Donald Clarke

Jojo Rabbit works such tensions throughout: between laughter and groans, between emotion and sentimentality, between daring and bad taste. Such gambles are worth taking even if you believe the gambler is headed for the breadline.

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

Exhaustingly beautiful, serious of purpose, the film knows where it’s going and, when it gets there, it stays for a very, very long time. A Hidden Life risks inducing Stendhal syndrome with its early overload of beauty. It risks something closer to narcolepsy in its repetitive final act. But even then, the singularity of Malick’s approach repels irritation.

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.

Against the odds, Iannucci has delivered a minor miracle. Somehow or other, he has managed to touch all familiar elements over 119 consistently delicious minutes without allowing the slightest whiff of compromise.

The audience, eager to give such characters their due, has to crane its collective neck as the momentum drags it to a relentless conclusion. But it’s worth the muscular strain. There’s more to Uncut Gems than dizzying momentum.

The film is a genre entertainment and, like all such beasts, it honours certain conventions and allows certain compromises.

The film is merely a component part of a larger machine (the trilogy) that plugs into an even larger mechanism (the Star Wars universe). It has no more use or appeal when examined in isolation than would a sparkplug or a distributor cap.

In short, the third best Christmas film ever.

By way of contrast, Imitation of Life and its predecessors really poked their noses into the ratty, fetid spaces behind the plush curtains.

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]

Maybe, Morgan’s Creek does not have the ironic grit of Sullivan’s Travels or the suave perfection of The Lady Eve, but, as a showcase for Sturges the comic impresario, it can hardly be bettered.

The story’s underlying message has ended up more relevant than the film-makers can ever have anticipated.

Mirror is much copied, but as the recent run of Terrence Malick films demonstrates, eschewing time and plot for flotsam and psyche is much harder than Tarkovsky makes it look.