Donald Clarke

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

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.

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.

Wonka is not any sort of disaster. It is made with enormous professionalism. It abounds with good nature. And it does offer at least one fascinating titbit about the protagonist’s background.

There is a lot here about how female sexual desire is repressed and sublimated. There is an implied, though not exactly hopeful, treatise on the promise of the later 1960s. Not every risk pays off. But all were worth taking.

What is most conspicuously absence is a hint, in even the vaguest technical terms, of what made Bernstein such an admired conductor and composer. It is not enough to have people tell us (and him) he’s a genius. The film does, however, give us a dramatic tribute to the passion he put into his work.

Its backwards glances serve only to remind us how transcendent Disney animation once was – as recently as Frozen – without offering any hopeful signposts to the future. But, yes, cracking songs.

Now 85, Scott again proves there is nobody so efficient at pressing contemporary technology to the limits. He also draws heroic performances from fleshy human beings

Fennell sets off in the right direction. A strong cast helps her on her way. But conviction falters long before the tables are kicked over.

Project X never encounters anything you could call a plot: the party starts off badly, gets wilder and ends in total calamity. An unhealthy strain of misogyny runs through the dialogue, and the film- makers' unquestioning acceptance of high-school one-upmanship fairly turns the stomach. But the film does have a certain impure purity to it.

A bracingly original, notably creepy film that leaves you brooding on its knotty messages.

All involved deserve better.

A paternoster of strong scenes and strong performances serve only to highlight pedestrian writing elsewhere.

Think Mean Girls mashed into Lindsay Anderson’s If ... But with more sublimated high-feminist discourse. Just perfect.

No great blame attaches to Emilia Jones or Nicholas Braun. Both leads do their best with a screenplay that doesn’t allow the creaks in meaning that made the story such a sensation.

The closest thing to a decent joke comes (I think) in a closing reference, at one or two removes, to a popular television show of the early 1970s. This bewildering exercise’s only other notable achievement is to make Willy’s Wonderland seem an underappreciated masterpiece. It really wasn’t.

For all the cast’s best efforts, however, Foe never seems more than a theoretical exercise, a sketch for an uncompleted project.

The wan characters never find the profane spark we know they would have possessed. One longs for the late Maeve Binchy to give the thing a vigorous shake. She knew how to make such people live.

Almost entirely set in the island community, The Road Dance delivers on its mission to entertain without defying any long-standing conventions. A pleasant slice of afternoon telly for the big screen.

As in Green’s latter two Halloween films, we sense a desperate attempt to cut together random footage that stubbornly resists any such amalgamation. One is ultimately left wondering what exactly has been retained from the original project.

It has the precision of retooled memory. It speaks to experienced time and place.

As in the best of Anderson’s work, there is a lesson in here about the addictive balm of storytelling.

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.

It doesn’t exactly subvert expectations, but the sharp writing and subtle acting make for a more satisfying experience than a bald synopsis promises.

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.