Kevin Maher

Fans are calling this the Brothers Grimm meets The Substance but it’s better than that sounds. And certainly harder to watch.

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.

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

You can’t lie in a close-up, which is lucky for Stewart. Because her lead actress, on camera throughout, expresses the kind of deeply moving primal agony and preternatural resilience that never once feels false, and ultimately compensates for the ostentatious nonsense around her.

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

The writer-director Runar Runarsson makes a virtue out of this narrative simplicity, however, and delivers the equivalent of sweetly moving “slow” cinema, where we get to luxuriate in the characters for long, long, sometimes wordless takes, and to find in the exemplary performance of the relatively new and untested Hall a heartbreaking expression of hidden grief.

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.

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.

Personally, I gorged myself silly on the esoteric references, and appreciated profoundly the way that this ersatz Belmondo, just like the real thing, rubs his lower lip. But I’m not convinced that everyone else will.

Flawed to its core but never less than riveting

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

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.

The film ends far too neatly and with a speedy pass over the failures, but there is much here to savour.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 has its moments, mostly in the initial set-up. And Armstrong still lands a few zingers.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing here resonates and its slavish adherence to recent Pixar formula is ultimately deadening. Yes, Elio, you are unique and wonderful. Your flaw is your gift. Now, please, can we all go home!

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.

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.