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.

[A] richly enjoyable documentary.

The initial setup is great, the Ephronesque excitable phone conversation montage is tolerable, but the cliched breakup and makeup plot transition clanks.

It is well made and well acted, with a fervent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o.

Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act – and too reliant on a handgun plot-point – is fluent and heartfelt.

West mulches up a thick impasto of pulp, gore, filth and fear and gets away with some colossally self-aware scenes.

It’s an amusing, affectionate tribute.

This is certainly not a crime thriller in the dourly realistic “cold case” vein; it is outrageously over-the-top at all times, with crazy and almost dreamlike convolutions of plot, and yet its silliness is enjoyably dramatised.

I would have liked to hear more about Gena’s late mother and the family history generally, but this is an arresting portrait.

Not a terribly profound movie, perhaps, but robustly performed and an interesting reminder of the dusty old debates on the point of being swept away by the great horror of the second world war.

Inside Out 2’s view of growing up has nothing in it as powerful or real as the When She Loved Me song from Toy Story 2 – but there are a lot of entertaining moments, including a great demonstration of what sulky teen sarcasm does to the tectonic plates of your emotional geology.

Something has perhaps been lost in the edit. This never quite comes together.

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.

Smith and Clark, at the head of a very capable supporting cast, keep the movie on an even dramatic keel, with intelligent, thought-through performances putting life back into some familiar tropes.

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

It’s a sombre, sober movie but made with impressive artistry.

It crept up on me at its own measured walking pace – and it incidentally has the best and cleverest last line of any film I have seen this year.

The Bad Boys are still providing innocent amusement.

The film may not be perfect, but its courage – and relevance – are beyond doubt.

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.

There is a freshness and emotional clarity in Payal Kapadia’s Cannes competition selection, an enriching humanity and gentleness which coexist with fervent, languorous eroticism and finally something epiphanic in the later scenes and mysterious final moments.

It’s an indulgent doodle of a film, a self-admiring industry in-joke, an earthbound flight of fancy, unconvincing on a literal level, and unenlightening on a metaphorical level. Yet Deneuve, puncturing her daughter’s affectations and delusions with a wry and bemused smile, injects some real humour.

Hit Man comes close to fantasy and approaches screwball but keeps the realism. A hit is what it deserves to be.

This film is terrifically acted by its central trio: three intensely and unselfconsciously physical performances in which their bodies are frequently on show, sensual but fragile.

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.

It is elegant, eccentric and needs some time to be indulged. ... And yes, it is six parts beguiling to one part exasperating. But ... it leaves you with a gentle, bemused smile on your face.

A droll account of the world’s whimpering end.

It’s an exhilarating, alarming look at that much discussed subject: the Russian soul.

It might resemble other family dramas, but there’s a hum of something strange underneath, a sense that life is about surrendering to the infinite flow of events.

The performances are exhaustingly unsubtle and undirected and the film’s failure to hit the comic note early on has the added disadvantage of undermining the avowedly serious moments of solidarity and body-positivity at the end.

What would Pretty Woman look like if it bore the smallest resemblance to the reality of sex work? Maybe something like this, Sean Baker’s amazing, full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal.

It’s a movie presented with absolute conviction and gimlet-eyed seriousness, but less wayward humour than Cronenberg often gives us.

Director Ali Abbasi has given us fascinating monsters in the past with Holy Spider and Border but the monstrosity here is almost sentimental, a cartoon Xeroxed from many other satirical Trump takes and knowing prophetic echoes of his political future. It’s basically a far less original picture.

Audiard brings his usual ambition and sweep, energy and attack; although I wondered at certain points if the musical numbers functioned at some level as an alibi, to pre-empt objections about being the film being contrived.

In its trashiness – and, yes, its refusal of serious substance – The Substance should really be put out on VHS cassettes and watched at home in homage to the great era of home entertainment pulp and video-store masterpieces of weirdness and crassness.

In some ways, Horizon reminded me of Costner’s 2003 western Open Range, but that had a much more interesting performance from Costner and first-rate support from Robert Duvall and Michael Gambon. The acting here is far less impressive, and less directed. There isn’t much on the horizon here.

This is another deeply felt film from Jia Zhangke, with a very contemporary artistry.

Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment.

A tough, sinewy drama about a whole community that wants to look away from others’ differences and its own culpability.

While it’s such an intriguing idea, an almost absurdist scrutiny of what avoidance looks like and how families choreograph their collective denial, there is something a little bit contrived in it and, though always engaged, I found myself longing for some outright passion or rage or confrontation.

There’s no doubting the shiver of pure fear that runs through this movie from beginning to end.

Khebizi gives a heartfelt performance.

It meditates on identity and belonging, the poignancy of not being valued, not being seen, the transition from childhood to adulthood, girlhood to womanhood, sexism and cruelty. The energy and heartfelt good humour offset the moments of cliche and implausibility.

The effect of it all is elegant and overwhelmingly stylish, yet maybe there’s not a superabundance of substance to go with the style. Kinds of Kindness feels heavier and longer than I expected, as if reaching for a meaningful resolution that might not be there. Yet absence and loss is perhaps the whole point.

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.

Calamy gives it everything she’s got but this film is fundamentally heavy-handed.

In this film, nothing about mega-celebrity looks fun.

Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth are a great pairing and Taylor-Joy is an overwhelmingly convincing action heroine. She sells this sequel.

It’s a sprightly meta gag, a movie about a movie, or perhaps a movie about a movie about a movie – or perhaps just a movie, full stop, whose point is to claim that reality as we experience it inside and outside the cinema is unitary despite the levels of imposture and role-play we bring to it.

It’s an absorbing drama given sympathy and life by two very high-calibre performers.

Once you get to the big reveal, you feel like you’ve sat through a hundred episodes of a saucy daytime soap with the saucy bits cut out. They could franchise out a sequel: Strictly Confidential in Dubai.

The film becomes rather jumbled and preposterous by the very end, but not before some perfectly good action sequences, and the CGI ape faces are very good. This franchise has held up an awful lot better than others; now it should evolve to something new.

As a whole, it’s not exactly a masterpiece, but amiable and funny in a way that’s much harder to achieve than it looks.

For a film as over-the-top as this, it might be counterintuitive to talk about subtlety, but Stewart is genuinely that; her line readings are coolly calibrated, quizzical, restrained, sometimes infinitesimally double-taking at the bizarre or outrageous things happening in front of her.

A solid serving of popcorn entertainment.

The Animal Kingdom seems squeamish about going for the jugular in the way a proper genre movie would.

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.

The performances from Hathaway and McKenzie are vehement and watchable, but the film itself is an unsatisfying and anticlimactic oddity.

As the catastrophe escalates, the movie’s mood music of imminent horror gets gradually and continuously louder, without ever quite reaching a climax of fear – or meaning.

This is a powerful and important documentary, though I have one tiny qualification.

It’s as if everyone involved is terrified of actually making people laugh in case that gives offence somehow, or disrupts the algorithmic calculation that theoretically makes this a palatable piece of content. The whole thing is as bland as cellophane.

Escalante’s storytelling vigour and his way with an unsettling image keep this film’s voltage high.

Perhaps Control will gain cult status – or inspire a remake. But Spacey’s eerily detached, jaded presence does not do much for his putative comeback.

The sleek, stark images of this film are hypnotic; the faces are compelling and the hallucinatory finale is rather inspired. An arresting piece of work.

It is a vivid snapshot of a troubled private life at the apex of the US music scene.

Not even the fierce wattage of Toni Collette’s talent can light up this hokey crime comedy.

Phoenix is the key to it all: a performance as robust as the glass of burgundy he knocks back: preening, brooding, seething and triumphing.

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

Well, Caine and Jackson and their ineffable class give this film some real grit: it’s a wonderful last hurrah for Jackson and there is something moving and even awe-inspiring in seeing these two British icons together.

The fly-on-the-wall camera has had privileged, intimate access, there’s no doubt about it. But it still always looks like a film which is happy to go so far and no further. Perhaps some more detailed, critical analysis of the music itself would also have been welcome.

Dream Scenario is a cousin to Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and very enjoyable; it is at once strangely light-hearted and heavy with menace.

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.

Larson, Harris and Vellani are an entertaining intergalactic ensemble.

It is the intelligence and delicacy of the acting which keeps this wobbly contrivance steady.

There’s a lot to admire in the performances from Garner, Henwick, Yovich and Weaving.

Bottoms is actually a bizarrely violent film, and its plot is always teetering on the brink of pure incoherence, but it’s always funny, thanks to the goofy and winning comic presences of Sennott and Edebiri.

The folk singer and counterculture veteran Joan Baez is the subject of this intimate and painful documentary, which brings us to the brink of a terribly traumatic revelation that it can’t quite bear to spell out.

It is a record of the past, but an almost unbearable warning of agony yet to come.

It’s an outstanding documentary.

It looks like an interesting experiment, but there is something fundamentally inert here.

Some guilty pleasure thrills are what’s on offer but they are frankly annulled by Liam Neeson’s autopilot dullness, a driverless car of a performance from an actor we know to be capable of much more.

With natural sympathy and warmth, film-maker Carol Morley has created this likable, generous, imaginative response to the work of the neglected English artist Audrey Amiss.

Despite a very game lead performance from Heather Graham, and some amusing 90s-style erotic thriller mannerisms – voile curtains blowing on a hot summer night while a sex scene happens to a wafting sax accompaniment – this left me not knowing quite where to look.

This heartfelt story is always watchable.

Some of the time, this new Chicken Run has the same flaw as the newer Pixar movies: a sense that the film could almost have been algorithmically fabricated through AI, especially here in the opening act. Well, the gags puncture that and a lively voice cast including Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, David Bradley, Jane Horrocks and Imelda Staunton provide energy and fun.

A worthwhile, engaged film.

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.

Stanfield is a performer whom you can’t help warming to, although here, as sometimes in the past, I found myself wanting him to bring something extra in the third act, some new level of energy or anger. But maybe it would be wrong here.

This is a watchable enough film

This searing film bears a terrible witness to this great crime.

Saltburn is an English mystery drama of the high-cheekboned upper classes, watchable but sometimes weirdly overheated and grandiose, with some secondhand posh-effect stylings, a movie derived from Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith, with a bit of Pasolini.

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

At 37 minutes long, its brevity perhaps exposes or even creates a flimsiness in his signature style that in a longer film would have more space to breathe and parade itself.

It’s an intriguing, stimulating, exhilarating movie, which really does address – with both head and heart – the great issue of our age, AI.

Jason Statham is the only bit of genuine oomph in a tired tale whose digital effects could have been shot on an iPhone.

As always, I find myself considering that in a world where everyone’s a cynic and an ironist, Cousins’s unaffected rapture is unique and refreshing. And there is an odd-couple comedy here, with Cousins as the unstoppably garrulous super-fan and Thomas as the reticent English gentleman, almost like a charismatic Cambridge don on the long vacation, who has picked up a voluble hitchhiker.

The visuals are not exactly cutting edge but the storytelling has bounce and there’s gusto in the vocal talents.

This is the kind of movie whose amiable directionlessness and romantic gentleness generate a lot of warmth; it’s the kind of independent film which we haven’t seen a lot of lately, endowed with intimacy and a kind of dreamy charm.

Perhaps there is nothing very new in this film, but it’s a very civilised experience.

No amount of spooky jump-scares can save Kenneth Branagh’s latest Christie adaptation, which wastes its atmospheric setting and stellar cast.

Green Border is a tough watch: a punch to the solar plexus. But a vital bearing of cinematic witness to what is happening in Europe right now.

Not a terribly profound film, but delivered with real brio.

It’s a complex drama, a realist film teetering on the edge of the uncanny, whose very title points the way towards the idea that there are shades of grey in every judgment we make.

The result is a film with urgency and heartfelt sympathy, but one which I couldn’t help thinking may have been better served as a documentary to focus more directly on the issues involved.