Peter Bradshaw

There’s a mega-helping of daftness, silliness and goofiness in this wacky British comedy of Ye Olden Medieval Dayes from screenwriter Andy Riley and director Curtis Vowell.

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

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

Moment by moment, line by line and scene by scene, Challengers delivers sexiness and laughs, intrigue and resentment, and Guadagnino’s signature is there in the intensity, the closeups and the music stabs.

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.

This unbearably cute joint selfie of a movie is gruesomely indulgent and entitled from the first; it allows Ewan McGregor little or no opportunity to show his natural wit and flair and there is oddly no real chemistry between him and his co-star.

It’s a strange, violent dream of disorder, drained of ideological meaning.

Back to Black is essentially a gentle, forgiving film and there are other, tougher, bleaker ways to put Winehouse’s life on screen – but Abela conveys her tenderness, and perhaps most poignantly of all her youth, so tellingly at odds with that tough image and eerily mature voice.

The drama is smothered by its own overwhelming sense of importance.

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

Yannick doesn’t try blurring the lines between reality and performance in any Pirandellian way. The comedy is simpler than that. Yet there’s a touch of sadness as Yannick realises, as many other dramatists have done, that the actors are the ones getting the glory.

Seydou and the others are not exactly masters of their fate, or captains of their souls, to quote WE Henley’s Invictus. They are swept along by power and inequality, but Garrone shows that their humanity and compassion are still buoyant.

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

The movie starts out very serious and shocking and concludes on a note of pure farce, though I have to say Chastain’s performance has a clenched restraint which is marginally more convincing than Hathaway’s operatic but callow displays of hurt and entitlement.

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

The tropes are a bit familiar.

An entirely absorbing, coolly low-key movie.

There are one or two laughs here and an attempt at a queer romance, but no real signs of life.

The point is not motive, it isn't the elucidation of the human mind; it is more the simple juxtaposition of horror and bourgeois normality as a kind of Neurotic Realist motif: sinister, enigmatic, disquieting.

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.

This film opens up the storytelling throttle with a throaty growl, delivering the doomy romance of an old-fashioned western and the thrills of a mob drama.

The happy ending redemption narrative is not entirely earned.

Copa 71 is a revolutionary political parable that goes beyond football.

It’s shallow and insouciant, adding up to precisely nothing at all, but carried off with panache.

The panoramic intelligence of this film is a wonder.

It is an invigorating and enlivening film.

It’s a depressing seaside postcard of a film.

It’s a spaceflight to nowhere.

The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s monumental Dune adaptation lands with a sternum-juddering crash; it’s another shroom of a film, an epic sci-fi hallucination whose images speak of fascism and imperialism, of guerrilla resistance and romance.

It is entirely gripping and a witty and unnerving way of representing the mysterious silence of animals and a future world in which human beings can no longer exist.

It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.

It’s a film whose tone and meaning can’t be nailed down.

It is an absorbing, committed drama.

It’s a watchable though slightly sentimentalised story and Mikkelsen gives it seriousness and force.

This is a vacuum-sealed package of fan-orthodoxy that never takes off. The euphoria and uplift aren’t there.

In this film it perhaps isn’t clear what the sacrifices have been for, and Durkin is sufficiently loyal to wrestling and its fanbase not to question it; however there is a muscular force here and the sentimental postmortem scene is inspired.

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

Broad-brush American Fiction might be, but its approach to race and racism is oblique and unexpected, and it’s very funny about publishing’s literary ghetto.

This could theoretically be a fun movie, but it is all so self-conscious and self-admiring, with key action sequences rendered null and void by being played on two levels, the imaginary and the real, so cancelling each other out.

It is a sweet-natured little tale, indebted to Monsters Inc and the whole Pixar canon but saved from being predictable with other borrowings (Back to the Future, Inception), as well as its various metafictional levels of storytelling.

Calling a film-maker a “dreamer” sounds hackneyed, but it does justice to his idealism. Perhaps no other description will do.

Comer’s vulnerability and idealism are authentic as are her determination and a dash of real ruthlessness . . . She carries everything with unselfconscious strength and style.

What a unique talent Giamatti is; it’s a pleasure to see him play a movie lead, his first for a while, and his prominence in this really good film is a signal that the cinema could be moving back to a more approachable world of authentic drama and analogue talent.

This is an absorbing story, acted with superlative delicacy and maturity by Chastain and Sarsgaard.

There are plenty of laughs and fun along the way.

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.

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.

A very entertaining madeleine for movie-going of the analogue age.

It generally feels secondhand, though the final musical scene has an authenticity and heart that the rest lacks.

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.

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.

The Aquaman franchise is just flatlining, floating through the dreary depths like the kind of discarded plastic bag which is going to choke the last remaining vaquita porpoise.

The Boy and the Heron is a valuable new addition to this unique film-artist’s canon, about confronting a terrible sadness and finding a way to replace it with wonder and joy.

The whole film is a little rough-and-ready in the way it’s put together, but it’s amiable and well-intentioned and the laughs are real.

This is a fervent film, heartfelt and shot with passion and sweep.

This heartfelt movie-musical of The Color Purple sugars the pill and softens the blow, planing down the original’s barbed and knotty surfaces, taking away some of the shock of violence and tragedy and tilting the experience more towards female solidarity and triumph over adversity.

The script works efficiently and everyone involved sells it hard; there are continuous closeup cutaways to that cute and gurgling baby who never cries no matter what happens. But the sheer robotic sheen of the film in the end works against it.

This is a sympathetic and very contemporary study.

This is a tremendously crafted, impeccably intelligent film.

A piercingly emotional drama, acted with natural flair.

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

I enjoyed this more than either of the two earlier filmed versions, with Gene Wilder in 1971 and Johnny Depp in 2005. It supplies the chocolate-endorphins.

This is a lavishly produced, very enjoyable innocent pleasure.