Peter Bradshaw

It's indulgent, but Macdonald's performance is attractive and relaxed.

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

Uncle Frank doesn’t have the witty indirectness of American Beauty or Ball’s TV classic Six Feet Under, but it has a strong and very convincing performance from Bettany.

There’s a puppyish charm here.

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.

There’s a fair bit to enjoy here, with the club sometimes resembling a kind of senior-citizen X-Men group whose collective superpower is invisibility; old people can do things without people noticing them.

Greed isn’t especially penetrating about money or power. ... Winterbottom chucks everything up to and including the kitchen sink into this movie: sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s a flawed, undigested film that, like Sorrentino’s movie Youth, is knowingly indulgent of old men’s foibles. But there is one great scene in which Berlusconi, just to prove he’s still got it, cold-calls a woman out of the blue posing as a realtor and tries to sell her an apartment off-plan.

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

Emma Thompson gives us a scene-stealing performance which is enjoyably macabre.

It’s a serviceable, watchable, determinedly unoriginal film.

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

The film does not really permit the various emotional crises and issues to supersede the importance of fighting all that much, and the fighting itself is not transformed or transfigured in the drama.

Screenwriter Mark Bomback has adapted the three-hankie property from author and movie producer Garth Stein, and Simon Curtis directs. They have created a film aimed with lethal efficiency at your tear ducts like Chuck Norris putting his boot into your kidneys.

The Wright/Stoppard Anna Karenina is not a total success, but it's a bold and creative response to the novel.

Benesch brings a tough, smart, credible presence.

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 an engaging and spirited piece of work.

However agonising it is to admit it, this film isn't half bad, a sparky black-comic actioner with a cute "con trick" scene showcasing Gibson's Clint Eastwood impression.

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

Running at just 71 minutes, Socrates left me wondering if it was slightly underdeveloped as a feature project. But plenty of glossier and more finished films don’t have its beating compassionate heart.

It’s decently and honestly acted by Jack Lowden, who keeps the film alive, but it somehow winds up being a story about always following your dream and never giving up.

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.

A slight but engaging two-hander.

There is something weirdly heavy and foggy in Amsterdam that feels like it’s working against the lightness and nimbleness needed for a caper. It’s the reality of the history, which the movie makes explicit in the closing credits.

Settlers isn’t perfect: some of the storytelling beats aren’t hit as clearly as they could have been. But it’s a quietly impressive piece of work.

I can't help thinking that the most interesting things happen in the precredit sequence - the fraught childhood, Blanche's sinister "accident" - but it's still vivid, barnstorming stuff.

The rapport between Law and Lively allows the movie both to relax and pick up the pace. Morano puts together good fight scenes, robust stunt work and tasty car chases. It’s destined to be viewed on a million long-haul flights, but it works perfectly well as a thriller.

An amusing vignette.

As hammy, silly, and undeniably entertaining as ever.

Perhaps it is inevitably going to be of limited interest, and as intelligent as the two performances are, neither Whishaw nor Hall is tested very much. But it is an intriguing experiment in recovering the moment-by-moment reality of a lost time and place.

This is a genial and good-natured production with much spectacle and entertainment to offer, and, like all of Branagh's classical revivals on celluloid, it manages to be high-minded and yet accessible.

Perhaps some of the narrative tension flags between their arrival in Turkey and then the all-important border, but this is a well-acted, spirited piece.

The movie is at its lightest, most charming and most persuasive in the 60s; as it approaches the present, something inescapably preposterous weighs it down, though Honoré carries it off with some flair.

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

It’s a movie whose subtle thoughts are in danger of being upstaged by a potent and erotic love story that surfaces and then disappears, leaving you uncertain whether finally to be more interested in that romance or the ruminations it has interrupted – or enlivened.

A watchable and accessible revival, though not groundbreaking, and not quite matching the story's passionate fear and rapture.

2073 is certainly a relevant shout of rage against the authoritarian forces despoiling our democracy and our environment – and the bland and complaisant naivety that’s letting it happen.

The film has an odd teatime glow of cosy-crime sentimentality which deadens the effect, and this period drama can’t quite bring itself to show that, in the 1930s, murder was punishable by death. But McKellen overrides these concerns; his glorious star quality and dash make him the only possible casting.

Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act – and too reliant on a handgun plot-point – is fluent and heartfelt.

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

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.

It’s a bit derivative, with borrowings from a handful of other films, but there are some nasty moments.

It is a gentle, heartfelt relationship drama about – and for – intelligent adults.

Overall a very silly movie – though it’s keeping the superhero genre aloft.

The best of this is Yorke’s music, which is fierce and propulsive. But, as visual spectacle, there is a strong so-what? factor.

The film is very silly and always watchable in its weird way.

Michôd creates a good deal of ambient menace in The Rover; Pearce has a simmering presence. But I felt there was a bit of muddle, and the clean lines of conflict and tension had been blurred: the dystopian future setting doesn't add much and hasn't been very rigorously imagined.

An interesting and worthwhile drama.

This is a tear-jerker that does not shrink from using plangent piano chords on the soundtrack to tell you when to feel sad, but it also has something interesting to say about intergenerational wealth.

Nabulsi hits the dramatic beats with confidence and Bakri has genuine distinction; his sensitivity and intelligence command every scene.

It’s a fierce, muscular piece of work, not a million miles from something like the Coens’ No Country for Old Men.

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

An intriguing and drily comic film.

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

It's been a while since I've seen a silly baddie get the seat of his trousers set on fire, run around squawking, and then sit down in a water trough with an ecstatic sigh.

It’s Curtis who embodies the story’s wacky spirit.

The lack of development in the supporting cast is a problem. Nothing, or almost nothing, of any consequence happens to these people. The title is a bit misleading: there is no real communal plot development.

At its worst, it feels like an insufferable vanity project. But it’s pugnaciously well-acted, flavoured with vinegary insights and rage-filled denunciations, and a hilarious set piece of scorn about how awful film critics are.

The film has charm as well as a certain deja vu for audiences, although for me it didn’t quite have the distinction of Marnie.

It’s not a film to break moulds or test boundaries. Yet Jackman’s real charm will carry you along.

Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp.

This is a watchable, if blandly celebratory and unchallenging portrait of a massive rock institution.

It borders on cliche a little, but there is compassion and storytelling ambition here.

Reasonably good fun.

I admire it for its craftsmanship and technique, like a machine for creating nostalgia.

It’s a one-note drama of simmering resentment. That note is sustained with impressive conviction.

Finally, inevitably, at the end of the protracted tale, we get to the question of which of the two is the “real” monster. The answer, in this high-minded and eventually rather sanctified romance, would appear to be – neither of them.

Twisters is a fun film with some big setpiece scenes, and Ramos and Powell make gallant admirers for Kate. I do think though that the movies still haven’t given Edgar-Jones – so excellent in TV’s Normal People – the well-written big-screen role she deserves. Some spectacular stormy weather, though.

It’s a bit silly maybe, with a plot that requires you to overlook the implausibility of a certain smartphone with no passcode protection. But there is a nifty premise.

It’s a winning and likable film.

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

It’s a pleasure to find a comedy about bought sex that’s pretty funny – and funnier than the pun in the title might suggest.

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

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

Here is a strange, opaque but interesting piece from Vietnamese film-maker Minh Quý Truong: an ethno-fictional essay movie.

Basically, this new Lion King sticks very closely to the original version, and in that sense it’s of course watchable and enjoyable. But I missed the simplicity and vividness of the original hand-drawn images.

Perhaps a more unassuming genre director would have tightened this movie’s cables a little, so that it had more tension and less revulsion. At all events, it delivers some nasty shocks.

The movie's apocalyptic finale indicates that it's bitten off considerably more than it can chew in terms of ideas, but it looks good, and the story rattles along.

There are no prizes for guessing what happens, but it’s a smart scary movie that relies on atmosphere and characterisation – not just jump-scares – for its effect.

It is a strange slo-mo farce, well directed, highly sexualised – shallow, but sleek.

It has to be said that Nobody rattles enjoyably and bone-crunchingly along and as for Odenkirk, this career turn more or less pays off. He never tries to be macho exactly, and spends a lot of his time flinching and scowling at all the cuts and bruises on his face.

Jim Jarmusch’s undeadpan comedy is laconic, lugubrious and does not entirely come to life, despite many witty lines and tremendously assured performances by an A-list cast.

Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken is a sad, painful, self-conscious vignette of a film with forthright performances; it’s a chamber piece in many ways, but with bold flashback excursions that come close to causing its emotional engine to overheat.

It’s an entertaining and sympathetic movie, if a bit route one, and audiences might possibly feel that TV shows like Sex Education and Heartstopper go a bit further and with more contemporary nous. But nice performances from Anders and Small bolster this movie’s likability factor.

All this is acted with smouldering intensity and authenticity, particularly by Filipovic, although it’s possible to wonder if there is anything unexpected to come in the third act, or if we can roughly guess where it’s all heading.

A fun ride.

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

The broad characterisation, dialogue and scene transitions probably worked better on stage, but they give a bounce to this feelgood Britfilm version.

It is the intelligence and delicacy of the acting which keeps this wobbly contrivance steady.

A solid serving of popcorn entertainment.

Ozon has made a decent and valuable film, though it often seems like the drama part of a docudrama: some of the scenes feel like respectful re-enactments that could have gone into a documentary.

I suspect a previous, wackier idea for the film was ditched in favour of a slick promotional video about their jaw-dropping global tour, but I also have to admit that this is a rather watchable record of a phenomenon.

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

It’s a spectacular movie, watchable in its way, but one which – quite apart from the “whitewashing” debate – sacrifices that aspect from the original which over 20 years has won it its hardcore of fans: the opaque cult mystery, which this film is determined to solve and to develop into a resolution, closed yet franchisable.

The movie partly follows the classic period-biopic template with the story extending in flashback from Marie being wheeled into hospital with her final illness. But the narrative is more unusual and ambitious – with its stylised flashforward sequences showing the consequences of Marie’s discovery, occurring like dream-premonitions.

I felt that we were not permitted much access to the character’s innermost thoughts, and so some of the film’s romance, and its fatalism, did not have the piercing impact as the visual masterstrokes. But there’s no doubting Diao’s style.

The unreality of the film never quite equates to dishonesty about what exactly happens when two people not in the first flush of youth decide to be in love, but it takes an effort of will to suspend disbelief and submit to a well-intentioned fantasy.

It is a film with charm and the chemistry between Jones and Redmayne has something rather platonic and even sibling-like, but that isn’t to say there isn’t a spark of sorts.

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

The movie needed some more detachment – and brevity – but Wahlberg shows once again he has the comedy chops.

Whether you like this movie may depend very materially on how you respond to Franco himself, but I found his casting very astute.

It’s an elegant directorial performance from Herzi.

Deeply strange and politically incorrect, ­baffling, and often funny.

For all that this film has something exasperatingly opaque and inert about it, it has an uncompromising insistence that ideas matter. These people’s thoughts, although debatable, are not simply presented as absurd. Malmkrog is a long, demanding experience – a real festival event. But that bizarre dreamlike eruption lives on in the mind.

Larson, Harris and Vellani are an entertaining intergalactic ensemble.

We get one or two outrageous sight gags and massive "getting progressively drunk" montages, and some neatly managed comedy on the laugh-with/laugh-at borderline.

Enjoyable and well-crafted as it is, this movie can’t quite decide what to do with the tougher, darker side of Richard Williams.

Khebizi gives a heartfelt performance.

The film is maybe a little callow, but it’s an undoubtedly impressive and accomplished debut.

As a demonstration of the banality of evil, The Iceman is certainly effective and Shannon's performance gives the film its power.

This is a sympathetic, serviceable but respectfully unintrusive documentary about the Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin.

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

Opinions will divide as to the film's final moments: some may find it all too much, and the film does not quite digest everything it wants to encompass. But there an energy and boldness in the debut work from Daniel Wolfe.

The Snowden/social media plotline of this film does a bit to make Bourne more relevant. But the ingredients are basically the same.

This film induces a grisly shiver, like a slug dropped down the back of your neck, and there are some amazing images. But I wondered if it was finally unfinished and anticlimactic.

It’s a baggy comedy, sentimental in ways that are not entirely intentional, but there is value, too.

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

It’s a simplistic film in some ways, with a naive ending – but there is energy and vigour, too.

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.

It is romantic and hallucinogenic, with an edge of softcore erotic sleaze.

It's perfectly workable popcorn entertainment for the school holidays.

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

The film is interestingly candid about the toxic, driving force of envy behind a musical career – something many music biopics omit – but in the end, however initially startling and amusing, Robbie-as-chimp feels like a distraction from his all-too-human unhappiness and talent.

The fly-on-the-wall camera has had privileged, intimate access, there’s no doubt about it. But it still always looks like a film which is happy to go so far and no further. Perhaps some more detailed, critical analysis of the music itself would also have been welcome.

This is a watchable, if somewhat stagey film, and these jump-scare visions, leaping out of the ambassador’s tormented subconscious, might have worked better in the theatre.

Cruz carries the film. She has a ridiculous kind of heroism, and her disguises are hilarious, particularly as a knight, when she insists on wearing a false beard under her helmet.

Unsubtle and on-the-nose though it undoubtedly is, there is also an amiable, upbeat energy.

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

Nimona is likable and engaging entertainment that finds its way through self-created chaos to some humane life-lessons.

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.

The fight against fascism is a serious business, now more than ever, and it is right that Kurzel treats it seriously, but this means his movie feels constrained tonally and the finale is weirdly protracted and even anticlimactic. Yet The Order maintains a drumbeat of tension to the last.

The Informer is spread over a big canvas, but by the time of its big finale it is leaking energy. It might have made better sense as an episodic drama on television but it is brash and watchable, its world reeking with cynicism and fear.

Collette is a potent, unsentimental presence and Hardwicke and Banks know how to connect with the audience.

The whole movie is lit in that fascinatingly artificial honeyglow light, and it runs smoothly on rails – the kind of rails that bring in and out the stage sets for the lucrative Broadway touring version.

It is an involving story, with a strong lead performance.

It’s a valuable portrait of a great risk-taker.

This is no masterpiece, but it’s amiable slice of popcorn entertainment.

Assassination Nation has got some gross-out chutzpah, and the surreal marching band scene over the final credits is inspired.

The idea of an apocalypse means every dial has to be turned up to 11 and this film certainly provides bangs for your buck, although there is less space for the surreal strangeness of the X-Men to breathe, less dialogue interest, and they do not have the looser, wittier joy of the Avengers. But the more playful episodes with Cyclops and Quicksilver are welcome and everything hangs together.

The slightly slushy tone of celebration rather obtusely fails to engage with the nihilist, pessimist nature of Tatsumi's work. Anyway, an intriguing event.

Xavier Giannoli’s The Apparition is a flawed but heartfelt film about the mysterious workings of divine grace, and things that can’t entirely be explained away.

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

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

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

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

You might need a sweet tooth for this gentle, Hornbyesque drama from writer-director Brett Haley. But it’s a likable heartwarmer and very decently acted.

It’s a riff or theme-variation on Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love – with a twist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window – doggedly spinning a spider’s web out of itself. The result is intricate, elaborate, though a little nebulous.

The film has the authoritative air of official history: sometimes brash, sometimes stolid, sometimes with flashes of inspiration and sometimes with long stretches of courtroom dialogue.

Spotlight never hits the heights of passion, but capably and decently tells an important story.

What keeps the film going is simply the factual chaotic bizarreness of what is happening: an improvised deal on Iran-Contra levels of crookedness. Sudeikis is authentically bland and slippery.

While it’s such an intriguing idea, an almost absurdist scrutiny of what avoidance looks like and how families choreograph their collective denial, there is something a little bit contrived in it and, though always engaged, I found myself longing for some outright passion or rage or confrontation.

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

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

In the end, Gully Boy runs on very traditional lines, and maybe comes too close to cliche, but is always engagingly dead set on entertainment.

It is a bit stagey, but heartfelt and well acted.

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.

It is a strange, subdued, rather miserable film, interestingly perceptive on conformism and philistinism as a way of life, and on the disconcerting wiles the inhabitants use in order to thwart Florence’s entirely reasonable plans.

Outrageous but entertaining pulp-melodrama thriller.

It’s a garrulous, yet almost static movie, and weirdly for a film about narrative there is no single overwhelmingly important storyline.

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.

Ma’Rosa is made with control and clarity, a narrative purpose which is held on to despite an apparently aimless docu-style, and a clear sense of jeopardy. My reservation is that it doesn’t reveal much of what is going on in Rosa’s mind and heart.

This one has quite a bit of zip and fun and narrative ingenuity with all its MacGuffiny silliness that the last one (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) really didn’t.

It is not a story of great depth or passion, but there are intriguing and unsettling moments on its well-crafted surface.

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

The film has some startling moments.

Minamata is a forthright, heartfelt movie, an old-fashioned “issue picture” with a worthwhile story to tell about how communities can stand up to overweening corporations and how journalists dedicated to truthful news can help them.

The film's depiction of the ugliness and strangeness of his self-hating LA celeb lifestyle is disturbing. Not just for Python fans.

Much but not all of this movie’s good work is undone by its silly and unconvincing ending.

The beamingly ingenuous Cruise, whose character is not burdened with any doubts or an inner life, somehow sells it to you.

It’s entertaining and amiable, but with a softcore pulling of punches: lightly ironised, celebratory nostalgia for a toy that still exists right now.

It’s a confident, often engaging mix of music and no-frills theatrical performance, with Bono often coming across like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created but then suppressed due to undue levels of rock’n’roll pizzazz.

Frustratingly, the film tells us little about the crime itself and the denouement is a little unconvincing. The taste of sweat and fear is, however, real enough.

Dinklage always holds the screen with his natural charisma.

Fury is a punchy, muscular action film, confidently put together and never anything other than watchable.

Zombie-ism in the movies is traditionally inspected for metaphorical qualities. Here it could simply be that we males are emotionally dead … until love revives us.

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.

Perhaps as a parable, simplicity is what is required, although sometimes the film does not rise to tragedy. Visually, Age of Uprising is classy and plausible, but delivers less than it promises.

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.

It’s a muscular, heartfelt performance from Ackie.

It certainly doesn't bore.

It’s a movie of big moods and grand gestures, undercut by the banal inevitability of losing.

This film may stretch your patience to the limit and beyond. It’s minor work – but there is always something there, some restless wounded intelligence, a pugnacious worrying-away at something.

It can be a bit soppy, sometimes resembling Sunday-night TV comfort food, but this big-hearted picture wins you over, and there are certainly some marvellous panoramic shots of the Highlands.

Everything in Showing Up is certainly valid, but I confess I thought it lacked some perspective on Lizzie’s life, and it is sometimes a bit studied and passionless, especially compared with Reichardt’s previous film, First Cow. But there is sympathy and charm and food for thought.

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

Eventually, the drama closes in on itself and attains the logic of a dream, though a dream that dissipates quickly on waking.

Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn bring a controlled intensity and force – and even a twisted kind of chemistry – to this disturbing if structurally flawed movie.

It’s an intriguing filmic tribute to the rehabilitation programme: effective altruism in action.

It is an interesting new Nosferatu for our age of pandemic fear, with some beautiful images and striking moments, particularly in the eerie moonlit hallucination sequence at the beginning, which makes the rest of the story feel slightly literal and self-conscious.

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

Nothing here to challenge anything from the Pixar golden age, but Despicable Me 2 is a sweet-natured family film.

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.

A strange, faintly frustrating but diverting film.

It's still atmospheric enough, and like the original, has a quasi-theatrical event status. But it feels like a copy.

This movie lodged in my mind a little more than Hong’s earlier films, perhaps because it is less contrived and it features a genuinely funny and complex opening scene.

There’s a propulsive, driving force to the way the film is directed, but there are some things that don’t entirely track.

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

The ideas here were far more interestingly rehearsed in movies like Tropical Malady and his Palme-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. A diverting footnote to the main body of work, no more than that.

A worthwhile, engaged film.

Hare cleverly suggests Nureyev’s mixture of courage, hauteur, emotional damage and cool self-appraisal; the Soviet authorities cannot threaten him through his family because he long ago left them behind. An athletic, confident, undemanding film.

It’s always good to witness Young’s authentic acoustic presence.

The stranger-than-fiction weirdness and emotional dysfunction are what’s interesting here, and the film doesn’t quite take the lid off it.

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

It is a watchable, insouciant love story with some great incidental performances, although there is a sense of the shark being jumped 30 minutes from the end.

This is a sympathetic and very contemporary study.

It’s a clotted and delirious film, with flashes of preposterous, operatic silliness. But it doesn’t have much room to breathe; there are some dull bits, and Leto’s Joker suffers in comparison with the late Heath Ledger.

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

I was less taken with the wait-is-this-really-happening moments that tend to undermine the emotional currency in which the drama is presented to us. Some real tremors, though.

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

It’s all very chaotic and entertaining, like a bizarre cult sci-fi TV show that somehow survived a threat of mid-season cancellation.

This is a fluent, watchable piece of work, though not quite as lucid as it might have been. A poignant tribute, at any rate, to the lost innocence of skateboarding.

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

Perhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu.

It’s dynamic and intriguing, though the detail and the emotion can get lost in the splurge.

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

It’s refreshing for a film-maker to opt for subtlety, and there are good performances from Riley, Martin and Farthing.

From the current vantage point, this film, not yet entirely dominated by digital effects, looks like a 1960s-vintage second world war film.

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.

The film isn’t perfect, and there is a touch of orientalism about the obsessive-affair-with-Japanese-man trope (which surfaced also in Wash Westmoreland’s The Earthquake Bird in 2019). But there is also something well controlled in the movie as it maintains its cool, even pace and Alexandra Daddario’s performance as the vulnerable, secretive yet emotionally open Margaret is smart.

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

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

A sweet, eminently sensible film.

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

It’s a very strong performance from Kendrick, who disturbingly conveys the tiny and not so tiny symptoms of emotional abuse.

It’s a film in which Spielberg’s traditional reverence for the wonder and idealism of youth has had to compromise with wised-up survivalist toughness of the new YA mode. But what extraordinary visuals this films conjures up, with images that appear and disappear like quicksilver memes.

Brutal, bloody and presided over by a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, the Canadian ice hockey in this movie is a cross between Rollerball and a prison riot: harking back to the robust certainties of Paul Newman's 1977 bonecruncher "Slap Shot."

Michael Gandolfini is goosebump-inducing as the young Tony Soprano, amid race riots and antagonism towards rival African American gangs.

Bekmambetov directs with gusto, and the forthright absurdity of the story, combined with its weirdly heartfelt self-belief is winning.

Dosch brings a wonderful humanity and sensitivity to the role.

Greg Barker’s documentary is a heartfelt, if historically disjointed, tribute to individuals who took part in the Arab Spring.

None of this, arguably, is inaccurate. But it’s all very smooth: a slick Steadicam ride through a historic, tumultuous moment.

A decently acted, heartfelt film.

It’s a film which needs an investment of attention, but there is a great observational intelligence and sympathy at work.

It is a typically calm, lucid drama, presented in the director's unforced, cinematic vernacular and attractively and sympathetically acted.

A fog of menace descends on this hauntingly photographed, oppressive and driftingly directionless movie from Lucile Hadzihalilovic. It has the intensively curated atmosphere of body-horror noir – if not the conventional plot structure – and some way into the running time you might find yourself awakened from its reverie of formless anxiety by a sudden, horrifying stab of violence.

Now Guardians of the Galaxy has reached the threequel stage: overlong, yes, and finally reaching for an importance and emotional closure (perhaps inspired by Gunn’s own emotional corporate redemption) that it doesn’t quite encompass, while leaving the GOTG brand open for a next-gen reboot. But it’s still spectacular, spirited and often funny.

Some of the time, this new Chicken Run has the same flaw as the newer Pixar movies: a sense that the film could almost have been algorithmically fabricated through AI, especially here in the opening act. Well, the gags puncture that and a lively voice cast including Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, David Bradley, Jane Horrocks and Imelda Staunton provide energy and fun.

It’s impossible to object to In the Heights with its almost childlike innocence. Ramos is very good and it is great to see Stephanie Beatriz (from TV’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and Dascha Polanco (from Orange Is the New Black) round out the supporting cast. But this is a pretty quaint image of street life, whose unrealities probably worked better on stage.

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

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.

A entertainingly nasty film for the new year.

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

The Holocaust material was not entirely successful, though certainly transmitted with absolute certainty and sincerity. This Must Be the Place is not my favourite of Sorrentino's films, but it certainly deserved inclusion at Cannes, and deserves to be watched for the glorious Byrne moments alone.

Journeyman is flawed, but intelligent and heartfelt.

It is an uncompromising and exasperating 70-minute cine-collage placed before us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, composed of fragments of ideas, shards of disillusionment.

It’s a really watchable film, more substantial than most sports movies and many postwar dramas.

I have taken some time to acclimatise to her distinctive, affectlessly sentimental film-making, but it is growing on me, and Kajillionaire is intriguing.

The film is a respectful and valuable tribute.

It’s still a tremendous spectacle: all four of the musketeers are very attractive characters, particularly the noble and agonised Civil as D’Artagnan.

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

It is an intriguing story, although I have to admit to feeling a bit bemused at the arbitrary way the Beast story is inserted into the already tense and interesting situation of Suzu/Belle and her relationships with people at home and school.

It may be a bit corny, but Hammer keeps the funny lines coming and it has some pep that George Clooney and Julia Roberts’ recent romcom effort Ticket to Ride didn’t.

The film might occasionally feel a bit self-conscious, but in a way this is a by-product of the film’s experimental nature; trans people are engaging with this fictional literary text in which trans identity has a poetic reality, a visionary reality, precisely that reality which is here found to be empowering.

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 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.

It takes time to grow on you, but for me, there is a demure watchability.

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

It’s not ground-breaking, but there are laughs, and it is a good audience movie.

Smith and Clark, at the head of a very capable supporting cast, keep the movie on an even dramatic keel, with intelligent, thought-through performances putting life back into some familiar tropes.

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

It is well-acted, disciplined and intimate as a play. But for me it is marred by an early, unsubtle moment of overt supernatural creepiness, which signals a retreat from ingenuity and restraint.

It’s a technically impressive work with some lovely images — and a bit of a sugary taste.

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.

This Swallows and Amazons is decent enough: but probably best savoured on the small screen after tea on a rainy Sunday.

This is certainly not a crime thriller in the dourly realistic “cold case” vein; it is outrageously over-the-top at all times, with crazy and almost dreamlike convolutions of plot, and yet its silliness is enjoyably dramatised.

It isn’t a masterpiece, and no one needs Despicable Me 5, but being unassumingly enjoyable isn’t easy.

It’s an interesting film, which Trank tops off with a contrived finale of bizarre, spectacular (and contrived) violence, yet the woozy slipping-into-dementia-fantasy sequences, although striking, mean sometimes that the visual impact of what we are seeing is sometimes lessened, as we wait to see if it is really happening or not.

It's a headspinningly wacky premise, and it takes a little while for the audience to get up to speed, but once this is achieved, there's an awful lot of unexpected fun to be had, boasting zany adventures with various historical figures.

Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.

It sometimes seems as if each Jude film is almost to be viewed once only; if you press play again, or go to the cinema to see it a second time, there will be only a blank screen, as if Jude and his ragged company have folded their tents and vanished.