Peter Bradshaw

Evans certainly brings the craziness and the violence but, for me, without the stylish martial arts of his Raid films and without any plausible sense that anything is believably at stake.

Without Buckley, this would have been lacking; with her, it’s a very bizarre and enjoyable spectacle of married bliss.

It's a nice, if undemanding, Yuletide treat.

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.

Extraction is a little bit hokey and absurd, and the very end has an exasperating cop-out – but it has to be admitted that, in terms of pure action octane, Russo and Hargrave bring the noise.

All in all, this is not a bad tale from the Disneyfied continent of talking animals, but a minor cousin to the first film’s movie-royalty.

Although the character of Gru is mildly funny, the minions are unfunny without him and have never convincingly attained spin-off hero status. This is another of those intellectual property concepts whose trademarked quirky voices and characters should be laid to rest.

Tamahori, director of Along Came a Spider, does a competent, if over-fussy job, but the pace flags in the showdown in Iceland.

Léa Seydoux, in all her haughty and sullen sexiness, dominates this well-crafted piece of suspenseful if curiously pointless hokum from French director Benoît Jacquot; it leads its audience up an elegantly tended garden path to nowhere in particular.

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

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

The madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can’t overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant.

It is a very odd, singular piece of work: not the visionary masterpiece it assumes itself to be and muddled in its effects and ideas. But certainly bold. It loses altitude yet never becomes earthbound.

We call our House of Commons proceedings Punch and Judy: but the climate-change deniers on Fox News are Punch on steroids. It's a chilling and depressing picture.

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

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.

Our Time, for all its moments of brilliance, takes almost three hours in leading us nowhere very rewarding at all.

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

On the Road does, ultimately, have a touching kind of sadness in showing how poor Dean is becoming just raw material for fiction, destined to be left behind as Sal becomes a New York big-shot. But this real sadness can't pierce or dissipate this movie's tiresome glow of self-congratulation.

The dog transformation is somehow always Dr Jekyll, and her “nightbitch” persona frankly never becomes a very interesting metaphor for depression or midlife crisis. Yet there’s no doubting the sympathy and vehemence of Adams’s performance.

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

The Wizard of the Kremlin just feels pointless in its knowing cynicism, right up to the silly, unearned flourish of violence at the very end.

Like many fan favourite follow-ups, Hocus Pocus 2 is stuck, trapped somewhere between different times, audiences and tones, trying to do so much yet, in this instance, achieving so very little.

The movie moves on to some grandstanding moments, before finally painting itself into a corner. The ending is frustrating: it runs out of ideas before the final credits. But Johnson packs an almighty punch.

Viswanathan anchors the movie in a kind of quiet emotional seriousness without which it would quickly feel like flavourless chewing gum. A starring feature film role is what she needs now.

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.

Utterly bizarre and entirely ridiculous – and yet effective, an imaginative Guignol festival, like the goriest of soap operas, in which one wrong move opens a portal to hell.

There’s some nice early-60s period production design and the whole thing moves along smoothly, if unhurriedly. But it never delivers anything like the punch of Tom Cruise’s M:I adventures, nor the wit and distinctiveness of 007.

Not funny enough to be satire, not realistic enough to count as political commentary, not exciting enough to work as a war movie, David Michôd’s supposedly Helleresque romp, released on Netflix, is an imperfect non-storm of unsuccess.

For the first half-hour it's got a full-on horrible energy, but there isn't enough humour for it to qualify as comedy, and not enough reality or plausible characterisation to justify calling it any sort of procedural noir.

As things turn out, this case turns on a rather ridiculous coincidence: but never mind, it’s an entertaining piece of counter-factual noir.

The Running Man sometimes feels retro-futurist and steampunky, though it is always watchable and buoyant. Wright has hit a confident stride.

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

David O Russell’s Joy is an intriguing but weirdly subdued and stylised film.

Everyone is trying way too hard and Dom's final speech is toe-curlingly misjudged and charmless.

It’s a spaceflight to nowhere.

It's all watchable and pretty funny, and the big setpiece is the three wildly queeny stewards Joserra, Fajas (Carlos Areces) and Ulloa (Arévalo) going into a drug-fuelled song-and-dance routine: a rendering of the Pointer Sisters' I'm So Excited.

Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome.

It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.

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.

There is something weirdly pointless about it all, and there is a kind of tonal gap where, in another kind of film, the humour might go – which would counterweight the nasty violence. But it sure does pack a punch.

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.

A disappointing excursion into movie history.

It’s a very forthright performance from Dern, but Stewart is simply too opaque and subdued in the role of Knoop. The film itself pulls its punches, unwilling to satirise either her or the egregious Albert too fiercely; it is inhibited about really attacking the vanity of the situation.

It contrives to be a very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channelling his masterpiece Manhattan and brilliantly finding a fictional way to tackle his personal reputation head-on.

The elements of silliness and deadly seriousness are nicely balanced and although I wasn’t absolutely sure about the ending, which has maybe too neat a bow tied on it, this is just very enjoyable and I was on the edge of my seat, not knowing whether to flinch or laugh, though I did both.

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

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

Although this film can be a bit hokey and uncertain on narrative development, the puppyish zest and fun summoned up by Curtis and Boyle carry it along.

For me, it tends to be a recipe in which you can't taste either of the constituent ingredients. The big man-to-wolf transformation scene is still a marvel.

For all the spectacular action set pieces, there’s something silly and tedious that sets in well before the two-hour mark. It flatlines.

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

This mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time.

Did the whole nation and its governing class go into denial after the Kennedy assassination as a way of managing their shock and grief? Perhaps. But this documentary, for all its factual material, is frustrating.

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

There is a fair amount of not sufficiently witty or lovable banter, and Paula Patton gets to play Katharine Ross to their Butch and Sundance. She really has nothing to do except pose fetchingly in her underwear. Not much firepower.

For me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence.

Wilson is just, frankly, dull. He is not allowed to develop an interesting character and he suffers from the obvious comparison with Loki, Thor’s adopted brother played with relish by Tom Hiddleston as a velvety-voiced villain. But then Momoa’s good-ol’-boy characterisation of Aquaman itself only goes so far. This is a film that never quite comes up for air.

Some entertaining moments can’t hide the fact that this latest product of the DC Comics universe doesn’t exactly fly past.

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.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan saddled with a by-the-numbers script in a well-meaning but hackneyed Brit flick.

It's amiable enough, but it makes "The Flintstones" look like it was scripted by Karl Popper.

The film has some startling moments.

Here it seems that Death Row Records was simply a criminal organisation, of which rap music was a byproduct. The talent it somehow nurtured in this way looks even more tragically fragile.

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.

Club Zero is a strenuous, pointless non-satire which fails to say anything of value about its ostensible subjects: body image, eating disorders and western overconsumption.

The Prom is as corny as you like, and there is hardly a plot turn, transition or song-cue that can’t be guessed well in advance; but it’s so goofy that you just have to enjoy it, and there are some very funny lines.

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.

The scenes have no fire or lightness and sometimes they are embarrassing. ... Sachs is such a talented film-maker, but this is a baffling misstep.

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

Sadly the acting and dialogue needed a little work.

Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable is a reasonably funny, moderately interesting movie, wearing its sprightly colourful pastiche like dry-cleaned retro couture.

This movie rattles along with terrific energy and dash and the flashback sequences show that it’s actually far more daring and ambitious that you might expect. It’s a great duel between McKellen and Mirren.

A valuable, meticulously observed and wonderfully acted social-realist feature about a family under pressure.

It is made with real panache – so much panache, in fact, that you can forgive much of the film’s outrageous narcissism. Iñárritu could, if he chose, tell us an equally painful but less grandiose and auto-mythic story about his own life – but he has exercised his prerogative as an artist and given us this confection instead. It is certainly spectacular.

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

Ithaka shows us how time and experience have lent perspective to it all, affectingly focusing on Assange’s elderly father John Shipton, and Assange’s fiancee Stella Moris (now his wife), who have doggedly fought for Assange’s rights as an investigative journalist and publisher.

Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact is a horror film developed from a short, and unfortunately it splits apart while being stretched out to feature length.

There’s nothing wrong with a weepie or big emotional moments, but for me Goodbye June is too unreal, too contrived in its sugary farewell.

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

Baldwin has some brilliant moments as he icily dismisses Monica's posturing: his final closeup – heavy-lidded, undeceived – is fascinating and rather chilling.

This is an entirely ridiculous shaggy-dog story, a comedy salted with strangeness and seasoned with surreality.

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

It is mainly a rather silly high-concept dramedy intercut with maudlin moments, and the sentimental keynote inevitably dominates by the end.

Rare Beasts is a bold experiment in nerve-jangling confrontation: it has the structure and ingredients of romantic comedy but turns everything on its head.

A nice, creepy performance from Hemsworth, with Teller gamely going along with the script, but having stretched out the story idea to feature-film length, the film doesn’t really give the sense that it knows where it is going.

Snyder’s film may be exhausting but it is engaging. Justice is served.

This film certainly chops up a few sacred cows. Could it be that the anti-wind brigade will have to make common cause with climate change scientists?

In the end, the film looks like something that’s been salvaged in the edit, as it muses boringly on life’s great imponderables.

Each scene needed a jolt of music or energy that just wasn’t there.

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

This solid roster of acting talent can’t do much about how frankly uninteresting and unfunny The Toxic Avenger is most of the time. As satire or spoof of both superhero movies and scary movies it is abysmally obsolete, and on its own terms as horror-comedy it achieves neither scares nor laughs.

It’s all very easy: a feelgood war tale from what feels like a distant age.

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

The Bad Boys are still providing innocent amusement.

This feels like something LaBute wrote in an afternoon on the notes app on his smartphone while thinking about something else.

It is an entirely outrageous film with a lot of bad-taste laughs along the way, and a bizarrely real dramatic impact when Reggie finally confronts Doug in the horrendous finale.

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

It’s an anticlimactic oddity of a film, and a slightly wasted opportunity – but with curiosity value.

It’s impossible not to enjoy this big-hearted and sweet-natured British family movie.

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.

The film is intensely, almost radically humourless, which is hard to ignore and in fact hard to bear, because of this film’s obvious resemblance to recent great movies like Booksmart or Lady Bird and particularly at times the hard-edged classic Election.

The film never quite rings true.

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions.

Oblivion goes on for a long time, moving slowly and self-consciously, and it looks like a very expensive movie project that has been written and rewritten many times over. It is a shame: Cruise, Riseborough and Kurylenko as the last love triangle left on Planet Earth should have been quite interesting.

As with so many family animations right now, I felt that the script stays on the safe side, with fewer smart lines and ironic gags than I might have wished for, but this is a good-natured entertainment.

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

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

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

Profile is a pretty conventional thriller with pretty conventional stereotypes.

It’s a very mysterious and even bizarre film in many ways, shot in what is becoming Nemes’ signature style: long takes, a persistent closeup on the lead character’s face, and a shallow focus that allows the surrounding reality to intrude only intermittently.

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

The estimable cast all do their utmost but the overall effect is frustratingly implausible.

This movie finally ties itself into various knots to prefigure the later world of Katniss, but the time to end the Games came long ago.

Anon lacks identity and arrives at the finish line in a desiccated, cerebral, unsatisfying style.

It’s good to see Hamilton getting a robust role, although, sadly, she has to concede badass superiority to Davis. This sixth Terminator surely has to be the last. Yet the very nature of the Terminator story means that going round and round in existential circles comes with the territory.

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.

Empire of Light is a sweet, heartfelt, humane movie, which doesn’t shy away from the brutality and the racism that was happening in the streets outside the cinema.

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.

The snuff-porn aesthetic might suggest a realist drama, but a supernatural dimension is brought into play, making the plot directionless. There isn't an ounce of ingenuity in the way the movie is concluded, but some generic expertise in the way it is put together.

An ingenious, elegant counterfactual drama.

This is a movie with, in the Scots phrase, no small opinion of itself; a movie of big scenes, big performances, big images, epiphanies and hallucinations. Not all of them work, but the presence of Day-Lewis settles and moors it.

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

Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell. A vanilla dystopian romance.

Lemercier’s weirdly grinning, gurning face superimposed on the child’s head creates an unnatural chill that the film fails to shrug off, even after Aline as an adult is supposed to be glammed up with her teeth fixed.

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 are moments of visual brilliance here, moments of reverence and even grandeur. He is always distinctive, and anything he does must be of interest. But his style is stagnating into mannerism, cliche and self-parody.

Irrational Man is a good idea, a sketch for a movie, but the movie itself is unrealised.

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

However preposterous, The Rise of Skywalker is socked over with such energy, such euphoric certainty. And it’s such fun: full of the rackety exuberance of the now forgotten Saturday morning movie serials that were an influence on George Lucas.

The two adjectives in the title should be replaced with "annoying" and "unendurably tiresome".

This could be projected on to a wall at a club, but actually being made to sit down and watch it in a cinema is a weird experience.

Crash is still creepy, still menacing, still hypnotic, and it is still dedicated, in its freaky way, to the ideal of eroticism, to just drifting from erotic scene to erotic scene without much need for story. But Crash is no longer so contemporary. [4K re-release]

This movie is content with congratulating itself for being on the right side of history, with little attention paid to questions unanswered and history unresolved.

There are some good ideas, strong moments and a blue-chip cast in Broken, the feature-film debut from award-winning theatre and opera director Rufus Norris. But they somehow don't come together successfully.

This is a strong, fierce, heartfelt movie.

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

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

There are some pretty broad emotional strokes here and maybe a fair bit of grandstanding. But it’s made with some style.

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.

It’s a strained, dramatically inert and often frankly silly odd-couple bromance fantasy about the Northern Ireland peace process negotiations.

The Killer Inside Me is a particular distillation of male hate, as practised by repulsive and inadequate individuals who have been encouraged to see themselves as essentially decent by virtue of the trappings of authority in which they have wrapped themselves. And Winterbottom is tearing off the mask.

No movie with these excellent actors can be a complete dead loss, of course, but it’s the kind of feelgood film that somehow always manages to set a keynote of feel-bad, feel-sad gentility.

Eisenberg does an honest job with the role of Marceau, but it is a subdued performance. Marceau emerges as animatedly nerdy before the Nazis invade, but when the film has to show his heroism, Eisenberg plays him pretty straight. The result is a performance that could have been turned in by anyone.

George Clooney has long been a force for good in movies and public life – but what a bafflingly bland, indulgent, gritless oyster of a film he’s directed here.

It’s terrifically watchable, a high-octane automobile of a film with dodgy steering, but exciting in a world of dull and prissy hybrids.

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

It’s an effective retelling, though the film could have concentrated more on her tragicomic relationship with her oil plutocrat husband. Could it actually have been a love story after all?

Thewlis keeps the film from sinking completely: the haunted, unhappy man resigned to his unjust burden of guilt and shame.

It is refreshing that this story does not simply unravel into miserablism, but the film’s weird narrative leaps are implausible and jarring.

Viceroy’s House is no very profound work, but it is a nimble and watchable period drama.

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.

There are some nicely creepy moments, and director and co-writer Nick Murphy interestingly dramatises some of the neuroses feeding the appetite for ghostly phenomena – repressed sexuality, guilt and self-harm.

It’s all socked over with great and gruesome conviction, but there isn’t the same character-related interest as the TV series could generate.

Here the romance and adventure of the actual Apollo 11 achievement are undermined for a smirking, tonally jarring non-laugh.

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

It’s a disturbing, challenging drama, but one that perhaps begins to lose its narrative focus as the story proceeds.

Anne Zohra Berrached’s film is ambitious and interestingly intended, but naive and flawed, with a fundamental problem, which is right up there in the title.

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

Berry brings commitment and focus to the drama. She wins on points.

Weirdly, I felt that this odd film might have worked better if it was just about the lonely man and the penguin without the Argentinian tyranny – or just about the lonely man and the Argentinian tyranny without the penguin. The real non-CGI bird itself is very sweet.

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

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 bulky physical presence of Del Toro himself gives the film its momentum and force.

There is something basically unsatisfactory about this glassy-eyed biopic of the satanic dreamboat Bundy.

Of course, Sorrentino’s way with a camera will always be intriguing and exhilarating to some degree. Yet Parthenope simply floats complacently across the screen, like a two-hour ad for some impossibly expensive cologne.

Berman is guilty of one of the most tiresome cliches in documentary – solemnly playing the audio of a phone conversation, with subtitles, over an exterior shot of the building where it is taking place, giving the impression that this is smoking-gun proof of something sensational, or at any rate interesting, when it is pretty ordinary.

The movie is as tired and middle-aged as Akeem himself; Murphy is oddly waxy and stately, and has no authority figures he can really play off.

This comedy never quite relaxes or convinces or comes together, despite a blue-chip pedigree and a great cast.

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

Branagh brings something spirited and good-humoured to the role of Poirot, but the film’s attempt to create some romantic stirrings to go with the activities of those little grey cells is not very convincing.

There are some nice touches and an attractive new diversity worn lightly, but this is an underpowered and uncertain film.

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

It’s a sonorously well-meaning film that bathes everything in the bland, buttery sunlight that Disney always produces and in which the human performances are as opaque as the ones given by the horses

This film never gets up a head of steam.

This frankly odd film is misjudged and naive about the implications of its Holocaust theme. Its bland, TV-movie tone of sentimentality fails to accommodate the existential nightmare of the main plot strand, or indeed the subordinate question of when and whether to put your elderly parent in a care home.

As for Malek’s performance, his line readings and screen presence are very distinctive, but I have to say the moments when he has to present anguished emotion to the camera do not quite work, and feel eccentric.

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 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.

A gentle, thoughtful and reflective movie.

Channing Tatum’s hunky stripper enjoys some sizzling scenes with Salma Hayek but this eccentric threequel feels cobbled together.

Silent Night is not exactly a satire of well-off and well-connected people as such – everyone is supposed to be basically pretty adorable. But there is something undoubtedly startling and bizarre about seeing the end of the world generically grafted on to this jolly Britcom mode.

The movie is clenched with its own sense of contemporary relevance and risky blurred lines, saddled with an almost deafening score that often grinds straight through the dialogue; the drama becomes an atonal quartet of self-consciousness.

JK Rowling’s creative imagination is as fertile as ever, and newcomers Law and Johnny Depp impress, but the second film in the series is bogged down by franchise detail.

Despite all those fierce confrontations and tribal divisions, exhaustively rehearsed and mythologised, nobody's really a bad guy and nothing's really at stake.

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

It’s pretty much impossible for Kate McKinnon to dip below a basic level of funny, and her presence keeps the fizz in this spy spoof action-comedy from director and co-writer Susanna Fogel.

It has to be said that there is a level of cheerfully self-aware ridiculousness, which means that 300 is not entirely without entertainment value.

The whole thing is performed with relish and high spirits, and the digital fabrications of the Tower itself, rising out of the ground in stages with hair-raisingly dangerous structural work, are entertainingly contrived.

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.

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

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.

The story is clotted and overloaded, lacking the necessary clean tautness and suspense. And Kate Winslet's turn as a hatchet-faced Russian mob matriarch is a bit on the ridiculous side.

It’s an engaging piece of work from Merlant who has a real sense of directing an ensemble of actors.

A deafening, boring action pile-up that is more Call of Duty than Robocop.

Saint Laurent is a well made but bafflingly airless and claustrophobic film.

It’s entirely ridiculous, but performed with absolute seriousness and the result is an innocent amusement.

Girls of the Sun is a feminist war movie: impassioned, suspenseful, angry.

The result is something appreciably sillier and more eccentric than the original ... It’s certainly far from the sophistication and gloss for which Hazanavicius became famous ten years ago with his silent pastiche The Artist; it’s closer to his spy spoof series OSS 117. But it’s likeable and goofy.

It’s a muscular, heartfelt performance from Ackie.

Woman Walks Ahead is a solidly crafted and well shot, if basically unchallenging film.

There are some reasonably entertaining scenes and set pieces, but the whole concept feels tired and contrived, and crucially the dinosaurs themselves are starting to look samey, without inspiring much of the awe or terror they used to

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

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.

When Fanning is off screen, we are marooned in a fashion shoot in a hell of silliness. Yet her star quality gives The Neon Demon what substance it has, and Refn’s film-making has self-belief and panache. Take it or leave it.

It’s all very silly, though it’s impossible not to feel some affection for this film: Cruise’s pure, strenuous earnestness, the disconcerting laser focus of his stare, and the video-game combat sequences with the MiGs – the words “Soviet” or “Russian” aren’t mentioned.

It is a drama that attempts to behave like a tough police procedural in a quasi-Melville vein, but also like a musing prose-poem about the vanity of human wishes.

Farming is a tough film on a tough subject. There’s not much light and shade – but there can’t have been much light and shade going through it in real life – and Gubu Mbatha-Raw’s role as the concerned teacher is weakly drawn.

As this film’s producer-star, Angelina Jolie shows honesty and courage in tackling a story that so closely mirrors her own experience of having a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer. But sadly, the film itself feels specious and shallow, insisting with bland and weirdly humourless confidence on the glamorous importance of the fashion world in which it is set.

It's a thriller in which the twists become so absurd that it becomes a kind of caper, but without the humour.

It’s not a vanity project (Brühl does not seem in the least vain) but an actor’s project, nonetheless.

It’s an eerie, disquieting experience.

It's leaden, boorish and dull.

It’s hardcore, yet much softer-core than Noé’s earlier movies, without the terrifying shock factor of Irréversible and Seul Contre Tous, and without the visual brilliance of Enter the Void, and Love is preposterous and badly acted and talky in a way that porn films haven’t been since they were designed to be shown in cinemas.

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

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.

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.

Good intentions are all but submerged in nonsense.

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

This is pretty ho-hum stuff, but it could keep very young kids quiet over a lockdown Christmas.

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

This has been painfully de-tusked.

De Niro is the most fluent and relaxed I've seen him for many years, but this is still very low-octane stuff, and the film lamely and unsatirically ends up at the Cannes film festival.

Private Peaceful is a small-scale story in essence, which works efficiently on the non-epic scale in which it's presented.

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.

Hanks carries the film with his personality and his easy address to the camera, but this oddity of a film never quite comes to life.

Once the wounds have healed, Anvari may wish to make a film with the strength and distinctiveness of his debut.

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

There is something absolutely robotic about Trolls World Tour: the voices, the design, the dialogue, the plot progressions, the break-up-make-up crisis between Poppy and Branch, everything. It’s chillingly efficient, like a driverless car going round in circles.

This film is an ordeal that I never want to go through again, but it’s undoubtedly executed with a cerebral conviction and uncompromising seriousness that no Anglo Saxon film-maker could approach.

What a strange and intriguing film.

The film's purpose is the reverent mystification of everything that avowedly makes YSL special.

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.

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

Ritchie has made an entertaining return to his mockney roots.

There's some comedy in there, too, intentional – mostly. As a poignant study of the ageing process, it's on a rough par with "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For The Expendables 3, they might want to consider enlisting Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Judi Dench.

No songs at all now, and not much fun.

Just as in the book, the memorable part of this story is its ripe black-comic business.

The crude, tedious action sequences with their video-game aesthetic are an incredible trial and there is nothing interesting or glamorous about these vampires at all.

Perhaps any screenwriting teacher could explain why romantic comedies such as this frontload it with all the jokes in the first act, and then get progressively sentimental and humourless. This one becomes gooier and squishier until the comedy has entirely gone.

Boseman carries off the drama with flair and style.

Jennifer Lopez is radioactively humourless and Owen Wilson is robotically bland in this stinker.

Dejah, with her seen-it-all-before smirk, is not a very sympathetic heroine, and Kitsch is stolid and dull. And as for the red planet, the answer to David Bowie's famous question is no. What a sadd'ning bore it is.

Outrageous but entertaining pulp-melodrama thriller.

This is undoubtedly a vehement and very watchable drama – far superior to Serebrennikov’s previous film, the sprawling and unrewarding Petrov’s Flu. If there is a narrowness in its emotional and tonal range, that gives it force.

The estimable Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters has bafflingly decided to try everyone’s patience with this insufferable vanity project: a violent gonzo grossout that sadly conforms to the horror-comedy tendency of being neither properly scary nor properly funny.

The transformation scenes are passable – including time-honoured fingernail- detachment moments – but far inferior to comparable scenes devised long ago by John Landis or David Cronenberg. Those estimable performers Garner and Abbott look exposed by a film project that simply feels rushed and undeveloped.

The result is funny and plausible, with a fair bit of newly modish Bridesmaidsy bad taste, though I kept getting the sense that the romcom template meant Mazer couldn't really let rip with pure comedy pessimism and cynicism in the way he might have liked.

This is at least concentrated dramatically in being brought to an endpoint. For fans only.

Everything about this clunks.

Larson, Harris and Vellani are an entertaining intergalactic ensemble.

What begins as a sprightly, shrewd, visually striking satire from Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska deflates in its second act into something unconvincing, sophomoric and dramatically redundant.

This is a well-meant story of someone pulling himself up by his bootstraps, with some help from his grandma. But it feels contrived and self-conscious.

Braff puts us through a gruelling “relapse” montage as Allison hits the pills again after an illusory breakthrough and then a “recovery” montage as she gets it together. And the film’s single valuable lesson – the one about not looking at your phone while driving – is all but forgotten.

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

This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.

Devotees of Dumont's earlier films – particularly his 1999 film "Humanity" – will instantly recognise the style, the locale, the narrative, the bizarre quasi-realism, in which events take place in a world infinitesimally different from the one we inhabit. As ever, the visionary, radioactive glow is compelling.

A pleasing, high-minded film; also something of a palate-cleanser.

An excellent brief documentary about a heroic grassroots political movement whose importance reveals itself more clearly in retrospect with every year that passes.

Civil and Exarchopoulos (and Frikah and Wanecque) give it everything they’ve got and that is a great deal. But this can’t prevent Beating Hearts being an unsatisfying experience.

Some interesting material here, but the punches don’t land.

Despite the hefty talent involved, there’s a preposterous pass-agg tweeness to this film.

This romp is just embarrassing.

Albert Serra’s bizarre epic is a cheese-dream of French imperial tristesse, political paranoia and an apocalyptic despair. It is a nightmare that moves as slowly and confidently as a somnambulist, and its pace, length, and Serra’s beautiful widescreen panoramic framings – in which conventional drama is almost camouflaged or lost – may divide opinion. I can only say I was captivated by the film and its stealthy evocation of pure evil.

The movie is not a disaster, just weirdly pointless.

It’s a bit overextended but very watchable with flourishes of exotic invention.

The spark that was there in the opening section disappears and the film splutters out into something directionless and derivative and dull.

Opaque and unrewarding.

The mystery has been dialled down, the treacle dialled up, and what we are left with is basically Eat Pray Love 2.

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

Michael Grandage’s new film has been coolly received by some, but I found it an interestingly fragile and Rattiganesque melodrama of repression and regret.

Ticket to Paradise may well do great business to those looking for some escapist fun, and that’s entirely understandable. But I found the wacky double-act of George and Julia slightly hard work.

[A] terrific debut feature.

[A] bafflingly insipid, zestless, derivative film.

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

Overcooked, overcomplicated and underinteresting, this heist caper turns into a mess.

For me the superpower idea can only work with humour and lightness of touch: and there is a persistent and disconcerting joylessness about this.

A decent, heartfelt, robustly presented drama.

There’s a reasonable premise to this horror-thriller, but also something straight-to-rental about the look and feel of the whole thing.

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

The film stands or falls by its claims to deadpan comedy – but this is heavy-handed and unsatisfying.

Well, there’s no doubting that de Armas gives this everything she’s got and that is a very great deal, an expert analogue performance digitally deepfaked into various hallucinations. . . . Her performance is great; the film itself is self-satisfied and incurious.

There’s no doubt of the rousing urgency and terrific design of this likable movie, and the scene where Atreyu’s beloved horse Artax begins to sink into the swamp is absolutely gripping.

Almost all the charm of the real story is lost through the contrivances and overacting.

The tears of Roger Federer, along with the tears of Rafael Nadal and even the tears of Novak Djokovic, are what finally give some point to what is otherwise a pretty bland, officially sanctioned corporate promo for the Federer brand.

It feels like a screensaver, a movie generated by an algorithm, the same algorithm that calculated the likely profit on extending the Sing franchise.

This film could have done something more convincing with that mode of reverse-vertigo hinted at in its title: that fear and willed blindness about what looms over us. But if the movie helps to do something about climate change, such critical objections are unimportant.

Here is a terribly meagre experience from writer-director Rodrigo García, a silly, pointless movie which never delivers on its promises of drama and comedy and contains not a single funny or believable moment. As a filmic meal, it is pretty much entirely without nutritional or calorific value.

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.

It’s a lugubrious quasi-noir mystery set in modern-day New Orleans, starring a charismatic Patricia Clarkson as Detective Mike Hoolihan; a movie that sometimes seems papier-mâchéd together with layers of mannerism and pastiche, floating along like a two-hour dream sequence.

There’s certainly an impressive cast lineup for this one, but there’s also something weirdly formless and frustrating about it as well; the film gestures at some dark and disturbing possibilities in human nature without quite knowing if or how to follow through.

Inevitably, the guys wind up sentimentally telling each other they should do this every year. Please no.

Two solid hours of efficient Netflix content is what’s on offer here, the action-thriller equivalent of a conscientiously microwaved Tuscan Sausage Penne from M&S.

With much buzzing, beeping and whirring, the Terminator franchise comes to an absolute creative standstill, or even goes clankingly into reverse, with this fantastically dull fourth episode.

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

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