Donald Clarke

The costuming and production design are so crisp one can often overlook the vacuum within the packaging.

The jokes land with satisfactory regularity. The locations are lovely throughout. But a middle-ranking Working Title rom-com – more Wimbledon than Notting Hill – may not be enough to revivify a spluttering genre.

See How They Run is not quite so self-regarding as Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, but See How They Run is a delightful, shamelessly affectionate deconstruction of ChristieLand that outstays not a second of its welcome.

The picture doesn’t reach out and grab you. It doesn’t fling viscera in your face. It hangs around outside your house, half hidden in shadow, and gradually insinuates malaise. So, no, not comfort food.

Miller has, as directors often will, followed up a succès d’estime — this is his first film since Mad Max: Fury Road — with something of a personal folly. Better that than bland boilerplate, but Three Thousand Years of Longing grates as often as it charms.

They don’t make them like this any more. To be fair, they never made them quite like this. Passes the time very nicely (and occasionally horribly).

We bounce from one adventure to another without settling into anything like a rhythm. But the nuanced acting and characterisation elevate a film that feels securely connected to a particular place and time. The Bronx has rarely been so affectionately evoked.

The directors do good work in conjuring up a remote era and teasing out still extant racial tensions. One does, however, end up yearning to hear a little more about how the legal team went about their work. A good complaint to have.

A perfect late-summer diversion.

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

[Peele] may never again make a film so elegantly structured as Get Out (who has?), but the ferment of interlocking ideas here is so diverting it hardly matters that the film is more at home to a meander than steady ascent.

We are left with a properly entertaining drama that gets across the technical details with great efficiency. A good job of work by a reliable Hollywood professional.

Sadly, the thing is so chaotically exhausting it proves beyond the talented actors’ saving. It plays like the last 20 minutes of a much-better action film stretched out to the length of a biblical epic.

A lovely comedy of the most serious hue.

There is nothing much to actively dislike here. Reynolds, a hugely experienced editor who won an Emmy for directing the superb documentary The Farthest, keeps the energy high and allows her fine cast to exercise all muscles. But Joyride feels like old-fashioned stuff.

Daisy Edgar-Jones does her best, but no actor could make sense of the insanely compromised protagonist.

The new film is a plodding affair, characterised more by fastidious set dressing than by narrative tension.

Cracknell’s romp is, despite what the purists say, a perfectly pleasant variation of a text that could endure worse, but it feels stranded between two competing approaches. An honourable effort for all the bellyaching.

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.

A strange, strange film. Often in a good way. Sometimes not.

A remarkable piece of work.

The viewer may struggle with the continuing inconsistency — the film is more comfortable with the supposedly compromised Elvis than the barely seen roots artist — but the audience is, at least, propelled back into the street in something like an elevated mood.

As directed by Sophie Hyde, who made the recent Irish film Animals, the picture never fully collapses beneath its own compromises. Credit for that must go to Thompson and McCormack. You get a sense of actors from different generations relishing the opportunity to tug at the ragged screenplay like handsome dogs squabbling over an old blanket.

Raiff is brave enough to not give us all we desire from the story. He accommodates a star in the ensemble cast without allowing her to unbalance the character dynamics. But the film is a tad too obtuse to capture the attention of awards voters. Oddball here wins out over mainstream.

It hardly needs to be said that the film will not be for everyone. But even those frustrated by the knotted plotting will admit that Hadžihalilović masters the crucial trick of presenting the narrative as if it makes sense to itself.

The only noteworthy achievement of Jurassic Park Dominion is to render the dinosaurs mundane and superfluous.

Alex Garland’s folk horror takes the broadest of swipes at various colours of toxic masculinity without opening up many new lines of investigation.

Here is an interesting, beautifully acted if somewhat underpowered drama about the connections between the public and the personal in the life of a Ukrainian gymnast during the Maidan disturbances of 2014.