Peter Bradshaw

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

It all could have been fun with a teaspoonful of humour, but everyone concerned behind the camera has calculated (perhaps correctly) that this would be inimical to its commercial success.

It’s exciting, ingenious, funny and an unmissable Christmas treat.

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.

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

The film moves more freely because of its willed unconcern with the historical implications of the Munich hostage massacre; modern audiences may feel the contemporary context makes it naive or obtuse. But it’s a muscular, well-made picture with the tang of cold sweat.

A strongly intended and conceived film, but without the passion of the earlier work.

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

Only the robust presence of Russell Crowe – and what might conceivably be a sly visual joke about exiled Russian plutocrat Mikhail Khodorkovsky – make this generic slice of superhero action worth watching.

The film’s real power is in the accumulated testimony from others about the Netanyahus’ entitlement and paranoia.

Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance.

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

A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed; hilarious, surreal and, yes, in its weird way, genuinely exciting.

This is a very entertaining account of an actor who appeared to ascend, singly, to a higher plane than all others of the Hollywood golden age.

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.

A lucid, emotionally honest account of trauma that lies beneath the smiles of family photos and wedding videos.

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

Berger orchestrates marvellously tense, explosively dramatic scenes and with cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine and production designer Suzie Davies contrives some spectacularly strange and dream-like tableaux.

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.

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

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

What is still amazing is how brief an instant it was; in just a few years, the Beatles and their music would evolve into something completely different. A few years after that, they would break up, while still only in their 20s. An amazing split-second of cultural history.

The film ends with a terrifying question about the fate of one of the women. It spreads an existential chill.

It’s carried by a winning performance from Hasna.

What an enjoyable spectacle it is.

C’est Pas Moi amuses – and discomfits.

Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story give a shrewd, fly-on-the-wall picture of the divisions within the union itself, with the working-class members and people of colour uneasy with the white college-grad contingent who are very gung-ho about protesting and getting arrested, not quite realising that for black people this is to risk death.

I last encountered the work of the Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez in the documentary-reverie Double Take from 2009, which imagined an encounter between two Alfred Hitchcocks. Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961.

Scott’s return to the Roman arena is something of a repeat, but it’s still a thrilling spectacle and Mescal a formidable lead. We are entertained.

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

A sombre, sobering work.

The Lego Pharrell is an intriguing, absurdist high concept, but not nearly as interesting as the real thing.

There’s nothing wrong with a big-hearted film for Christmas, but this commercial and formulaic slice of content is a toy destined to be forgotten.

This is a bleak, bold, extravagantly crazy story which is emotionally incorrect at all times.

There are fewer jokes, moment by moment, but just as much sprightliness, spectacle and fun.

Heretic is gruesome and bizarre and preposterous, the third aspect made palatable by Grant’s dapper performance of evil.

I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers.

Itō is an amazing personality: an intelligent, courageous journalist who may have changed the course of Japanese history.

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

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

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.

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

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

It’s a somewhat stagey reconstruction but an approachable and humane account of a great moment in scientific history.

There is terrific fun, charm and storytelling energy in Superboys of Malegaon, and it settles on an interesting theme: very rarely indeed does a new film-maker find success with a completely original work.

Hong makes all of this look as easy and fluent as breathing.

A documentary might have served this material better, or a fiction feature that doesn’t have a made-up character as the lead.

There is an important subject at the centre of this documentary from Korean-American film-maker Sue Kim, co-produced by Malala Yousafzai, but the film is finally let down by a bland and supercilious way of celebrating the women involved as a picturesque eco-feminist folk tradition, without actually tackling the hard questions their work is raising.

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

This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.

In every shot and every scene, mostly in closeup, Ronan carries the film with her unselfconsciously fierce and focused presence.

Plaza’s natural toughness gives this film some texture, but the truth is she isn’t in it much. You can spend very, very long stretches of the running time longing for her to re-emerge. So, when she doesn’t, it feels bland.

There’s plenty for nostalgists and completists to swoon over. . . . Such a pleasure.

This is a very impressive debut.

It’s in uncompromising bad taste but made with lethal precision and discipline.

Kahn orchestrates the angry energy with an expert hand.

Some good moments and a great cast, but this doesn’t come together.

[A] deeply disquieting and indeed enraging documentary.

There is something quietly magnificent in it. Moments like these in life are poignantly brief – but many never have them at all. It’s a lovely film.

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

It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.

Opinions may divide about the extended coda that Fortuné gives her story but it is evidence that she is ambitious for something that eludes so many film-makers: an ending. It’s a stylish debut.

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.

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

Hard Truths is a deeply sober, sombre, compassionate drama about a black British family, with flashes of fun and happiness that are emollient if not exactly redemptive.

It is a deeply unsettling meditation on sexuality and transgression.

This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.

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

Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent.

A lead performance of pure sociopathic intensity is what makes this serial-killer horror stand out.

It all makes for something startling, amusing and bizarre.

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

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

This film is covered in a thick ectoplasm of disappointment.

The resulting movie is a technically competent piece of work; but no matter how ingenious its references to the first film (let down, however, by borrowings from the A Quiet Place franchise) it has to be said that there’s a fundamental lack of originality here which makes it frustrating.

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

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

Some passable entertainment here but there’s not much adrenaline.

Izaac Wang’s reserved, undemonstrative performance is what sets the film’s non-sucrose tone: he only really smiles in a goofy video of his much younger self. It’s a cool, downbeat and satisfying piece of work.

It’s a compelling, visually exquisite piece of work.

I Saw the TV Glow is claustrophobic, unwholesome and brilliant.

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.

There are stabs of the same fear and revelation that made The Beast so fascinating, but this is in the main unfocused and undisciplined, and the isolation of each character merely drains the film of oxygen.

There’s an ingenuousness and innocence to Memoir of a Snail, a family-entertainment approachability that belies a strange intensity.

The film has sympathy and charm, although I can’t exactly share all the praise that’s been lavished on it. It unfolds in an indulgent, dreamy summer haze, halfway between rapture and torpor; a murmuring indie-stonewash of good taste.

There is a trio of excellent performances from Arabuli, Kankava and Dumanli: very good actors, very well directed, defining three personalities very different from each other in terms of age and attitude but bringing them together in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

Squibb is however really good: no other casting is conceivable, and it is good to see her get the lead turn she deserves.

This is stylish, energised new wave film-making.

It is only with the explicit possibility of a supernatural explanation, combined with full-on psychiatric breakdown, that the movie loses its light touch and its plausible detail. Yet there’s always a hyper-vigilant twinge of fear.

The sheer sustained silliness of this spoof silent comedy is what finally compels admiration. It’s like chancing across a bunch of eerily gifted kids by the roadside putting on a bizarrely accomplished, very extended series of magic tricks and circus acrobatic stunts.

Perhaps that final meeting in Lasker-Wallfisch’s front room does not offer closure. Nothing could. An amazing and dramatic historical tableau nonetheless.

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.

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

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

An explosion of pass-agg hipster quirkiness is what’s offered here, an everything-everywhere-all-at-onceuniverse of cutesy vulnerability and pseudo-childlike ersatz charm.

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.

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

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