Hannah Strong

The bite that made the first Bridget Jones’ Diary such a delight isn’t really here. Perhaps that’s a sign of the maturing protagonist, but it doesn’t leave much for us to get excited about.

Although the script does have a zippy, wisecracking feel, there’s also an earnestness at play: the characters embrace the strangeness of their world without ever feeling the need to remark on it. In short, this is a film that is fun while also taking its premise somewhat seriously.

Ramsay articulates the inarticulate, here through her saturated blues, yellows, browns and greens, the colours of grief and sickness and rot…but also new life, summer skies, and hope.

No Way Home feels like a greatest hits package specifically designed to hit every fan service button. It doesn’t give us any indication of where this story is going, or why we should care.

It’s a deeply unpleasant and reactionary film that even compelling central performances can’t save.

Cemented by Efira’s restrained, empathetic performance, Paris Memories is a deft exploration of recovery, and a moving tribute to Winocour’s brother Jérémie and other victims and survivors.

It’s an elegant film, reckoning empathetically with an extremely complex topic, but there’s a slight sense that something is missing, keeping The Room Next Door from ever really becoming truly great.

At a time when the tech industry is continually attempting to force AI down our throats, there’s something cloying about a film so nakedly insistent that a robot can replace a human being it portrays almost all the humans in the story as self-serving and villainous.

Better overambitious than the opposite, and hopefully In Camera provides plenty more opportunities for Khalid and Rizwan, who so richly deserve them based on the strength of this feature.

Garland’s film seems to be an attempt to highlight the very real misogyny within the modern world that has no insight on the subject beyond Women Have Always Had It Quite Bad.

The film’s creative gore alone cannot paper over the ultimate flimsiness of Blichfeldt’s concept, which amounts to an adolescent scrawl of fairytale satire, somehow less interesting and transgressive than Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ which predates it by 46 years.

It’s passable as a mildly amusing twist on the slasher genre, but its lack of strong identity or coherent thesis means there’s little that sticks in the mind after the credits role, and ultimately does a disservice to its crop of talented stars.

Lamb’s premise is intriguing too – a pleasing twist on the familiar horror trope of monstrous motherhood. Even so, the imaginative conceit is let down by a rather sudden and underwhelming climax.

The film’s final scene is also a chilling subversion of normal expectations for the climax of a campground slasher, but the lacklustre 90 minutes that precede it mean that by the time we trudge to the forest’s boundaries, there’s little reason to care who comes out of the blood bath on top.

The naturalistic camerawork and performances ground the film in realism, creating a wry dramedy that refuses to placate us with easy answers or condescension.

It’s a film about the necessity of holding onto small, precious things in the face of all-consuming fear. Whether that’s an authentic New York slice or your beloved, curiously bombproof cat.

The desire to create a web of characters as complexly mapped as the LA road network is to the film’s detriment; much like a good heist crew, you’ve got to know when the cut the dead weight.

It’s an easy watch – even a mostly enjoyable one, thanks to the great time Cage and Pascal are clearly having – but the dialogue stumbles into cheesy territory more often than not, and overall it feels like a missed opportunity to make a bolder statement about the ruthlessness of the Hollywood machine, or indeed Cage’s enduring celebrity.

There is something sweet about The Idea of You, even if it is a total fantasy. Perhaps it’s simply the winning charm of Hathaway and Galitzine or the novelty of a rom-com featuring a leading lady over the age of 25. More of that, please!

It’s all exceptionally silly, and fans of the first film might find the first hour little more than a rehash of Smile, but there’s still something admirable about Parker Finn’s gusto.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Blink Twice is that its message of female solidarity feels sincere without being cynically corporate. Rather than patting itself on the back for highlighting the importance of women’s relationships, there’s an understanding that women are not a monolith, and embracing each other’s complexities enables us to fight structural inequality better.

Wheatley captures the volatility of emotions during the festive period, where every familial anxiety seems to come to a head, and does so with compassion and humour.

The overarching theme of White Noise – an anxiety around the looming spectre of death – is familiar territory for for the writer/director, as is the psyche of the film’s middle-aged, middle-class white protagonist. This is his most ambitious project in both scale and provenance.

The Housemaid lacks the guile to transform its flaws into future camp classic material – it feels like a sign of the times: a film which holds the audience’s hand at every turn while gesturing at the very real issue of domestic violence, yet keeping things just light and sexy enough that no one will be bummed out this holiday season.

That emotional core is missing in Twisters, even with a few stabs at highlighting the human cost of America’s inadequate tornado warning and damage mitigation systems.

Exaggerated misdirections do nothing to prevent Drop‘s eventual reveal from feeling obvious and contrived, to the extent that even a svelte 90 minute runtime starts to feel like a stretch.

It’s a film that feels gloriously alive, earnest in its depiction of masculinity that is fragile rather than toxic while still grappling with the question of why anyone would choose to make a living in such a barbaric way.

It’s a shame the film that exists around this technical experiment oscillates between ludicrous and tedious, undermining any scares that might be generated through the wonder of creative foley and effective mixing.