Peter Bradshaw

For many, the movie could as well do without the supernatural element, and I admit I’m one of them; I’d prefer to see a real story with real jeopardy work itself out. But there is energy and comic-book brashness

As for Malek’s performance, his line readings and screen presence are very distinctive, but I have to say the moments when he has to present anguished emotion to the camera do not quite work, and feel eccentric.

The movie is its own show of force in some ways, surely accurate in showing what the soldiers did, moment by moment, though blandly unaware of a point or a meaning beyond the horror.

It’s an interesting, strange film, with a key moment withheld from the audience – and yet its omission, and the resulting ambiguity and mystery, is something we are almost supposed to forget about.

Writer-director Sandhya Suri has made a tense, violent and politically savvy crime procedural set in India: a film about sexism, caste bigotry and Islamophobia that doubles as a study in the complex relationship between two female cops, a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie.

This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.

There is a kind of solidity and force to the film in its opening act, but its interest dwindles and we get little in the way of either ambition or moment-by-moment humour.

This is a movie that strains and contorts for its effects; the performances are strong – strong enough to carry the big twist – and Labed might have absorbed Agnieszka Smoczynska’s comparable film The Silent Twins, although that was unselfconscious and heartfelt in a way that this isn’t. It’s a film that feels actorly rather than real.

Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end.

German screenwriter Constantine Werner has adapted a story from fantasy author George RR Martin and the resulting dialogue lands like a series of sandbags on a concrete floor; director Paul WS Anderson handles the material with stolid determination.

It’s a great comic turn from Apte who deserves to be better known.

Over-the-top it may be, but Love’s film-making has an attacking force that some of the more respectable Brit films are lacking.

Peck’s film, in which LaKeith Stanfield narrates a kind of heightened, fictionalised first-person account from Cole’s own writings and diaries, is devastatingly sad. It is the sadness of an artist who becomes estranged, not merely from his homeland, but from his art and his livelihood.

The Electric State is a fundamentally unsatisfying and muddled film, even leaving aside the deja-vu.

Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp.

Three big names doing a professional job … but the target isn’t found.

It is a strong turn from Anderson, though, whose fans are entitled to wonder if it is she, and not Demi Moore, who deserves this year’s “comeback queen” crown.

Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas – a scattershot fusillade of scorn. It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair.

It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.

The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised.

This is an amiably talky film, and yet I never for a moment considered that the central relationship was being presented with anything less than seriousness, and there is much dry comedy to be enjoyed.

It’s eerie, startling — and yet also unexpectedly benign.

Perhaps it is inevitably going to be of limited interest, and as intelligent as the two performances are, neither Whishaw nor Hall is tested very much. But it is an intriguing experiment in recovering the moment-by-moment reality of a lost time and place.

Out of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film, evidently inspired by a real-life situation in film production.

Brave it might be, but there’s nothing all that “new” about the world revealed in this latest tired and uninspired dollop of content from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Though I was willing myself to enjoy this fourth film, about the heroine’s adventure with a younger man, the Bridget Jones series has frankly run out of steam.

Overall, this is a likable and well-researched film, but there is something unsatisfying in ignoring the band’s later stages. Perhaps Part II is in the works.

In plot terms there is something unsubtle, unconvincing and even absurd in where it’s all heading.

There’s an odd, disconcerting tone of solemnity to this slice of cultural history.

In its engaging and eccentric way, Hong’s film-making is diverting and intriguing and then it capriciously concludes, leaving things up in the air, yet without making you feel shortchanged. Perhaps this one is slighter than his recent work, but it has a comic charm.

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.

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.