Kevin Maher

It is difficult to overstate Streep’s importance, and how deeply she inhabits a role that, for any other actress, would certainly be cartoonish — the outfits, the glasses and the whispered catchphrase “that’s all”.

Insolia and Riondino, meanwhile, are quite perfectly cast. Their characters have soul chemistry and their scenes together are the film’s best.

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

MacKay and Turner acquit themselves handsomely with many silent stares, tortured looks and grimaces. Like all Jenkin’s films, it looks extraordinary and the deliberately “tinny” post-sync sound only adds to the sense that you are watching something ancient, meaningful and quite magical.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

In a project that took a full year to edit, with unfettered access to the Orwell estate’s entire archive, Peck proves impossibly adept at layering in seemingly disparate clips, quotes and footage without ever once losing sight of his central message. Much like Orwell, in fact, it’s the clarity of his polemic that impresses most.

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.

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.

So why two stars? Because it’s inoffensive and criticising it feels like punching down. And because Martin Clunes, playing a grouchy landlord, is really quite good.

It’s more funny peculiar than funny ha ha and, alas, doesn’t always work.

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

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.

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

Ryan Gosling on charisma overdrive and buckets of deadpan irreverence are enough to power this otherwise familiar sci-fi story to the highest possible entertainment orbit.

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.

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.

There’s lots of fun here, some of the one-liners are exquisite and the helter-skelter finale is delightfully overstuffed. Frustratingly, it’s still second-grade Pixar.

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?

There’s a hint of repetition in the mid-section and a schmaltzy third act courtroom scene. But all flaws are overcome by Aramayo’s technically precise and heart-rending turn. It’s astonishing.

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.

It’s a testament to Nayyef’s ingenuous performance and the mesmerising sense of place that the film is always compelling and sometimes bleakly funny, although there are no happy endings.

This is all good fun but at about the midway mark (see the chunky running time) it begins to lose its vitality, ceasing to be a new Heat and becoming more of a reheat.

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?”

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.

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.

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

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).

Gosh, I hope that Ralph Fiennes’s back is OK. Because the 63-year-old certainly did a lot of heavy lifting in this latest instalment of the long-running zombie franchise. I mean that metaphorically, of course, because in this movie it’s up to Fiennes to provide the emotional, intellectual and comedic fireworks.

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.

Sweeney proves here, after Christy, Echo Valley and Reality, that she’s a performer of versatility and, crucially, staying power.

Jackman’s tendency towards camp is hidden by glitzy outfits and silly stylings of his stage persona, while Hudson is positively unleashed by the demands that Claire places upon her. She has been quite rightly nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance, and is a credible best actress Oscar contender.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a sobering riposte to the clickbait era.

Majors plays the central character, Killian Maddox, with subtlety and sensitivity.

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.

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

Arguments will rage about how much of this is staged and how much captured. The film-makers have labelled the film “a documentary fable” and that works for me. It’s that place where Ken Loach and David Attenborough meet. In the best possible sense.

There are gruesome gunfights, car chases, savage beatings and the sense by the closing frames that Safdie has delivered the narrative equivalent of an unstoppable plummet down an especially precipitous flight of stairs. You’ll emerge battered and bruised.

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.

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.

Flawed to its core but never less than riveting

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?

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

There’s only one thing worse than being trapped in a theatre watching a badly staged play: being trapped in a cinema watching a badly adapted stage play. And so it is, frequently, with this Ibsen update that’s pulled in too many directions at once by its ambitious director, Nia DaCosta, and the producer-star Tessa Thompson.

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

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.

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.

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.

I’m not convinced that we have the moral right to watch some of these scenes and to witness a tiny traumatised boy at his most bereft and alone. Still, it’s an outstanding, provocative film that is bound to inspire debate. Watch it and discuss.

The ending, set in the Globe during a production of Hamlet, is harrowing, meaningful and magnificently sad. You might want to yell out, “Make it stop!” This is, instantly, the essential Shakespeare movie.

It delivers first giggles, then twists and gasp-inducing rug-pulls, courtesy of standout performances from a cast that includes Josh Brolin, Glenn Close and a never better Josh O’Connor. Not just that but Johnson’s probing script also explores the biggest conundrum of them all: God, faith and religion.

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.

It’s always compelling, and a powerful first feature.

A thrillingly tense game of kill-or-be-killed.

I’m not sure if it’s Anderson’s masterpiece, and though Penn is funny in the role of the crazed colonel, he frequently veers towards cartoonish and almost ruins his scenes. Still, it’s an easy best picture Oscar nomination in the bag.

It’s a classy, glossy production that’s frequently bathed in stunning crepuscular light (the Canary Islands’ tourist board should be thrilled). And thankfully it’s one that refuses to patronise the audience.

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.

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.

Far too much time is spent with the tedious off-camera histrionics of the brattish co-star Shia LaBeouf, and the admission that Figgis was hand-chosen (“invited”) by Coppola for the documentary renders it slightly toothless.

There is, initially, some heavy slapstick here (the first murder is a calamitous mess) but the bite of the film resides in the richness of its characters and how it delves into the protagonist’s home life.

The film, alas, and it pains me to say it, is not very good. It’s overwhelmingly, unfortunately, self-serious, and thus accidentally very Monty Python. There’s little dramatic tension and the music is close to agony.

In short, Yorgos, move on.

It is deliberately punishing material, channelled through unapologetic, galvanising film-making. Politicians should see it. Decision-makers should see it.

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.

The film, written by Julian Fellowes on autopilot and directed by Simon Curtis (in a trance?), climaxes with a scene that is simultaneously grossly saccharine and deeply cynical.

The film rarely draws breath. It barrels bleakly, with effortless aplomb, to the end. You might need a stiff drink.

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

It’s not quite vintage Jarmusch (for that see Night on Earth and Broken Flowers), but it is light and compassionate.

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.

It’s unashamedly derivative but also entertaining. Butler and Kravitz are charming together and dripping with chemistry.

The film builds to a magnificently sad climax, with Clooney breaking the fourth wall and delivering probably his best screenwork ever.

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

It is not the greatest Frankenstein ever. It’s not even an especially good one. It’s just, in the end, serviceable.

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.

La grazia is wonderful. It is slow initially and sometimes difficult but it gradually, seductively seeps into you and becomes near impossible to shake.

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.

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).

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.

Where to start with this utterly gorgeous, commanding, terrifying and masterful suspense thriller? Firstly don’t believe the hype — it’s not a horror. It’s bigger than that. Not a slasher, a creeper, a spooker or a demented killer movie. It’s better than that.

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.

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.

All of this, to be clear, is hilarious. Emotionally desolate, but hilarious.

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.

Ending with uncertainty, and a sense that Brazil is never too far away from another military dictatorship, this is sobering, essential viewing.

There are glimmers of intrigue, as well as quirks and curios.

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.

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

In the end, though, the pairing of Edwards with Koepp is the complementary master stroke. They are camera and script in harmony, deftly entwined for a franchise that is finally, after thirty years, worthy of rebirth.

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

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.

There’s an unashamedly “enthusiastic” cross-promotional quality to the film, like a two-and-a-half-hour Formula 1 commercial, that never quite gels with its hoary central story.