Kevin Maher

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.

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

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.

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.