Kevin Maher

It’s loud, multicoloured and garish, like sticking your head inside a giant tin of Quality Street while someone whacks the outside repeatedly with a polo mallet. Only this time, for once, it’s slightly more pleasurable than that sounds.

It’s an ambitious contemporary western shot last year yet set in the summer of 2020, and ostensibly aims, in almost every scene, to analyse and ridicule the political obsessions and digital neuroses that dominated that moment. And, well, it’s quite the mess.

The film hovers uneasily in a narrative grey zone, post-audition yet pre-show, and repeatedly castigates social media and reality TV for turning a generation of human beings into vacuous, camera-ready twits.

It’s all too obvious that The Smashing Machine has been conceived, among other things, as another Safdie-branded career boost for a pair of charming, charismatic actors who could do with a dash of Oscar magic. It’s just a shame that their film is a fugazi.

Yes, it’s just awful. Fake, puke-inducing emotional dishonesty of the most absurd kind. Nothing here makes sense.

It leans away from formula and into the hard-knock-life of its protagonist.

The film is peppered with alarmingly dull and horribly written sequences featuring water-treading conversations about democracy, power and the dream of Rome. In short, no, we are not entertained.

This is the Donald Trump movie that you never knew you needed: full of compassionate feeling yet ruthless in analysis.

It works. Peake is that good. Isaacs is also that good. And the subject is compelling and timely.

There are no solutions offered here, alas, other than a call for awareness, and the film instead remains a beautifully photographed and elegiac depiction of a lifestyle that’s slowly fading even as the women within it burn bright.

It’s not going to rock everyone’s world and neither is it a patch on Carol. But it’s competent, sometimes clever, film-making with ideas and lots of heart.

Ultimately this protagonist looks to nature and to Mabel in an admirable attempt to reconcile the ubiquity of death, the brevity of life and the urgent, though possibly pointless, search for meaning.

This is a film fed by, and consistently cutting to, the operas that defined its subject. Yet there is not a single moment that is emotionally operatic. It is wilfully, wearily flat.

The film is a hoot, possibly the most gloriously macho cop movie since the writer-director Joe Carnahan’s previous cop movie Copshop (2021), or his breakout cop movie Narc (2002), or the cop movie he wrote for Edward Norton, Pride and Glory (2008).

The earnestness slowly becomes suffocating, and Grandmother’s endless lessons grating. Yes, nature is the ultimate healer. And?

Keaton commits fully to the puerility demanded by the title role. And yet the mania feels consistently forced. The fun is diluted.

In the end Good Fortune is perhaps too ambitious, and indulges in too much sermonising, especially when Gabriel also joins the human workforce and, like Jeff, experiences financial hardship. Reeves is good value as the clueless angel but an unfortunate sense of repetition sets in.

It’s difficult to convey just how little dramatic urgency there is in a film that’s effectively a computer-generated diorama, one that’s filled with fantastical flora and fauna and mystical beings who are all dressed up with nowhere to go.

The Uninvited is similarly haphazard and, even by the film’s shamefully saccharine finale, has little to say other than “life is short, and making movies sucks.

The film, despite themes of empowerment, is really a strange cinematic palimpsest. Scratch the glossy feminist makeover to reveal underneath a still smirking, leering, chauvinistic pig.

Flawed to its core but never less than riveting

Fall is an instinctive visual storyteller, the two leads have a winning chemistry, and the location shooting in Istanbul is vivid and authentic. Just a shame the film is less so.

Mirren, of course, smooths over most quibbles with a character who begins in pure camp and enjoys a cheeky nod to her off-screen ex-beau Liam Neeson in Taken, and then gradually evolves into a serious, stony-faced sleuth.

There’s more of everything. More narrative convolutions, more subplots, more supporting characters, more one-liners, more slapstick, more musical interludes, and even more tear-jerking finales.

A painfully derivative buddy movie.

The supporting character interactions can be creaky and stiff, as if the director Benjamin Caron was so convinced of Kirby’s prowess that he presumed she could carry the film, flaws and all. And she almost does. Almost.

This is a film that, at its best, while softly cradling its two battered protagonists, is also howling madly at the shadow of mortality.

No, it’s not subtle. The rock soundtrack thumps along with propulsive vigour (cue original tracks from Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC and Amy Taylor from Amyl and the Sniffers), the screen pulses with stylish slow-mo from the director Tom Harper (Heart of Stone), while the top-tier acting duo of Murphy and Keoghan bring some unexpected poignancy to an otherwise familiar Oedipal clash.

The twists are many and some predictable, but the mood here is mostly, and unapologetically, guilty-pleasure hokum.

A nuptial apocalypse has rarely been explored with such dark intelligence and mordant wit as in this often piercing and cringe-out-loud dramedy starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya.

Everything ultimately descends into an overblown and hyper-violent firefight south of the border, near Juárez. It is an action movie, after all. But it’s one of the good ones.

The bogus tone is grating from the start. It’s vanilla Quentin Tarantino, featuring long, diner-based exchanges, inexplicably glowing boxes and sudden eruptions of violence. Yet, unlike Tarantino, the dialogue is bland, the violence augmented with CGI gore, the set-ups devoid of jeopardy.

Eternity might have worked if the three leads conveyed anything beyond jaded inertia in each other’s company. They are supposed to be consumed by a love so passionate it propels them into adventures beyond the grave. They look, instead, as if they could barely get out of their trailers.

This is a mildly distracting guilty pleasure romp that is undone by its own casting crisis.

Sam and Mother Mary’s chemistry is the film’s big sell, and the impeccable Coel and imperious Hathaway prove the ultimate dynamic duo.

Sweeney is also surrounded by a plethora of ace character actors, especially Merritt Wever as Christy’s sanctimonious mother Joyce, who compound the sense of a lead protagonist trapped within a hopeless, claustrophobic milieu. It’s a proper movie.

The music is from the TikTok stars Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, who bring some verve and serious Frozen-esque power to the standout track Beyond (chorus: “Can I go beyoooooooond?!!!!!”). It’s just a shame that the surrounding film, unlike Moana, never really finds its way.

Erivo is extraordinary as Elphaba. Although she is known and rightly celebrated for her vocal prowess, her best scenes are wordless. She carries whole set pieces, and the wounded essence of the entire project, in her haunted looks and her mood of quiet despair.

It just coasts, with breathtaking laziness, on the power of nostalgia, and it seemingly hopes that the sight of our beloved trio gathered together, mostly on chairs and improvising badly, will be enough in itself.

There’s very little narrative sense here and even less psychological realism.

Evans is a film-maker with an instinctive understanding of frame space (The Raid is a joyful camera ballet), but he seems constrained here. As a screenwriter he leaves no cliché unloved.

This is intellectually specious and ethically dubious. You can’t simply hide bad art underneath political messaging. Yes, we need movies, urgently, that fully address Epstein, Pelicot and all the male monsters of the world, and this week’s brilliant Sound of Falling, from the German female director Mascha Schilinski, arguably does that in spades. But slapping the phrase “Me too” onto a sloppy, ham-fisted vanity project doesn’t cut it.

Here the Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) dives truly deep for a tale of orphanhood, family conflict and the reluctant fight for a throne. It’s often thrilling to watch a film featuring only anthropomorphic animals where the central characters are more rounded than most of their human counterparts at the mainstream multiplex (yes, that means you, Gladiator II).

Even by the depressing standards set by the Mortal Kombat movies, Uncharted and the first two miserable Sonic the Hedgehog outings, this third Sonic is staggeringly poor.

The movie treads narrative water for the entirety of its running time.

The film bounds ambitiously through fifteen years of the Baranov-Putin alliance.

It all ends with a grossly emetic monologue about how evil mass media is trying to “make us hate each other so they can steal from us”. And The Running Man is not part of the mass media how? Still, who doesn’t love Shaun of the Dead?

Yes, there is no person or inanimate object safe in a film where Fennell’s main directorial note to Elordi seems to have been, “Great, but can you also lick it?”

It is a fascinating, often moving exploration of Japanese family life in the traumatised, bomb-blasted aftermath of the Second World War.

The narrative arrives in clumsy self-contained chunks that don’t always gel.

It’s bigger, brasher, more inventive, more “roboty”, certainly more entertaining, but missing just a sliver of the first instalment’s raw-bones charm.

You just want to punch the air and shout, “Yes, this is what it was like in the before times! With actual acting, crafted lines and plot!”

It’s mostly a dirge, but the younger Day-Lewis has an artful eye and his indecently talented dad is clearly crying out for better material.

The film instantly falls into the seemingly insuperable live-action remake trap — the deluded belief that simply putting the original on film, sometimes via a frame-by-frame copy, is enough in itself.

Sadly, the mockumentary Zamiri’s film most resembles — at times, eerily so — is Spice World: The Movie. No, really. Same manic energy. Same faux crises. Same shouty one-note line delivery.

Yes, it’s ostensibly sweet and inoffensive. But it’s so inoffensive that it’s almost, well, offensive.

The problem with this is that it howls at everything and nothing, while also using the kind of conspiracy theorising about sinister global cabals that’s more suited to foam-flecked podcasters and Elders of Zion loonies.

Winstead, in her most fruitful role since 2012’s Smashed, is a powerhouse, while Monroe, though never camp, is frequently and fabulously boo-hiss.

Guadagnino is also on the form of his life, directing with assured style and structure, and offering a lovely closing device that asks us to relax, calm down and remember that it’s all just playtime.

It’s sloppily directed by David Ayer (Sabotage) with a depressing lack of urgency and a sense that everything here has been done better, more efficiently and with more emotional engagement before.

This is impossibly strong writing for a wacky comedy.

It doesn’t help either that the cheap-looking CGI unicorns are wildly unconvincing or that Jenna Ortega, as Elliot’s disaffected daughter Ridley, seems to have wandered on to the set from a different and far more subtle movie.

It’s a discomforting film and a potentially eerie experience for all viewers. The villain appears to be personal compromise and the moral lapses ignored on a daily basis in the name of getting by.

With Bader and Blyth on quietly charismatic form throughout, [Haley's] made a film that is eminently slick, consistently palatable and instantly forgettable. The perfect Netflix product.

My two stars are for [Pike] alone. She’s an utter hoot in every scene, part Miranda Priestly, part Hannibal Lecter, and it’s an unsettling testament to her power as a performer that she tilts the sympathy axis of the entire movie towards her.

Believe the anti-hype. It’s that bad.

The Colleen Hoover school of social realism is back — and this time it’s more idiotic than ever.

There are some mildly diverting moments, and it’s pleasing to see Ed Harris emerge later on in a significant set piece. Like everything else in this ill-judged effort, his appearance is a wasted opportunity.

Hallstrom also works wonders with the principal cast, finding hidden depths in Cline and mostly neutralising Apa’s unnerving propensity for blinkless serial killer stares (it’s like he’s going for Blue Steel but just, well, misses).

It looks great, and Cronin is a gifted stylist. But, as with his debut The Hole in the Ground, there’s too much slavish imitation and homage here. His greatest accomplishment is the downtime family scenes. They throb with easy realism. He should dump horror and do drama instead.

Ultimately, bar some tedious spell-making scenes, nothing happens. Harrowingly poor.

There is seemingly an ironic undertow to Urban’s character. He’s from “the Earthrealm”, aka Earth, and is a washed-up former action star in the Chuck Norris mould. It’s supposed to be a clever wink to the audience and a quirky acknowledgement that this is all pretty awful, right? As if joking about the stench of a sewer will somehow make it smell sweeter.

The director Todd Phillips said there would be no follow-up to the original, but he changed his mind and the result is a derivative musical.

It’s so inane and confused, in fact, that it suggests there are no storytelling iterations left for the Marvel Cinematic Universe other than, perhaps, a wounded retreat into the overloaded one-joke irony of the Deadpool flicks.

Ayo Edebiri, the award-winning star of The Bear, is on typically charismatic form here, delivering droll reaction shots and angsty frowns aplenty on a one-woman mission to rescue this extraordinarily toothless celebrity satire and half-cocked horror.

This Indiana Jones knock-off is staggeringly slapdash.

There’s little dramatic jeopardy here and certainly no danger. Instead, by the closing credits Cécile has barely changed, and the musical around her has barely registered. Sorry, the film with songs in it.

It’s left to Leonidas, in the only substantial female part, to steal the show. She plays Dani with an easygoing naturalism that bestows some much needed soul upon the project and suggests that Love might yet have a glittering future ahead in women-centred melodramas. If only he could ditch the swaggering.

Mackey is fine but wasted, and still clearly anticipating a role to top her astounding Emily from 2022. The political messaging, meanwhile, is grimly bromidic.

This is the quintessential Trump-era film, where difficult truths are met with bold-faced mendacity and where the director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) and the screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator) have met the challenges of the Jackson story by simply drowning it in quasi-Christian, yes, bullshit.

You know that your comedy is in crisis when you’ve substituted actual jokes for the grating rhythms of an oompah band. Still, Pfeiffer remains charismatic till the end. She deserved better.

It doesn’t help that the director, Polly Steele (The Mountain Within Me), has seemingly chosen to fill the narrative longueurs with endless drone shots of the Irish countryside. Pretty, yes. But they can only offer so much damage limitation.

The film is torturous to sit through and, for me, provoked periods of actual physical discomfort. I had to stab myself repeatedly in the hand with a pen to distract from the howling distress. It’s that bad, and that offensive.

It remains ludicrous to the end but it’s never anything less than entertaining.

Worst of all, and quite baffling for a film that was directed and cowritten by the franchise creator, Kevin Williamson, this isn’t even about articulate teens deconstructing horror films any more. There are a handful of limp references to AI deepfakes but otherwise all the sharp culture awareness, and certainly all the irony, has been removed. It’s as if nobody realised that a Scream movie without the irony is just a bad horror movie. Roll on Scream 8?

Pratt is fine, and blandly likeable in the manner of a not-especially-demanding labrador, but the prospect of his blameless heroism is always depressingly inevitable and the identity of the real villain is conspicuous from almost the first scene.

It’s badly shot, full of pointless jeopardy-free action sequences, with a flat-lining story and airless characters poorly performed by floundering actors at their lowest ebb. The search continues for DeBose.

Every single scene here is about what the scene is about, creating the deepest vat of cinematic s**t imaginable. The screenplay is shamefully inept.

The two Spider-Verse movies proved that brash and branded Hollywood entertainment does not have to sacrifice novelty and innovation. Smurfs, on the other hand? Profoundly, oppressively empty. There’s no reason to see it.

The look is mid-period Transformers. The dramatic tension non-existent. And the performances uniformly weak. This is top-dollar tedium.

A witty premise and a muscular cast are cruelly betrayed by this flaccid Tinseltown satire that features Robert De Niro delivering one of the most wretchedly cartoonish performances of his career.

Building a whole movie around leaden, titter-inducing chunks of ersatz anti-drama is madness.

The entire film is like this. Random and unfocused. Bit of this. Bit of that. Lots of charm. See how you go. There are great lines hidden in the mulch, mostly delivered by Fellows.