Peter Bradshaw

Audiard brings his usual ambition and sweep, energy and attack; although I wondered at certain points if the musical numbers functioned at some level as an alibi, to pre-empt objections about being the film being contrived.

Patel turns it into a very exciting and stylish movie. His previous acting work didn’t obviously point to a kickass action career, although his performance in The Green Knight might have given us a hint. He’s evolved.

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.

There’s a strong basis of originality here, and the warmth and good nature of the movie carries it along.

It buzzes with uncomplicated enjoyment.

Mia Madre is a tremendously smart and enjoyable movie.

It is superlatively well performed and well directed with a real narrative grip.

Wonderful entertainment.

Kokkali persuasively enacts both the emotional hurt and emotional healing.

Just when we thought it was impossible to say something new about , documentary film-maker Eugene Jarecki pulls it off.

The brio and ambition of The Italian Job can’t be doubted and Caine has enormous charisma.

Binoche’s performance and the movie are elegant, ingenious and sexy.

An irritating, baffling, fascinating film.

Preposterous though it may be, this is a terrific family movie in a style audiences may not have seen since Mary Poppins.

This extraordinary story has unfortunately been turned into a handsomely produced but laborious, drawn-out and dramatically inert movie.

A Hero is an engaging and even intriguing film, but I wonder if its realist mannerisms are concealing a slightly unfocused story.

Violence and tragedy is where the story is naturally heading, and this trajectory is plain in every scene and every shot: a world where aggression must either be violently and dangerously resisted or accepted.

This documentary is a spirited rebuke to the “sellout” narrative which has been allowed to grow up around his career, and a paean of praise to his commitment, talent and heroism.

It’s a tremendous film that was ahead of its time on LGBT issues and, in some ways, is ahead of ours.

This film has a horribly ingenious premise and there is something chilling in the central concept.

There are such great gags, and it is acted with such fanatical gusto by Barratt that it’s impossible not to root for this unlikeliest of heroes.

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very end.

An entertaining documentary. Maybe the full story of Studio 54 has yet to be told.

Perhaps above everything else, Arnold returns us to the most potent fact about the Cathy and Heathcliff love affair: it is a love affair between equals, not between a woman with coquettish "erotic capital" and a man with property and status.

The story has a moderate charm, but is less baroque and ambitious than many Japanese animations.

Reiner Holzemer has made a film that is intensely supportive and uncritical – as fashion documentaries tend to be – and to those of us who are outside the fashion world, it can be a bit opaque. Yet it is refreshing to hear creativity discussed with such seriousness and commitment.

It is a riveting, dreamlike evocation of this man’s tortured, unhappy life, whose transient successes bring him no pleasure of any kind.

Smith’s performance, honed from the previous stage and radio versions, is terrifically good.

Amstell creates a detailed ecosystem of in-jokes from the worlds of media and film, and from that cynical context he conjures a miraculously heartfelt love story, sweet and poignant in all its awkwardness.

Mug is a strange, engaging film – well and potently acted and directed, a drama that puts you inside its extended community with a mix of robust realism and a streak of fantasy comedy.

This is an absorbing, compassionate film.

At heart, Late Night is a romcom and like so many romcoms, the funny stuff recedes after the first act, as the plot and its relatability imperative gets into gear. Yet Kaling is very good at conveying the paradoxical misty-eyed idealism of those working for this long-running TV institution.

As for Radcliffe, he doesn’t seem to have a funny bone in his body, but then it’s difficult to tell considering the preponderance of unfunniness in this script.

It really is strange, a film with what is actually a pretty good premise for a comedy, but with no interest in actually being a comedy and also no interest in being a thriller, or even that mysterious erotic parable that it seems to be claiming to be.

It’s a fierce, stark, almost primitive parable of cruelty and power.

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.

RoboCop looks more than ever like Verhoeven’s masterpiece, a classic of 80s Hollywood and apart from everything else a brilliant commentary on the city of Detroit; hi-tech RoboCop is a harbinger of the decline of the automotive industry and the ruin-porn wasteland to come.

It is all unexpectedly potent, particularly in the absurdity and petulance and pain that Parsons crams into his performance. It’s a strange, compelling dose of unhappiness.

It’s impossible not to be carried along by the delirious rush of silliness in this knockabout screwball comedy.

It is an unsubtle and schematic but very well-acted Brit folk-horror pastiche from the writer-director Alex Garland; it feels like a reverse-engineered version of The League of Gentlemen, with the overt comic intention concealed or denied.

The adjective in the title is right. It gets old pretty quickly.

This film is an intriguing and well-made diversion, a puzzle whose missing pieces make a disquieting pattern.

It never quite catches fire, but it has a curious atmosphere of its own: menacing, pregnant with unease.

A very touching and insightful film.

Blichfeldt has made an elegant debut.

It’s a wildly dated-looking and derivative film, a quaint adventure in fantasised naughtiness.

It’s a diverting scenario, though maybe it doesn’t quite have the “danger – high voltage” thrill of Morris’s other works.

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.

A very valuable film.

The secret life of farm animals remains a secret, but a fascinating and even poignant one, in this strange and unexpectedly subtle film from the Russian documentary-maker Viktor Kossakovsky.

[A] terrific debut feature.

It is always entertaining, and delivered with the usual conviction and force but with less of the romantic extravagance than we’ve seen before, less of the childlike loneliness that has been detectable in his greatest movies.

A rather silly, pointless and directionless film.

It is a film with its own miasma of unease.

It’s a film whose initial charge of mystery and intensity dissipates over its running time, the narrative impetus slows, and there is that question of tone that is very much not solved by the revelation at the end. These drawbacks are offset by the directors’ terrific confidence and visual style.

The Coens are back with a vengeance, showing their various imitators and detractors what great American filmmaking looks like, and they have supplied a corrective adjustment to the excesses of goofy-quirky comedy that damaged their recent work. The result is a dark, violent, and deeply disquieting drama, leavened with brilliant noirish wisecracks, and boasting three leading male performances with all the spectacular virility of Texan steers.

There are some very coolly orchestrated scenes in the big city and Mackenzie ratchets up the tension in style.

The film occasionally hits a rather loud note of passive-aggressive piety, but it is very persuasive.

It has the ruminative lightness, almost weightlessness, the watercolour delicacy and reticence of the emotions, the sense of the uncanny, the insistent play of erotic possibility and that Murakami keynote: a cat.

In Another Country looks very much like something written on a napkin and shot in the one afternoon that Huppert could come to South Korea. Slight, diverting, forgettable.

Why Don’t You Just Die! is an accomplished film that makes the very most of its limited sets, without seeming constricted or stagey.

The sad thing is that there doesn’t appear to be much space for someone like Ardern in modern politics; less space than ever in fact.

It is a tough story, told with conviction.

Moll has given us this audacious, witty and absorbing mystery thriller, a tale of adultery and amour fou with a gamey touch of the macabre.

With production designer Paulina Rzeszowska and cinematographer Annika Summerson, Bailey-Bond creates something almost unbearably close and oppressive, like the bottom of a murky fish tank. It’s a very elegant and disquieting debut.

Sex is earnest, but cerebral and challenging.

This has elegance, vigour and charm.

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

The film concludes in a minor key, and unresolved: always smart, amusing and engaging.

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

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

For one star to get an award, a handful of defeated nominees have to swallow their pain, as the spotlight moves away from them. For one star to deliver the shock of the new, another one has to receive the shock of the old. A Star Is Born turns that transaction into a love story.

It is about a homecoming that isn’t quite a homecoming, a reckoning with something not exactly there, an attempted reconciliation with people and places that can’t really be negotiated with.

Maybe there is a kind of saintliness in the film which is occasionally difficult to take, but it’s an accomplished, tremendously shot piece of work.

The performances of Jonsson and Blyth are fierce and overwhelmingly convincing.

The problem is that almost everything here looks like route one scary-movie stuff that we have seen before: scary clowns, scary old houses, scary bathrooms. In their differing ways, Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick were inspired by the potency of King’s source material to create something virulently distinctive and original. This film’s director, Andy Muschietti, can’t manage quite as much.

What a thoroughly likeable and funny film.

As for Louis-Dreyfus, she is very good in the way that only she can be: intelligent, sensitive, focused and intense, hitting the line-readings with percussive force. How overwhelming it might have been to see her and Petticrew play this story without the indie high-concept bird.

It’s a stark, fierce, wonderfully acted film.

Sixty years on, the big-screen adaptation of the landmark play looks more conservative than revolutionary but Burton’s firepower is undimmed.

Despite being a valuable reminder of Thunberg’s idealism and unselfconscious courage, the film doesn’t entirely work.

Without that initial fanbase buy-in, Julia feels like a redundant tribute, with something very indulgent about the “foodie” rhapsodising.

I found something a little too subdued in this film, though the evocation of Tokyo itself is very uncliched, despite the emphasis on something that is the subject of so many touristy jokes: the loos. Not perfect, but engaging enough.

This is not animation which is there to exalt, or soothe, or celebrate human loveliness: it is animation which takes a fiercely miserable satirical stab at the world and itself, a language which is unreconciled, unaccommodated.

Maybe this film, concluding as it does on a distinctive note of euphoric sentimentality, does not add up to quite as much as the director thinks; but it intrigues, it exhilarates and it shows that Sorrentino is Italian cinema’s heir to Antonioni.

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen are two excellent actors outclassing their material in this amiable feelgood-liberal entertainment, inspired by a true story.

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

Sergio himself has real gentleness and is a lovely character, and there is some amiable comedy about how he is starting to enjoy himself in the home. But he is marooned in a tricksy, gimmicky film.

Benesch brings a tough, smart, credible presence.

At all events, it shows how homophobia creates credulous, fearful people vulnerable to the snake-oil con trick of “conversion”.

A fun ride.

Venus In Fur is a playful if occasionally heavy-handed jeu d'ésprit on the subject of sexual role-play, the games we all play, illusion and reality, and directing as a sexual act.

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.

Lee wants to clear away the tabloid smoke and spite, and bring the focus back to Jackson's professionalism, his craftsmanship, his artistry and his pop genius; the movie defiantly insists that Jackson was and is superior to his detractors.

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

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.

Despite its moments of charm and caprice, the film is prolix, inert, indulgent and often just plain dull.

A droll account of the world’s whimpering end.

Tim Roth is excellent as David: impassive and enigmatic, withholding the truth about himself, but radiating in repose a sadness and a swallowed pain.

It’s impossible not to be swept along and caught by the details: the pompous army officer falling into the barrel, the anarchist (played by a young Klaus Kinski) watching an old couple affectionately cuddling on the train, Zhivago himself suddenly shocked at his own haggard reflection in the mirror. Lean was hunting big game, and catching it.

Leto is a film with some wonderful moments and some slightly forgettable stretches – like an album with one or two wonderful tracks.

This is a really exhilarating, disturbing picture which foregrounds excellent writing and 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.

This is an amusing essay in amorous delusion.

This is a serious and worthwhile film, though one that tells you what you know already, and yet somehow perhaps doesn’t tell you enough.

It is the very preposterousness of Eyes Wide Shut which is the key to the achievement it represents: it has a singular excessiveness - at once gamey, florid and enigmatically deadpan - which underpins this picture's rich, sensuous style.

It is captivating and agonising all over again to see how dazzling Diana was, how simple and spontaneous she was compared with both the stuffy royals but also the secular celebrity class – how she instinctively knew to work with the press when it was still essentially sympathetic, but how panicky and dysfunctional she became when this same press became boorish and predatory.

This brief, winsome feature is a typically stylish, if ephemeral piece of work in the classic New Wave manner – almost a time capsule.

A strong, muscular, heartfelt film.

For me, Tenet is preposterous in the tradition of Boorman’s Point Blank, or even Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, a deadpan jeu d’esprit, a cerebral cadenza, a deadpan flourish of crazy implausibility – but supercharged with steroidal energy and imagination.

Woody Allen said that he could watch a Bergman movie and feel himself gripped as if by a thriller; that's how I felt watching this restored version of John Cassavetes's 1977 picture Opening Night.

It is as if Noé has somehow mulched up the quintessence of dance, coke and porn together and squooshed it into his camera. If that sounds horrible, then yes it is, but also, often, demonically inspired.

Denis's drama intrigues more than it actually delivers...Sleight of hand is all well and good. But sooner or later a film must pay up.

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.

Holland is very good but he needs someone to play against, someone with Downey’s heft. That someone could well be Zendaya, as MJ, the great love of Peter Parker’s life. We shall have to see how the Marvel franchise plays this romance in forthcoming episodes.

Brilliantly written, terrifically acted, superbly designed and shot; it's a sweet, sad, funny picture about the lost world of folk music which effortlessly immerses us in the period.

Wells’s coolly indirect way with dialogue prevents the movie becoming insufferable in the way that it might have done in other hands. It is like a short story that insouciantly signs off before you’ve quite decided what it means.

This is a teenage movie that could in other hands have been precious; instead it has delicacy and intelligence.

In its outrageous way, 21 Jump Street has real laughs.

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.

There’s an amazing lineup of collaborators and stars, and it’s good to see Candy’s uniquely likable and buoyant screen personality, but the tone borders on the stultifyingly reverential.

The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre.

Loach and Laverty fervently argue that through solidarity and a recognition of real interests, British people can naturally show empathy to immigrants and refugees.

It’s a melancholy, dreamy study.

It was a goofy, almost silly caper which could have gone wrong or turned out to be misjudged; instead it was a moment of secular grace, like something from a late Shakespeare play. The film does justice to this overwhelmingly moving event in British public life in a quietly affecting drama.

It’s a great piece of Hollywood confectionery, and you might well find yourself choking up a little at the end.

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.

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.

There's some great Pinteresque dialogue, and the murky gloom is illuminated with flashes of genius. [07 May 2004, p.15]

This is a film that doesn’t set out to push your emotional buttons all that hard, or even at all. But it covers a surprising amount of narrative ground and there is always something engaging and tender to it.

It’s an entertaining, fairly overwrought piece, a little tightly buttoned.

This is a fluent and very watchable work, and Johnson and Burghardt carry it.

Marianne Ihlen emerges as someone of enormous gentleness and dignity.

The film is as intelligent and committed as you would expect from Greengrass, but basically pretty conventional, like a very classy TV movie.

It’s a strange film; it rattles fiercely along, but its relentless cynicism and nihilism leaves a sour taste and opinion may divide as to exactly how funny it is. Podalydès gives an entertainingly blase performance as the worldly image consultant, trying to seduce Alexandre over lunch.

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

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

the film is often stately and sluggish with some very daytime-soapy moments of emotional revelation.

Every shot, every scene, every exchange from The Harder They Fall is combat-ready and garishly tensed for violence – and Samuel certainly brings the freaky mayhem, with gruesome relish and high energy. My feeling, though, is that there is a diminishing return on it, and the big reveal at the end is slightly silly and somehow retrospectively discloses that we haven’t really found out enough about Rufus Buck’s backstory.

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.

There are times when the passive, elusive quality of It Must Be Heaven, as with other Suleiman films, eluded me and felt mannered and superficial, but they are stylishly made with a distinctive signature.

What’s so funny about the film is that it shows how very little divides your early-twentysomething self from your mid-thirtysomething self – you’re never too old to be humiliated.

A strange, faintly frustrating but diverting film.

Akira’s strangeness is very startling and sometimes bewildering. But there is a thanatonic rapture to its vision of a whole world ending and being reborn as something else.

The ending of Limbo is a disappointment, but this is a film which lingers in the mind long after the final credits.

Comedy and irony are not allowed to encroach on the film’s upbeat message, and the drama doesn’t reach out beyond a wrestling fanbase.

Mr Jones is a bold and heartfelt movie with a real Lean-ian sweep.

Despite the violence and procedural detail, this is about as gritty as Dixon of Dock Green.

This film offers something that is never in sufficiently plentiful supply: fun.

The movie is a shard of comic and cosmic spite, and the image of the malign smile carries force.

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

Chopper is a great film.

It is possibly a little bit derivative and sometimes seems to be treading water in narrative terms, but only after making us submit to a very woozy and hallucinatory experience.

Steel brings a very distinctive kind of control and restraint to his film, both in terms of its subdued colour palette and an emotional language which despite explicit scenes of both sex and homophobic tension and paranoia, has something opaque and elliptical about it.

Tommy Lee Jones shows some true storytelling grit in this superbly watchable frontier western; he has a muscular and confident command of narrative, driving the plot onward with a real whip-crack, and easily handles the tonal swings between brutal shock, black comedy and sentimentality.

The physicality of this picture is exciting.

Another type of drama would put the issue-led handwringing at the centre of things. Not this film. It is just the hinge on which the family drama turns, and the performances from Dussollier and Marceau are quietly outstanding.

It’s impossible not to laugh at the inspired silliness and charm of Park’s universe. Early Man is a family film that doesn’t just provide gags for adults and gags for children: it locates the adult’s inner child and the child’s inner adult. It’s a treat.

Martinessi shrewdly combines subtlety, melancholy, satirical observation and candour about sex.

Scott Cooper’s Black Mass is a big, brash, horribly watchable gangster picture taken from an extraordinary true story and conceived on familiar generic lines.

As for Williams himself, his wild-man routine is only in evidence in his opening scenes; otherwise he dials it down, perhaps sensing that the way to upstage the loony creatures is to be relatively rational. There is something touchingly innocent in his performance.

Director Hugh Hartford does not patronise his stars, although perhaps there is something too gently celebratory and obviously feelgood about the film. These dynamic table-tennis stars put the rest of us to shame.

Tarantino has created another breathtakingly stylish and clever film, a Jacobean western, intimate yet somehow weirdly colossal, once again releasing his own kind of unwholesome crazy-funny-violent nitrous oxide into the cinema auditorium for us all to inhale.

Monge has created a satisfying drama of doomed obsession, the gambler’s thrill that staves off, for a few moments, a weariness with life. It’s a film with, as they say, something of the night about it.

Spacious, shrewdly detailed and conceived with compassion and wit, it unfurls at an unhurried walking pace, spreading itself across a very American urban landscape.

The richness and strangeness of the comedy is somehow simply down to Dujardin’s frowningly serious and haughty face.

The cynicism and indifference to suffering is truly horrible, and a kind of insidious evil rises from the screen like carbon monoxide, and also a terrible sadness.

Just occasionally, Lyne brings the right kind of flash, brash and trash to this fantastically silly and unbelievable story. But the film plods along in such a disconcerting way: there is no ratcheting up of tension, or plausible psychology.

With less gripping subject matter, this might have been a so-so bit of club memorabilia. As it is, it can’t help but be gripping.

An interesting feature, almost a B-side to The Graduate in its way, without the predatory older characters.

Here is a toothless, aimless dramedy from Canada, a lo-fi excursion into nothing very interesting; it’s what would happen if Harry met Sally and maybe they weren’t meant to be lovers or even friends and were both a bit bland.

The ploddingly unvaried pace and undirected, underpowered performances make this an exasperating experience: a directionless, shallow movie which seems bafflingly unconvincing and inauthentic at every turn.

Here is a frustrating film that tries to tell two stories at once, and succeeds with neither.

There are some laughs and it’s always likable.

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.

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

As well as showcasing the blandest and most tasteful three-way sex scene in history, this movie spreads an odd pall of sentimentality and period-glow nostalgia over a fascinating real-life story.

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.

I was utterly absorbed in this teeth-clenchingly exciting story and the “heist” sequence itself stands up really well – as well as anything I’ve seen.

As the catastrophe escalates, the movie’s mood music of imminent horror gets gradually and continuously louder, without ever quite reaching a climax of fear – or meaning.

In theory, these are twentysomethings we're talking about. But they walk and talk like fortysomethings or fiftysomethings, such is their dullness and self-absorption.

Farhadi’s storytelling has overpowering force.

The Third Murder is a captivating puzzle.

This is a glossy piece of Netflix content, but it relies very heavily on NBA fan buy-in for the drama fully to work; there is a continuous series of recognition jolts provided by the stars and legends playing themselves.

It’s a deeply intelligent and sympathetic rendering of real-life situations, using nonprofessionals playing approximations of themselves.

This documentary is an invigorating, disturbing portrait of the arrogance and sinister self-importance of rich people, bullying politicians and their battalions of lawyers.

Somehow in its pure uproariousness, it works. It’s just a supremely watchable film, utterly confident in its self-created malleable mythology. And confident also in the note of apocalyptic darkness.

The status-anxiety, fame-vertigo, sexual satiety and that all-encompassing fear of failure which poisons every triumph are displayed here with an icy new connoisseurship, a kind of extremism which faces down the traditional objection that films like this are secretly infatuated with their subject.

We get some lovely photography of the Highlands and the breathtaking landscapes all around Inverness, and Hancock is always a potent presence. But she could have done more, conveyed more, with a story that wasn’t so basically simplistic and familiar.

There’s a fair bit of macho silliness here, but the panache with which director Joseph Kosinski puts it together is very entertaining.

This curious, truncated piece tells us nothing substantial about Zofia Bohdanowiczowa or Józef Wittlin – or, indeed, about anything at all.

This movie gets a real gallop on, due to the sheer warmth of its performances.

Mon Roi, directed and co-written by Maïwenn (that is, film-maker and actor Maïwenn Le Besco) is an unendurable confection of complacent and self-admiring nonsense: shallow, narcissistic, histrionic and fake.

It is all intensely controlled, although this is a drama that goes by the book, in all senses; there are no unabsorbed events to disorder the parable’s secular/religious alignment, and the Greeneian miracle it eventually conjures is arguably a little too pat. Yet it is also strangely moving.

Pink Wall can be a bit contrived at times, with situations that have been rather effortfully created. But there are strong, forthright performances from Maslany and Duplass as the lovers who were never meant to be.

Chiwetel Ejiofor has made his debut as writer-director, and the result is exhilarating and rather inspiring – a story of success against the odds, of ingenuity and resourcefulness, of a father and son painfully coming to terms with each other.

It all rattles along amiably enough.

It is well made and well acted, with a fervent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o.

Overall, it is a highly watchable spectacle, leaving a sizzling streak of rubber on the tarmac.

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

No Time To Die is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and perhaps most of all it is big: big action, big laughs, big stunts and however digitally it may have been contrived, and however wildly far-fetched, No Time To Die looks like it is taking place in the real world, a huge wide open space that we’re all longing for.

Basically, Deadpool is quite right – he is Marvel Jesus, he is the guy elevated from the ranks here to be the heroic saviour, the wacky character who is going to make sense of the whole MCU business by repositioning it as gag material and keep the whole thing ticking over, perhaps until the MCU in its original fundamentally serious mode comes back into box office fashion. It’s amusing and exhausting.

An amusing vignette.

There can hardly be a bigger waste of time than this piece of twee nonsense.

For all its cheesiness, Notting Hill delivers a very great deal of pleasure.

Somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight.

The unhurried pace, extended dialogue scenes and those sudden, sinister inter-titles ("One Month Later", "4pm") contribute to the insidious unease. Nicholson's performance as the abusive father who is tipped over the edge is a thrillingly scabrous, black-comic turn, and the final shot of his face in daylight is a masterstroke...Deeply scary and strange.

It’s still entertaining and charming in its innocent idealism.

From the very beginning, this new Superman is encumbered by a pointless and cluttered new backstory which has to be explained in many wearisome intertitles flashed up on screen before anything happens at all. Only the repeated and laborious quotation of the great John Williams theme from the 1978 original reminds you of happier times.

Ghost Stories is a barnstormer of an entertainment, a fairground ride with dodgy brakes.

Quite a spectacle, and a nice family outing.

Never Look Away is not without ambition and reach, and there is a real storytelling impulse. But the central performance of Schilling looks shruggingly uncertain, as if he is bemused by what is going on.

It’s an extraordinary planet that Cronenberg lands us down on, and insists we remove our helmets before we’re quite sure we can breathe the air.

There are some entertaining meta-touches here, but the entire Gutierrez plot is strained and borderline dull. Pascal isn’t a natural comic and the movie winds up fudging his crucial bad-guy status.

For fans of Black Widow and everyone else, this episode is great fun and Harbour could well ascend to spinoff greatness of his own.

With In The Basement, [Seidl] seems to falling back on the same old shocks. The freakiness is losing its capacity to disturb.

It’s a sentimental film about New York and the way it sees itself: tough, big-hearted, assimilated and patriotic.

This documentary includes witty and insightful interviews with MI stalwarts like Thompson and Hugh Grant; it is a great pleasure to watch and will send people back to Merchant Ivory films themselves, particularly perhaps their Quartet (1981) and The Golden Bowl (2000).

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.

The film is an enormously satisfying and affecting experience.

The movie is not without interest, but I found it mannered, derivative and opaque.

The President is a striking movie - and a bold and challenging change of directorial pace from Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

There is humanity and complexity in this welcome movie, as well as muscular power and unreconciled anger.

It is a horrifying parable, with chilling moments, although the story is structurally uneven.

The personae and performances of Pacino, Domingo and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic nastiness of the affair, and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious: a display of, not heartlessness, exactly, but a shrewd professional sense that pity and fear were emotions that could only benefit the kidnapper.

This is an old-fashioned father-son story and none the worse for that, but there is something a little slick and subdued about the way the story is resolved.

And what do we find aside from the high-tech visual superstructure? The floatingly bland plot is like a children’s story without the humour; a YA story without the emotional wound; an action thriller without the hard edge of real excitement.

What a commanding performance from Cassidy. And Scott Walker’s orchestral score offers a sinister caress.

The cumulative effect is very pleasurable. The film has got some Python, Douglas Adams, Charlie Kaufman and also John Waters and Ed Wood Jr in it; it’s also possible that Dupieux has seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled.

Some of the scenes in the LA art world are a bit broad. But this is a terrifically absorbing thriller with that vodka-kick of pure malice.

Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting is everything I could reasonably have hoped for - scary, funny, desperately sad, with many a bold visual flourish.

Some funny stuff, but a rental/download only.

Here is a documentary for anyone who’s ever suffered from impostor syndrome or ever fantasised about going back in time to their school days, to reverse all those heartbreaks and humiliations. In other words: all of us.

The film and its accusers turn out to be on the same side: Mignonnes attacks the pornification of girls and young women by social media and society in general; it is about the false promise of liberation in this kind of sexualised display. The offending scenes are gruesomely unwatchable – deliberately so.

The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.

With this startling and sombre documentary, Mexican film-maker Rodrigo Reyes has conducted an experiment in verbatim cinema, or what you might call witness cinema.

Vie Privée canters along to a faintly silly, slightly anticlimactic conclusion and audiences might have been expecting a bigger and more sensational twist. Yet Foster’s natural charisma sells it.

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.

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

It’s an elegant directorial performance from Herzi.

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.

The film is watchable in its quirky and wayward way, with some funny moments – though shallower than it thinks.

Annette is a forthright and declamatory and crazy spectacle, teetering over the cliff edge of its own nervous breakdown, demanding that we feel its pain, feel its pleasure and take it seriously.

What makes the film so compelling is the ferocious ingenuity with which Moodysson ratchets up the fear and astonishment that accompany Lilya's all too believable descent.

The King of Staten Island is not structurally perfect. There is a rather contrived crisis the purpose of which is to bring Claire, Scott and Ray together at last, but there is charm and gentleness in this new stepfamily. Powley’s performance and the final shots of the Staten Island ferry brought back happy memories of Joan Cusack in Mike Nichols’s 80s classic, Working Girl. There are a lot of laughs here.

It's often entertainingly creepy in a twilit world of its own.

Anyone who says voting is a waste of time needs to watch this film.

In the Aisles is a poignant and richly sympathetic film.

Love and sex, two things taken so casually for granted in so many different kinds of story, here become totemic articles of faith. Lady Chatterley still has the power to move.

The psychological thriller form has imposed on Dolan some discipline, and brought out his talent and energy.

It's an amiable film with some great musical moments and the classic "growing success" montage showing them on the road in south-east Asia. On music, identity and race, the film has a big beating heart in the right place.

It’s fun, though GOTG2 doesn’t have the same sense of weird urgency and point that the first film had. They’re still guarding, although the galaxy never seems in much danger.

It is a good idea and there are good moments in the film, especially at the very beginning when Anna and Aleks have a bizarre encounter with the old woman herself, Rita Concannon, strikingly played by Olwen Fouéré. But then things begin to slide. There are however some resonant ideas here.

It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I.

It’s powerfully and pugnaciously acted, and horses are brought in – as animals often are in social-realist movies – as symbols of redemptive nobility. But I felt that in narrative terms it turned into a cul-de-sac of macho violence.

As with the last film, there are bold extravagant gestures of spectacle, while Wright, Coel, Bassett, Gurira and Thorne all supply fierce performances; each of them ups the onscreen voltage simply by appearing.

There are always some laughs to be had here, and Ben Stiller’s couture legend now has an endearingly muppety look.

It feels relaxed and sure-footed in its Spielberg pastiche, its big dino-jeopardy moments and its deployment of thrills and laughs. Maybe the series can’t and shouldn’t go on for ever: we need new and original ideas. This one would be great to go out on.

Ray's language of cinema is a kind of miraculous vernacular, all his own. It has mystery, eroticism and delight.

This really is a very strange film, and perhaps doesn’t quite cohere the way a more rigorously refined and redrafted screenplay might, but each of its exotic elements suggests a mounting delirium – exactly the kind of unacknowledged, displaced group frustration that grows and metastasises in a police state.

The rock’n’roll bad boy of tennis is watchably if uncritically celebrated in this documentary portrait by Barney Douglas; it is a film that leaves unsolved the riddle, if it is a riddle, of John McEnroe’s confrontational on-court personality.

This film is a distinct, articulate pleasure.

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.

This film is a gruelling experience and Dirk Bogarde’s coup de grâce is the most horrible effect of all.

There are substantial talents involved in this film, but it doesn’t come together.

It’s a vehement movie, with a driving narrative force and a robust sense of time and place.

This is a powerful and important documentary, though I have one tiny qualification.

Silver Haze is a sombre, thoughtful film about depression and what is (and isn’t) likely to promote emotional healing, performed with openness and honesty.

An interesting and worthwhile drama.

It really is very very long; watching it like going to an all-night movie show where the only film is Fight Club. Yet it’s tremendously directed and performed with brio.

Love Life is an inexpressibly tragic and painful human drama about complicated lives, a movie that interleaves the utter desolation with a dry understated comedy and a sense of emotional tangle and chaos, a film that moreover blindsides its leading female character – and us, the audience – with an entirely unexpected coda section.

With the fourth film, the Ice Age family animation franchise is looking almost extinct.

In some ways, this works better without the metaphorical reading – as just a far-fetched, but quite ingenious entertainment, with some bold climactic touches.

It is genuinely mind-boggling, and yet this unsatisfying, naive and fundamentally uncritical documentary, despite careful modern-day interviews with the participants, doesn’t get to grips either with the story’s implications or with the story itself.

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

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 performances are exhaustingly unsubtle and undirected and the film’s failure to hit the comic note early on has the added disadvantage of undermining the avowedly serious moments of solidarity and body-positivity at the end.

It is an elegant if slight piece of work, touching and intriguing by turns, but hampered structurally in that it relies on two separate flashback sections.

It is a beautifully acted, exquisitely considered chamber drama of subtlety and nuance: spellbindingly tender and utterly involving

Kazan brings to the role a sweet and dignified vulnerability, keeping rigorously to plausible human behaviour.

It's all a bit absurd, but Legrand handles the absurdity with some style, and there is something clever in making an apparently minor character responsible for a major narrative flourish. An enjoyable spectacle.

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.

It is a film with all the depth of a fridge magnet.

Caine's star-quality and absolute ease in front of the camera are fully formed.

Ben Wheatley’s Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is a hothouse flower of misery, sprouting dozens of resentment-buds under artificially controlled conditions.

It’s all operatically mad, and the city-destroying final confrontation is becoming a bit familiar, but Whedon carries it off with such joy and even a kind of evangelism.

The movie cleverly spins a meta-fictional "origin" myth for Captain America: explaining that he was in fact a propagandist comic-book superhero before becoming a real one. The final scene of the film, and Captain America's very last line, are rather brilliant – though admittedly less brilliant if their sole purpose is to set up sequels.

It isn’t easy to develop a sketch-length idea into a feature film and not easy to pivot from ironic comedy into dark Straw Dogs-style menace, and then into a sweet-natured happy ending. But Earl, Hayward and Archer have managed it. It’s the bromance of the year.

A worthwhile, engaged film.

Thoman coolly creates an oppressive atmospheric charge, as well as a deadpan satiric view of a certain kind of chillingly affectless conceptual art. A disquieting and mysterious mirage of a film.

The film is a bit stagey sometimes, but ambitious and insightful. Tovey is excellent as he shows someone progressing from innocence to fear and then to loneliness.

Loren still has an imperious address to the camera. I spent much of this film wishing she were allowed to let rip with something more spirited, but it’s a heartfelt performance. Loren has an undiminished screen presence and it’s great to see her with a substantial role.

Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now.