Donald Clarke

This is a cinema of introversion, concealment and evasion. Nothing is given up easily.

Good news for both lubbers and sea dogs. The recent cutbacks in Netflix’s animation department came too late to condemn this lavish, funny, playful adventure to the briny depths.

The jokes are funny and weird. At its heart, there is a story worth caring about.

Late Wenders sits at an odd angle to the young man obsessed with wandering and with the United States. There is a sense of a busy mind eager to share enthusiasms. Its generousness is part of the appeal.

In short, the third best Christmas film ever.

Jessie Buckley’s determination to stop her slippery part from wriggling out of her clutch is positively heroic. The Kerry actor becomes Everywoman and Nobody. Her sorrow is bottomless. Her uncertainty is painful. One can imagine no better guide through these mysterious swamps.

Promising Young Woman nonetheless remains an entertaining, imaginative exercise in creative score-settling.

If nothing else, this fine debut feature from Korean director Jason Yu – hitherto assistant director to Bong Joon-ho – counts as a small masterpiece of tone.

Camus’s prose is heard as we sink into intellectual concerns that obsessed French intellectuals through the 1950s. But it remains a gripping piece that treats its source with great respect.

Many will have issues with the depiction of a largely benevolent military and political hierarchy. Some will worry about the necessarily terse summaries of North Korean and Russian polities. Almost everybody will shiver at the realisation that when a response to nuclear attack is required it is too late for any to be effective.

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.

For all its undeniable pleasures, Dumb Money, derived from Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network, feels just a little shallow.

No doubt the unrelenting archness will annoy many. But, honed to an economic 93 minutes, Black Bag beats all the current worthless streaming thrillers for wit, pace, style and commitment to the bit.

Hewson confirms her capacity to fill every square inch of a screen. Kinlan deftly hints at the vulnerability behind performative aggression. Helped out by fine support from Carney stock company members such as Jack Reynor, Marcella Plunkett, Don Wycherley and Keith McErlean, the leads confidently bring home a smallish film with a sizeable heart.

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

Lilleaas and Reinsve go up against each other with nuanced vigour. Fanning, though not suggesting any real film star I can think of, has fun spreading trivial glamour about the place. Skarsgard deserves the Oscar he may well receive.

This remains a top-notch effort that implicitly pleads for invention and sincerity in family entertainment.

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.

Janet Planet plays a little like a memory piece from an unknown future – the assembled past life of an adult who, as a child, grasped only a bare majority of the tensions unfolding about her. A lovely, flawed idyll.

Sing Sing itself does us all good while delivering a compendium of engaging personal dramas. Domingo rules over all like the most benign of creative deities.

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

The film does not quite pull off its enigmatic ending, but this remains a startlingly eerie debut that finds new angles to a familiar genre.

Apples works both as an unintended record of the times and as a wry comment on the ancient human condition. Dare we call it “memorable”?

Working from his own tight script, Whannell demonstrates an admirable ability to place the wet-yourself shocks where you least expect them. Benjamin Wallfisch’s insidious score complements later action, but the director is prepared to play out the opening conflicts with no music whatsoever. Great thought has gone into the architecture of this ingenious structure

At any rate, though loose in structure, Friendship offers a few minor masterpieces in the art of cringe.

A rare historical epic that is connected to contemporary crises.

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.

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