Geoffrey Macnab

This warped satire is ultimately neither as shocking nor as funny as you initially hope it’s going to be.

In what could easily have been a banana skin of a role, Law is surprisingly sure-footed. The British star has clearly studied his subject closely. He captures the Russian president with metronomic precision – his mannerisms, his cunning, his smirks and scowls.

For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.

Alpha has some tremendous moments, but the movie is undermined by its own dense and impenetrable storytelling style. It would surely have worked far better as an immersive installation piece than as a two hour feature.

If everything seems familiar from countless other crime dramas, at least the film is very slickly and creatively directed by Lee.

The Texan auteur’s new film – his 22nd, and the first of two due for release in this year alone – boasts a fine, quirky and courageous performance from Ethan Hawke, but it’s a stagey affair which at times becomes very stilted.

You could claw together some brilliant short films from the best sequences here, but this 36-years-in-the-making follow-up should make us all question Tim Burton’s modern storytelling sense.

Ultimately, this isn’t the car crash it could have been. It is, though, deeply flawed and very eccentric.

At times, it plays more like a sitcom than a story about the legacy of the death camps. Thankfully, it still provides probing insight into everything from casual antisemitism to the plague of historical forgetfulness.

The filmmaker always shows the same painstaking attention to detail as his homicidal hero does to the logistics of murdering his adversaries. Fassbender is well cast and gives a typically committed performance – one leavened by moments of very deadpan humour. However. The Killer also often drifts into the realm of self-conscious pastiche.

In her own coolly analytical way, Coppola makes some trenchant points about the way Priscilla is controlled by the men in her life. She is living in a gilded cage. The wealth and luxury she experiences don’t compensate for her complete loss of freedom.

The movie consists of a series of chases and fights linked by ever more improbable plot twists. The action is often very inventively staged. James Mangold, who has taken over directing duties from Steven Spielberg, sets a breakneck tempo.

This is a film rich in ideas but with very little tension or passion. At times, it’s more like a cerebral art gallery installation piece than a full-blooded dramatic movie.

It is hard not to wish Wright had made an entire film set in the Soho of the Sixties rather than one that pays tribute to it through the prism of the present day. It is a pity, too, that the magnificent Taylor-Joy’s role wasn’t further foregrounded.