John Nugent

Haunting, serenely composed and beautiful, this is an elegy for a life and a country that America used to be. 

This is not the messiah. Nor is it a very naughty boy. There was an opportunity for a truly original spin on the so-called Greatest Story Ever Told here, but The Carpenter’s Son pulls its punches to make a rather rote horror that amounts to little.

Gothic, iconoclastic, engrossing, slyly excoriating of modern-day America and very funny to boot, it’s another solidly satisfying whodunnit from Benny B. Keep them coming, please.

Wicked: For Good, sure — but not quite Wicked: For Great.

Gurinder Chadha’s Dickens do-over is a typically original perspective on a canonical classic, if let down by its stretched production values and unlikable songs. But it aims only to be a crowd-pleaser, and may yet become one. 

Now You Three Me, as it should be called, offers ample 2010s nostalgia, but not quite enough brainless fun lands successfully. Put this rabbit back in the hat.

Edgar Wright’s biggest film yet feels like something out of both the future and the 1980s: a scathing satire that’s also a lot of fizzy blockbuster fun.

There’s trouble in this paradise: bleak without much of a point to make and bloody without any particular reason, this is an odd attempt at satire that takes a fascinating slice of real-life stranger-than-fiction history and somehow makes it less interesting.

Riveting, unhinged, and sardonic to its honey-soaked core, this is another Lanthimos-Stone winner. (With a great opening-title typeface, to boot.)

It has about as much depth as a floppy disk, but some lovely, shiny CGI and a stunningly ear-shattering score from Nine Inch Nails makes for a fun if forgettable bit of futuristic fluff. Bio-digital jazz, man!

Not quite vintage Black, and Mark Wahlberg is no Robert Downey Jr, but this is fast and funny enough to be worth a couple of your hours. Squint hard enough and it almost feels like you’re back in the ’90s.

As a newly solo director, Safdie summons a thoughtful and moving mood for this unconventional sports film; as a newly serious dramatic actor, Johnson is about to win some awards.

All Of You might only work for some of you, but the easy, insatiable fire between Goldstein and Poots is undeniable. 

This collection of tired jokes is enough to prompt the question, “What day did the Lord create Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, and couldn’t he have rested on that day too?”

A heck of a debut from first-timer Shawn Simmons, and another powerful argument for A-list status for Samara Weaving. Bring on the sequel, which is obliged to be titled Miny Moe. 

An audacious, farcically funny digest of where we are now, and how we got here: the cinematic equivalent of pandemic primal therapy, a mad scream into the void.

A weak shadow of Eddie Murphy’s action-comedy yesteryear, The Pickup would be better off being left unpicked.

A hugely accomplished horror achievement, and a significant step up from Barbarian: tense, sad, hilarious, unsettling, ridiculously entertaining, and ultimately oddly uplifting.

The result is a film that has a better chance of producing a belly laugh than any in recent memory: one that deserves, as Drebin would say, “20 years for man’s laughter”.

Adam Sandler goes back to his Happy place for this unashamedly stupid sequel. What it lacks in precision or panache, it makes up for in sheer goofy, golf-y geniality.

A big old pile of Smurf.

M3GAN 2.0 is more absurd, self-aware silliness: a riot of timely tech paranoia, with almost no horror but a ton of successful comedy. Slay, queen!

A different beast to Past Lives, this is a razor-sharp look at the competitive marketplace of dating: both rigorously honest and idealistically romantic.

Killer Of Killers looks the business and comes with all the gory kills and human heroes you’d hope for, but like most anthologies it is a little hit-and-miss.

Strictly-for-fans-only. Bono is a charismatic chronicler of his own life, but the self-conscious storytelling concept is a harder thing to stomach for non-enthusiasts.

A tense, knotty opening act yields to some of Tom Cruise’s most impressive stunts yet, ending the film — and perhaps the series — on a high.

With a committed, crazed, brilliantly calibrated performance from late-Renaissance Cage, this is a feverishly good thriller: surreal and strange and sticky.

Cleaner has good people behind it but this British attempt at a Die Hard ends up just being a bit of a mess. Yippee-ki-nay.