Peter Bradshaw

It is a deconstruction of genre and a meta story of failure from which the director salvages a teaspoonful of success.

Not a knockout, by any means, but a win on points.

Everything about this film is very well observed.

The film is, of course, very silly, but diverting and ingenious, and contains game performances from Wahlberg, Dockery and Grace.

It is well-acted, disciplined and intimate as a play. But for me it is marred by an early, unsubtle moment of overt supernatural creepiness, which signals a retreat from ingenuity and restraint.

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

Even with Noémie Merlant as her lead and no less a film-maker than Rebecca Zlotowski working with Diwan on the screenplay, this Emmanuelle 2.0 comes across as inert and self-conscious, confusing torpor with languor, and endowing the non-sex scenes and also the sex scenes with blankness rather than tension or anticipation or pleasure.

The dreamy quirkiness keeps you watching and the folksy warmth of performances from Tom Hanks and Robin Wright encourage you to cut it some slack.

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 hippo, as a German tour guide tells us at the very beginning, may look fat and placid and rather cute, but it’s fast-moving, aggressive and dangerous to humans; perhaps the film itself, so mysteriously distended with huge digressions and non-narrative scenes, is as exotically fleshy and strange as a hippo. Yet it has bite. And the hippos themselves are entrancing.

The film drifts along to a strangely implausible non-denouement with impermanent effects; she has all the backstory with work and family and he is weirdly blank in ways that don’t feel entirely intended.

Both Culkin and Eisenberg are excellent and this is such a pleasure.

Maria is the most persuasive and seductive of Larraín’s trilogy of great women at bay, after Jackie about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer about Princess Diana.

It’s silly and flimsy but sometimes oddly daring; director and co-writer Caroline Vignal coolly protracts certain scenes, extracting their potential for softcore eroticism where the standard-issue romcom would cut smartly away, having coyly established what was going to happen.

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

The fight against fascism is a serious business, now more than ever, and it is right that Kurzel treats it seriously, but this means his movie feels constrained tonally and the finale is weirdly protracted and even anticlimactic. Yet The Order maintains a drumbeat of tension to the last.

The film is interestingly candid about the toxic, driving force of envy behind a musical career – something many music biopics omit – but in the end, however initially startling and amusing, Robbie-as-chimp feels like a distraction from his all-too-human unhappiness and talent.

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.