Peter Bradshaw

What an extraordinary story of sexism, violence, diplomatic bad faith and dishonesty on an international scale.

It is a thoroughly intelligent production, a film festival event that could not exist in the rough-and-tumble of regular movie distribution but will I hope find a home on streaming services.

It is an interesting work, delicately and discreetly animated, with a quiet visual coup in its final moments.

There is release at the end of this fine film, but no euphoria; just a sense of having come through a period of evil, the memory of whose darkness will never entirely lift.

It is a sombre, thoughtful, restrained and often powerful piece of work.

The gentleness of the connection between Jason and Georgie gives Scrapper its warmth. Just hanging out together on camera is much more difficult than it looks, and Dickinson and Campbell manage it well. Regan looks like a very impressive and capable movie talent.

It’s possible to be slightly overwhelmed by the scale and the social realist detail of the film, which was shot over a five-year period from 2014 to 2019, but the hope and idealism of the young workers is moving.

The pure work-in-progress energy of all this is exhilarating, and if the resulting movie is flawed in its final act, then this is a flaw born of Jia’s heroic refusal to be content making the same sort of movie, and his insistence on trying to do something new with cinema and with storytelling.

Been So Long has a sweet-natured openness. It balances the tough realities of life in the city with the buoyant possibilities of romance isn’t easy, and succeeds a lot of the time. Michaela Coel is tremendous in the leading role.

This is the sort of British movie that I can imagine being made by Michael Reeves or Robin Hardy back in the 60s and 70s, drama that’s all about strong characterisation and heady atmosphere.

It is interesting that this new cut of the film gives a much fuller account of Harris’s ferocious consumption of cocaine, which I thought the film originally glossed over in favour of a more sentimentally traditional booze narrative when it came to discussing that picturesque concept of “hellraising” – although in both versions I liked Harris’s contemptuous refusal to be cowed or psychoanalysed: he indulged because he loved it.

This Carry-On really could have leaned in more to the classic trappings.

It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.

A fun ride.

[A] highly entertaining and outrageously over-the-top Cinderella soap opera.

This is a derivative movie, whose comic entanglements are perhaps there to provide an alibi for the obvious plot implausibilities - but it’s well made, great looking, and nicely acted.

There is a fair bit of sentimentality here, but an awful lot of affection and energy as well.

It’s an interesting, strange film, with a key moment withheld from the audience – and yet its omission, and the resulting ambiguity and mystery, is something we are almost supposed to forget about.

The tunes are gold, and as Jane approaches a local creek, resplendent in her gorgeous yellow gown, we get one of the most famous visual gags in the history of the musical.

Dream Scenario is a cousin to Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and very enjoyable; it is at once strangely light-hearted and heavy with menace.

Dolan's energy and attack is thrilling; his movie is often brilliant and very funny in ways which smash through the barriers marked Incorrect and Inappropriate.

This is a big, muscular picture which aspires to the crowd-pleasing athleticism of Spike Lee’s sports icons; it’s very enjoyable and there’s a great turn from Washington.

In narrative terms it never really develops any of its characters or relationships, yet its two utterly heartfelt lead performances make this a grimly authentic spectacle.

It's a tough, absorbing and suspenseful drama, excellently acted by its three non-professional leads.

This film isn’t really sure where it’s taking us and how, or if, it wants to surprise us, and the key scene with Klaudiusz doesn’t work.

Lin-Manuel Miranda gives us an unashamed sugar rush of showbiz rapture and showbiz solemnity in this heartfelt tribute to Broadway talent Jonathan Larson, played here by Andrew Garfield.

The film coolly conveys the awakening-from-denial horror that their investigation spreads through the film industry and I admire the way it takes the macho cliched nonsense out of journalism in movies: these are not boozy guys being adorable and chaotic, but smart, persistent people doggedly doing their job.

[Pearce] gives us a carefully crafted dramatic setup, an intriguingly curated selection of suspects for the crime and all of it building to a fascinating, finely balanced ambiguity in the movie’s climactic stages.

Very few films or plays can survive the stigma of having an exclamation mark after the title, but Fred Zinnemann's bigscreen version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, originally released in 1955, still has some breezy charm and robust American music, under those vast cloud-dappled skies in Cinemascope.

The film is a contemptuous slap at boredom, at hypocrisy and at everything petty and mean. I’m not sure that it entirely transcends all these things, but there’s a rebellious spark.

It meditates on identity and belonging, the poignancy of not being valued, not being seen, the transition from childhood to adulthood, girlhood to womanhood, sexism and cruelty. The energy and heartfelt good humour offset the moments of cliche and implausibility.

Queen and Slim doesn’t entirely work. The credibility factor isn’t too high sometimes and there are big set pieces that don’t gel. . . . Yet this is a punchy, watchable film.

[A] terrifically stylish work.

The tone of the film is sometimes a little opaque. There is some slightly cliched 16mm footage of subway scenes and indulgent home-movie material and Huntt’s own voiceover has something of the student graduation piece about it. But there is a rich, dense texture to this very questioning, personal film.

There are some cheerfully amusing moments . . . . But really the banter and the elegance needs some substance in the script and it really isn’t here, or not enough of it, and the serious moments seem glazed in a kind of negligent unseriousness.

It’s high-minded, valuable work.

Unassuming and old-fashioned funny entertainment isn’t exactly what we associate with this film-maker, but that’s what she has very satisfyingly served up here. It’s not especially resonant or profound but it is observant and smart, with some big laughs in the dialogue. The whole thing is enjoyably absurd though not precisely absurdist.

In this film it perhaps isn’t clear what the sacrifices have been for, and Durkin is sufficiently loyal to wrestling and its fanbase not to question it; however there is a muscular force here and the sentimental postmortem scene is inspired.

Yannick doesn’t try blurring the lines between reality and performance in any Pirandellian way. The comedy is simpler than that. Yet there’s a touch of sadness as Yannick realises, as many other dramatists have done, that the actors are the ones getting the glory.

What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story.

It’s an adventure which begins by being bizarre and hilarious but appears to run out of ideas at its mid-way point, and run out of interest in what had at first seemed to be its central comic image: humans turning into animals.

Though this is familiar Lynch stuff, it is never dull, and I was often buttock-clenchingly afraid of what was going to happen next and squeaking with anxiety.

This is a sweet-natured, but essentially undemanding film from Kore-eda.

The school is no more dysfunctional than any other institution and a lot more intelligent and self-questioning than many. A very engaging film.

Wheatley's new film is grisly and visceral, an occult, monochrome-psychedelic breakdown taking place somewhere in the West Country during the civil war.

It’s an enjoyable spectacle, and a madeleine for the 1980s: but there was something more to say about friendship, sexuality and the music itself.

Inside Out 2’s view of growing up has nothing in it as powerful or real as the When She Loved Me song from Toy Story 2 – but there are a lot of entertaining moments, including a great demonstration of what sulky teen sarcasm does to the tectonic plates of your emotional geology.

[A] richly enjoyable documentary tribute.

A decently acted, heartfelt film.

A solid serving of popcorn entertainment.

What an enjoyable spectacle it is.

It goes on for ever without getting properly started: an epic of depthless self-indulgence.

The Biosphere 2 project now looks like reality TV, or maybe a conceptual art happening. Its quixotic extravagance is rather amazing.

For all his commitment and drive, Gibney shows us the trees but not the wood, and never quite nails the cover-up itself.

Fastvold’s film is distinctive in that she shows us how physical constraint and violence are part of the fabric of living.

It’s an intriguing, disturbing, amusing twist on something which in many ways could be a conventional horror-thriller from the 1970s or 1980s, or even a bunny-boiler nightmare from the 90s.

Sheridan is emerging as a master of the Mexican standoff, the shootout, the stomach-turning crime scene, the procedural office politics, but he’s also adept at tuning into the vulnerability and strength of the women and men called in to uphold the law. Wind River is a smart and very satisfying movie.

This film winds up looking like the most expensive in-house corporate promo in history: shallow, parochial and obtuse. By the time the credits roll, we’re apparently supposed to be euphoric – not so much at individual sporting achievement, but at all the billions of dollars that Nike has been making.

Queen and Country is an entertaining and sympathetic guide to a lost world: a rite of passage that Britain was to find it could do without.

It is often poignant and humorous but also placid and complacent, with performances bordering on the self-regarding and even faintly insufferable.

Lovely, heartfelt performances from Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth carry this intimate movie.

The metaphorical properties of The Matrix are part of what makes it so seductive, along with the no-filler-all-killer action.

This is an almost unbearably painful and emotional group family portrait.

Perhaps no film can entirely compete with the simple fact of this novel/museum’s existence, but the movie circles around the dual conceptual artefact beguilingly.

It is a film with its heart in the right place, but the dialogue and characterisation are both plonkingly unconvincing.

The film perhaps suffers from a loss of nerve about how villainous to make the villain, but it zaps along very entertainingly.

It is an interesting story, and yet the film doesn’t quite summon up the atmosphere of the raft. It doesn’t fully plunge you into that strange milieu, nor does it quite analyse exactly what was going on.

It is effortlessly and unassumingly funny – and terrifically smart.

There’s a rich confectionery of strangeness, sadness and fear to this very absorbing film.

As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film was over.

This is a genuinely bizarre, startling, freewheelingly lo-fi and funny indie picture with the refreshing bad-taste impact of Todd Solondz or Robert Crumb.

Season of the Devil is the work of a real auteur: every millisecond of his film has been rigorously created. There are moments of dreamlike intensity and the despair of the period is genuinely conveyed. Only the strongest devotee of Diaz could however deny the presence of longueurs in this film.

The film’s poetry resides in its thoughtful inactivity, its vernacular spirituality and its gentleness.

How bland and forgettable this film is, without in the smallest way harnessing the real performing power of Banderas, Colman, Pugh, Winstone et al.

In the course of a mammoth, horribly absorbing four-hour film from Charles Ferguson we are immersed in a world of milky TV news footage, big lapels, bulbous combovers, dirty tricks, sweat, jowls and guilt.

The film’s real power is in the accumulated testimony from others about the Netanyahus’ entitlement and paranoia.

Cine-narcissism like this is always tiresome, and it isn’t any more palatable in a European setting.

Honey Boy is a fluent, heartfelt, tightly structured and well acted personal story.

It is all entertainingly absurd and yet the pure conviction and deadpan focus that Fassbender and Fincher bring to this ballet of anonymous professionalism makes it very enjoyable. And there are moments when the veneer of realism is disquieting.

The explosively potent Graham does deliver a colossal, intimate ending, acted with complete and affecting sincerity. He has presence, potency and force.

Brings a new urgency to an old subject: the ivory trade, which is threatening the world’s elephants. This threat has not been cancelled or brought under control, as I had assumed. The film persuasively argues that it is all but out of control: so much so that elephants are in danger of being wiped out in the wild in just a matter of years.

What seems to be most therapeutic is their contact with the dogs. As one teacher puts it: “You are more than good enough for that dog just the way you are.”

Erin Brockovich is a study in Hollywood optimism, and Roberts sells it hard.

A lucid, emotionally honest account of trauma that lies beneath the smiles of family photos and wedding videos.

This is not as richly compelling as other Almodóvar films, but it’s a fluent and engaging work.

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.

Tom Hanks leads this handsomely shot but stolid and blandly self-satisfied western.

The sheer sustained intensity of the drama and performances carry it through.

This movie really brings some gobsmackingly weird and outrageous spectacle, with moments of pure showstopping freakiness. Eventually it loses a bit of focus and misses some narrative targets which have been sacrificed to those admittedly extraordinary set pieces.

The first world war is one of the 20th century’s oldest, grimmest tales of futility and slaughter. Dibb and his excellent cast put new passion into it.

Claire Denis’s new film is a seductively indirect love triangle, a drama of the mind as much as the heart. It’s intriguing if contrived and anticlimactic, though acted at the highest pitch of sensual conviction.

There is a strenuous earnestness here, which is made to coexist with entirely artificial romcom dialogue of a kind not spoken by real human beings.

It is a desperately unhappy story, sympathetically told by film-makers Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri.

I still can’t be convinced that Megalopolis is anything other than an (honourable) failure. But Figgis’s documentary is an absorbing success.

It's solid entertainment.

This is a richly intelligent drama, in which every word and every shot counts.

It is a handsome-looking film, though it has a promo look to it occasionally, like a lavish tourist ad. I loved the horse’s-eye view Spender gave us at one stage, careering around the track.

Some critics have expressed reservations about melodrama and overworked symbolism, but I found it gripping, with an edge of delirium.

The film is intelligent, thorough and sympathetic, with Rupert Everett narrating Beaton’s diaries. But it never quite persuades you that Beaton really deserves to be considered a substantial artist.

Dead Pigs is an unassuming topical entertainment (rather different from the movies of its executive producer Jia Zhangke), but diverting and well-acted.

Mandabi features an excellent performance from Guèye, who is innocent and culpable all at once. This is gentle, walking-pace cinema that leads us by the hand from vignette to vignette, from scene to scene, presented to us with ingenuous simplicity and calm.

Viewers may be split on the question of exactly how satisfying it all is in the end. The performances are strong.

There are a few laughs in Z2: of course there are. But they are algorithmically generated and corporately approved. It’s the kind of movie you put on an iPad to keep the children quiet on a long plane or train journey; nothing wrong with that of course, but the heart and soul are lacking.

I find myself admiring his visual and compositional sense, while being a bit exasperated by the provisional and coyly non-committal nature of his storytelling.

Shallow Grave is persistently cynical and uningratiating, a tale of nasty, greedy, stupid people who don’t realise that the finders-keepers rule doesn’t apply to a suitcase full of cash whose criminal owners will not merely want it back but want to create the specific circumstances in which Juliet, David and Alex will be unable to testify against them in a court of law.

Dark Waters is a movie that works marvellously well within its own generic terms, and perhaps after the fey disappointment of Todd Haynes’s previous, rather insufferable fantasy Wonderstruck, this tough, clear movie was what Haynes needed to clear his creative palate.

There are some good gags and routines here, but loads of them, particularly the one about what it was like being eight and getting hit by your mother, have been done with far more invention and wit by Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.

The film pinballs cheerfully about the place, from crisis to crisis, from losing the tickets to getting back the tickets, with no great narrative purpose other than fun.

The Dig is actually not a very earthy film, though there is intelligence and sensitivity and a good deal of English restraint and English charm, thoroughly embodied by the fine leading performers Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes.

It’s spectacular and immersive, with a sensational opening. But it gets bogged down in its own one-note, one-tempo uproar and open-ended parkour camerawork – impressive though that is – and suffers from a number of sneaky false-flag get-out clauses that feel like a cop-out.

Never was a title more misleading. This is sophisticated pleasure.

Matilda is a tangy bit of entertainment, served up with gusto.

The throwaway gags and throwaway ideas reminded me pleasantly of the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled from 1967. Lowe’s comedy has bite.

It is a love story that is also a fascinating artefact: quixotic, romantic, erotic.

Just as in Stacy Peralta’s classic 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, this gives its audience a sense of the almost pastoral innocence of skateboarding, its devotion to nothing more or less than having fun: a subversive urban vocation that is dedicated to the art of pleasure.

[Berg] uses Jeff’s answering machine messages and archive 90s material, including the unmistakable, moody black-and-white MTV footage, to tell a very sad story with sympathy and urgency.

This is the kind of movie whose amiable directionlessness and romantic gentleness generate a lot of warmth; it’s the kind of independent film which we haven’t seen a lot of lately, endowed with intimacy and a kind of dreamy charm.

It is a deconstruction of genre and a meta story of failure from which the director salvages a teaspoonful of success.

Oddly, Magic Mike somehow looks like a much darker and more challenging movie than is actually the case.

There is something nightmarish and hallucinatory about this business and also in the terrible retribution exacted by Oreste, a grotesque mob chieftain. The film has a throb of something disturbing and transgressive.

It is a masterpiece of black-comic bad taste and a positive carnival of transgression. The secret is the deadpan seriousness with which everything is treated.

Life can be desperately embarrassing in your first year at university when you are trying out new identities and personalities. This film replicates that agonising discomfort.

This is a jewel of American cinema.

It’s an uncompromising midnight movie.

Wilson and Stanley are both excellent performers and they are the mainstays of a valuable piece of work, but I felt the ending was contrived and a bit grandiloquent. However, the visual style and fluency of the film are obvious.

It’s a potent drama – and a melancholy reminder of the talent that Irish cinema and TV lost in McGuigan

In its trashiness – and, yes, its refusal of serious substance – The Substance should really be put out on VHS cassettes and watched at home in homage to the great era of home entertainment pulp and video-store masterpieces of weirdness and crassness.

All The Money In The World is not perfect; there is a touch of naïveté and stereotyping in its depiction of the malign Italians with their one, redemptive nice-guy gangster. But with the help of Plummer’s tremendous villain-autocrat performance, Ridley Scott gives us a very entertaining parable about money and what it can’t buy.

Could Nasheed be the political Prospero to save the island – and the planet? Well, now he is out of power, and the Copenhagen summit was a disappointment. Perhaps his advocacy will help to bring the climate change issue back into political fashion.

However smart and sophisticated this film is, it may disappoint those who, in their hearts, would still like to be genuinely scared.

It’s possible to read Friendship as a plausible, if far-detached character study, a cringe-comedy Single White Male heading for disaster. Then it swerves away, following its nose towards something weirder.

It is heartfelt, but its periodic attempts at thriller-style bouts of excitement are redundant, and I wondered sometimes if the film-makers were sure what exactly their story was.

Writer-director Emerald Fennell (a showrunner for TV’s Killing Eve) lands a stiletto jab with her feature debut, and Carey Mulligan is demurely brilliant as the appropriately named Cassandra.

The real-time agony of the wedding day itself has an edge-of-the-seat factor, and Kooler gives a sensitive, emotionally generous performance.

Gary Oldman’s superb livewire performance is now virtually an authentic testament of the man himself. Alfred Molina’s morose, self-hating Halliwell is also utterly convincing: Bennett’s script cleverly conveys their long years of bickering domesticity.

Journeyman is flawed, but intelligent and heartfelt.

A black-comic psychological drama with poise and self-possession. Featuring Fabrice Luchini and Kristin Scott Thomas, how could it have anything else?

A entertainingly nasty film for the new year.

For me, King Jack relies too much on violence for its dramatic voltage, but it’s a well-acted movie with heart – and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

It’s eerie, startling — and yet also unexpectedly benign.

It is not a new direction for this film-maker, admittedly, but an existing direction pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.

It’s a movie that is boldly anti-clerical, juxtaposing the spectacle of faith with a hidden reality of corruption and hypocrisy – although in the final act I sensed that it perhaps did not quite have the courage of its satirical convictions.

The title is appropriate: it’s garrulous, elegant, bristling with classy performances from an A-list cast, and Deborah Eisenberg’s screenplay has a theatrical intimacy. It’s loosely and waywardly plotted, perhaps as a result of having gone through many drafts, though maybe not enough. It is slightly unfocused and uncertain as to where its emotional centre really lies – though there is a charm and a big dramatic finale.

Despite the film’s obvious interest, it is a bit conceited and stately, a little like Wim Wenders’ movie about Pope Francis, though without the sycophancy.

Exhibition is challenging, sensual, brilliant film-making.

This film does not offer any actual conclusions, but it is an atmospheric immersion in the old, smoky and very male world of American TV journalism.

It’s a movie straining for more than it’s achieving, moment by moment, but Goth’s toxic energy always holds the attention.

In every shot and every scene, mostly in closeup, Ronan carries the film with her unselfconsciously fierce and focused presence.

For me, it never came to life.

The film’s real ferocity is saved for the ideologues of terror.

It's a likable scary story – with hints of Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg.

It might resemble other family dramas, but there’s a hum of something strange underneath, a sense that life is about surrendering to the infinite flow of events.

Herzog and Oppenheimer are back (and Oppenheimer gets a co-directing credit) with another nimbly curious and fascinating film on a similar topic: meteorites. This is a rare example of modern documentary film-making that uses voiceover – that inimitable Herzog growl.

The Painted Bird is a brutal kind of ordeal, but eerie, unearthly and even beautiful sometimes: a bad dream that leaks into waking reality.

Contrived and possibly overheated though the film might be at times, there is real storytelling gusto to it, and Laurent punches it across with relish.

This heartfelt movie-musical of The Color Purple sugars the pill and softens the blow, planing down the original’s barbed and knotty surfaces, taking away some of the shock of violence and tragedy and tilting the experience more towards female solidarity and triumph over adversity.

Overall, it’s an entertaining bit of summer fun.

Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot.

Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent.

This documentary by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin argues that Pussy Riot suffered an old-fashioned Soviet show trial, and what emerges is the effrontery and hypocrisy of Putin's attempt to associate these three young women with the Bolsheviks' suppression of religion.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre and amusing new film has a predictably strong performance from Emma Stone, an intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score from Jerskin Fendrix and, most importantly, a wonderful montage finale – but frankly it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump.

It is a sweet-natured little tale, indebted to Monsters Inc and the whole Pixar canon but saved from being predictable with other borrowings (Back to the Future, Inception), as well as its various metafictional levels of storytelling.

Coppola tells the story with terrific gusto and insouciant wit, tying together images from the first scene and the last, so that the narrative satisfyingly snaps shut.

This is a calm and often affecting study of L’Arche, a community of people with learning disabilities in Trosly-Breuil, northern France.

It features an awful lot of very rich, clever, cordially self-satisfied collectors and connoisseurs; their pink, twinkly-eyed faces positively beam out of the screen, and surely Hoogendijk is inviting us to wonder how Rembrandt himself would have painted them.

Stingily is relaxed and amiable, but in acting terms there may be nothing else there and the film doesn’t develop in any interesting direction.

This film is a very sly, subversive and disturbing black tragicomedy about a universal secret addiction.

It’s amiable, but the real action thrills and the chemistry between the leads isn’t there.

Though I was willing myself to enjoy this fourth film, about the heroine’s adventure with a younger man, the Bridget Jones series has frankly run out of steam.

This has to be the year's most pointless remake: a boring and badly acted reboot of John Milius's gung-ho red-scare actioner from 1984.

This film is a very tasty confection of satire and scorn.

This film may not have all that much new material but it piercingly asks the right questions about Chaplin’s elusive reality.

It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.

Perhaps the full story of the encampments has yet to be told.

This is another powerful addition to Larraín’s movies about the ongoing agony of Chile, and the Chilean people’s struggle to confront the past, armed with the hammer and the sharpened stake.

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.

With its pale, washed-out colour palette, its eerily slow, almost somnambulist pacing and occasionally bizarre emotional demonstrations, Post Mortem is strangely gripping.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, a crescendo of paranoid trippiness building to an uproarious grossout in its final moments.

This is a fervent film, heartfelt and shot with passion and sweep.

It is well acted, well shot, earnest and high-minded in its eroticism, but with a certain Mills-and-Boony-swoony-ness that creates something unsubversive in the love affair itself.

It hardly needs to be said that subtlety is not really among this film’s attributes - but it is fierce, angry, engaged, and intensely, sensually alert to every detail of its own pleasure and pain.

I’d like to see a film about a comedian who, like Bishop, really does flower into being funny.

There are moments of inspiration that light up this film like flashes of lightning.

It’s a tremendously engaging and likeable superhero ride, in which the classiest of casts show they know exactly where to take it seriously – and where to inject the fun.

Not everything works here, but the sheer crazy confidence-through-chaos of the Suicide Squad and their bizarrely dysfunctional MO makes for a mighty spectacle.

As Chiara, Rotolo’s face dominates the screen in closeup for much of the film, and she manages to look very young and yet very worldly wise at the same time. Another very impressive achievement from Carpignano.

The Day After is an elegant exercise. It feels like a chapter from something bigger.

This is a film in touch with modernity, but I wonder if the livestreamers were quite as apolitical as this film makes them appear. And I was unsure about Zhu’s decision to correct all the images from colour to black-and-white, an arthouse-ification that the film didn’t need.

Refn delivers some shocks - but not the shock of the new.

As always, I find myself considering that in a world where everyone’s a cynic and an ironist, Cousins’s unaffected rapture is unique and refreshing. And there is an odd-couple comedy here, with Cousins as the unstoppably garrulous super-fan and Thomas as the reticent English gentleman, almost like a charismatic Cambridge don on the long vacation, who has picked up a voluble hitchhiker.

Here is a film about a very complicated and painful kind of coming of age, or maybe a meditation on “coming of age” as something that never actually happens; it also examines the illusory dividing line between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, present and past.

It’s an engaging film, but it leaves you with a feeling that there might be a deeper, darker, more specific story yet to be told.

Among Jarecki's interviewees is David Simon (author of The Wire) who is incandescent with contempt for the system.

The performances from Hathaway and McKenzie are vehement and watchable, but the film itself is an unsatisfying and anticlimactic oddity.

It’s a movie presented with absolute conviction and gimlet-eyed seriousness, but less wayward humour than Cronenberg often gives us.

The ending is tiresome and shark-jumping in the extreme.

This is terrific film-making – enough to bring a rush of blood to the head.

There is terrific fun, charm and storytelling energy in Superboys of Malegaon, and it settles on an interesting theme: very rarely indeed does a new film-maker find success with a completely original work.

It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere.

It is a deeply personal drama about culture, family, community and what it means to represent – though it can also be self-indulgent and even a bit self-involved, though this is arguably a function of the story.

London Road was a mighty success on stage. Now it is a unique triumph on the movie screen.

There are smart moments of fear and subliminal shivers of disquiet, the dance sequences are good and of course Guadagnino could never be anything other than an intelligent film-maker. But this is a weirdly passionless film.

Chappie is a broad, brash picture, which does not allow itself to get bogged down in arguing about whether or not “artificial intelligence” is possible. It has subversive energy and fun.

It’s an entertaining romp, although the formulaic quality is becoming a little obvious.

It is well-acted and well directed by Mylod with tasty side plates of droll humour.

It’s a great performance from Bridges, and he seems weirdly young in this film, certainly compared to the brilliant craggy oldsters that later became his acting birthright. You can still see the boyish, vulnerable figure that he was in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. One of a kind. [20th Anniversary]

Homemade is a diverting but indulgent collection, and the experiences of genuine hardship don’t shine through very much.

The film moves more freely because of its willed unconcern with the historical implications of the Munich hostage massacre; modern audiences may feel the contemporary context makes it naive or obtuse. But it’s a muscular, well-made picture with the tang of cold sweat.

Heretic is gruesome and bizarre and preposterous, the third aspect made palatable by Grant’s dapper performance of evil.

It's an athletic, loose-limbed piece of movie-making, not perfect, but bursting with energy and adrenaline.

It is a well made, well controlled film, and its sullenly monomaniac quality – perhaps partly a function of the star doing the writing and directing – is entirely appropriate for the subject matter.

It’s a study in anger and emotional hurt that feels like a work in progress, an unfinished script the director has put before the camera before its complete development. Yet it is absorbing and challenging, as everything from this film-maker always is.

Maybe the final five minutes are a little too over the top, but the overwhelming impression is that Dounia has ambition and vision, a conviction that she might still be able shape her own future. It’s an exhilarating film.

The work is the most important thing and Addario’s speaks for itself.

The incessant and eerily unsatirical product placement is enough to give you a migraine: especially the complacent Disney cross-promotion.

It is an absorbing and moving tribute to the courage of the young victims of Utøya.

This is an absorbing story, acted with superlative delicacy and maturity by Chastain and Sarsgaard.

It’s a compelling, visually exquisite piece of work.

It is basically deadly serious, and after some moderate knockaboutfun, settles into something pretty dull. Where's the edge?

Wonderstruck is sometimes sweet and well-intentioned, but more often indulgent and supercilious.

Welcome to New York proves thoroughly engrossing. Here is a work of ragged glory; dirty and galvanic. [Unrated Version]

It certainly provides that rarest of things: relaxing enjoyment. In all its uncompromising goofiness, 22 Jump Street brings onstream a sugar-rush of entertainment.

This is an elegant, chilly dream of despair.

The comedy is at odds, perhaps even at war, with the gravitational downward pull of bittersweet seriousness, and the sucrose content is pretty high by the end. But it's an entertaining film.

It is an introspective and downbeat film, but forceful and personal, with excruciating and all-too-real moments of mortification. And it can be weirdly moving, almost out of nowhere.

Chris Pratt and Tom Holland play teenage elves in this standard-issue but entertaining supernatural quest story.

This documentary is a bit reticent on the subject of racism. It’s not a subject that Trejo addresses, other than to say that cops who used to pull him over now do so to get selfies. Yet it’s an amazing true-life success story.

Day’s rendition is heartfelt. But the direction and storytelling are laborious, without the panache and incorrectness of earlier Daniels movies such as Precious (2008) and The Paperboy (2012). A cloud of solemnity and reverence hangs over it, briefly dispelled by the music itself.

It all adds up to less than we hoped, though Pearce’s direction is never less than confident.

It’s a movie about masculinity that could have been solemn and prescriptive; instead it’s pulsing with humanity, thanks in great part to tremendous performances from its leads Natey Jones, Alexandra Burke and smart newcomer Temilola Olatunbosun.

The dual storylines are wrapped up together ingeniously with images and ideas slyly implanted at the very beginning. And there are some jump scares that had me Fosbury-flopping out of my seat with a yelp.

The film scoots smartly past the death and brings us briskly on to the entertaining business of sheep-oriented crime detection. It’s all very silly, although, as with Babe, I have to confess to agnosticism about digital talking animals, even if the technology here is next-level. It’s an entertaining tale of ovine law enforcement.

The sheer pointlessness of everything that happens subtracts the oxygen and even Fanning’s imperishable star quality can’t save it.

The interest of this garrulous, convivial documentary creeps up on you by degrees.

All the fire and lifeblood of this idea has been sucked out and we are left with something bland.

Marsh's movie is calm, level, downbeat. The tension is subtle – perhaps subtler than it really should be.

Pugh’s pure force carries everything, and conveys the central paradox: to unlock this mystery, Lib is going to have to surrender to it, to believe in it, in order to gain Anna’s confidence and learn the child’s own awful secret. The wonder reverberates with the pangs of hunger and fear.

Sometimes the casting and staging work well, sometimes not so well.

Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese makes a really stylish debut with Disco Boy, a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness, or into something else entirely: the heart of an alternative reality, or a transcendent new self.

There is a lot of sound and fury in this Macbeth, but not without meaning. It’s not perhaps a very subtle version, and I felt that Kurzel should have perhaps worked more closely with Fassbender with the contours of his speeches, and shown the painful mind-changing and nerve-losing in the early stages. There is an operatic verve.

Sands is still an opaque figure by the end of this film. We have his sombre writings and journals but, interestingly, there are hardly any clear photographs, and we learn little about him as a human being.

There is ultimately something very unbalanced in this movie: the female lead and one male support are outstanding; another supporting male is fine and the third is frankly uncomfortable and miscast.

The Perfect Candidate is the sort of film I can imagine getting a remake in contemporary America or Britain, with not as many changes as we might assume.

It is another powerful, absorbing picture from Campillo and a fitting swan song for Laurent Cantet.

This struck me as that kind of comedy horror in which (like much romantic comedy) the “comedy” half of the equation has gone missing.

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.

For good or ill, the film does not directly engage with Ginsburg’s views on contemporary feminism and sexual harassment and what is sometimes derisively called identity politics.

The Survivor wins on points, a decent and honourably intended picture about one man’s ordeal in the horror of the Holocaust and the heartbreak that came afterwards.

This is substantial and rewarding.

James Erskine’s film showcases the unforgettable Holiday voice: her elegantly casual, almost negligent readings of melodies, with a sensual moan or purr that was on the verge of a sob.

The film is a respectful and valuable tribute.

It’s fair to say Washington has never quite topped this performance. It’s an unparalleled treat to watch him messing with the bewildered Hoyt at their first meeting at a diner, and then to watch the two men striding out to the car, filmed from a low camera angle. It is all thrillingly ominous.

It is a sad and lonely world, sympathetically captured, beautifully photographed.

It’s an entertaining and watchable film, with horribly convincing reconstructions of what shopping centres and jobcentres looked like in 1987.

The direction from Eric Lartigau keeps things moving along fast and furious: preposterous it may be, the movie is carried off with some style.

It’s an intriguing, startlingly restrained and even cerebral piece of work from Ferrara, an unimpeachably serious homage, with an assured lead performance from Willem Dafoe.

In some ways, If Beale Street Could Talk is a portmanteau movie with great performances from KiKi Layne, Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry, a succession of scenes from interrelated lives, constellated around the main narrative arc and supercharged with an ecstasy of sadness and knowledge.

It’s a dismal TV movie of the week: trite, shallow, cautiously middlebrow and blandly complicit in the cult of female prettiness that it is supposedly criticising.

A gentle and charming entertainment.

Francofonia is a fascinating essay and meditation on art, history and humanity’s idea of itself.

Richness, warmth and tenderness pulse from this lovely documentary.

An explosion of pass-agg hipster quirkiness is what’s offered here, an everything-everywhere-all-at-onceuniverse of cutesy vulnerability and pseudo-childlike ersatz charm.

Well, Caine and Jackson and their ineffable class give this film some real grit: it’s a wonderful last hurrah for Jackson and there is something moving and even awe-inspiring in seeing these two British icons together.

It's an intriguing and distinctive story, soberly told.

A movie with incomparable bite and strength.

It is at once a relief and an obscure disappointment that the mystery is not left enigmatically unsolved.

Steve McQueen finds the key of C major for this well made and unashamedly old-fashioned wartime adventure, heartfelt and rousing and – yes – a bit trad overall, sometimes even channelling the spirit of Lionel Jeffries’s The Railway Children, although for me that’s no put-down.

Gazer’s atmosphere of looming disaster and dreamlike oppression crowds in on you as the movie progresses; an intriguing, genuinely scary picture.

What emerges from Klayman’s film is how very important Brexit Britain is as a self-vivisecting research animal in Bannon’s experimental thinking.

While it is flawed, this film finds an assured place in the quietist tradition of African cinema with beautiful images and strong moments, and with relevant things to say about community, a woman’s place and the climate crisis.

I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers.

This is a film that carries you along and there is an added savour in seeing those cherubic faces which have since settled into middle age.

I don’t think L’Immensità quite encompasses what it’s straining for and I’m not sure that Penélope Cruz is directed towards her greatest strengths, very good though of course she always is. But Crialese has fervency and style and those fantasy worlds might even have a touch of De Sica’s miraculous Milan.

A deafening explosion of energy, gruesome violence and chaos.

Trance is a disappointment: a strident, chaotic, frantically overcooked film with an almost deafeningly intrusive ambient soundtrack. There is some embarrassing, eyeball-swivelling acting from the male leads, and the elegance of the film's premise is quite obliterated by its crude and misjudged violence.

There are some heartfelt moments, but this is an opaque and frustrating experience.

In the end, Collins emerges as an opaque figure, as resistant to interpretation as her famously 2D fictional heroine Lucky Santangelo.

Calling a film-maker a “dreamer” sounds hackneyed, but it does justice to his idealism. Perhaps no other description will do.

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.

This is a poignant and weird film.

This is a celebratory film, and it’s easy to agree with its praise for Fauci’s intellectual heroism, especially when reactionary anti-science charlatanism is running rampant across the internet and the political right. But the documentary maybe doesn’t nail the historical paradox at its centre: Fauci has been vilified twice in his life, from different directions.

Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance.

Although I can’t help wishing Blakeson could have given Pike’s co-star Dianne Wiest more to do in the final act, it is grisly and gleefully cynical entertainment. If Ben Jonson directed films, they would be like this.

There are, arguably, scenes in this film which are less than subtle – and there were times when I wanted something more indirect. But Manville and Neeson have a real empathy and intimacy on screen.

This film opens up the storytelling throttle with a throaty growl, delivering the doomy romance of an old-fashioned western and the thrills of a mob drama.

This film is justifiably celebratory and respectful, and it reaches out beyond the rock fanbase.

It’s a highly entertaining portrait of the two men, and Tucci’s own directorial brush strokes are bold and invigorating.]

[Black] creates some outrageously contrived and protracted shootouts and one or two good old fashioned action explosions. But he also keeps the dialogue cracking along.

What a rush of storytelling energy and style.

Hong makes all of this look as easy and fluent as breathing.

An unclassifiably brilliant gem of American independent film-making.

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

This is a movie whose absurdities need to be indulged.

It’s a movie made dense and vehement with Julie’s passion for bikes and her angry sense of a death wish which is going to strike her, ahead of anyone else.

This is an engaging ensemble piece, acted with vehemence and sincerity, though it concludes a little melodramatically.