Peter Bradshaw

Upper-middle-class white privilege does not exempt you from drug problems, but it looks as if it rates you a premium kind of respectful and sorrowing film treatment, something to do, I suspect, with the tremulous father-son ownership of this narrative.

This documentary does something very few films can: it makes you grin with pleasure.

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

This fantastically muddled and exasperatingly dull quasi-update of the King Kong story looks like a zestless mashup of Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now and a few exotic visual borrowings from Miss Saigon. It gets nowhere near the elemental power of the original King Kong or indeed Peter Jackson’s game remake; it’s something Ed Wood Jr might have made with a trillion dollars to do what he liked if he’d been given a trillion dollars – but minus the fun.

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

Dreams of a Life is a painful film, a Christmas film with no feelgood message, but one which I think would in fact have interested Charles Dickens. Watching it is an almost claustrophobic experience, but a very powerful and moving one.

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

Maybe a little unexpectedly, Amazon Studios have given us a very watchable and classily upscale espionage drama-thriller in the spirit of John le Carré.

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

This is a documentary that discreetly does not concern itself much with Peterson’s personality, and concentrates on the music, which is entirely worthwhile.

Murphy’s maverick cop – and his theme music – are back to fight corruption, but four decades on there’s little energy to enliven their formulaic reunion.

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

The Goonies has a rich and indomitable air of all-American innocence.

This has been painfully de-tusked.

For all its tendency to soap opera, it has a lovely happy-sad sweetness.

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.

John Schlesinger’s winsome adventure from 1965 still has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London.

DiCaprio’s performance is excellent; his Romeo is transformed and astonished by the real thing; he has play-acted at love until now, and he hasn’t realised how vulnerable it would make him. Danes looks more mature than he does (though in fact six years younger) and she is such a smart, stylish player, even at this age. The Luhrmann R+J is a tonic and a delight.

Given that a fair amount of creative licence has been exercised here, it is strange that Bruce Lee has such a small part to play.

As for Violet, Emily Blunt brings to the role genuine sympathy, and she continues to thaw out the ice-queen hauteur of her earlier movies.

Free Guy isn’t going to have many MA theses written about it, but it has entertainment value.

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.

It is a rather slight dramatic experience.

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 is basically droningly reverent, as well as sometimes bland and naive.

It’s a winning and likable film.

It seemed overextended and self-conscious.

Chalamet gives it his all as the pudding-bowl-hairstyled young king. But so much of the poetry and the sense of loss has gone from this decaffeinated version of the story.

Destroyer reverses the gender polarity and ethos of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant: with Ferrara, the cop is the abuser and with Kusama the cop is the abused, but both are cops who have descended into hell and whose compulsive, addictive behaviour may be an effort to escape it – or to enter further into hell in an attempt to cauterise the pain.

It is a tender and valuable film, well acted, with a shrewd eye for how naive you can be in your early 20s, how impatient, how pompous, how tragicomically un-self-aware.

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

Despite an intriguing high-concept lo-fi premise, its oddities and uninteresting superfluities mean that it never really emerges from its self-imposed inertia and gloom.

It’s pretty basic boilerplate, scary-movie stuff, with tropes and tricks that have already been extensively satirised elsewhere.

It is oddly like an Agatha Christie thriller with all the pasteboard characters, 2D backstories and foreign locale, but no murder.

Interview With the Vampire is still horribly exciting, shocking and funny.

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

Charming and intriguing tale of undeclared love, full of haunting set pieces that stayed in my mind for hours afterwards. [11 June 1999, p.15]

Jed Rothstein’s very entertaining documentary is another horror story from the tulip-feverish world of tech startups.

This is a never-say-die story and its cheerful optimism makes it a calorific Christmas treat.

It is quite a vision: mordant, satirical, brutal.

Avatar is as gigantically uninteresting and colossally impervious to criticism as ever: a vast, blank edifice that placidly repels objection.

This is a stridently, bafflingly cacophonous movie which despite some smart, shrewd touches, is pretty much content with its single note of shouting acrimony and finishes by immolating itself in martyred self-pity.

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.

It’s an enjoyable enough way to spend two hours but without any commentary or real depth, it’s in need of a bit more suspense or conflict to really oil the wheels, the film too often ambling along when it should be racing.

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.

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

Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big: but feeling medium, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response which should be happening without any explicit instruction. Yet it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such black-belt movie stars as Pitt and Robbie and there is something funny in Babylon’s wild, event-movie gigantism.

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

This is a well-intentioned film with some forthright performances, although there’s a fair bit of actorly shouting going on and the smiley spaciness of Bruni-Tedeschi can sometimes feel a bit affected.

A few laughs.

It’s a diverting private tour.

There are one or two interesting moments: including an intriguing discussion of the idea that Tinder is anti-love and in fact just promotes addiction to the app, which is inimical to actually finding a long-term partner. But really this is a very tiring and mediocre film.

I would have liked to hear more about Gena’s late mother and the family history generally, but this is an arresting portrait.

We’re always waiting for something important or interesting to happen, but it never really does.

There is visual interest here, but for me the drama isn’t sustained.

The narrative focus is frustratingly split between Ben’s family and Abbie’s, and the result is a non-frightening muddle.

John and the Hole is well enough photographed and acted, but is really an oppressive and exasperatingly pointless piece of work, without consistency or the courage of its realist convictions.

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.

Bale brilliantly captures the former vice-president’s bland magnificence.

There are plenty of Seidl's signature grotesques, extended uncomfortable scenes and hardcore imagery owing something to Lucian Freud and Diane Arbus. But perhaps for the first time there is also a hint of ordinary human heartbreak.

This is a long, laborious movie whose every scene feels hackneyed at some level and which is always drifting towards its own misjudged secular gospel of simplistic salvation and life lessons learned. But an artist’s life is more complicated than that.

The film, though eventful enough, does not quite succeed in its tacit claim to be a study of poverty; the author behaves like a student who is stoically accepting some temporary dodgy accommodation.

This debut feature from the Cambodian-born, London-based film-maker Hong Khaou is heartfelt, intelligent film-making on a shoestring budget.

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.

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

Port Authority is vehement, urgent and sensual – not perfect, and I would have liked to have seen more extended dance sequences. But it is made with storytelling gusto and heart.

A tough, sinewy drama about a whole community that wants to look away from others’ differences and its own culpability.

Here’s a defanged, declawed yeti in an animation whose every beat, character and narrative component feels as if it has been algorithmically tested for commercial safety by a computer programme.

There’s a rigorous chill to this Hamlet.

There is, as ever, pleasure and awe in hearing his great songs.

The strangeness of this story will live in your bloodstream like a virus.

The camera roams this way and that in the media scrum, and as in subsequent scenes, the dialogue is overlapping and borderline unintelligible. It is bravura work in its way, but unconnected to any real dramatic energy or political point.

Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it’s the best he’s been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans. But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley.

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

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

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.

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.

There is something interestingly non-argumentative and personal about this documentary. It is gentle and reflective, a paean to his own youth and idealism that have been preserved in the ice.

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

Some of the acting isn't bad, but the story is messy and unsatisfying with a plot-hole you could drive a dozen combine harvesters through, the ending is an outrageous fudge and the lead performance from Dennis Quaid is strange to say the least.

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

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

This movie channels the paranoia and bad faith that’s in the air at the moment and converts it into a thriller of visceral hostility and overwhelming nihilism. It’s all killer, no filler.

Saltburn is an English mystery drama of the high-cheekboned upper classes, watchable but sometimes weirdly overheated and grandiose, with some secondhand posh-effect stylings, a movie derived from Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith, with a bit of Pasolini.

It’s an exhilarating, alarming look at that much discussed subject: the Russian soul.

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

Her photographs are like very bad dreams and simply looking for any period of time at dead bodies is a very strange experience.

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.

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

There’s an odd, disconcerting tone of solemnity to this slice of cultural history.

The Light Between Oceans isn’t subtle – that swoony title should tip you off – and it’s a fair way from the realist grit of the less obviously commercial pictures Cianfrance has made previously. There’s more corn in the recipe here, a bit more ham and cheese. But he carries it off with forthright defiance and with strong, heartfelt, ingenuous performances from Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender.

Chernov is armed only with a camera, to the astonishment of many soldiers he encounters, and the film was constructed by editing his footage together with that of solders’ helmet cameras and drone material. Chernov shows us how drones are now utterly ubiquitous in war, delivering both the pictures and the assaults.

This is a long film, but there is something so horribly compelling about its unhurried slouch towards the precipice.

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

The 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.

Joseph L Mankiewicz's four-hour Cleopatra is a stately but sometimes mindboggling spectacle. The central moment is the queen's jawdropping entry into Rome, for which Mankiewicz creates a sensational Busby Berkeley fantasy, like the world's biggest Olympic opening ceremony.

The tropes are a bit familiar.

It’s deeply silly but uproariously entertaining. At the end, I almost felt guilty for enjoying it all quite so much - almost.

The movie has a streak of sentimentality amid its melancholy and a certain formal theatricality: director Emma Dante has adapted the movie from her own stage play, but has opened it out very plausibly and cinematically.

This is exasperatingly nonsensical and humourless: it is full of grand gestures, gigantically self-important acting, big scenes (though often bafflingly truncated), big emotions and smirkingly knowing dialogue. Yet I admit there is technique and gusto to the way it is put together.

It’s all more or less sufferable, and it may well keep young children quiet at Christmas … but we surely needed a higher joke content.

The multiverse madness is treated with genial high-energy panache, though I have to say that this infinite profusion of realities does not actually feel all that different in practice from the shapeshifting, retconning world of all the other Avengers films. And infinite realities tend to reduce the dramatic impact of any one single reality, and reduces what there is at stake in a given situation. Nonetheless, it’s handled with lightness and fun.

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

There is something exacting and audacious in it, something superbly controlled in its composition and technique. The clarity of her film-making diction is a marvel – even, or perhaps especially, when the nature of the story itself remains murkily unrevealed.

What would Pretty Woman look like if it bore the smallest resemblance to the reality of sex work? Maybe something like this, Sean Baker’s amazing, full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal.

There’s a very entertaining daftness and theatre nerdery to See How They Run (the title sounds uncomfortably like Run For Your Wife) as director Tom George takes the same approach to The Mousetrap that Ken Russell took to The Boyfriend: playing up the artificiality of it all. The comedy is shallow in the right way, and Rockwell’s bleary world-weariness contrasts nicely with Ronan’s saucer-eyed idealism.

The film is watchable and often funny, but still seems encumbered with a kind of Sundance-indie self-consciousness, and I wondered if, in the end, it was doing anything more than the far more unassuming and gag-packed Harold & Kumar movies.

The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.

The film has an impeccable technical finish, but it is insipid, contrived, solemn, and ever so slightly preposterous.

[An] engrossing, unnerving but unexpectedly sympathetic drama of family dysfunction.

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

Ronan is just so good in this movie – so intelligent, so passionate, but she upstages Robbie, and Robbie’s parts of the film, often lumbered with leaden historical exposition dialogue, especially from Pearce, don’t have the same snap.

Director Robert Zemeckis is usually known for his zestiness and zippiness; but this is arduous. Screenwriter Steven Knight scripted smart movies such as Locke, Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, and there are some nice touches, but it resembles an unconvincing and sluggish pastiche of a war movie.

Perhaps there is less zap in Scream nowadays and archly invoking the newer generation of indie horror - Jordan Peele is mentioned, with absolute respect - only serves in the long run to remind you how elderly Scream is. But it’s still capable of delivering some piercing high-pitched decibels.

The film just bounces along, zipping through its running time.

There is something deeply crass about this facetious nonsense, and everyone involved in this film might want to reflect that Nazi medical experimentation during the second world war did in fact happen, under circumstances other than these. It was a very real thing, not just a death-metal horror movie gag.

Some massive laughs, a huge Stephen Merchant cameo and the most impressive school play on film since Wes Anderson’s Rushmore are all on offer in this very funny teen – or rather tween – comedy.

There’s bits and pieces of entertaining stuff here, a few sharp lines and a gonzo final shootout, but the overall tone of cliche is a bit wearing, correctly signalled in the title, which appears to misremember the phrase “saints and scholars”.

It’s a heavy meal to digest, but this is a strong, vehement film with a real sense of time and place.

Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.

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

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.

A more unforgiving approach might have been more interesting.

There is such tenderness and gentleness in this film.

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.

This is one to forget: a muddled, tonally misjudged, badly acted, uncertainly directed and frankly dubious drama, something that falls into the so-bad-it’s-bad bracket.

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

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

For all its twisty unexpectedness, it didn’t deliver a really satisfying denouement. The performances are interesting.

The humour is delivered with the same conviction and discreetly weighted force as the sadness, and the same goes for this film’s determinedly unbowdlerised view of sex.

Point Break is a freaky mix of Dog Day Afternoon and Big Wednesday; bank robbing meets surfing.

It looks weirdly like a romcom pastiche, not cynical, but not properly inhabited; it doesn't taste of romance or comedy any more than Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans taste of soup.

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

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

This feature is a very funny, if derivative panto-ish romp about the early life of Shakespeare.

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

The stunts are still awe-inspiring, and there's plenty of laughs. They really were thinking big.

Neither of the two worlds of the film’s English title is illuminated clearly enough

It is a superbly shot, viscerally acted ensemble drama.

It’s a film to remind you of the almost miraculously collaborative nature of cinema, but also the radiant personalities of individuals.

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

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.

None of this is represented in any compelling dramatic style, and the actors – all very talented and assured – have perhaps not had clear enough direction. It is a mood piece. Whose mood leads nowhere.

This film just wades into a murky lake of self-consciousness and sinks inexorably to the bottom.

Not a terribly profound film, but delivered with real brio.

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.

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

In the end, this is Lady Gaga’s film: her watchability suffuses the picture, an arrabbiata sauce of wit, scorn and style.

An oddity, in which all the characters seem to be avatars for the loquacious Sorkin himself.

Something in the sheer relentless silliness and uncompromising ridiculousness of this, combined with a new flavour of self-aware comedy, made me smile in spite of myself

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

Cillian Murphy is excellent as the fiercely committed Josef Gabčík; Jamie Dornan does very well in the slightly more reticent role of his co-conspirator Jan Kubiš. An intelligent, tough, and gripping movie.

This is a laborious movie whose final intertitles rather superciliously assure us that Inter Milan has made greater advances than other European clubs on protecting its young players’ mental health. That claim is as cloudy as everything else.

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

Fundamentally, Sybil is not funny because it is not convincing, and some of the acting is not of the highest order. Efira’s “drunk” turn is something she may wish to omit from her showreel.

It is a resoundingly confident drama.

Pattinson gives what is simply a dull performance in a dull role: something in the casting and conception is wrong from the outset. Maybe he would have been better as Dean.

This garden is pretty but lifeless.

It all rattles along watchably enough, taking in more locations than just boring old London, though you’ll find your credulity stretched almost to breaking point.

David Mackenzie’s retelling of the Robert the Bruce story for Netflix is bold and watchable, with a spectacular final battle scene shot with flair by the cinematographer Barry Ackroyd

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

This is an engrossing, well-acted story – disturbing but also tender and sad.

All Is True is sentimental, theatrical, likable – and unfashionable.

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.

It is more than half an hour longer than the Stanley Kubrick film, although it seems more than that – laborious, directionless and densely populated with boring new characters among whom the narrative focus is muddled and split.

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.

Looks dated and clunky, like a drawn-out episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected on TV, and the direction doesn't have Softley's usual drive.

It spends its time among unfeasibly beautiful young people in microscopically tiny swimming costumes, and moves with them in a trance of heightened physicality, drifting across beaches, bars and dancefloors. The mood is dreamy unseriousness qualified occasionally by temporary stabs of jealousy or misery. The sexiness isn’t promiscuous exactly; more directionless.

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

The film is a derivative, if well intentioned, piece of fan fiction.

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

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

What sealed the deal for me – by a whisker – was the gigantic physical comedy that Dempsey, Zellweger and Firth uncorked as they try to get through the hospital revolving door as Bridget is about to give birth, the traditional romcom rush to the airport having been re-invented for this maternal drama.

It is superbly directed and shot with great scenes.

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

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

Reasonably good fun.

Sadly, Savages plays up to Stone's worst tendencies: machismo, bombast and self-indulgence, and the factor that could conceivably have made this movie tolerable – humour – is off the menu.

Salvo is a strange, involving, if flawed movie.

Insufficiently diverting ... Lux Æterna shows Noé reverting to the self-parodic silliness that Climax had taken him past.

Good Madam is an intriguing, atmospheric movie which doesn’t quite tie up all its sinister portents and implications in a satisfying ending. Yet there is something very unsettling in it.

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

It’s all a bit earnest and derivative and sometimes a bit lachrymose, despite some perfectly decent performances.

It offers us a provocation, a jeu d’ésprit of outrage, a psychological meltdown that is more astutely articulated than in many other more solemnly intended films. And it gives us what it promises in the title.

It all tootles along inconsequentially enough, like a daytime soap about nothing very much in particular; all the supposedly important things feel negligible in terms of political or emotional weight.

This sequel from Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto, co-written by the writer of the original, Derek Kolstad, really doesn’t have much of the humour and the storytelling chutzpah of the first film.

A terrifically enjoyable and exciting summer spectacular: savvy, funny, ridiculous in just the right way, with some smart imaginative twists.

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

This movie doesn’t really follow through with its own ideas, either in the natural realm of the ageing couple’s relationship or the supernatural arena of an eerily possible apparition.

Paxton’s movie sketches out the sinister dread just under the happy-family surface; she is in expert control of her film, achieving her effects with economy and force. It is really unnerving.

However grotesquely culpable Chuck has been, you find yourself wanting to hug him. It’s a clever comic trick to bring off.

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

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

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

A slight but engaging two-hander.

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

The film’s freakiness and wooziness might have been a bit grating were it not for the glacial authority that Ferrara brings to every scene and shot – centred, of course, in the craggy gravitas of Dafoe himself.

This Joker has just one act in him: the first act. The film somehow manages to be desperately serious and very shallow.

This is a world of brutality and fear from which the movie averts its gaze at key moments, but the chill is unmistakable. The title appears to refer to a light which is inexorably fading.

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.

There’s an unexpectedly huge amount of old-fashioned fun to be had in Disney’s spectacular new origin-myth story.

It feels as if you've seen it many times before. Bill Nighy isn't in it, for example, and yet afterwards I had an intense memory of Bill Nighy being in it, the way amputees can feel their toes itching.

The movie has a high gloss and sheen, like something by Nancy Meyers, which creates a diverting disconnect, yet it flinches from the recognisable, tragicomic reality of a bad marriage.

The characters at one stage debate the merits of a smooth, fruity wine versus something more taut and acidic: it would be tempting to say that Klapisch goes too predictably for the first option, but the problems here are more with structure than taste.

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

This is an engaging and thoroughly worthwhile movie.

At its best, Malick's cinematic rhapsody is glorious; during his uncertain moments, he appears to be repeating himself. But what delight there is in this film.

Kid Like Jake is an earnestly intended, seriously acted film, painful in various intentional and unintentional ways.

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.

Like the first film, it becomes a virtual non-narrative anthology of standard jump-scares that could be reshuffled and shown in any order. The second time around, your tolerance for this is tested to destruction and beyond because, unlike the first movie, it is just so pointlessly long.

This deafening fantasia of internal and external combustion delivers outrageous action spectacle magnificently divorced from the rules of narrative or gravity. . . . I think we can include Isaac Newton among the people who are getting their asses kicked here.

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

A director like Jonathan Demme or David Fincher would have gone for the jugular on this kind of material, but writer-director Matt Ruskin seems a little squeamish and keeps everything on the right side of contemporary taste. The chill of fear is missing.

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

Brainwashed is a bracing blast of critical rigour, taking a clear, cool look at the unexamined assumptions behind what we see on the screen.

An American Pickle is a tasty, insubstantial snack of a comedy.

This pretty routine follow-up has some decent material and amiable bad taste, heavily diluted with gallons of very ordinary sequel product: more of the same.

The happy ending redemption narrative is not entirely earned.

It’s a sentimental tale of hokum, carried by Eastwood’s star quality.

It’s silly and poignant and funny.

The Dictator isn't going to win awards and it isn't as hip as Borat. Big goofy outrageous laughs is what it has to offer.

Quantum of Solace isn't as good as Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig's Bond debut has been toned down in favour of conventional action. But the man himself powers this movie; he carries the film: it's an indefinably difficult task for an actor. Craig measures up.

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.

Clooney guides the performances competently, but the story drifts pointlessly into space.

The film is perhaps flawed by its ending, which loses a bit of narrative momentum and insists too strenuously on the metaphorical properties, but there is a tang of real evil in the story’s chaos and its final image.

A decently acted, heartfelt film.

It's a confident, well-made film that ends up in a blind alley of cynicism.

Peedom has now done it again, this time on the subject of rivers with the usual montage of powerful images. Visually rich though it still is, I have to admit to being a bit restless with this kind of globalist Imax-style docu-fantasia.

There are no insights to be had – and no laughs.

There’s a creak of old leather (and other things) in this outrageously dated and hokey sentimental western, made from a script that’s been knocking around the industry for decades; it’s a Swiss cheese of bizarre plot-holes set in 1979, clearly because that is when it was conceived.

Sweeney has already shown what a superb and detailed performer she is in the FBI interrogation movie Reality, but this is far inferior: a stodgy, lifeless piece of work.

It’s a depressing seaside postcard of a film.

You'll need to have a very sweet tooth for this, and it makes light of those difficult sexual politics that Mad Men attacked with such fierce satire.

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

There are some comedies that seem to have been rubbed all over with an anti-funny, anti-romance Kryptonite. This is one. It’s the cinematic equivalent of elevator muzak – a festival of glam-smug with zero chemistry between any of its three leads.

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

It is all inoffensive enough, but weirdly lacking in anything genuinely passionate or heartfelt, all managed with frictionless smoothness and algorithmic efficiency.

There are plenty of laughs and fun along the way.

After 170 minutes I felt that I had had enough of a pretty good thing. The trilogy will test the stamina of the non-believers, and many might feel, in their secret heart of hearts, that the traditional filmic look of Lord of the Rings was better.

This is a wonderfully sympathetic, deeply felt and tenderly funny family drama with a novelistic attention to details and episodes – a little like Alfonso Cuáron’s Roma, about growing up in a similar era in Mexico City. Cámara thoroughly inhabits the figure of Gómez: unselfconsciously inspiring and lovable.

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

Subtlety and nuance are not exactly this film’s strong points.

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

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

This is an absorbingly told story; Knightley’s vocal performance is engaging and Charlotte’s face, in particular, is strongly and expressively drawn. But the film arguably fudges one of the most important issues of Charlotte’s life: her grandfather’s abusive relationshipwith her.

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

All of this film’s various moods – erotic, euphoric, tragic – are unearned and despite what is clearly strenuous effort from the performers themselves, the acting is hammy and undirected.

You can even forgive the franchise for cheating the issue of Spock’s death, though another death seems forgotten relatively quickly. The original cast members bring a certain gravitas.

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.

Beautiful Beings is shot with real style, with very good performances, but the cliched and consequence-free violence is a flaw.

What a performance from Erivo; it is genuinely moving when the Prince has to convince Elphaba what we, the audience, have always known: that she is beautiful.

A decent, heartfelt, robustly presented drama.

Winterbottom's location work in Jaipur and Mumbai has richness and spectacle, but somehow this does not come fully to life.

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

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

It’s a supernatural chiller about our fear of death - and our longing for death as an end to this fear. This brutally effective and convulsively disturbing story is something to compare with WW Jacobs’s classic Edwardian ghost story The Monkey’s Paw or maybe even Franz Kafka’s stage-play The Guardian of the Tomb.

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

There’s lots of good stuff here, some witty reboots and reworkings of gags from the first film and sprightly update appearances from minor, half-forgotten characters currently residing in the “where-are-they-now?” file.

Dreamland is no masterpiece but it is a robustly made action drama, with impressive and even daring visual sequences.

Unassuming, likable entertainment.

This film has to be indulged a little, and you'll have to negotiate the stumbling block that is Hawke's stodgy, dodgy French accent.

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

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

This Dracula isn’t from Coppola’s great 70s/80s period, but it has a melodramatic and operatic energy and draws on the look and feel of Hollywood’s pre-Code salaciousness and the silent movie madness of Nosferatu – though the expressionist shadows are blood-red, not black.

It has an intriguing premise and a gripping first act. But the ending fizzles when it should explode, giving us neither the twisty and suspenseful entertainment that it seemed to promise, nor the serious response to sexual politics in Pakistan that also seemed to be on offer.

Never was a film so candidly designed to sell products, but it has an archival interest.

It is a demanding film, without a doubt – but a passionate one.

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

This elaborately contrived story feels as if it has been cobbled together from a dozen others, and it never escapes cliche.

It’s all just one monumental splatterfest, where the zombies’ army of the dead face off against people who aren’t very alive, and all basically without jokes.

This is a shallow but watchable movie, and it nicely conveys the world of semi-respectable Soho porn, sadder and tattier than its sleazier end, with its desperate champagne lunches and dreary afternoon hangovers.

Dosch brings a wonderful humanity and sensitivity to the role.

The first Extraction was entertaining enough but this new one is just cynically about extracting the cash.

Giovannesi’s movie is watchable enough, but often looks like a smoothed-out, planed-down version of Garrone’s Gomorrah: Gomorrah without the rough edges, like a classy television version.

It is nowhere near as creepy as the recent indie horror "V/H/S," but it is a full-bloodedly grisly and macabre film that zaps over a few scares.

The film is probably on its strongest ground with the most purely absurd touches.

A sprightly and mischievous cameo from Mick Jagger is one reason to enjoy this movie.

Comedy gothic isn't exactly novel, and frankly there is a sense here of a movie coasting along on Halloween hype-marketing, without providing as many laughs and ideas as it really could have done.

A solid serving of popcorn entertainment.

Here’s a movie that tells us that the days of summer, like the boys of summer in Don Henley’s song, are going to get outlived by the love they inspire. It’s what happens in this thoroughly sweet-natured, charming and unassuming British film.

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

Even without Liam Neeson’s bizarre promotional “rape revenge” anecdote, this violent movie would leave a weird taste in the mouth, lumbered as it is with odd sub-Coen, sub-Tarantino stylings.

It is reasonably inoffensive, a bit like the recent Goosebumps, in which Black played a comparably defanged role, but it looks as if it was produced by some computer programme, devised by accountants and market researchers.

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.

It has none of the brilliance and insight of Emma Cline’s 2016 novel The Girls, on roughly the same subject.

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

The result is tangled and overblown.

An adorable trio pootle around a post-apocalyptic world in this sentimental sci-fi that curiously lacks any sense of danger.

Binoche's performance – tiresomely radiating a martyred integrity – is mannered and self-conscious, and her character's professional work is naively imagined.

This is a film that is trying very hard to be liked, while at the same time complacently assuming its likeability is beyond question.

This is an odd combination of broad semi-satirical humour and deeply serious hugging and learning.

The sclerotic staginess of The Dinner means this is one to miss.

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

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