Donald Clarke

The Cellar does sag just a little in the middle, but its spooky beginning and apocalyptic denouement set it aside from the horror pack.

Nobody looks to have helped Affleck get to grips with the author’s signature sociopath and, rather than appearing coldly ruthless, this cuboid-headed anti-hero comes across as a bored man queuing for an uninteresting clerical formality.

The film does feel a little thin in its later stages, but the inventive performances – Rylance’s in particular – keep the film aloft throughout. No bogie. Comfortably a birdie. Not quite an eagle.

Turning Red remains a charming film that will win friends and trigger worthwhile conversations. The right sort of feel-good.

For all the sinister undercurrents, Red Rocket is hilarious throughout.

Happily, the screenplay is a model of design and economy. The dilemmas remain clear. The solutions mostly make sense.

Swelling the running time close to three hours, the story, though well worked, has ideas above its humble station. One longs for the strings to be tightened. One yearns for just a smidgeon of levity.

Studio 666 is not exactly a good film. It is not a particularly enjoyable one. But it is cheering to know it is out there in the world – merrily not being a tortured autobiographical tale of ghetto life or a compilation of musings on the singer’s sociological concerns.

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

Too many bad ideas are juggled in too small a space.

Death on the Nile remains the sort of harmlessly enjoyable entertainment they used to make when … well, way back when they made this film.

Hogg has created her own universe and explored it with relentless vigour. Few final shots have so satisfactorily summed up such a magnum opus. Sod the detractors.

Bentley, whose father and grandfather rode, has done an exemplary job in recreating that world.

There is nothing special about the animation. The lead characters are reasonably easy on the eye, but too many of the secondary players look like human beings with animal heads crudely jammed on unwelcoming shoulders.

Almost entirely plotless, it consists mostly of the characters pointing guns and wracking their brains for the next terrible line. Yet they had enough money to pay Willis whatever he asks to sit in two different chairs for a few hours (and he may charge by the chair). Nothing adds up.

Though there are some clunking flaws... Cicada has the compact shape of an elegant short story – open-ended, yet not incomplete.

A gorgeous, proudly unreliable glance over the shoulder. A tribute to an often maligned city.

There are implicit arguments here about the monetisation of motherhood and about the human capacity to shut out unattractive truths.

Taking place in an upmarket east London restaurant on a busy night during the Christmas season, the film gives a real sense of the frantic stress that underlies such operations. The lack of cuts presses home the real-time scenario and allows no escape from the hurtling momentum.

It is better to create original action roles for women than to lazily alter the gender of already familiar characters. But there is no other reason for this humdrum film to exist.

One can scarcely imagine a more enjoyably chaotic way of welcoming in the new year. What a blast.

Had we seen none of Cumberbatch’s earlier troubled intellectuals, we might embrace his performance with enthusiasm. But there are a few too many familiar manoeuvres for comfort in a performance that treads water throughout.

This is a Macbeth for the head rather than the heart, but no less beguiling for that.

In Lana Wachowski’s defence, much of Resurrections does play like a sincere conversation with herself. She and her sister invented this extraordinary world, and they have the right to analyse and deconstruct it. But she is a victim of her own early success.

After the so-so Kingsman: The Secret Service and the unendurable Kingsman: The Golden Circle, one might reasonably assume that Matthew Vaughn had nowhere else to go with the secret agent pastiche. This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink prequel deflates such pessimism in disreputably enjoyable fashion.

It would be wrong to describe A New Generation as a mere coda to The Story of Film. Clocking in at a weighty 160 minutes, the documentary travels to every corner of cinemaspace.

What makes the thing really fly – and it does still fly – is the witty energy of Jon Watts’s direction and the fizzy chemistry between the core actors.

There are decent jokes all the way through, but, even at a groaning 145 minutes, the film feels overstuffed.