Donald Clarke

At its best, The Devil Wears Prada 2 engages saltily with the social and economic changes that have set in since the 2006 original. One yearns for a little more of Miranda’s amusingly half-hearted attempts to accommodate woke restrictions on her acidic put-downs.

Philippe brings few stylistic flourishes to the film, but the fascinating conversation, punctuated by delving into her personal archives, should be more than enough to satisfy the serious cinephile. She is kinder about Hitchcock than some of his other female leads. She is realistic about the rigours of the studio system.

For all the eccentricity of its premise, Rose of Nevada has things to say about how easily we can become disconnected from the relatively recent past.

The film is about the cost of success. It is about the emptiness of fame. It is about the companionship of women (in small groups and in vast stadiums). Those themes are expounded with an invention and wit that add bounce to a film draped in rich, oil-painterly gloom. Approach with the most open of minds.

The film exists to give Lopez an opportunity to bring the house down. She does that, but it’s not quite enough.

The picture, shot in Ireland and Spain, will prove a blast for those who like their horror propulsive, transgressive and (in a good way) nauseating. Cronin and his team haven’t quite solved the age-old problem of what to do with the Mummy, but they have confirmed that it remains a dilemma worth tackling. The film deserves the pharaoh’s ransom it will undoubtedly make.

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.

As ever, all these thumping stereotypes would matter less if there was some chemistry between the two leads. Page has sufficient charisma to skirt through the absurdity unscathed. In contrast, Bailey seems dazzled and bemused – neither crafty enough nor ingenuous enough to make sense of the central deceit.

The screenplay blows it at the close with an absurdly clunky flashback that ties up every loose end with improbable neatness, but this remains a decent class of red-meat actioner for a now underserved audience.

Revelling in bright fabrics and seductive horizons, the director, despite all the conflicts, is here to argue for both the warmth of traditional families and the excitement of contemporary youth culture. No film other than Sirat has, this year, made such compelling use of music.

It would be a mistake to seek too many lessons from the film. Its great achievement is in the creation of a timeless nowhere that is both drawn from history and independent of it. That is the absurdist ideal.

A humane work devised by serious minds.

Resurrection, shot with extravagant beauty by Dong Jingsong, makes more sense on first viewing than the director perhaps allows. Each story is whole in itself. But it has the quality of a gorgeous knot that will never fully be untied.

It is such a shame that momentum is allowed to sag as the film shuffles through six endings when either of the first two would do nicely. To that point, Project Hail Mary is a model of high-class popular entertainment. An explicit tribute to a Steven Spielberg classic in the opening third feels like no great overreach.

All sincerely intended. All a bit rickety. Still, The Bride! does just about get by on suave style and committed performances.

Sound of Falling asks a fair bit of audiences. It provides great rewards for those who oblige.

This is, for good or ill, the sort of enterprise both fans and detractors will be talking about for years to come.

What follows is a reasonably ingenious meld of new-generational tomfoolery and the unearthing of ancient characters whose identities we shan’t spoil. There is little original here, but, as has always been the case in this treatise on repeated tropes, that is precisely the point. They can have that get-out clause on me.

Night Shift does not go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria’s eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us compellingly through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday.

Sadly, the film’s sardonic edge is dulled by a reliance on stereotypical depictions of philistine self-interest.

We don’t demand hard realism from such a project, but a little more edge would have been nice. Solid, middlebrow entertainment, nonetheless.

The problem – and it is no small one – rests with the leads. Elordi is fine as an unthinking hunk of abusive resentment. But the script cannot make sense of this Cathy as someone of Robbie’s age. At least one sarky crack confirms the character is no longer supposed to be a teenager (or anything close), but the dialogue does not satisfactorily retune Cathy to a woman in her 30s.

Trash this classy doesn’t come along often enough.

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.

Linklater repays the debt in a beautiful film that eschews granular analysis of the art for a broad celebration of Frenchness at its most proudly awkward. It captures the point at which artists were just discovering energies that would turn culture on its head in the decade to come.

This remains a sincerely felt piece of entertainment that, unusually for current mainstream cinema, treats the audience and its characters like adults. Worth indulging.

Here is a perfectly respectable – if ragged at the edges – attempt to engage with a sporting story that wove triumph and pride in with regret and disharmony.

For all that flash and bash, it does feel as if we spend a lot of time staring at Chris Pratt looking worried and a Rebecca Ferguson increasingly bored of sounding increasingly boring. Too much dialogue plays like a conversation with an automated phone service only marginally more animated than the one that fails to direct you to customer services.

It could be enormously clunky, but the quiet warmth of Fraser’s performance, the delicacy of Hikari’s direction and the ravishing location work just about distract from the teeth-smarting sentimentality. Soothing balm to kick off the cinematic year.

The new film, evocatively shot by Sean Bobbitt, feels like a trivial, if entertaining, diversion on the way to a more substantial closing fall.

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.

It is all very on the nose. It’s all shamelessly manipulative. Mind you, a cynic might argue you could say the same of Diamond’s best songs. And there’s nothing wrong with a hatful of Neil.

Here is an intelligent entertainment as generously stuffed as the greatest 19th-century novel. They rarely make them like this any more.

Breakdown: 1975, like the best films of that period, never lets up on entertainment as it pursues a serious end. We don’t get just Network and Harlan County, USA; we also get The Towering Inferno and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All contribute to sharp analysis of a body politic apparently unaware of its own psychological instability.

Rarely has anything looked simultaneously so spectacular and so monotonous. It’s like being drowned to drunken death in a lake of curaçao.

Goodbye June is messy, humanistic and shamelessly sentimental.

It is 15 minutes too long and, with all the emotional and literal clamour, loses some of the intimacy you desire for a rural golden-age-of-crime lampoon.

There is much else to admire in this beautifully shot, cruelly raw film, but, with some justification, most of the talk will be about the female lead. One can think of few other actors who can so unashamedly access such torrents of simulated emotion.

All the best science fiction on artificial intelligence is really about the challenges of being human. Her is full of strong, sly jokes and intriguing speculation on future technologies. But, ultimately, it is a sad story about the difficulty of making meaningful connection with any psyche, whether organically evolved or digitally tailored to the user's needs.

The closing sequence, sure to endure future homage from impressed film-makers, has already become famous for its chilling ambiguity. One of the year’s very best films.

The three leads demonstrate absolute belief in romantic absolutes as we drift towards a class of sob-heavy denouement Hollywood now rarely attempts. The Irish director’s best film yet.

The problem is that, until the closing 15 minutes, the film traces the same path as too many (sad and true) stories before it. Happily, the inevitable redemption is handled with great vim and a shameless determination to cause audiences to punch air and dab eyes. Only those with the coldest of hearts will be able to resist.

Yet, through sheer insistence, Erivo and Grande, who deserve the bump in status they’ve received, almost pull it back together with a closing duet that makes a virtue of emotional incontinence.

Mind you, everyone here is suffering. That overbearing mass of existential angst almost certainly contributes to the many negative responses, but few will endure its attack without admitting they’ve sat through something out of the ordinary.

No sensitive person watching Anemone could fail to be intrigued about where Ronan Day-Lewis will go next. This grandiose, inventively operatic project is no ordinary film. But it is not quite a good film either. Too monotonous. Too self-regarding. Showy to the point of meretriciousness.

This remains a careering exercise in mid-ranking Yorgosia that just about justifies its many indulgences. We should remain grateful that a talent so odd remains somewhere adjacent to the mainstream.

The Palestinian submission for international picture at the incoming Academy Awards is a handsome, old-fashioned production that, even when it is telling us things we didn’t know, confirms all our worst suspicions about the British colonial experience in the Holy Land.

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

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?

Every scene, like the effusions of the worst social-media bore, dares different bits of the audience to get righteously furious. Few will be minded to bother.

A classy film that doesn’t entirely make sense.

This excellent debut feature from Ben Leonberg may be unique among horror films in fairly attracting the compound adjectives “deeply unsettling” and “utterly adorable”.

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.

Anderson and his fine cast layer all these pyrotechnics with a palpable sadness for their characters and for the country. There are few explicit arguments here about the state of the US, but one can imagine endless such arguments being projected upon it.

McConaughey and Ferrera prove the most delightful endangered bus companions since Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Speed, exhibiting just the right balance between tension and comradeship.

For all the bustle, flow and noise, there is little here we haven’t seen before.

For all the good work, however, the film fails to fully capture the madness of the response at home.

None of which is to suggest the film backs away from great gags that, as it was in 1984, continue deep into hilarious improvisation over the end credits.

Allegories are unavoidable. The walk is American capitalism. The walk is life itself. It requires, however, no such connections to enjoy the best King adaptations in many years.

The film is never boring, but, once that delightful opening winds down, the action clunks where it should purr.

The Cut is ultimately too broad, cliched and preposterous to take the belt. Still, it was brave to go where it went.

The extravagance of Fastvold’s techniques can sometimes get in the way of the characters. Strong supporting actors such as Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie and Christopher Abbott don’t quite succeed in making personalities heard over Blumberg’s bewitching arrangements. But, as cinema of melodic effect, The Testament of Ann Lee could hardly be bettered.

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

The film does indeed reflect how megastardom goes about its business. The script, by the director and Emily Mortimer, piles on the irony with admirable diligence. But this is about as cutting-edge as making fun of Donald Trump for being orange.

Like all the director’s films, it never allows a boring shot when an unusual one is possible. It has compelling momentum. It features charismatic actors. What a shame it is so tonally chaotic.

One good reason we all have to remain upright is this clever, original, warm cinematic balm.

That first (third) act functions effectively as a bewitching enigmatic short that gets away with its downbeat denouement. The audience can fill the gaps in whatever enigmatic way they see fit. Unfortunately the movie continues backwards into increasingly mawkish territory.

Horrible, silly, reprehensible, enormously good fun.

Materialists has received the odd puzzled review in its home territory, but it has the welcome oddness of a future classic.

When the macabre does fully show itself, no concessions are made to taste or restraint. Though Weapons is lavishly shot and expensively acted – Amy Madigan is deliciously gamey in a role we won’t spoil – it ultimately settles into the rhythms of premium-brand pulp.

It must be admitted that, against the odds, the team do a largely satisfactory job of reanimating the corpse. I’m not sure audiences will have quite as much fun watching the thing as the writers plainly had getting it on to the page. But they have certainly stuck to the brief with admirable diligence.

One remains puzzled as to what these films want to be. Not nearly enough is done with the animal natures of the heroes.

Coming after the exhaustingly overstuffed Superman, First Steps rattles along with a refreshing clarity of purpose.

Only a monster could object to the delightful pairing of Byrne and HBC (whose accent isn’t too bad). Get them back together in a better film as soon as possible.

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

The cartoonish closing battles make it clear that, not for the first time, Gunn is striving for high trash, but what he achieves here is low garbage. Utterly charmless. Devoid of humanity. As funny as toothache.

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.

Considered as an exercise in hushed mortal contemplation, The Shrouds, sombrely scored by Howard Shore, earns a spot beside Cronenberg’s best work. This is just the sort of unclassifiable oddity that the greatest directors, now less concerned with expectations, manage late into fecund careers.

Jurassic World: Rebirth plays, nonetheless, as a refreshing blast of matinee exuberance after the pomposity of the previous three films. Yes, third best in the series. For whatever little that is worth.

Oh no. The sequel to M3gan is absolutely t3rribl3.

F1 really is too thuddingly familiar for words. Drop a bowling ball off a cliff and you would be less sure of its trajectory.

The film has sad stories to tell about Minnelli’s marriages, but there is often grim humour in the footage.

What most sticks in the brain is the film’s incidental meditation on the mythology of England from distant past to speculated future.

The film does occasionally struggle with getting England right. We are always aware that this is a French film-maker looking through the window at the crumpets on their doilies. But there is a mischievous intelligence at work that complements the embrace of sometimes broad misunderstandings.

One could bang on all day about how familiar so much of this seems. But it is only fair to acknowledge that, judged as an independent entity (if such an assessment is possible), the current How to Train Your Dragon works as sleek, charming, funny entertainment.

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.

This fine documentary on the Palestine solidarity encampments at Columbia University, in Manhattan, makes much of comparisons with student protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

Along Came Love (which has a deceptive title) does not torture the emotion or tax the brain, but, well acted and easy on the eye, it just about delivers on its early promise of knotty personal drama. It also has important things to say – implicitly for the most part – about the unjust expectations placed on women in French society.

Ultimately, for good or ill, one has to accept that Bono’s compunction to spill his emotional innards is, for fans, more of a feature than a bug.

Few so economical features – 80 minutes, with only three significant characters – have had such unsettling fun in the dark, dark woods. Don’t let it slip you by.

Bloodlines, after that first-class opening section, isn’t quite so clever in its constructions as were the earlier episodes. There is more reliance on out-of-nowhere splatter than on amusingly inevitable disaster.

Too murky. Too little access to the character’s face. It takes a long, long time for the film to redeem itself with the biplane stunt you’ve seen on the poster.

Veiel structures his film with grace and guile.

The Surfer, for all its unpleasantness, offers encouraging evidence that there is still room for existential awkwardness in contemporary cinema. No better, odder man than Nicolas Cage to act that out as the catechism of surfism gains another worthy chapter.

Thunderbolts* works best as a jokey romp at home to tolerable quips amid mounting chaos.

We have a new cinematic poet in Kulumbegashvili, and she doesn’t care if the stanzas rhyme. Difficult. Abrasive. Worth persevering with.

Murray and Watts make something genuinely touching of Iris’s quest to discover what prompted the writer to end it all.

Even the greatest general will lose some control when marching an entire division over hostile highlands. But, far from feeling indulgent, the picture is positively economical in the way it addresses so many ideas – sociological, cultural, historical – while forwarding its rattling, viscera-soaked yarn.

Many will retain understandable uneasiness about the project, but few could deny the technical brilliance and dedication to an austere brief. An essential watch. Though maybe just the once.

There is always room for a post-Beatles doc if it’s this good and this original.

If any recent release has the potential to become a cult classic it is this melodic warning from beneath the earth.

Flow needs to make no specific points about human misuse of the planet. Its generalised sense of environmental dread reminds of something we all know and constantly pretend to forget.

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.

So joyous and inventive is each scene that it proves easy to disregard the ambling lack of plot.

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.

Mickey 17, adapted from a novel by Edward Ashton, feels like a rickety compromise bolted together from incompatible parts.

An astonishing, unsettling fable of hidden miseries.

This is pure pulp, but it’s good, honest pulp that keeps in time with the backbeat throughout. Good support from Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran. Not for the squeamish, though.

The dialogue in one pathetically desperate audition sequence is withering in its authenticity. But credit must go to Anderson for turning this staple of drama – like Olivier in The Entertainer, a hopeless victim of changing fashion – into a living, breathing human being.

Good old-fashioned disgusting fun. I had a blast.

Energy does not buzz around this film, but it swells with decency, humanity and quiet bravery.

This is an uncomfortable film, but one that sweeps you along in its momentum.

Mad About the Boy may take place in the safest of all worlds, but it is more connected to the greater sadnesses of life than we had any right to expect. Oh, and it’s still properly funny. Which matters a bit.

More than a few critics have suggested the film ends up losing the run of itself, but few would deny that it remains indecently entertaining up to the last frame. Odd, special, important.

When film-makers aren’t asking people to read their films as westerns they are asking for them to be read as Greek tragedies. For all the commitment of the actors and brooding ambience of the film-making, Bring Them Down can’t quite sustain that comparison.

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

A knotty, rough-hewn marvel.

If The Brutalist were not so wedded to audiovisual effect, it might play like a lost Great American Novel.

Adaptations of Ivanhoe have imagined the past less romantically.

The risky focus that Leigh Whannell, the film’s director, puts on the psychological over the physical may alienate some gorehounds, but it makes for an original shocker with subtexts that linger.

A small film about great matters.

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

Many will be won over by the emotional surge of the closing moments. Others will wonder if there is a word for a manipulative drama that fails to satisfactorily manipulate.

The monkey conceit is a success on several levels. It presses home that sense of Williams being an agent of chaos in any environment.

Carrey’s antic madness – elsewhere often too much to digest – is just what the Sonic films needed to balance out the digital gloss.

There is little character, no visible emotion, just endless show-offy technical competence.

There is nothing here to win over those habitually ill disposed to sword and sorcery, but anybody half on board should have a decent time. It is certainly a heck of a lot better than the over-extended Hobbit trilogy.

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

The film is at its best when incorporating text from the play with oddly appropriate gameplay.

Adams, as usual, gives it her all, but it’s as if Kafka’s Metamorphosis had been adapted as frivolous comic operetta.

Beautifully shot by Ranabir Das, a cinematographer who apparently revels in the variety of artificial light sources, those scenes welcome us into the last act with a warm, satisfying hug. It is, however, Kapadia’s generous polyphonic engagement with Mumbai that sits most memorably in the brain.

Does it all add up? The cleaved-brow Fiennes, who does inner torture better than anyone, makes something believable of Lawrence’s battle for truth and integrity. Isabella Rossellini works magic with a minute supporting role. But few will survive the final scenes without pondering the Italian for “magnificent hokum”.

It is hard to gripe at a movie that sends one out in such buoyant mood. Job just about achieved.

This is a deliberately puzzling, oblique affair that never runs when it can sneak.

The narrative parallels with Gladiator – taking in soft-edged shadows of the earlier characters – only press home the current project’s second-hand status. It’s no Gladiator. It’s no Asterix the Gladiator.

Many will roll their eyes when Williams is praised for supposedly ground-breaking collaboration with luxury brands. But the real problem with this tolerably diverting film is that he isn’t really that interesting.

The interaction between these fine actors – John David Washington, the director’s brother, continues his rise – keeps the production tasty even as, in later stages, it gives into something like desperation.

This is a bold, brassy entertainment that breaks new ground as it hugs venerable genres to its chest.

No purer entertainment has come our way this year.

A worthy, if workmanlike, tribute.

The cool, often static shots and unhurried editing are characteristic of a school of documentary film-making that allows the viewer complete freedom to shuffle significances. There is a beauty in the empty precision.

A superb family entertainment. Maybe even a future classic.

What we have here is something like a supervillain origin story, with Cohn spelling out almost every negative trait that now defines the former president. That makes for momentum, but the approach – supposing a man is made by other men alone – is also inherently trivial and reductive.

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

The book may not show its age, but this adaptation feels more ancient than the oceans.

For all the disappointments, McQueen has delivered a grand mainstream entertainment that puts pressure on the tear ducts as it uncovers unspoken truths.

A welcome oddity.

Even if such a proposition didn’t quite work out it would surely be the right sort of failure. Maybe a gloriously camp Jailhouse Rock. As it happens, we have ended up with a drab affair that never gets properly started.

Will & Harper, a natural Netflix entertainment, oscillates between sincere openness and painful artifice.

You couldn’t sincerely argue that The Outrun brims over with plot, but its rough, maritime texture is never less than diverting. It needles. It provokes.

A film that is no less thrilling for its sober rigour.

All kinds of comparisons present themselves during Coralie Fargeat’s monstrous growl at the inhumanity of society’s response to the ageing process.

By the close, one is left befuddled. Is this a tragedy? Is this a comedy? Is it a moral fable? Cruelty to Homo criticus is the least of its problems.

James Watkins’s version easily justifies its independent existence, however. Four first-rate performances find new energies in the story. The shift in nationalities adds other interesting angles.

There are reminders of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and Sean Baker’s incoming Palme d’Or winner Anora in that urban chaos, but Watts’s bland style washes out all the grime to leave us with, well, something you might expect from a streaming release.

Though immaculately made in every respect, Paradise Is Burning never quite finds its narrative rhythms. The story is happily fussing over here and then gets distracted by something over there. But Sine Vadstrup Brooker’s lovely cinematography, drifting in the liminal spaces between city and country, keeps the viewer uneasily gripped throughout.

Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned.

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.

A glossy package. Not quite enough inside.

The only distinguishing feature of this exhilaratingly bad film is its apparent close association with London’s tourism authorities.

Alien: Romulus remains a shapeless beast that never so much as hints at the disciplined elegance of Scott’s founding text. The action progresses rather than builds.

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.

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.

With little of Crockett’s original charm remaining, the audience is left with a generic entertainment struggling to find a reason to exist beyond the need for more “content”. As soon seen as forgotten.

The creators of Deadpool will argue, lamely in my view, that by admitting the puerile nature of the humour they inure themselves to criticism in that area, but no such excuses are offered for the onanistic self-regard. After two hours of this infantile mugging, one is left longing for the genuinely upending humour of the Batman TV series from 60 years ago. Awful. Just awful.

Nobody will walk away from Skywalkers: A Love Story raving about its soap-opera shenanigans. But as an exercise in physical unsettlement it could hardly be bettered.

Twisters feels no need to offer footnotes and variation on its predecessor. It’s a big fat summer movie in its own right. And that’s something these days.

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.

Yes, the pulpy mythologies sometimes overshadow that carefully maintained mood. But it remains quite a mood. Hokum as high art.

A grim thrill rounded off with a chilling last shot.

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.

Murphy reminds us, albeit at a lower temperature, what caused so many heads to laugh themselves off shoulders during his pomp.

The set pieces are well handled, but this prequel stands out most for its commitment to fleshy humanity.

It is plainly the work of talented individuals, but it ultimately leaves you with little to show for your patience other than a pounding headache.

Unfortunately the characterisation is so thin and the dialogue so clunky that the thing plays more like one of those 1960s surf horrors – Cannibal Martians at Wipeout Cove – that invited drive-in audiences to speculate about which beach denizen deserved to get eaten first (usually a hard question to answer).

Most contemporary westerns end up mourning a vanished era of compromised freedom. The Bikeriders doesn’t quite believe in that myth, but it still finds time to dampen a handkerchief as its shadow recedes. A flawed, fascinating film.

There is, as there was in the first film, a profound sadness at the heart of Inside Out 2.

The miracle is that most of it sticks. Kane is a fine craftsman.

The downside to all this is that it reminds us that video games tend to manage cleaner storytelling than the makers of Bad Boys: Ride or Die do. The film plays as a muddle of set pieces – some impressive, most unintelligible – that fail to form any kind of coherent line. One almost longs for Bay’s return. His satanic mayhem at least had a consistency to it.

The film has its flaws, but worriers will find much with which to identify.

All in all, a diverting entertainment that, unlike so much contemporary horror, is prepared to have a good time. Fun for all the family.

The seat-of-the-pants grit of the first film seems as distant as kitchen-sink verite.

Not everyone will approve of the big swing here. But few will resist the richness and fullness of [Arnold's] characterisation.

If comes together nicely in a moving denouement that almost makes sense of the fantastic clutter. Often touching. Often infuriating.

This is often a difficult film to watch. The subject’s physical frailty is palpable, and his resistance to even the least intrusive advice is infuriating. The atmosphere of fug, filth and peril is suffocating. But Chambers selects the footage cunningly to always allow whispers of charm to filter through the stubbornness.

The film is good enough to deserve the sequels towards which it there gestures.

Oh, well. Perhaps the best response to junk food is junk cinema.

What keeps it ticking is the fiery gut-clenched romance between the two leads.

If the film has a significant flaw, it is that it doesn’t get the room to breathe. Another 10 minutes to flesh out plots and subplots would have been nice.

A real stonker of an entertainment.

All You Need Is Death, craggy and rough-edged, may be in constant conversation with the distant past, but it also puts up signposts to the future for Irish horror cinema. It’s about time somebody found a name for this artistic movement (if it is yet that).

There is a sense here not just of Vietnam-era experimental cinema but of contemporaneous postmodern novels by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and the recently late John Barth. Smart and dumb. Fascinating and frustrating. An absolute blast.

Civil War is wan as satire. But it’s an action stormer for the ages.

Sure, you will learn more – and hear more of the original recordings – in Asif Kapadia’s great documentary Amy, but Taylor-Johnson does a decent job of making a tight drama from the same tragic yarn.

What we have here is a humanist matrix that spins calculations in good and ill from all sides. And then it is something else. The film looks to be heading to a place of reassuring compromise when it dramatically veers into something tonally and emotionally distinct.

It hardly needs to be said that, as it goes on – and it does go on – the film loses coherence and slips into rampaging chaos. But, coming a year or so after that catastrophic Exorcist sequel, The First Omen feels a lot better than it needed to be. That may have to do.

The plot is rubbish. Nobody seems comfortable putting tongue anywhere near cheek. If the costumes were any more heightened you’d demand a song and dance number. All of which makes it hard to look anywhere else. But good? Probably not. Bad? Maybe not that either.

What we have here is an efficient compilation of the hoariest sporting cliches given a breath of life by some charming actors.

The reverence for the past here does nobody any favours. It is as if a 1984 kids’ film tried to get them interested in the collected lore and backstory of Abbott and Costello. We all need to move on.

It would be nothing without a charismatic star at its heart. Sweeney is certainly that – and, as the final shot confirms, she is as game as they come. Nun more fun.

The film is (like its predecessor) no classic, but it would play well enough to a packed Friday-night audience in Megaplex 3.

Drive-Away Dolls is no disaster. Matt Damon has fun as a hypocritical politician in a last act that cannot be faulted for chutzpah. But nobody will mistake this yellow-pack Coen flick for the real thing.

Copa 71 is conventionally told: talking heads interspersed with footage of the era’s pop music. But the rhythms are captivating and the story is irresistible. Highly recommended.

The film has bad news for us about humanity, but it also exudes a joy in the art of creative storytelling. All of which is a way of saying: pay attention throughout.

For all its flaws, however, Origin does have power as both didactic treatise and drama of recovery. There is something reassuring being said here about the restorative power of work.

What really hooks you, however, is the gorgeous smoothness of the narrative machinery. We get jolts. We are not short of shocks. But, as in all the best farce, the surprises ultimately seem preordained.

Ultimately, we end up with an abundance of craft and a forest of lore wrapped around personal narratives too flimsy to sustain marching feet.

Reviews will be mixed. But it has every chance of being resurrected as a cult classic.

By the close, the picture risks taking on the quality of those allegorical novels that provided solace in the post-hippie era. Jonathan Livingstone Lavatory Cleaner. Zen and the Art of Lavatory Maintenance. But better than that. Sharper, less sentimental, less aphoristic. A film to live your life by.

Sadly, the film runs out of steam as it develops into a detective story with a solution that will surprise nobody.

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.

Like the Whitney film, One Love suffers greatly from a looming whiff of authorisation.

For all the undeniable power of Occupied City, some will wonder if, given its formal repetitions, the piece should not be presented as an installation. Maybe. But the concentration and lack of distraction allow that greater degree of immersion. That sense of being dragged through a narrative – even a non-linear one – is a vital part of its unsettling appeal.

So hard and chillingly perfect is the aesthetic – Friedel and Hüller adding another carapace with their unflinching performances – that one bristles a little when it is occasionally broken.

And yet. Howard is so irrepressibly charming that Argylle proves hard to wholly resist. Her inherent warmth and charm add interesting balance to the violence she ultimately gets to inflict on circling maniacs. One must also grudgingly acknowledge Vaughn’s dedication to an epic mayhem that strives towards a blend of Bollywood, Hong Kong action and Golden Age musical.

Never mind the plot. Written and directed by Rich Peppiatt, a former journalist who created the salty 2014 satire One Rogue Reporter, Kneecap works best as a collage of digs at contemporary Northern/North of Ireland woven in with a touching treatise on why the Irish language matters.

An absolute treasure.

If the first film didn’t exist, the current Mean Girls would impress as a modestly clever variation on common tropes. As it is, the current picture will remain a footnote to earlier triumphs.

The attempts to get us interested in fictional NFT art are no more successful than the international cabal of idiots’ efforts to draw us to the real thing. For all that, there is a sort of honest energy to Lift that deserves just a sliver of respect.

Along the way, Scala!!! (the number of exclamation points varies) takes in the history of a wider culture. You could see the community under discussion as that swimming in the long wake of punk.

There are endless nuances and ironies throughout. Though stories are told, In the Shadow of Beirut is more a mosaic than a narrative tapestry.

One Life breaks no new cinematic ground. But it tells a story worth hearing. And it allows an indisputable great one more chance to show us what he can do.

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.

Based on an acclaimed documentary, the film looks to be asking us to fill in the many gaps in its Swiss-cheese narrative.

It is Coppola’s best film in 20 years.

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.

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

Branagh’s decent performance and Christie’s indestructible reputation may just be enough to see the film through to a modest profit and, later, decent figures on Disney+. But A Haunting in Venice feels like a misguided experimental sprig from an already compromised operation.

A gentle, complex film that will pay rewatching.

For the most part...A Life on the Farm is a warm-hearted celebration of an oddity for the ages.

It is a film of high emotions and quiet conversations. It is a film that embraces blended nationalities while acknowledging the pull of one’s earliest home. One leaves aware of unavoidable open-endedness but sated by a work that has achieved all its lofty ambitions.

Though it doesn’t have the complexity of Zodiac or the resonance of The Social Network, this may be Fincher’s sleekest and most uncomplicatedly entertaining film of the current century.

It amounts to a dizzying feast of cinematic excess. But there is intellectual traction and psychological grit to the project.

What emerges is a torrid, gripping drama that acknowledges not just what damage the careless can wreak but also to what extent the responsible often conspire in their own annihilation.

Theater Camp is itself shamelessly infatuated with the great American musical, but it also enjoys poking affectionate fun at the kids’ creative tunnel vision.

Are we supposed to be scared or are we supposed to be laughing at the absurdity of it all? Happily, the actors throw enough energy at the screen to deflect any incoming frustration. An odd beast.

Too drippy and half-cocked to bother defending.

Sarandon is, sad to say, not the best thing in a film that only occasionally rises above the anarchic mediocrity we expect from the DC Extended Universe.

There is some spirited work from a consistently fine cast. DeVito cannot fail to be funny. Stanfield delivers a performance more suited to a less-compromised film. Even they cannot save this fatally compromised farrago from sinking into the swamp.

One can offer no greater compliment to D Smith’s examination of the black transgender experience than that it makes the viewer, however they identify, feel a welcomed part of the busy conversation.

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

Having honed their film-making through endless online pastiches, the directors know just how to time the stomach-jolting jump scares. There is forever a hand ready to grab your unsuspecting ankle.