Donald Clarke

Like the fanciest of scams, Barbie is carried off with a conviction that deserves sustained applause and occasional loud hoots.

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.