Donald Clarke

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.