Peter Bradshaw

Audiences might, by the closing credits, think they still don’t quite know what happens to Helen and Mabel in the end, or perhaps at any time, but then again real life can feel messy and unfinished in just this way.

The film’s poetry resides in its thoughtful inactivity, its vernacular spirituality and its gentleness.

It has a seriousness, an unsentimental readiness to look reality in the face.

This is an utterly absorbing and outstandingly acted film.

Hersh emerges as a tough, combative, peppery personality from this movie.

What seems to be most therapeutic is their contact with the dogs. As one teacher puts it: “You are more than good enough for that dog just the way you are.”

Magazine Dreams itself, though flawed by a cumbersome flashback structure in which he is talking to a counsellor, has powerful moments and Majors is very good, especially in the bizarre scene when Killian insists on going onstage at a bodybuilding event just after being beaten up.

The sad thing is that there doesn’t appear to be much space for someone like Ardern in modern politics; less space than ever in fact.

The pure craziness is a marvel.

As with the previous Knives Out films, the characters are not, in fact, equally important and equally capable of murder. An inner core of suspects emerges and their guilt discloses itself incrementally at the end, as opposed to being withheld for a final reveal. What a treat though, with cracking turns from one and all and O’Connor the first among equals.

Sweeney has already shown what a superb and detailed performer she is in the FBI interrogation movie Reality, but this is far inferior: a stodgy, lifeless piece of work.

Sirāt is a path to nowhere, an improvised spectacle in the Sahara; it is very impressive in the opening 10 minutes but valueless as it proceeds, and a pointless mirage of unearned emotion.

There are a few laughs in Z2: of course there are. But they are algorithmically generated and corporately approved. It’s the kind of movie you put on an iPad to keep the children quiet on a long plane or train journey; nothing wrong with that of course, but the heart and soul are lacking.

Quite simply: when the crow is off the screen, the drama starts to be involving and affecting. Once the crow is there, the film looks self-conscious.

What a performance from Erivo; it is genuinely moving when the Prince has to convince Elphaba what we, the audience, have always known: that she is beautiful.

Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it’s the best he’s been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans. But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley.

This cynically Christmassy movie is leaden, unconvincingly acted and about as welcome as a dead rat in the eggnog.

The Running Man sometimes feels retro-futurist and steampunky, though it is always watchable and buoyant. Wright has hit a confident stride.

It’s a stark, fierce, wonderfully acted film.

Greg Kwedar has adapted the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson; the director is Clint Bentley, and they have created a lovely looking, deeply felt film, clearly absorbing the influences of Terrence Malick in some of the low camera positions, sunset-hour compositions, narrative voiceovers, and epiphanically revealed glories of the American landscape.

The humour is delivered with the same conviction and discreetly weighted force as the sadness, and the same goes for this film’s determinedly unbowdlerised view of sex.

This is a movie with, in the Scots phrase, no small opinion of itself; a movie of big scenes, big performances, big images, epiphanies and hallucinations. Not all of them work, but the presence of Day-Lewis settles and moors it.

The sheer pointlessness of everything that happens subtracts the oxygen and even Fanning’s imperishable star quality can’t save it.

The work is the most important thing and Addario’s speaks for itself.

There are some very coolly orchestrated scenes in the big city and Mackenzie ratchets up the tension in style.

The effect is tender, sympathetic, diverting and often very elegant and indirect. But it withholds from us the full, real pain of damaged love.

None of these characters quite flares passionately into life but all are persuasively portrayed, and it’s a vehement reminder of what doesn’t get taught in British schools.

An intriguing, bittersweet family study.