Peter Bradshaw

You have to make friends with the jauntiness and zaniness of this film and to forgive its sometimes rather laborious quality, and Lara’s deadpan drollery is always watchable.

It is all presented earnestly and engagingly, though self consciously, and if the political debates are unsolved, well, that could be because they are unsolved in real life. It’s certainly a heartening demonstration that new ideas can flourish in a religious society.

Last and First Men is an interesting if minor work, perhaps comparable to Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens or Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity.

This film is an ordeal that I never want to go through again, but it’s undoubtedly executed with a cerebral conviction and uncompromising seriousness that no Anglo Saxon film-maker could approach.

Viceroy’s House is no very profound work, but it is a nimble and watchable period drama.

It’s an effective retelling, though the film could have concentrated more on her tragicomic relationship with her oil plutocrat husband. Could it actually have been a love story after all?

For pure gonzo outrageousness and steroidal silliness, this action spectacular made for Netflix by Michael Bay has a certain amusement factor and thumpingly unsubtle oomph.

Wilson and Burke give formidably good performances: a woman who desperately wants to give and receive love, and a man who hasn’t the smallest idea what any of that means.

It’s a sprightly meta gag, a movie about a movie, or perhaps a movie about a movie about a movie – or perhaps just a movie, full stop, whose point is to claim that reality as we experience it inside and outside the cinema is unitary despite the levels of imposture and role-play we bring to it.

Kawase's film is sometimes beautiful and moving but I couldn't help occasionally finding it a little contrived and self-conscious.

The mystery and beauty of bees emerge strongly enough. But should we be seriously concerned, or not?

This is a Hail Mary pass that Gosling just about manages to catch.

What is interesting about Sauvage is that it shows how savagely boring Leo’s life is, quite a lot of the time.

It’s a somewhat stagey reconstruction but an approachable and humane account of a great moment in scientific history.

Here is a film with its heart in the right place, an anatomical correctness coexisting with heartfelt, forthright conviction and an admirable belief in the virtue of simplicity and underplaying.... But this restraint sometimes sags into a kind of absence, and means the film itself is a bit rhetorically underpowered.

Whatever its flaws, this movie provides fans of French star Léa Seydoux with a treat.

For me, it tends to be a recipe in which you can't taste either of the constituent ingredients. The big man-to-wolf transformation scene is still a marvel.

This is a movie whose absurdities need to be indulged.

For a film renowned for its violence, Garcia unfolds at a leisured, almost lugubrious, pace with scenes allowed to unspool at a length that would never be allowed in any Hollywood thriller today.

The movie’s operatic claustrophobia makes its mark. Cult status beckons.

It may be no more than the sum of its parts, and the slightly soap-operatic finale doesn’t entirely distract your attention from untied plot threads, but there is some great fancy footwork in the narrative and fierce satirical strokes that recall Tom Wolfe.

Perhaps to overcompensate for the lack of conventionally opened-out dramatic action, there is some big closeup acting from Gyllenhaal, but it’s a well-made and watchable picture of a man in the secular confessional box, a sinner forced to occupy the place of a priest.

It’s a melancholy, dreamy study.

The routine is more familiar and the semi-staged stunts – which faintly undermine the credibility of all but the most spectacular moments – are more conspicuous. But there are still some real laughs and pointed political moments on the subject of antisemitism and online Holocaust denial (though I was disappointed to see the film go along with a dodgy “Karen” gag).

This film floats, but, like a synchro-swimmer doing the “egg beater” leg movement, it needs a fair bit of strenuous activity to keep it upright.

This Faust is part bad dream, part music-less opera: sometimes muted and numb, though with hallucinatory flashes of fear.

It runs out of steam in the final 10 minutes, but there's some gruesome drama and Cusack is on decent form.

Sightseers is funny and well made, but Wheatley could be suffering from difficult third album syndrome: this is not as mysterious and interesting as Kill List.

Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time, lost film projects, lost love and all those beautiful women that you never got to sleep with.

As things turn out, this case turns on a rather ridiculous coincidence: but never mind, it’s an entertaining piece of counter-factual noir.

Rylance is good casting as Maurice: his delicate sing-song voice and sometimes faintly unfocused gaze fit nicely with our hero’s lovably awkward determination, as well as Flitcroft’s sense as a natural comedian that there is something more than a little absurd in the game of golf.

The issues involved here might have been discussed a little more extensively and the provenance and context of the TV interview archive material could have been labelled more clearly. But this is a decent film.

The ensemble cast work wonderfully and intuitively together; I loved the surges of emotion, and then the palate-cleansing moments of silence and calm. The song is a tremendous setpiece and the dialogue has a music of its own.

This long film is blisteringly brilliant for the first hour or so. Then there are shark-jumping issues.

Overall, this is a likable and well-researched film, but there is something unsatisfying in ignoring the band’s later stages. Perhaps Part II is in the works.

It’s a nifty little tale of jeopardy and the eternally fascinating idea of breaking away from your parents: part frightening, part liberating.

This is a sentimental and folksy film, and the ending is a little garbled, but there is a gentleness and sweetness there, and Kingsley carries it off very well.

The pure strangeness of the movie commands attention and there is a charismatic lead performance by Japanese actor-musician Mitsuki Kimura, or Kôki.

There is something, for me, unrevealing about the drama, and almost sentimental about the final moments. But Hovig and Skarsgård are both very good.

It has plenty of energy and drive, and Jeremy Renner is really good, better as a Bourne-y agent than Matt Damon, tougher and more grizzled-looking, more convincing as the professional soldier who has grown careworn and disillusioned in the public service.

JK Rowling’s creative imagination is as fertile as ever, and newcomers Law and Johnny Depp impress, but the second film in the series is bogged down by franchise detail.

The movie is intensely acted, with a sense of interior longing possibly inspired by Terrence Malick, but it is also sometimes contrived and straining self-consciously for dramatic mood and moment.

It isn’t that Rosi has removed the context, it is more that he has supplied a new context, a more universalised, humanistic context of the spirit – with some artistic licence. But I felt that his earlier films give us a more intimate access to people’s lives than Notturno does, for all its intelligence, empathy and stoicism.

It is a strange, clenched movie: weirdly compelling, with an undertone of absurdity worthy of Woody Allen’s Love and Death.

Some of the wisecracking dialogue falls a bit flat and the narrative line is occasionally uncertain, but Grainger creates a watchable quarterlife crisis.

This is an epically long and epically brash film from director and co-writer Patty Jenkins, but Gadot has a queenly self-possession and she imposes her authority on it.

There are some great scenes, strong images, nice setpieces and Chen triangulates the sexual tension interestingly. The Breaking Ice is not as absorbing or fully realised as his award winning debut Ilo Ilo, but his film-making has an arresting fluency and openness.

The Blue Trail is a generic mashup: it partly has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant old people, and partly it has something far more subversive and disquieting. The mix of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.

Cruz brings gall, spite and passion to the role of Laura, but there’s not much for Woodley to do in the thankless role of Lina. And Driver is a remote and unengaging paterfamilias. But no one could doubt the style with which Mann stages those race scenes, with their danger and horror.

Buckley provides a vitamin boost in every scene.

Jones certainly shows Mr Burton’s sad and dignified loneliness.

This is a very male world and perhaps the inner life of Edith remains a mystery (as perhaps it might have been for Tolkien), but its earnestness and idealism are refreshing.

Depardieu brings his natural charisma and watchful presence to the role, and he can bring off Maigret’s air of worldly, tolerant bemusement and distaste at the transparently guilty people he comes across.

The raffish charisma and sinister, saturnine handsomeness of Javier Bardem is what raises this movie above the standard of soap-opera … mostly.

It all rattles along amiably enough.

Boseman carries off the drama with flair and style.

What gives Jumanji its likability is that it has the emphases and comedy beats of an animation, but also the performance technique of live action – and the occasional reshuffling of avatars and players lets the actors show off a little bit further. Jumanji’s next level is rather satisfying.

I’m not sure that this documentary completely nails the movie’s attraction, and it can’t quite bring itself fully to condemn the misogyny or the rape scene, in which a woman of colour is assaulted (so that the white heroine can get her revenge) and is then forgotten. But there are plenty of insights.

It is a study of grief suppressed and a personality becalmed.

Moore never quite settles on a single, compelling riposte to Trump, never really hones his arguments to a piercing arrowhead of counterattack. Instead, he rambles over almost everything … entertainingly, but confusingly, ending on an image of Parkland School shooting survivor Emma González.

It’s at least as enjoyable as the much-hyped Mamma Mia! movies.

The movie is its own show of force in some ways, surely accurate in showing what the soldiers did, moment by moment, though blandly unaware of a point or a meaning beyond the horror.

The whole film is like an incomplete fragment, intriguing if frustrating.

The Sessions can be sugary, but it's likable.

A well made film, which slithers confidently in its slick of blood.

Nothing in the movie matches the fascination of its premise and its opening 10 minutes: the undisturbed status quo is mesmeric. Once the narrative grinds into gear, however, the film's distinctive quality is lost.

David O Russell’s Joy is an intriguing but weirdly subdued and stylised film.

A gentle, thoughtful and reflective movie.

It’s an impressively contrived film, almost a machine for winning awards, a monochrome reverie of midlife yearning.

Stanfield is a performer whom you can’t help warming to, although here, as sometimes in the past, I found myself wanting him to bring something extra in the third act, some new level of energy or anger. But maybe it would be wrong here.

Escalante’s storytelling vigour and his way with an unsettling image keep this film’s voltage high.

It's a bit sucrose, especially at the beginning, but this traditional, sweet-natured family film will tug on the heartstrings.

Some of the movie doesn't exactly convince, and some of the scenes have an actors-improv feel to them, but there's always plenty of humour and energy.

The film has sympathy and charm, although I can’t exactly share all the praise that’s been lavished on it. It unfolds in an indulgent, dreamy summer haze, halfway between rapture and torpor; a murmuring indie-stonewash of good taste.

Rabbit Trap loses focus, but not before it has shown us a scary performance from Croot.

[An] attractive and sympathetically acted movie in a classic New Wave style.

Michael Grandage’s new film has been coolly received by some, but I found it an interestingly fragile and Rattiganesque melodrama of repression and regret.

There is no romantic tragedy, nor even a visible grit in the oyster: just a dogged, talented, unassuming professional showing us that it’s about the perspiration, not just the inspiration.

Hang on for the outtake bloopers over the credits and you'll see Aniston momentarily unsure how to take a joke at her expense.

It has a seriousness, an unsentimental readiness to look reality in the face.

Songbird is an acceptably watchable thriller that’s more notable for what it achieves technically than anything else. For many, the topical gimmick will prove irresistible but for others, it will be repellent, making the decision to avoid an expensive, anti-escapist rental all too easy. Either way, it’s headed to the history books.

For all the guns and gore, it's as breezy and uncritical as a tale from the True Detective magazine that the cops can't help reading.

This is an amusing essay in amorous delusion.

It's all watchable and pretty funny, and the big setpiece is the three wildly queeny stewards Joserra, Fajas (Carlos Areces) and Ulloa (Arévalo) going into a drug-fuelled song-and-dance routine: a rendering of the Pointer Sisters' I'm So Excited.

Not a terribly profound movie, perhaps, but robustly performed and an interesting reminder of the dusty old debates on the point of being swept away by the great horror of the second world war.

It’s a disturbing, challenging drama, but one that perhaps begins to lose its narrative focus as the story proceeds.

A valuable if slightly passionless and reticent movie.

With a sly dreaminess, Vikander steals the movie from the two males.

It’s a melancholy, interesting film, slightly opaque, a cine-journal about the way youth is clouded by experience.

For all the competence and strength of Trapero's direction, the film is not as powerful as it might have been.

The spectacle of highly competent professionals going about their work is always absorbing, and Simons is an interesting man: reticent, calm, shy, intensely focused but apparently never losing control until the end.

Perhaps the film could have got under Charlie’s bland surface more. A creepily watchable drama nonetheless.

With playful touches of Spielberg, Shyamalan and even Hitchcock, veteran director Joe Dante has confected a neat little scary movie, not explicitly violent, but pretty scary nonetheless.

Woman Walks Ahead is a solidly crafted and well shot, if basically unchallenging film.

Boyz in the Wood isn’t perfect (there isn’t really a wood in it as such and the title is a bit strained), but there’s likable wackiness and weirdness, one or two sizable laughs and a very bizarre deus ex machina moment.

It is another highly sympathetic performance from O’Connor, who converts the British reticence of his earlier roles into Dusty’s strength and quiet vulnerability.

There is a simplicity and clarity of purpose here that I responded to and the Dardennes have got excellent performances from their young leads.

It’s an amusing and diverting film that, with a series of ellipses and jumps, finally takes us to an unexpected world of fear and grief – and then back again, to stylised unseriousness. An engaging debut, which Sendijarević will follow up with more substance to go with the style.