Nicholas Barber

It's kitsch at times and transcendent at others, but the delicate puppetry and the gonzo ambition will guarantee Annette a cult following.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is no masterpiece, but it's warm, upbeat, unpretentious entertainment, and it's bound to be popular. We certainly won't have to wait another 23 years before the next Dungeons & Dragons film comes out.

Structured as a hardboiled detective thriller, Crimes of the Future has plenty of provocative concepts and images that will put a grin on your face (not least the dancer who has several ears on his face), but you may find yourself willing the plot to pick up momentum, and the ickiness to get a whole lot ickier.

You have to hand it to Nolan. To use the old expression, he puts the money on the screen, delivering the kind of noisy, extravagant and fundamentally ridiculous pulp fiction which reminds you why you go to the cinema. But it collapses under the weight of all the plot strands and concepts stuffed into it. You don’t get the impression, which you usually get from his films, that every element is precisely where it should be. Some parts of it go on too long, others not long enough. It’s a treat to see a really big film again, but a smaller one might have been better.

Viewers are sure to be impressed by Aster's prodigious imagination and technical skill, amused by his gallows humour, and amazed by some of the outrageous images he puts on screen. But whether they will be enthralled by the film is another matter.

The Order is a sombre, steadily paced, conventional drama. It's superbly acted by its charismatic cast, the locations and the period are evoked beautifully, and, best of all, the violent robberies and shoot-outs are staged with a nerve-jangling ferocity that recalls Michael Mann's Heat. But it isn't quite as gripping as the events deserve.

If a screenplay is going to be fixated on the history and purpose of storytelling, the stories within it have to be better.

Eternals is more serious in tone and more deliberate in its pacing than the average Marvel movie, with less of the usual banter and no cameo appearances by other superheroes. But, if you're looking for the humanity and originality of Zhao's other films, you won't find much of it here.

What's captivating about Bones & All is that it is so understated. The first few gory scenes suggest that Guadagnino has made an outrageous black comedy that gets its startled laughs and screams by contrasting the conventions of a coming-of-age romance with those of an X-rated monster movie. But soon Bones & All becomes entirely straight-faced. It isn't a horror film or a comedy, it's a sincere, sweet indie road movie that happens to feature bloodthirsty serial killers.

The racing sequences have enough energy and jeopardy to raise the pulse rate, but the rest of Ferrari... well, surely a film about high-speed cars shouldn't pootle along as slowly as this one does.

The main feeling it instils in the viewer is a renewed respect for the imagination of Lucas. The Rise of Skywalker has been lovingly crafted by a host of talented people, and yet the best they can do is pay tribute to everything he did several decades ago.

The Whale retains the pacing, structure and conventions of a solid but clichéd melodrama.

Niki Caro’s film is a well-constructed family-friendly wuxia drama, with bright colours, grand scenery, and commendable themes. But it’s best enjoyed if you’re expecting a solid tween movie rather than a monumental cinematic landmark.

Craig's soul-baring, skin-baring turn aside, Queer is a proudly artificial curio.

Leterrier's achievement in assembling such a gargantuan, multi-stranded, globe-trotting, head-spinning blockbuster is impressive, but however many gruff sermons Dom makes about his family, it's impossible to care about any of it.

The film is interesting and informative, but all those bomb blasts don't leave you as shaken as they should.

Twisters isn't bad, but a braver film might have admitted that addressing the causes of extreme weather might be more useful than throwing nappies at it.

This laidback crime caper doesn't have a great deal more to offer, but there is something to be said for seeing the pals from Ocean's Eleven on the same screen again.

As cluttered as it is, though, Blink Twice is stylish and savage enough to gain a cult following. And it is undoubtedly the work of a skilled writer-director, rather than an actor who is having a go at directing.

Parts of Dune: Part 2 seem just as monumental, lavishly bizarre and downright disturbing as anything that Jodorowsky and Giger can have had in mind.

Ramsay's film-making flair lights up scene after scene, but as the narrative fragments, and reality and fantasy blur, you're left with the urge to read the novel to find out what's actually happening. The film may have communicated its heroine's boredom and bewilderment a little too effectively.

They're all beautifully performed, and they all sparkle with Lanthimos's deadpan genius: in his world, everything is just off-kilter enough to be funny, but just real enough to be horrifying.

The story also ends on a touchingly optimistic note, which is unusual for a Batman film. Who knows, maybe the next one won't be quite as gloomy. Pattinson might even crack a smile. But I wouldn't bet on it.

This one may be the most unruly and excessive of the trilogy, but it is as sweetly touching as any film with so many slimy, tentacled monsters in it could be.

It's good fun, but unless your tolerance for the director's idiosyncrasies is stratospherically high, the chances are that the story will seem too random for you to care about by the halfway point.

Across the Spider-Verse leans into the artificiality of its world: its central, postmodern concern is how the multiverse will be affected by the tangled web of various Spider-Man narratives. If you don't happen to be a universe-hopping comic-book superhero, it's hard to relate to any of it.

Despite all this Moana moaning, though, it's still a high-quality piece of work: a hurtling Disneyland rollercoaster ride that small children, especially, are bound to enjoy. The irony is that if it had been a television series, viewers might well have gushed about how spectacular it was. But as a film, Moana 2 wouldn't be near the top of any list of Disney's finest.

The chilling fact is that the real world has overtaken the one in the film. If you read any article about how AI is creeping into our lives these days, then M3GAN's killing spree will seem quaintly innocuous in comparison.