Peter Bradshaw

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.

This is a story about the randomness of life in the big city, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV soap feel to its succession of escalating crises.

This is all amiable enough, with the all-important dimension of laughs: Tatum and Bullock showing that they are smart enough to know how silly it is, and that they know that we know that they know.

The Children Act is concerned with love, intimacy and moral responsibility and it is refreshing to see a movie which sets itself standards of this sort. But there is also something a little too neat in the way all these things are wrapped up. Emma Thompson’s performance, so elegant and vulnerable, carries the picture.

After some robust storytelling at the start; the film drifts into a series of images and moods which perhaps don’t deliver as much impact as intended.

It’s a likeable film which borrows liberally from everything and everyone, and if it’s put together by numbers, well, then it is done capably enough.

There’s a lot to admire in the performances from Garner, Henwick, Yovich and Weaving.

The Survival of Kindness has static elements of an art installation, a non-narrative dream state that is part arresting, part frustrating.

Operation Mincemeat is watchable enough, but perhaps can’t find a fictional way into the stranger-than-fiction outrageousness of the scheme itself.

Ritchie’s film is at all times over the top, crashing around its digital landscapes in all manner of beserkness, sometimes whooshing along, sometimes stuck in the odd narrative doldrum. But it is often surprisingly entertaining, and whatever clunkers he has delivered in the past, Ritchie again shows that a film-maker of his craft and energy commands attention.

A good-natured love story, doomed to flower and fade in the space of a single holiday, leaving behind the traditional coming-of-age realisation that friends and family are what’s important right now.

The movie shrewdly creates a shiver of nausea in the institutional use of “diversity” as another prestige-marker.

This is a film that doesn’t dramatically harness the vast forces it’s gesturing at, but trundles determinedly along with very little variation of tone or pace.

There is tragedy in this story, but the grownup questions of guilt and loss are de-emphasised.

Worryingly, there is an actual film-maker in the story who appears to be intervening in the action and The Nothing Factory appears to retreat into self-reference when it could be offering concrete ideas on the issue of people keeping their jobs.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them.

This big-hearted underdog sports comedy runs on rails, with no great surprises, but it’s likable.

You Hurt My Feelings is a movie about emotional pain, and there is something very astringent in it, a salty tang which isn’t really effaced by the later plot transitions whose emollient message is that we all fib a bit to our loved ones and it doesn’t mean we love them any the less.

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

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

Karia is a smart film-maker and this is a valuable beginning.

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

It certainly has its moments of poignancy and sadness and McGregor’s droll tones as the longsuffering cricket provide some grace notes of fun.

It is a preposterous confection of a movie, like one of the rich sweetmeats being languidly nibbled at court, but very moreish, nonetheless. It is handsomely furnished and costumed with blue-chip character actors in the supporting roles and some wonderful locations and interiors at the Palace of Versailles itself.

Saving Mr Banks is an indulgent, overlong picture which is always on the verge of becoming a mess. Thankfully, reliable old Tom Hanks snaps his fingers and – spit, spot – everything more or less gets cleared away.

The Idiots works as a situationist provocation about a situationist provocation, though claiming the sentimental high ground at the end. As ever, von Trier gets points for his sheer chutzpah.

Infinite Football is an austere 70-minute experience, but the eccentric idealism of Laurențiu Ginghină lingers in the mind.

Four John Wick films with Keanu fetishising his guns and sporting his increasingly werewolfy facial hair have been increasingly heavy going but now de Armas mixes things up and she is a smart screen presence. As for the ballet, the emphasis is on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; nothing wrong with that, of course, but if the Ballerina sub-franchise continues, let’s hope that different works are chosen and we see de Armas actually getting out there on stage in a tutu as opposed to simply racking up the kills.

The result is a film with urgency and heartfelt sympathy, but one which I couldn’t help thinking may have been better served as a documentary to focus more directly on the issues involved.

The performance styles of Behrens and Hoya are quite different – Hoya is more opaque – but this is a pointed, candid drama.

The Fever is a calm and quiet and subtle film, a little inert perhaps, but deeply engaged with the hidden lives of Brazil’s indigenous people. There is poetry in it.

This is a poignant and weird film.

The documentary vividness that Carol Reed brought to the streets of Vienna in The Third Man and London in The Fallen Idol, he here brings to Belfast in this fascinating but imperfect 1947 thriller.

For all that this film is about the revolutionary and disruptive business of art, it takes a pretty un-subversive view of art and artists, compatible with the museum gift shop. But I have to admit, it’s executed with brio and comic gusto – the “past” sections, anyway – and Lindon’s performance has charm.

Perhaps this movie is a little anticlimactic, but there is often an atmosphere of real fear, especially when Natalia is driven to the edge by her newborn’s incessant crying: a horrible moment which is not supernatural in the slightest.

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

All good stuff from Depp, although by sending up Trump’s 1980s period, it feels a little off the money, and this is a figure who has already somehow absorbed derision into his skin and made himself immune to it.

Malick does succeed, to some degree, on his own terms; he attempts to give some (stylised) sense of this man’s inner life: his emotional and spiritual architecture. It is admirably serious but static.

Nicolas Cage, Vanessa Hudgens and John Cusack give solid performances in this Prime Suspect-like thriller.

Hauser is the star and he keeps the film on track: poignant, lonely and vulnerable – maintaining the tricky balance of laugh-at and laugh-with.

It gives you a good idea of what a nightmare he must have been to work for, and the 24/7 tumult that drove his work. Fassbinder was the nearest an auteur came to punk rock.

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

It’s a very powerfully performed, intimate piece, perhaps inspired at some level by the classic adventure The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Mullan is very good at suggesting the careworn wisdom of someone who has to be a father figure, or even grandfather figure to men who don’t have his skill in self-control and self-denial.

When the decision is made, the final act has an almost morosely elegiac mood, as it must, as various speeches and set pieces reconcile its rather trudgingly earnest direction of travel with the witty, savvy materialism of the movie’s premise.

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.

It is a strange film in some ways, speckled with powerful, insightful moments but also with some strained acting, pulled punches and fudged attitudes, unable to decide if its heroines are compromised through having been loyal Fox staffers.

Cherry is a fervent movie, corn-fed with drama and action, but maybe a little less than the sum of its parts.

I was sometimes captivated but often frustrated by this epic essay-film, a meditation on Germany and his own family history that is stark, fierce, austerely cerebral and almost four hours long.

The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised.

The violence was for me almost unwatchable, but it’s a well-made and worryingly plausible film.

This film is no masterpiece, but the franchise has mutated, just a little.

There’s a mega-helping of daftness, silliness and goofiness in this wacky British comedy of Ye Olden Medieval Dayes from screenwriter Andy Riley and director Curtis Vowell.

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

It is possible to come away from the film less than convinced, but very impressed by the sheer force of Petzold’s film-making talent (recently so stunning in his drama Transit) but which has been here deployed for something which is a bit flimsy and silly.

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

Jafar Panahi has here created a quietly engaging quasi-realist parable, part of his ongoing and unique creative cine-autobiography, full of intelligence and humility and a real respect for women and for female actors. It is gentle, elusive, and redolent of this director’s mysterious Iranian zen.

It's a straightforward, heartfelt drama, well acted and well produced.

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

Quite a spectacle, and a nice family outing.

This really is a reasonably, moderately, whelmingly good film.

Profile is a pretty conventional thriller with pretty conventional stereotypes.

[A] decent retelling of an amazing true-life story.

I wished I liked it more. It is engagingly self-aware and excruciatingly self-conscious, wearing its hipness on its sleeve; it's ingenious and yet remarkably contrived. The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills. There are some great moments.

It’s a charismatic performance from Adewunmi, and Amoo’s camera often comes in close to his face and his gaze, suggesting that Femi is on the verge of some kind of epiphany or vision – and it’s nothing to do with the drugs.

At its best, Kaleidoscope is like an unsettling dream featuring an Escher staircase that plunges infinitely and vertiginously downwards.

Maybe the Indian influence on the Beatles’ music didn’t last, but India’s own prestige, its soft power in the west, was immeasurably enhanced.

The contemporary half of the film is for me less interesting, particularly in the overextended third act.

Garrel struggles to unearth anything new. The mechanics of the relationships on show fail to lead anywhere unexpected while the dialogue is often flat and on-the-nose.

It’s a big, ambitious, continent-spanning piece of work, concerned to show the Armenian horror was absorbed into the bloodstream of immigrant-descended population in the United States, but it is a little simplistic emotionally.

It’s a little hammy and soapy, with an occasional Pythonesque sense of its own importance but this film, directed by Richard Laxton, is performed with gusto.

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.

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.

This is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain.

A flawed, but interesting drama.

This is a formal and pedagogic production, but worthwhile nonetheless.

This inevitably doesn’t have the charge of the first story, but it is still interestingly weird and dreamlike, and quite disturbing. A commercially driven sequel, sure – but still effective.

The action is wrapped up with a slightly ridiculous reveal, which doesn’t quite make sense on its own terms, but Perfect Blue has its own kind of cult pungency.

This watchable, undemanding drama rolls along capably, enlivened by unmistakably Bennettian gags and drolleries which come along every minute or so.

A punchy, likable trio of performances are the point of this superhero action-thriller with energy to burn.

The visuals are not exactly cutting edge but the storytelling has bounce and there’s gusto in the vocal talents.

A decent, heartfelt, robustly presented drama.

Hepburn is in the boho-gamine mode, and this has a brittle charm, (arguably more than in Breakfast At Tiffany's four years later) but there is something unconvincing in the May-to-December pairing of 28-year-old Hepburn and 58-year-old Astaire and also something grumpy and not particularly classy about the way this film shrieks with laughter at silly modern women filling their empty heads with trendy Parisian intellectualism.

At times it looks like a parade of celebs, but the film comes belatedly to the point when it discusses Corbijn's parents, particularly his late father, whose approval Anton sought but perhaps never quite got.

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.

An irritating, baffling, fascinating film.

It is a bit silly, but is likable hokum.

It’s nice to see these figures again, but I couldn’t help feeling that there is something a bit underpowered and contrived about the storyline in Frozen II: a matter of jeopardy synthetically created and artificially resolved, obstacles set in place and then surmounted, characters separated and reunited, bad stuff apparently happening and then unhappening.

The Report is a cool, dry look at the facts.

A very cinematic spatial impossibility is conjured up by Robitel as he allows the audience to ponder how exactly these rooms are supposed to fit together. The film has a vicious streak of throwaway black comedy.

An entertaining if straightforwardly glossy action-adventure from the Disney workshop.

The pure silliness of this idea is enjoyable. The children give guileless performances, and Nyong’o gamely plays the broad comedy for all its worth.

It’s a watchable piece of faux history, but the movie does not know what to do with its own heroine, content to leave her to the clutches of its villain: Henry.

Jamie Bell’s tough performance carries this forthright, earnest, if limited drama.

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

Spall is good casting in the lead: miserable, hangdog, humorous and scared, like a handsomer version of Josh Widdicombe. James-Collier is a fierce screen presence: some film-maker needs to find something more for him to do.

I enjoyed it more when Hill showed a lighter touch.

A droll account of the world’s whimpering end.

It is a strange, enclosed experience: Dafoe’s mastery of the screen keeps it meaningful.

It is a film that does not proceed in the narrative style and the title seems to suggest that we should think of it as a different art form entirely: a constellation of themes, ideas, tropes, moods in which the personae relate to each other as concepts rather than characters.

The film is entirely ridiculous, often quite boring, with a script showing worrying signs of being cobbled together. But even as a longtime Von Trier doubter, I now have to admit it grows on you; there's a mawkish fascination and some flashes of real visual brilliance.

There is a sustained emotional seriousness in this movie, with committed performances.

What the film shows – perhaps not entirely intentionally – is that maybe you need someone vain enough to think he is destined to make a difference, and cunning enough to see how the vanity-economy of movie celebrity can generate media attention and cash.

Subtle it isn't. But the entertainment rev counter more or less keeps turning over.

The Animal Kingdom seems squeamish about going for the jugular in the way a proper genre movie would.

As a whole, it’s not exactly a masterpiece, but amiable and funny in a way that’s much harder to achieve than it looks.

Like so many Miike films, this is a firework display of strangeness, alienation and nihilism. It’s quite a spectacle.

It is up to McConaughey's crooked cop to carry the picture: a sleek, loungingly casual loner whose hunger for violence, like his hunger for fried chicken, is finally and horribly gratified.

It’s ingenious and watchable stuff, with cheeky twists, although the final escalation to full-on action mayhem is maybe a step too far towards pure absurdity. The film is also a bit lenient on AI: “Human or AI – we all make mistakes.” Uh … yeah. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Raven and Judge Maddox revive their human-digital chemistry for a sequel.

It’s cheerful and watchable, if a relentlessly on-brand fan promo, corporately policed and controlled, using vintage archive photos and video rather than closeup talking-head footage of the band now.

There is no doubting the verve and style of Eklöf’s film-making – and the brutality from people on an open-ended holiday from ordinary human empathy.

Gender, sexuality, status and power are all in flux here, a playful effect that is however withdrawn when we arrive at the sacrificial seriousness. It is a sweet tale which floats self-consciously out of the screen.

This is an intriguing, if undeveloped performance piece, elevated by Thompson’s class.

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.

This film is a blitz of bad taste, a cornucopia of crass, and it is weirdly diverting – more than you might expect, given the frosty way Suicide Squad was received critically – and engagingly crazy. Watching it feels cheerfully excessive and unwholesome, like smoking a cigarette and eating a chocolate bar at the same time.

The most powerful thing about the film is the "audition" scene at the beginning in which the prisoners have to introduce themselves in two ways: sorrowingly, and then angrily. It is a brilliant sequence, and the rest of the film doesn't quite match it.

It’s a likeable confection, and a pleasure to see Marisa Tomei on very good form.

Brosnan brings an intelligence and wit, together with a lightness, to the role - his softly Celtic vowels pleasingly reminiscent of Sean - along with a plausible virility Roger Moore never quite managed. And Pierce wears some beautifully tailored suits as to the manor born.

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.

Subtlety isn’t this movie’s strong suit and it’s often needlessly chary about drawing the parallel between sexism and racism. But it’s got a worthwhile story to tell.

The film really comes to life in the actual hip-hop scenes; the musical sequences have originality, comedy and freedom. The rest of the time, the film looks worryingly like a late 90s-early 00s cool Britannia geezer-gangster romp.

Apples is intriguingly deadpan and sometimes funny, though I couldn’t help feeling that it is also contrived, and even a bit flippant in a middleweight-arthouse mode, not quite as profound as it thinks but certainly displaying some impressively choreographed mannerisms of dysfunction.

For all its fantastical vein, this movie has an interesting grasp of what high school is really like – not a Hollywood narrative, neither funny nor tragic, and certainly nothing like that most unreal of genres, the coming-of-age drama. Rather it’s messy, downbeat and inconclusive, without teachable moments – like everything else in real life.

The plots are rickety and the characterisation has the depth of a Franklin Mint plate, but there are some funny moments and Kevin Doyle, playing the overexcitable servant Molesley, pretty much steals the entire film.

Foxtrot is a movie from Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz that is structurally fascinating yet also structurally flawed: its accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned by a whimsical final reveal.

This is a diffuse film, and lacks Afterlife's clinching motif. It is uncertain in both its tone and its message - if, indeed, any such message exists, or even needs to.... There is something melancholy and resonant about this film, and it has its own subtle, unsettling effect. [22 Aug 2001, p.12]

The effect is tender, sympathetic, diverting and often very elegant and indirect. But it withholds from us the full, real pain of damaged love.

It’s a valuable view on how easy it is for the news media to become sycophantic mouthpieces for the right.

The film’s relative failure to engage with the more quotidian details of Colvin’s behind-the-scenes existence is a shame, because it is here that some real clues to her personality might have been found.

A likable, admirably intentioned if slightly more predictable entertainment, in which the good guys and the bad guys are more obvious.

Redford delivers a tour de force performance: holding the screen effortlessly with no acting support whatsoever.

Billy Wilder's distinctive, irreverent slant on the world's greatest "consulting detective" holds up reasonably well 32 years on; you wouldn't expect anything directed by Wilder and scripted by his long-time associate IAL Diamond to be anything less than funny and watchable, and this is both.

Rocketman is an honest, heartfelt tribute to Elton John’s music and his public image. But the man itself eluded it.

Though it ends up as strident, laborious and often flat-out tedious as the first film, there’s an improvement.

This is a candid, sober, well-acted debut by the first-time director Ruthy Pribar.

The drama – featuring the kind of flat, chirruping upper-middle-class English accents that aren’t usually voiced on screen – is intriguing and uncompromisingly high-minded, right on the laugh-with/laugh-at borderline, but interestingly unafraid of mockery.

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.

A more unforgiving approach might have been more interesting.

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.

It is an attractive and sympathetic performance from Geirharðsdóttir as Halla.

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.

Perhaps Fox and the film itself don’t quite put us inside his anguish at first getting the diagnosis and then his decision to go public, but his courage is the more moving for being understated.

In all her signature deadpan intimidation, Huppert somehow gives the impression of being an exceptionally intelligent and self-possessed person who has never before acted in a film.

Like a great big playful un-neutered pitbull, Matthew Vaughn’s new Kingsman movie comes crashing into our cinematic lives this Christmas, overturning the furniture and frantically humping everyone’s leg before rolling over on the carpet for you to tickle its tummy or anything else that comes to hand.

The tricky mother-son relationship is well managed and Moore always brings to this kind of Oedipal drama a seriocomic intensity (as in Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace from 2007, playing opposite Eddie Redmayne).

It's an intriguing movie, in some ways, but its contrived and even bizarre final revelation depends on coincidences of almost Hardyesque proportions. It is not really believable, and yet if it is not taken literally, but as a cinematic prose-poem, it has undoubted force.

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

Franco's As I Lay Dying is a worthwhile movie, approached in an intelligent and creative spirit. The ensemble work from the actors is generally very strong, with a star turn from Nelson as the prematurely aged patriarch, and the story is presented lucidly and confidently.

These are brilliant impersonations, the kind that can only be achieved by exceptionally intelligent actors; the superb technique of both is matched by their obvious love for the originals.

At all events, it pays due homage to Edwards as a courageous pioneer.

This is Obama’s own film, so we can’t expect any tough scrutiny.

Julian Schnabel has made a heartfelt if straightforwardly reverent film about the last years in the life of Vincent van Gogh – acted by with all the integrity and unselfconscious ease that you would expect from this great actor.

I felt that the film was evasive about the uncinematic reality of what serious illness and death actually looks like, and the final choice is too simplistic. But the film is still something to see, if only for the marvellous performances from Garfield and Pugh.

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.

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.

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

It’s confusing and disorientating but brings back dreamy teen angst like the strongest of madeleines.

The film dissolves in silliness and whimsy, but not before it’s given us some surreal spectacle.

The story unfolds intriguingly within an intimate, almost claustrophobic environment. There is perhaps something ultimately undeveloped about it, but the film is a well acted, well presented piece of work.

This is a watchable enough film

Nanijani and Rae work well together, although “chemistry” is perhaps a stretch.

There are some laughs and it’s always likable.

This is clearly a very personal project for Avilés, and the heartbreak feels very real.

Perhaps it’s more for insiders and specialists, but this film is a taste of Italian life.

Kokkali persuasively enacts both the emotional hurt and emotional healing.

Not a knockout, by any means, but a win on points.

At 37 minutes long, its brevity perhaps exposes or even creates a flimsiness in his signature style that in a longer film would have more space to breathe and parade itself.

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.

I found something a little unfocused and even slightly indulgent or redundant in the way the images are put together (accompanied by a clamorous musical score by Evgueni Galperine) without making it clear to the viewer what we are looking at and where. Yet the film is so striking, especially on the big screen, almost itself a kind of land art.

Though a little mannered, the film has intelligence and force.

It is an amusing and gruesome premise, which writer-director Damian McCarthy stretches out into a convoluted, bizarre extended narrative.

When the wisps of khat smoke clear away, it is perhaps not easy to decide exactly what is left behind, or to decide if khat is a cultural practice to be celebrated or rejected: but there are some marvellous images and moods in this misty, impressionistic study.

Its fervency and its eroticism give the film its currency.

The film has its own kind of mad, migrainey energy and individuality, and Robert Pattinson gives a strong, charismatic performance.

It is a witty, intriguing film in many ways ... But I also feel the film is unsure of how much to disturb its audience, unsure whether to pursue the chaos and embarrassment of a bungled, noir-ish crime and an unsightly psychological disorder, or to contrive something more emollient: to finesse some sympathy and even heroism for the story’s troubled female lead.

It’s a bit hammy and TV-movie-ish, but you can’t help smiling at its feelgood directness and warmth.

Some enjoyable stuff, although a slightly weird deployment of Jim Croce’s bittersweet song Time in a Bottle at the film’s beginning and end – perhaps inspired by its use for Quicksilver’s slo-mo scene in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

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

It is a high-minded, often touching movie which replaces the nihilism and miserabilism often to be found in social realism, and replaces them with a positive vision of what the state can – and can’t – do to help.

It all bounces along amiably enough, due to the high-octane work of Boyega, Foxx and Parris. Perhaps they deserve to be in a more serious film or in a comedy that was skewed more to grownups. Well, it’s a film with its own peculiarly unexpected innocence and charm.

The movie has some real archival value and the simple juxtaposition of Polanski and Stewart – the oddest couple in Cannes, surely – has a surreal impact. But I wonder if there isn't something a little bit placid and self-satisfied about the film, which is paced remarkably slowly, given the subject matter.

The film’s plausibility-level isn’t perhaps as high as all that (it really works best as a period piece from the pre-2008 crash) but Kross brings to it a jaded, corrupted glamour.

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

Gentle, friendly, faintly bleary – and sans makeup – Pamela Anderson is an authentically likable screen presence in this intimate, if somehow elusive, documentary portrait from Ryan White; it is about her life and times and the super-strength misogyny she has faced from liberals and satirists in the long endgame of her celebrity career.

None of these characters quite flares passionately into life but all are persuasively portrayed, and it’s a vehement reminder of what doesn’t get taught in British schools.

This new movie could arguably have given Elba more to do, earlier in the picture, but it is the inter-relationship of the Enterprise’s crew which is the real source of drama. An entertaining adventure.

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

The Bad Boys are still providing innocent amusement.

Salvo is a strange, involving, if flawed movie.

There is talent and ambition here: the film has style, mood, references – and, inevitably, a great opening and credit sequence – though it's short on substance.

Mr Malcolm’s List has no great ambitions other than to amuse. But that is always harder than it looks.

It can be overwrought and even absurd but lively and heartfelt.

The movie still looks very good, and you'd need a heart of stone not to love the cat. [Review of re-release]

It is an absorbing, intriguing, bewildering work: often spectacular and beautiful, like a sci-fi supernatural disaster movie or an essay on nature and politics, but shot through with distinctive elements of fey and whimsical comedy.

A film deeply rooted in a close-knit community, with excellent performances, a sophisticated control of narrative tempo and – at least initially – a tragic force that could almost be compared with Elia Kazan.

There is an outstanding film somewhere inside this sprawling mass of ideas, which might have been shaped more exactingly in the edit.

The fierce sinew of Shaw’s performance gives the film some shape and keeps it grounded. Mackey and Krieps, both formidable performers, give the film their presence and force.

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

It's a likable film, though not a sensational development in Tim Burton's career.

Though flawed, its old-fashioned movie-making energy commands attention as well as its ingenious, if overextended three-act Rashomon structure, retelling the same story from three different standpoints, mostly without insisting on tricksy discrepancies.

Pure uncompromising yuckiness is what this comedy delivers. A grossout smack in the face. Deplorable. Unspeakable. Often funny.

The movie's pace flags a good deal once Bangladesh has been born in 1971, and the adult characters are much less interesting than their child counterparts, but there's enough here to entertain – and to send audiences back to the book.

It is a resoundingly confident drama.

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.

It’s flawed by a slightly unconvincing and anticlimactic gun-related ending, but well acted, forthright and confident in the universe it creates.

Justin Pemberton’s documentary, based on the bestselling book by French economist Thomas Piketty, tells us a story no less depressing or gruesomely hypnotic for being so familiar – like observing a slo-mo driverless car crash from the passenger seat.

This an enjoyably strange spectacle, perhaps best appreciated by taking it less seriously than its creators intended.

The movie thumps through successive events of Foreman’s amazing life in efficient, unsubtle, on-the-nose style, skating over his many marriages a little.

The Pusher remake may not have the full flavour of the original, but it makes brutally clear how the economics of drugs make paranoia and violence a fact of life.