Kevin Maher

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.

This is impossibly strong writing for a wacky comedy.

Thatcher’s performance is mostly a marvel. She’s instantly sympathetic, the most deliberately “human” being in the film, and yet the genius of her characterisation as a robot is in the way she slightly over-enunciates her dialogue and walks with the odd shuffle of a Thunderbirds marionette.

Past western, part romance, part philosophical treatise, this Sundance Film Festival stunner also feels like the greatest Terrence Malick film that Malick never made.

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

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.

Very occasionally a movie appears that understands the potential of cinema so deeply that it changes the medium for everyone.

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.

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).

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

Still, Norton’s great. It should’ve really been the Pete Seeger story.

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

The film is fun for a while, and it’s certainly the most commercial project that the experimental Canadian director Guy Maddin (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) has delivered. But it’s also pretty tedious and not half as smart as it might have been. Plus it’s very lazy, and smug.

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

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

It looks nice and, at best, it’s tapping some vague sexual anxiety about marriage-wrecking shaggers with big moustaches. But really ...

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.

Hollywood finally delivers a worthy successor to The Wizard of Oz with this musical adaptation, starring the superb Erivo as Elphaba and a startlingly good Ariana Grande as Glinda.

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.

Mostly newbie director Malcolm Washington puts his trust in Wilson’s words, the play’s complex characterisations and the phenomenal performances from his never better cast.

The film is consistently gripping and harrowing, while including delicate moments of optimism, where Abraham and Adra enjoy quiet conversations (sometimes beautifully shot by Szor) over a hookah pipe at night. And then, inevitably, it is back to violence, conflict and hate.

The songs are often exquisite, the duets heartbreaking. The performances are trophy bait, Saldaña’s especially. And the go-for-broke direction belies the notion that a septuagenarian like Audiard should be making movies of autumnal wisdom. This is a vivid, high-energy film, one of the year’s best.

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

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.

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.

Arguably the most heroic character in the film is the city. And Blitz is, instantly, one of the great “London Movies”.

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 visually appealing, obviously, because Guadagnino does not make ugly films. But it’s difficult to convey how little, dramatically speaking, is happening here.