Nicholas Barber

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.

Compared to most US action adventures, The Northman is adventurous and distinctive. It feels compromised, but the great stuff outweighs the not-so-great stuff. To see or not to see? If that is the question, the answer is: see it.

As it is, I have a strong suspicion that Wicked will work much better as the first part of a double bill, with Wicked Part 2 being shown after an interval. But we'll have to wait another year to know for sure.

The story is cluttered, the tone is muddled, and the pacing is off. Again, that doesn't make the film a disaster. In some ways, the identity crisis is what makes it worth seeing. But this muddled production will be enjoyed more by politics and cinema students than by children who are hoping to be enchanted by Disney magic.

Throughout the film, various people draw a distinction between "Maria" the woman and "La Callas" the superhuman diva. Its title notwithstanding, Maria is definitely about "La Callas".

With all due respect to Miller's bonkers vision, and his incredible ability to put that vision on screen, Furiosa seems like one of those spin-off graphic novels that plug the gaps between two films in a franchise, but which don't quite match up to the films themselves.

Stewart is such inspired casting that she makes all this eccentric nonsense watchable.

Overall, then, Wonka seems to be straining every sinew to be the best possible family entertainment at cinemas this Christmas.

The first in DC's new cinematic universe starring David Corenswet is "glib and flimsy". Comic fans will love it, but this curio feels like "an eccentric sci-fi B-movie".

As unbalanced as it might be, One Night in Miami is a well-acted history lesson and a sincere tribute to the men, their friendship, and their inspiring cultural importance. It’s just that King and Powers’ treatment of that outstanding premise hasn’t quite made the leap from stage play to big-screen film; it has landed in TV-movie territory instead.

It’s a bold, angry, provocative indictment, but because Franco zooms back to the state-of-the-nation big picture, he loses sight of the characters who were sketched so sharply in the opening scenes. They’re still in the film, but they have so little agency and dialogue that they are reduced to counters on a board – or ants for him to scorch beneath his magnifying glass.

The film’s director and co-writer, Ol Parker, is so committed to light, feel-good escapism that he leaves out all of the requisite tension and twists — and, for that matter, the requisite jokes.

It’s always watchable, and it has a distinctively grainy, intimate look, but the vague, generic characters and incidents are the kind of thing you might scribble on the back of an envelope without having done any research at all.

It feels as if Guiraudie had two separate ideas for a contemporary urban comedy but couldn’t figure out how to develop either of them, so he stuck them in one script and hoped for the best.

Like all of the best rock docs, it will make you want to listen to the band’s albums. But after the second hour has come and gone, you might decide that you’ve listened enough, after all.

It's true that many viewers have already fallen under its spell, but Zhao and O'Farrell have stripped away so much of what makes the novel magical – the time-travelling structure, the hypnotic prose rhythms, the internal monologues and the tiny, tangible details – that what's left is no more profound or authentic than any other costume drama set in ye olde days.

It’s an original and timely feminist spin on HG Wells’s concept, and a welcome riposte to those thrillers that are fascinated by homicidal maniacs at the expense of their victims. If only the film itself had been clever or scary enough to do justice to its ingenious premise.

If The Midnight Sky has the sombre tone of a high-minded art-house project, it has the bland design, sentimental characterisation and flimsy plotting of a children's TV movie. The story may have links with today's reality, but it never feels real.

The one Vaughn trademark that Argylle is lacking is the director's usual adolescent offensiveness. He's taken out all the sex, gore and swearing, which may be a sign of belated maturity, but which leaves Argylle seeming all too close to Ghosted, Shotgun Wedding, Freelance, Murder Mystery, and the other sort-of action, sort-of romance, sort-of comedy films which have been dumped on streaming services over the last couple of years. They're all vapid, anonymous blocks of content, but at least the others offer something vaguely glamorous to slump in front of in your living room when you can't settle on anything more nourishing to watch. Argylle, on the other hand, is being released in cinemas, so the shoddy and derivative nature of the enterprise is harder to forgive.

Don't get me wrong. Plan 9 from Outer Space is a terrible film. A dreadful film. An atrocious film. But it does have some elements that are halfway decent, and it's unlikely that it would have a cult following without them.