Mark Kermode

A lumbering, humourless, tech-driven damp squib of a movie, this long-awaited (or dreaded?) sequel to one of the highest grossing films of all time builds upon the mighty flaws of its predecessor, delivering a patience-testing fantasy dirge that is longer, uglier and (amazingly) even more clumsily scripted than its predecessor, blending trite characterisation with sub-Roger Dean 70s album-cover designs and thunderously underwhelming action sequences. In water.

Ultimately, it’s the film’s sheer strangeness – that peculiarly magical, lapsed-Catholic sensibility that runs throughout all of Del Toro’s most personal works – that makes this sing and fly.

A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.

This deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.

Few will remain unmoved by this intriguingly adventurous and thought-provoking drama.

It’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.

O’Connor clearly isn’t afraid of rattling cages when approaching sacred texts. There’s something refreshingly untethered about the gusto with which she reimagines Emily, tossing aside the image of a shy, sickly recluse, replacing it with an antiheroine whose inability to fit in with the ordered world is a source of strength rather than weakness.

Flux Gourmet makes us laugh because, on some bizarre level, we do actually believe in and care about these utterly preposterous characters and situations.

At its heart this is a gothic melodrama, a fever dream of childhood trauma haunting adult life, replete with skin-crawlingly cruel visions of inquisitorial torture, brutal ordeals and hellish infernos – more Nightmare on Elm Street than My Week With Marilyn.

What Moonage Daydream does manage to do is to share some of the adventurous spirit of its subject – a chameleon who wasn’t afraid of falling flat on his face while reaching for the stars. If Bowie’s career teaches us anything, it’s that no one can laugh at you if you’ve already laughed at yourself. Certainly his capacity for balancing seriousness with self-deprecation (“No shit, Sherlock!”) remained one of Bowie’s most endearing traits.

Mortensen and Seydoux play it deliciously straight, jumping through the well-rehearsed philosophical and physical hoops with elegant ease, conjuring a sense of yearning humanity that saves the production from descending into silliness… just about.

Lorne Balfe’s sparsely used music leaves plenty of open spaces for the drama to breathe, as if inviting the audience to fill in the blanks with an internal accompaniment (tragic? Comedic? Ironic?) of their own choosing.

The film too often seems to be heading somewhere extraordinary, only to disappear into an ambitious conceptual hole that, while occasionally startling, is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

It’s that blend of heartbreak and joy, profundity and absurdity that is the key to this enchanting movie’s magical spell.

A thrillingly intense central performance by Alice Krige (who earned her genre spurs in the underrated 1981 screen adaptation of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story) is the lightning rod at the core of the film, grounding its hallucinogenic visuals in the terra firma of past tragedies and modern traumas, provoking “dark thoughts; really dark thoughts”.

An impressively slick and slimy performance from Javier Bardem is the standout selling point for this serviceable if (perhaps appropriately?) workaday satire on corporate corruption and alienated capitalism.

The result has homemade charm to spare, proving delightfully ridiculous but also poignant.

It’s a riotously audacious work.

None of which is to say that Good Luck to You, Leo Grande isn’t admirably subversive and enjoyably whimsical fare.

It doesn’t help that Dominion spends a good deal of time trying to figure out what story to tell and which genre (or country) to tell it in.

It’s a playfully twisted affair – not quite as profound as it seems to think, perhaps, but boasting enough squishy metaphorical slime to ensure that its musings upon textbook male characteristics are rarely dull, and sometimes deliciously disgusting.

Top Gun: Maverick offers exactly the kind of air-punching spectacle that reminds people why a trip to the cinema beats staying at home and watching Netflix.

Behind it all is an endlessly saddening search for that transformative sacrament evoked by the film’s title – alluring yet elusive.

The result may be a tad overlong and convolutedly overstuffed, but it made me laugh, cry and think – which is more than can be said for many a Marvel flick.

The atmosphere is stripped down and austere, allowing the songs to speak for themselves as they transport us from this world to the next.

While the Norns-of-fate narrative may contrive several reversals of fortune and sympathy, there’s little of the genuinely uncanny weirdness that made Eggers’s first two features such a treat. What madness lies herein is not of the north-northwest variety but more in keeping with the bonkers blockbuster spectacle of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

Beautifully believable performances from Haarla and Borisov add emotional weight, rivalling the nuanced naturalistic charm of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy.

Ali & Ava is a vibrant work that uses the transcendent power of song to turn a streetwise tale into a diegetic musical, with genuinely surprising results.