for the period and her gift for folding potent discourse into the attractive visuals kicks it up to the level of high art.

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.

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.

Steven Levenson’s book is all about normalising common mental health issues. But the film also reduces the dead character to a cypher and lets the protagonist off the hook too easily.

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

A rare historical epic that is connected to contemporary crises.

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.

A hugely entertaining record of a person no novelist could have invented.

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.

There are plenty of reasons to yell at The Starling. The pile-up of dreary sub-country songs eventually takes on the quality of something the CIA would have played outside General Noriega’s compound.

A fine yarn that arcs towards a memorable denouement.

Peter Bebjak’s disciplined film is forever reminding us of arbitrary cruelties and absurd outrages.

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.

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.

What Respect does have going for it is Jennifer Hudson and some stirring musical sequences. Just as these films have become loaded with cliches, the reviews have too often lazily argued that “[Lead Actor X] just about saves the day”. Well, here we are again.

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.

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.

Here is a film clawed up from the damp soil and smeared imaginatively across the screen. It is unlikely to be confused with Wild Mountain Thyme.

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

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

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

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

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

Time will tell if the social media thread is set to become the epic poem of the new millennium. For now, Zola feels like a triumphant lunge into fresh territory.

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

This is a wonderful comedy that savours its remote environment while keeping its subjects at the centre of the story. There are always new ways of telling the era’s most unavoidable sad stories. Not to be missed.

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.

I Never Cry works best as a showcase for a terrific young actor with a nuanced grasp of a complex character.

For all the mad adventure, it feels like a Twilight Zone episode stretched out thinly to feature length.

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.

In short, domestic viewers in search of outrage may find themselves a tad disappointed.

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’s not exactly a world you would want to live in but Jumbo, nonetheless, is awash with a sympathetic visual aesthetic that gives us some sense of where the odd passion springs from. It needs a strong actor to compete with that madness, and Merlant does not disappoint.

The plotting is, alas, a little slack in the later stages. There is a sense of flailing around en route to a reasonably satisfactory destination. Son remains, nonetheless, the work of a singular, oddball talent. Seek out.

Shot in chocolatey browns amid the more comfortable suburbs of Copenhagen, Another Round underlines its later, more cautious warnings by reminding us how inexhaustibly tedious the drunk seem to the sober.

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.

It really isn’t worth trying to keep up. Immerse yourself rather in the sillier stunts and the genuinely sparky interplay between committed action stars: Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Jordana Brewster, Cardi B (!).

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