Donald Clarke

Hoover fans will know that, early on, a catastrophe looks to upset the order. Nothing in the film-making suggests, however, this dilemma will not be tidied away by the time of senior prom. Who would want to live in so dull a fantasy?

So Three Days is no great shakes, but it is rarely embarrassing either.

If you want to avoid cliche and overworked influence you have come to the wrong place.

The thing is unremittingly dull and bland (not to mention cold, apparently). If it is good for anything it is good for providing deserved paid holidays to venerable older actors and their long johns.

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.

Look elsewhere for virtual methadone to hold you over until the real stuff gets back in the supply chain. Just awful.

Rarely in the history of cinema has so much tortured exposition failed so completely to explain such an undistinguished plot. It is like trying to pick up the story through overheard conversations with nearby drinkers who have just emerged from a screening. Stop telling us stuff and do something!

A well-meaning, but dramatically inert biopic.

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

Unfortunately, the longer the thing goes on the less it ceases to be good honest rubbish and the more it expects us to care about the stupid, stupid plot. Console junkies will find themselves involuntarily hammering an imagined X button in the hope of getting back to the gameplay. No good. You’re stuck with this wacko BS.

For all its gimcrack incoherence, Madame Web – which would be nothing without Johnson’s charm – is a darn sight less pompous and up itself than the overstuffed Disney content.

You would get more sparks from rubbing a wet flannel with a wetter rock. But try it anyway. It could hardly be more tedious than waiting for Freelance to crawl to its predictable denouement.

No good impression emerges of the former Slovenian model. No bad impression emerges either. Ratner’s film achieves, rather, a sort of passive distance – as you might get by pointing a camera, for close to two hours, at a waterfall or a wheat field.

An early contender for turkey of the year.

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

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.

Embarrassingly for a film that actually features a star of Pulp Fiction, Killing Field is still harbouring an undignified passion for early Tarantino.

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

The perfunctory attempts to address social issues do not really come off. But it works through its tolerable high concepts with a great deal of verve and charm.

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.

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.

Though largely for already-persuaded aficionados, Blue Lock The Movie: Episode Nagi has enough imaginative zing to make up for its somewhat monotonous storytelling. This is football reimagined as a heightened form of futuristic warfare. Those who already know they like it will like it very much.

Many worse horror titles will make it to cinemas throughout the coming year. This is pulp as pulp should be.

Blue Road is most memorable for its crisply edited evocation of unlikely triumph.

An astonishing, unsettling fable of hidden miseries.

A strong set of performances from a top-flight cast help close Malone’s deal.

For all the richness of the tales told, So This Is Christmas remains an enormously peculiar project.

Most of Pink Narcissus could now be broadcast in primetime. But the sense of adventure, experiment and risk remains. An essential artefact.

Before Amongst the Wolves resolves itself into a familiar genre (I was much reminded of a particular British film from the noughties), we get a grim survey of stubborn urban discontents.