Peter Bradshaw

In many ways it’s a shrewd sketch of the ways that real life, in all its embarrassment and banality, does not respectfully stop for bad news.

The combustible mix of lowlife cynicism and high art provide enough energy and enjoyment to power the first two-thirds of this long film. But in the end it flags, and it’s as if the outrageous black comedy has to be paid for with solemn romantic fantasy. But what a performance from Butler.

Here is a really impressive directorial debut from Mumbai film-maker Rohan Kanawade: tender, subtle, candid, scrupulously observed.

It’s almost incredible to think that the Toy Story series is more than 30 years old, a central plank of the Pixar animation golden age. But now it is played out and IP exhaustion has set in.

As a formal experiment, Dry Leaf has its own conviction and self-possession and there is a deliberate, if opaque artistry here: one shot shows us a dry leaf under Irakli’s car-tyres, another gives us wet leaves in a waterfall. The soft-edged, pixelated look is, however, interesting and surprisingly watchable, bringing a kind of painterly effect.

Overall this is a frustrating and rather precious piece of work.

Disclosure Day does give us once again a very Spielbergian primal scene of suburban childhood, though not with the devastating reality of his autobiographical The Fabelmans; rather, it is that aliens give Spielberg his way of defying the old maxim about not being able to go home.

Black-belt performances from Claire Foy and Richard E Grant put some vim and vigour into this haranguingly one-note and unidirectional period romp of the raucously bewigged and be-poxed 18th century.

Here is a niche drama about one of the most important chapters in the history of experimental jazz. It is however watchable, well acted and avoids the music-movie cliches – though I could have done without the fourth-wall-breaking lectures about the nature of jazz improvisation.

Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.

Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure.

An absorbingly intimate, novelistically detailed procedural about the day-to-day, moment-by-moment lives of the Vichy administrators after the fall of France, mostly shot conventionally, sometimes jolting into an anachronistic dreamlike scenario on video.

The tension is capably managed and Magimel is a gargoyle of menace.

Teaching scenes in films always have a fascination for me, and these are tremendous; Mercier patiently, sometimes angrily, tries to get the students to appreciate the complexity, nuance, eroticism and social commentary in the frescoes and artwork.

With warmth and heartfelt passion, and a quintet of outstanding performances from young actors shot in looming closeup for so much of the time, Clio Barnard has created an absorbing and moving social-realist picture.

There is archival interest and historic drama in what Lennon has to say – and especially for me in his generous, open-minded comments about newer bands such as the B-52s and the Clash. But this is a disappointment.

The Dreamed Adventure is clearly the work of a director with a fluent, distinctive film-making language, but what she is trying to tell us is elusive.

The Esiris have created a seductive, mesmeric picture.

One for the fans … but some nostalgic entertainment here.

There is much that is valuable and interesting in this movie, although it is a little predictable in what it has to say and how it says it, though Campagne and Macchia give committed performances as secret lovers in the shadow of war.

The Black Ball is handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed, bringing the puzzle pieces together in the edit and contriving an elegant, poignant cameo for Lorca himself, a kind of incidental choric figure who seems to intuit all the future triumphs and disasters of love and war. It is a rich and rewarding movie.

The Man I Love is an honestly intended and conceived movie, but that faintly baffling and strenuous lead performance sits uncomfortably.

Fares’s gaunt, handsome face so eloquently conveys vanity, but also a poignant emotional woundedness, anxiety and self-pity.

A sweet, odd diversion – more eccentric, maybe, than Travolta intended.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film is a bafflingly unsatisfying and unconvincing muddle of ideas and moods.

This one, sadly, is flawed by that perennial problem of how to end a story with a great premise.

The performances from Mazurov and Lebedeva are outstanding, and Zvyagintsev’s direction is superb with his cold daylit compositions and scenes in grim streets and housing estates. Everything here looks like a crime scene.

There is something stolid and at times monotonous about the way this is presented to the audience – as ever with Nemes, the force of gravity is increased, making everything 20% heavier and denser. And Barábas’s performance is frankly actorly rather than real in his incessant frown of righteous resentment. It’s a minor movie from this always interesting film-maker.

I confess that, for me, this movie doesn’t have the impact of his comparably modernist Parallel Mothers, but Almodóvar’s sensual, playful, melancholy films are always food for thought and feeling.

Her Private Hell resists interpretation, like so many of Refn’s recent films, but executes a slow dervish swirl of hypnotic strangeness.

The film is watchable and barrels along capably enough, but perhaps there isn’t enough of the humanity, humour and extravagant space melodrama which has made and continues to make Star Wars lovable.

At all events, [Nemes] undoubtedly brings impeccable craftsmanship, and the performances and production design are strong.

This is a very glib and unsatisfying drama, whose essential naivety becomes apparent when the lead character is forced to confront the crisis in her life.

Ultimately, the film does not compellingly deliver a blazing truth about its various relationships – but neither does it intriguingly withhold any such truth from us.

There is some top-quality entertainment value on offer here from a movie which can only intensify the world’s K-obsession.

It’s a meaty drama with big scenes and big but carefully considered performances: a really substantial piece of work from Gray.

It is a fierce rejection of anything starry-eyed about movie-making and a quietly gripping psychological study of a painful confrontation between father and daughter.

This is a bleak, pessimistic film with two excellent lead performances.

It’s tender and sometimes beautifully made, but also contrived and occasionally features some too-good-to-be-true caring characters. Frankly, it’s rather precious.

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

Butterfly Jam is contrived, tonally uncertain, implausible and frankly plain silly in its underpowered kind of magic-unrealism, with some clunky secondhand Mean Streets mob-fraternal dialogue and pedantic ethnic-foodie cred, and elliptically positioning key scenes off camera for no obviously satisfying reason.

Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them.

On the face of it, the film contains a soap-opera’s worth of secret feelings and tumultuous events, including the teenage lovers’ sensational escape from the town during a heavy storm. And yet Fukada maintains a cool distance.

The double act of McKellen and Coel has the onscreen chemistry of the year.

Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink.

What is fascinating about northern soul is the way it survived under the media-cultural radar and appears to resist larger interpretive analysis.

It’s entertaining and bizarre chaos, anchored by Odenkirk’s hangdog air of gloomy resignation to the violent mess which he has to clean up.

Ramblers are justified in keeping the pressure up and the take-home message is: opening up the glories of the countryside and nature itself to everyone is a universal good.

The film’s absurdity and antique dramatic style never quite come to life.

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

Although no amount of revisionist gallantry can conceal how terrible Yoko Ono’s vocals are, this has a historical fascination as they were Lennon’s only full-length concert performances after the Beatles’ split.

It is an amusing and gruesome premise, which writer-director Damian McCarthy stretches out into a convoluted, bizarre extended narrative.

The coming-of-age parts of the film centred on Frances work a little better, but for all that, and despite Lithgow and Colman’s commitment, this is very uncertain.

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.

The emphasis is more largely upon discipline and commitment in the service of art, a vocational self-immolation in which the transformation of pain into beauty is the whole point.

This is good-natured, buoyant entertainment. It’s wearing well.

Opera director Damiano Michieletto makes his underpowered cinema debut here, and the whole film, with its lifeless staging, uninteresting performances and laughably naive ending can only be described as the school of Salieri.

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

It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

This is an elegant, chilly dream of despair.

Antoine Fuqua’s demi-biopic of Michael Jackson gives you the chimp, the llama, the giraffe … but not the elephant in the living room. It’s like a 127-minute trailer montage assembling every music-movie cliche you can think of: the producers’ astonishment in the recording studio, the tour bus, the billboard chart ascent, the meeting with the uncool corporate execs in their offices.

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.

For all that this film is about the revolutionary and disruptive business of art, it takes a pretty un-subversive view of art and artists, compatible with the museum gift shop. But I have to admit, it’s executed with brio and comic gusto – the “past” sections, anyway – and Lindon’s performance has charm.

It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.

It is another highly sympathetic performance from O’Connor, who converts the British reticence of his earlier roles into Dusty’s strength and quiet vulnerability.

The Blue Trail is a generic mashup: it partly has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant old people, and partly it has something far more subversive and disquieting. The mix of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.

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.

François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.

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.

It’s now commonplace to compare programmatic stuff like this to AI, but this is almost a second evolutionary step downwards; it looks as if humans, using AI, have tried to copy something that was originally AI generated, creating a bland, simplistic template that can be sold in all global territories where it can be dubbed by local voice talent.

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.

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.

This is a serious and worthwhile film, though one that tells you what you know already, and yet somehow perhaps doesn’t tell you enough.

The 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.

Ben Wheatley’s Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is a hothouse flower of misery, sprouting dozens of resentment-buds under artificially controlled conditions.

A pale imitation.

This is a Hail Mary pass that Gosling just about manages to catch.

The movie’s ironies and cruelties clatter across the screen, but Komasa also allows the audience to consider who it is Chris really wants to train.

It is a resoundingly confident drama.

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

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

The film perhaps suffers from a loss of nerve about how villainous to make the villain, but it zaps along very entertainingly.

Hüller’s quiet, sinewy performance provides the film’s form and musculature.

Bronstein is brilliant at conveying mounting panic and a terrible, all-consuming sadness.

You may find yourself wondering why we are going over this ground again, but it’s an engaging film, and there is always something mesmeric in McCartney’s face: cherubic, and yet sharp and watchful.

The performances of Jonsson and Blyth are fierce and overwhelmingly convincing.

[Berg] uses Jeff’s answering machine messages and archive 90s material, including the unmistakable, moody black-and-white MTV footage, to tell a very sad story with sympathy and urgency.

There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi.

This tender and sweet animation from film-makers Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is an involving, poignant study of early childhood; how fragile it is, and how strong you feel yourself to be to have outlived or surpassed it.

Overall, it is a highly watchable spectacle, leaving a sizzling streak of rubber on the tarmac.

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

There’s a rigorous chill to this Hamlet.

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

I’d like to see a film about a comedian who, like Bishop, really does flower into being funny.

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

It’s a time-honoured and perfectly enjoyable setup, and the first act, when the new reality dawns on clueless Bradley, is watchable. But the plot twists are derivative and the action then becomes dependent on weird stabs of grisliness that are not convincing or consistent with the characterisation.

An amusing vignette.