Peter Bradshaw

Coppola’s portrait is absorbing, especially in Priscilla’s child phase, and if it is less distinctive in its final section, as Priscilla becomes more briskly disillusioned and realistic about what to expect, then that is to be expected.

It is all entertainingly absurd and yet the pure conviction and deadpan focus that Fassbender and Fincher bring to this ballet of anonymous professionalism makes it very enjoyable. And there are moments when the veneer of realism is disquieting.

In the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices which art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners

Everything in it – every frame, every image, every joke, every performance – gets a gasp of excitement.

The film is an enormously satisfying and affecting experience.

Cruz brings gall, spite and passion to the role of Laura, but there’s not much for Woodley to do in the thankless role of Lina. And Driver is a remote and unengaging paterfamilias. But no one could doubt the style with which Mann stages those race scenes, with their danger and horror.

This is another powerful addition to Larraín’s movies about the ongoing agony of Chile, and the Chilean people’s struggle to confront the past, armed with the hammer and the sharpened stake.

Depardieu brings his natural charisma and watchful presence to the role, and he can bring off Maigret’s air of worldly, tolerant bemusement and distaste at the transparently guilty people he comes across.

In Passages the sex is the plot: the plot of all our lives.

This is just a dull and badly acted movie.

It all hangs together and the final shot rounds it off nicely enough.

The gentleness of the connection between Jason and Georgie gives Scrapper its warmth. Just hanging out together on camera is much more difficult than it looks, and Dickinson and Campbell manage it well. Regan looks like a very impressive and capable movie talent.

It is an entirely outrageous film with a lot of bad-taste laughs along the way, and a bizarrely real dramatic impact when Reggie finally confronts Doug in the horrendous finale.

You Hurt My Feelings is a movie about emotional pain, and there is something very astringent in it, a salty tang which isn’t really effaced by the later plot transitions whose emollient message is that we all fib a bit to our loved ones and it doesn’t mean we love them any the less.

What distinguishes North Circular is the overwhelming importance of music: there’s a musical tradition here that is not simply commemorative and static, but vital and evolving, and given a fresh burst of creativity by the emerging status of women in Ireland.

This new animated origin story for the chelonian adventurers is unexpectedly funny, with a rather stylish crepuscular design.

Lakeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson and Jamie Lee Curtis cannot save this laborious story of a creepy old dwelling and the awful Hatbox Ghost.

It’s a movie about masculinity that could have been solemn and prescriptive; instead it’s pulsing with humanity, thanks in great part to tremendous performances from its leads Natey Jones, Alexandra Burke and smart newcomer Temilola Olatunbosun.

Talk to Me is freaky and confrontational and hilariously crass; it crashes through its plot progressions with tactless verve.

It’s at least as enjoyable as the much-hyped Mamma Mia! movies.

It’s a valuable view on how easy it is for the news media to become sycophantic mouthpieces for the right.

Some deeply muddled non-storytelling and tonal blandness pretty much sink this movie from the outset, despite its decent cast and origins in a potentially fascinating true story.

Oppenheimer is poignantly lost in the kaleidoscopic mass of broken glimpses: the sacrificial hero-fetish of the American century.

It’s entertaining and amiable, but with a softcore pulling of punches: lightly ironised, celebratory nostalgia for a toy that still exists right now.

Well, point-by-point, clip-by-clip, this film remains brilliant. As ever, there is real evangelism in Cousins’s work and in My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock there is so much to learn and enjoy. You come away from it with your senses fine-tuned.

It all bounces along amiably enough, due to the high-octane work of Boyega, Foxx and Parris. Perhaps they deserve to be in a more serious film or in a comedy that was skewed more to grownups. Well, it’s a film with its own peculiarly unexpected innocence and charm.

Photographer and film-maker Anton Corbijn is the very best person to direct this very enjoyable documentary about design outfit Hipgnosis and its dynamic co-founders Aubrey “Po” Powell and Storm Thorgerson.

This really is a very strange film, and perhaps doesn’t quite cohere the way a more rigorously refined and redrafted screenplay might, but each of its exotic elements suggests a mounting delirium – exactly the kind of unacknowledged, displaced group frustration that grows and metastasises in a police state.

One for Hardwicke, and everyone else, to forget.

A fun ride.

The cumulative effect is very pleasurable. The film has got some Python, Douglas Adams, Charlie Kaufman and also John Waters and Ed Wood Jr in it; it’s also possible that Dupieux has seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled.

It’s an enjoyable spectacle, and a madeleine for the 1980s: but there was something more to say about friendship, sexuality and the music itself.

In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.

Nimona is likable and engaging entertainment that finds its way through self-created chaos to some humane life-lessons.

It’s a pleasure to find a comedy about bought sex that’s pretty funny – and funnier than the pun in the title might suggest.

The first Extraction was entertaining enough but this new one is just cynically about extracting the cash.

This is an intriguing, if undeveloped performance piece, elevated by Thompson’s class.

Some entertaining moments can’t hide the fact that this latest product of the DC Comics universe doesn’t exactly fly past.

It is a film of style and surface, and these are cleverly created and maintained.

It’s dynamic and intriguing, though the detail and the emotion can get lost in the splurge.

Loach and Laverty fervently argue that through solidarity and a recognition of real interests, British people can naturally show empathy to immigrants and refugees.

La Chimera is a film that utterly occupies its own fictional space; it expresses its eccentric romance in its own fluent movie dialect. I was utterly captivated by this sad, lovelorn adventure.

Breillat’s movie rolls along capably enough while the affair is in progress, but it’s tested to destruction when things go wrong. She is not good at delivering the iciness crucial to the story’s third act, happier as she is with the sunny, languorous sexiness of the amour fou.

This is a superbly controlled and expressed film and its high seriousness about the nature and purpose of art really is invigorating.

It’s possible to be slightly overwhelmed by the scale and the social realist detail of the film, which was shot over a five-year period from 2014 to 2019, but the hope and idealism of the young workers is moving.

There is charm and delicacy here and Magimel and Binoche perform impeccably, though I wasn’t entirely sure they go together as the ingredients of a love story.

I found something a little too subdued in this film, though the evocation of Tokyo itself is very uncliched, despite the emphasis on something that is the subject of so many touristy jokes: the loos. Not perfect, but engaging enough.

Bellocchio shows us a brutal convulsion of tyranny, power and bigotry with echoes of the Dreyfus affair in France, and later, horrific events.

Fallen Leaves is another of Kaurismäki’s beguiling and delightful cinephile comedies, featuring foot-tapping rock’n’roll. It’s romantic and sweet-natured, in a deadpan style that in no way undermines or ironises the emotions involved and with some sharp things to say about contemporary politics.

It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives.

Everything about it is heavy-handed and dull: the non-comedy, the ersatz-pathos, the anti-drama.

Club Zero is a strenuous, pointless non-satire which fails to say anything of value about its ostensible subjects: body image, eating disorders and western overconsumption.

It is possibly a little bit derivative and sometimes seems to be treading water in narrative terms, but only after making us submit to a very woozy and hallucinatory experience.

The movie rattles cleverly and exhilaratingly along, adroitly absorbing the implications of pathos and loneliness without allowing itself to slow down. It is tempting to consider this savant blankness as some kind of symptom, but I really don’t think so: it is the expression of style. And what style it is.

After some robust storytelling at the start; the film drifts into a series of images and moods which perhaps don’t deliver as much impact as intended.

This is a deadpan comedy which strides off down its own confident, eccentric path, and actually the whole heist trope is subverted from the outset by the purely un-tense way the robbery is shown.

There are some great scenes, strong images, nice setpieces and Chen triangulates the sexual tension interestingly. The Breaking Ice is not as absorbing or fully realised as his award winning debut Ilo Ilo, but his film-making has an arresting fluency and openness.

This is an interestingly unsentimental film, without the coming-of-age cliches, and one from which the three leads emerge stronger and happier than before.

The performances are very strong, and there’s a great sisterly relationship between Bemba and Gohourou; they deserved a more substantial story.

There is real emotional warmth and human sympathy in this otherwise somewhat flawed film, a docudrama experiment in getting actors to play some of the real people in a tragic news story from Tunisia.

It’s a watchable piece of faux history, but the movie does not know what to do with its own heroine, content to leave her to the clutches of its villain: Henry.

There are some strident cliches alongside redundant self-harming machismo in this sub-Schraderesque movie about New York paramedics.

While it is flawed, this film finds an assured place in the quietist tradition of African cinema with beautiful images and strong moments, and with relevant things to say about community, a woman’s place and the climate crisis.

The film does not signpost the traditional twists and turns and dramatic reversals, but keeps a cool distance, letting us wonder if Sandra is guilty or not, and we are kept guessing until the end. It’s a lowkey, almost downbeat drama, but with something invigoratingly cerebral.

This film, so apparently forbidding and opaque the way many Ceylan films initially are, has in fact something engrossing in its garrulous and wide-ranging quality: a literary quality in fact.

May December is delivered with a cool, shrewd precision by Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore carries off her dysfunctional queenliness very watchably and Natalie Portman has a great scene where she gives a lecture on acting to Gracie’s children’s high school drama class.

In its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving.

This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity.

The film, with its superb score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn, has undoubted power but might well revive the debate about conjuring slick movie effects from the horrors of history.

The performances from Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayami and the boys have a calm frankness and integrity. As for the story itself, it is arguably a little contrived with a thicket of mystery that perhaps didn’t need to be so dense. But this is a film created with a great moral intelligence and humanity.

This one has quite a bit of zip and fun and narrative ingenuity with all its MacGuffiny silliness that the last one (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) really didn’t.

The overwhelming sense of vocation necessary for such a life is almost awe-inspiring, although Paik’s own jokey, opaque persona seems to exist as a rebuke to any reaction as bourgeois as that.

A sweet, eminently sensible film.

It is a preposterous confection of a movie, like one of the rich sweetmeats being languidly nibbled at court, but very moreish, nonetheless. It is handsomely furnished and costumed with blue-chip character actors in the supporting roles and some wonderful locations and interiors at the Palace of Versailles itself.

It’s an effective retelling, though the film could have concentrated more on her tragicomic relationship with her oil plutocrat husband. Could it actually have been a love story after all?

Much of the film immerses us in an unknowable, unrecognisable world under the skin, without shape, without what Vesalius wanted to show us in the 16th century. It is an uncanny spectacle.

The nation of Ireland is vastly different now, but O’Shea shows this change was not inevitable, but the effect of courageous dissidents.

It’s a script which shows every sign of having had plenty of rewrites, though perhaps it could have done with a few more.

There is something nightmarish and hallucinatory about this business and also in the terrible retribution exacted by Oreste, a grotesque mob chieftain. The film has a throb of something disturbing and transgressive.

It is interesting that this new cut of the film gives a much fuller account of Harris’s ferocious consumption of cocaine, which I thought the film originally glossed over in favour of a more sentimentally traditional booze narrative when it came to discussing that picturesque concept of “hellraising” – although in both versions I liked Harris’s contemptuous refusal to be cowed or psychoanalysed: he indulged because he loved it.

Perhaps this movie is a little anticlimactic, but there is often an atmosphere of real fear, especially when Natalia is driven to the edge by her newborn’s incessant crying: a horrible moment which is not supernatural in the slightest.

This is a poignant and weird film.

With this startling and sombre documentary, Mexican film-maker Rodrigo Reyes has conducted an experiment in verbatim cinema, or what you might call witness cinema.

The film is smothered with a syrup of condescension.

The implacable forces of nature, nurture and destiny are what this movie grapples with; it is a really emotional and absorbing drama about adoption with terrific performances (many from nonprofessional first-timers) and compelling soundtrack musical cues.

I don’t think L’Immensità quite encompasses what it’s straining for and I’m not sure that Penélope Cruz is directed towards her greatest strengths, very good though of course she always is. But Crialese has fervency and style and those fantasy worlds might even have a touch of De Sica’s miraculous Milan.

Now Guardians of the Galaxy has reached the threequel stage: overlong, yes, and finally reaching for an importance and emotional closure (perhaps inspired by Gunn’s own emotional corporate redemption) that it doesn’t quite encompass, while leaving the GOTG brand open for a next-gen reboot. But it’s still spectacular, spirited and often funny.

The movie thumps through successive events of Foreman’s amazing life in efficient, unsubtle, on-the-nose style, skating over his many marriages a little.

Little Richard emerges here as an exquisite figure, an aesthete and athlete: a butterfly who could never be broken on any wheel.

Manzoor’s fight scenes, so amusingly executed by Kansara, effectively dramatise the terrible struggle that women are going to endure – especially the ongoing duel with that certain special in-law. This film delivers a spinning back kick of laughs.

It is an agonisingly tough watch, crackling with tension.

It’s a movie made dense and vehement with Julie’s passion for bikes and her angry sense of a death wish which is going to strike her, ahead of anyone else.

Here, the pipeline destroyers are the good guys; an interesting genre twist though one which arguably defangs the film, just a little, removing the addictive flavour of cruelty and chaos, yet not making it any the less gripping and ingenious.

Peedom has now done it again, this time on the subject of rivers with the usual montage of powerful images. Visually rich though it still is, I have to admit to being a bit restless with this kind of globalist Imax-style docu-fantasia.

It is basically droningly reverent, as well as sometimes bland and naive.

The minute Joseph steps into this disenchanted forest, tripping over every tree root, you can sense the impending disaster, and the horror that Machoian’s movie is moving towards.

Joaquin Phoenix is on really uninteresting form, playing to his weaknesses as an actor as he gives a narcissistic performance of pain, sporting a permanently zonked expression of anxiety and torpid self-pity at the misery that surrounds him.

There is such superb compositional sense in the still life tableau shots and the almost archaeological sense of time, creating something deeply mysterious and unbearably sad.

This film winds up looking like the most expensive in-house corporate promo in history: shallow, parochial and obtuse. By the time the credits roll, we’re apparently supposed to be euphoric – not so much at individual sporting achievement, but at all the billions of dollars that Nike has been making.

The second film adaptation of the phenomenally successful video game is a disappointment to rival the first.

1976 is made with thrilling assurance, and the tension and Carmen’s spiritual crisis are superbly conveyed, with a nerve-jangling score by María Portugal. It’s a great example of Chilean antifascist noir.

The Beasts is a strange film in many ways, difficult to pin down tonally or generically, but it leaves a trail of unease in the mind.

A shiver of disquiet runs right through it.

The film feels over-determined and self-satisfied.

It has the ruminative lightness, almost weightlessness, the watercolour delicacy and reticence of the emotions, the sense of the uncanny, the insistent play of erotic possibility and that Murakami keynote: a cat.

Memories of Murder actually inspired a solution to its case; perhaps The Night of the 12th could do the same. Either way, it’s a brutally engrossing drama.

For me it never gets to grips with the real issue for Pornhub, OnlyFans or indeed Facebook: are these sites publishers or platforms? If they derive profit from the content they host, then should they be responsible for it, or not?

It’s a movie straining for more than it’s achieving, moment by moment, but Goth’s toxic energy always holds the attention.

Somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight.

Braff puts us through a gruelling “relapse” montage as Allison hits the pills again after an illusory breakthrough and then a “recovery” montage as she gets it together. And the film’s single valuable lesson – the one about not looking at your phone while driving – is all but forgotten.

Abraham Lincoln's second term, with its momentous choices, has been brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg as a fascinatingly theatrical contest of rhetoric and strategy.

It sure as hell got under mine. Jonathan Glazer's sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary, and very erotic. It also comes with a dog whistle of absurdist humour that I suspect has been inaudible for some American reviewers on the international festival circuit so far.

A director like Jonathan Demme or David Fincher would have gone for the jugular on this kind of material, but writer-director Matt Ruskin seems a little squeamish and keeps everything on the right side of contemporary taste. The chill of fear is missing.

This new Shazam film is cordial, with a puppyish good nature and an awareness of its own silliness.

There’s a little bit of fun and interest along the way and Lange has some fun with her eccentric persona, but this feels under-energised.

There is something winning in this calm, walking-pace drama – and the landscape is amazing.

The standout star is the passionate and fierce Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a Korean-American musician for whom music was an escape from racism and sexism.

The awful truth is that this is a generic derivative horror script.

The film is entirely ridiculous, often quite boring, with a script showing worrying signs of being cobbled together. But even as a longtime Von Trier doubter, I now have to admit it grows on you; there's a mawkish fascination and some flashes of real visual brilliance.

The power of this film creeps up on you by stealth; its dramatic idiom is admittedly mannered in the Leigh style but shy of caricature, and designed consistently to abrade the audience's consciousness without irritating – fingertips down the blackboard, not fingernails.

This big-hearted underdog sports comedy runs on rails, with no great surprises, but it’s likable.

Ithaka shows us how time and experience have lent perspective to it all, affectingly focusing on Assange’s elderly father John Shipton, and Assange’s fiancee Stella Moris (now his wife), who have doggedly fought for Assange’s rights as an investigative journalist and publisher.

There is a gentle and very happy sense of freedom and possibility aboard the Adamant, and there is enormous warmth, sympathy and human curiosity in this film.

This is clearly a very personal project for Avilés, and the heartbreak feels very real.

It’s a vehement movie, with a driving narrative force and a robust sense of time and place.

It is a film that does not proceed in the narrative style and the title seems to suggest that we should think of it as a different art form entirely: a constellation of themes, ideas, tropes, moods in which the personae relate to each other as concepts rather than characters.

It is a tough, muscular film with the grit of crime, but a heartbeat of compassion.

In the end I felt that the film fully achieves neither the ostensible comedy of the opening, nor the supposed sadness of its denouement.

This, the film says, is what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of the law in a case like this: a calm, professional, technocratic but relentless display of overwhelming power.

It’s all socked over with great and gruesome conviction, but there isn’t the same character-related interest as the TV series could generate.

It is an absorbing, intriguing, bewildering work: often spectacular and beautiful, like a sci-fi supernatural disaster movie or an essay on nature and politics, but shot through with distinctive elements of fey and whimsical comedy.

This movie is a time-capsule of Europe’s recent tragic past.

As a war movie, it’s bafflingly dull; as a political-intrigue drama, it’s lifeless; as a personal portrait of Meir, it’s inert and superficial.

Joyland is such a delicate, intelligent and emotionally rich film. What a debut from Sadiq.

The Survival of Kindness has static elements of an art installation, a non-narrative dream state that is part arresting, part frustrating.

Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese makes a really stylish debut with Disco Boy, a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness, or into something else entirely: the heart of an alternative reality, or a transcendent new self.

It is a strange, enclosed experience: Dafoe’s mastery of the screen keeps it meaningful.

It’s a likeable confection, and a pleasure to see Marisa Tomei on very good form.

A waste of great talent, sadly.

The film appears to exist in the Venn diagram-overlap between twee and hipster, which isn’t for everyone – but let it grow on you, and there is a real sweetness and gentleness in its absurdity, a savant innocence and charm.

The film’s rather abstract conversation doesn’t convey much in the way of urgency or specificity. But there is a sustained moral seriousness in Polley’s work, a willingness to confront pain.

This is an odd combination of broad semi-satirical humour and deeply serious hugging and learning.

This is a film that is trying very hard to be liked, while at the same time complacently assuming its likeability is beyond question.

Like the luxury goods that in one scene we see being stolen, the performances are out of the top drawer, and it is a great pleasure to see Moore on such good form: no one cries more needily, and with more nakedly sinister intent, than her.

Channing Tatum’s hunky stripper enjoys some sizzling scenes with Salma Hayek but this eccentric threequel feels cobbled together.

The severity and poise of this calmly paced movie, its emotional reserve and moral seriousness – and the elusive, implied confessional dimension concerning Diop herself – make it an extraordinary experience.

How bland and forgettable this film is, without in the smallest way harnessing the real performing power of Banderas, Colman, Pugh, Winstone et al.

A strong, muscular, heartfelt film.

The Sixth Sense director’s apocalyptic mystery horror is short on both mystery and horror and the ambiguous finale is deeply ridiculous.

Perhaps Fox and the film itself don’t quite put us inside his anguish at first getting the diagnosis and then his decision to go public, but his courage is the more moving for being understated.

The ending of this film does not entirely measure up to the standard of tough realism set in the rest of the drama, but what a great performance from Riseborough.

Unsubtle and on-the-nose though it undoubtedly is, there is also an amiable, upbeat energy.

Gentle, friendly, faintly bleary – and sans makeup – Pamela Anderson is an authentically likable screen presence in this intimate, if somehow elusive, documentary portrait from Ryan White; it is about her life and times and the super-strength misogyny she has faced from liberals and satirists in the long endgame of her celebrity career.

Goldin shows that maybe there is always more bloodshed than beauty.

The Fabelmans left me with a floating feeling of happiness.

This is a documentary that discreetly does not concern itself much with Peterson’s personality, and concentrates on the music, which is entirely worthwhile.

It’s a melancholy, dreamy study.

It may be a bit corny, but Hammer keeps the funny lines coming and it has some pep that George Clooney and Julia Roberts’ recent romcom effort Ticket to Ride didn’t.

However grotesquely culpable Chuck has been, you find yourself wanting to hug him. It’s a clever comic trick to bring off.

It’s a very strong performance from Kendrick, who disturbingly conveys the tiny and not so tiny symptoms of emotional abuse.

Beautiful Beings is shot with real style, with very good performances, but the cliched and consequence-free violence is a flaw.

It is a deeply intelligent, humane drama.

It’s a diverting private tour.

Till is a fierce portrait of courage and a sombre study of the human cost involved in resisting this kind of barbarity.

A entertainingly nasty film for the new year.

Whatever its flaws, this movie provides fans of French star Léa Seydoux with a treat.

Hanks carries the film with his personality and his easy address to the camera, but this oddity of a film never quite comes to life.

As things turn out, this case turns on a rather ridiculous coincidence: but never mind, it’s an entertaining piece of counter-factual noir.

It’s a muscular, heartfelt performance from Ackie.

This is an absorbingly told story; Knightley’s vocal performance is engaging and Charlotte’s face, in particular, is strongly and expressively drawn. But the film arguably fudges one of the most important issues of Charlotte’s life: her grandfather’s abusive relationshipwith her.

The landscape has a certain gaunt beauty and so does Dickey’s performance.

Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big: but feeling medium, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response which should be happening without any explicit instruction. Yet it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such black-belt movie stars as Pitt and Robbie and there is something funny in Babylon’s wild, event-movie gigantism.

And what do we find aside from the high-tech visual superstructure? The floatingly bland plot is like a children’s story without the humour; a YA story without the emotional wound; an action thriller without the hard edge of real excitement.

This beautiful and compassionate film from first-time feature director Colm Bairéad, based on the novella Foster by Claire Keegan, is a child’s-eye look at our fallen world; already it feels to me like a classic.

This is a tender tribute.

This is a strong, fierce, heartfelt movie.

Love and sex, two things taken so casually for granted in so many different kinds of story, here become totemic articles of faith. Lady Chatterley still has the power to move.

It certainly has its moments of poignancy and sadness and McGregor’s droll tones as the longsuffering cricket provide some grace notes of fun.

The film coolly conveys the awakening-from-denial horror that their investigation spreads through the film industry and I admire the way it takes the macho cliched nonsense out of journalism in movies: these are not boozy guys being adorable and chaotic, but smart, persistent people doggedly doing their job.

This is a film that tries your patience a fair bit, and yet there is something attractive in its kind of innocence.

This is an almost unbearably painful and emotional group family portrait.

Glass Onion is never anything less than entertaining, with its succession of A-lister and A-plus-lister cameos popping up all over the place. And Johnson uncorks an absolute showstopper of a flashback a half-hour or so into the action, which then unspools back up to the present day, giving us all manner of cheeky POV-shift reveals.

It’s pretty much a laugh-free film to make you appreciate the work of Nancy Meyers or Richard Curtis; their films may look easy or corny but they have something this doesn’t, a kind of buoyancy or a way of alchemising all the luxury tourist incidentals into something entertaining.

It’s amiable entertainment, and Hamm may well develop in the character if this becomes a franchise.

Clara Sola is superbly filmed and composed with a very humid sense of atmosphere, and Araya’s performance is a miracle of sympathy and candour.

It is well-acted and well directed by Mylod with tasty side plates of droll humour.

Like Panahi’s recent films This Is Not a Film and Taxi Tehran, this is powerful because of its control, subtlety and diplomatic finesse.

An absorbing and nourishing documentary.

As with the last film, there are bold extravagant gestures of spectacle, while Wright, Coel, Bassett, Gurira and Thorne all supply fierce performances; each of them ups the onscreen voltage simply by appearing.

As for Radcliffe, he doesn’t seem to have a funny bone in his body, but then it’s difficult to tell considering the preponderance of unfunniness in this script.

Pugh’s pure force carries everything, and conveys the central paradox: to unlock this mystery, Lib is going to have to surrender to it, to believe in it, in order to gain Anna’s confidence and learn the child’s own awful secret. The wonder reverberates with the pangs of hunger and fear.

This is a wonderfully sympathetic, deeply felt and tenderly funny family drama with a novelistic attention to details and episodes – a little like Alfonso Cuáron’s Roma, about growing up in a similar era in Mexico City. Cámara thoroughly inhabits the figure of Gómez: unselfconsciously inspiring and lovable.

Perhaps the film could have got under Charlie’s bland surface more. A creepily watchable drama nonetheless.

Here is a terribly meagre experience from writer-director Rodrigo García, a silly, pointless movie which never delivers on its promises of drama and comedy and contains not a single funny or believable moment. As a filmic meal, it is pretty much entirely without nutritional or calorific value.

Michael Grandage’s new film has been coolly received by some, but I found it an interestingly fragile and Rattiganesque melodrama of repression and regret.

This is a dark reminder that even childbirth, that most universal human experience, can be clouded by sectarianism and suspicion.

Droll, witty, and proportioned like the proverbial outdoor brick-built convenience, Johnson is well placed to realise the superhero movie’s potential as surrealist action comedy. It’s a shame that all these other DC-ensemble heroes crowding into the action are frankly not really in his class, although Viola Davis’s brief cameo as Task Force X chief Amanda Waller brings the menace.

Sadly, this fatally self-conscious and self-aware movie fizzles out– a process that seems to start with the opening credits.

Stingily is relaxed and amiable, but in acting terms there may be nothing else there and the film doesn’t develop in any interesting direction.

Brainwashed is a bracing blast of critical rigour, taking a clear, cool look at the unexamined assumptions behind what we see on the screen.

It can’t end well. In fact, it ends badly. In every sense. The mystery of Myers has long since become deflated and inert, and when he is unmasked, the camera can’t quite be bothered to show us his pointless old face (unlike the unhelmeting of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which did at least show us what the great villain looked like). The only thing that’s scary is the thought of how long this has all been going on.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus and with battlefield scenes whose digital fabrications are expertly melded into the action. It never fails to do justice to its subject matter, though is perhaps conscious of its own classic status.

This is a sensually imaginative dive into the life of the Wuthering Heights author: it is a real passion project for O’Connor, with some wonderfully arresting insights.

Shaunak Sen’s documentary is a complex, thoughtful, quietly beautiful film about the ecosystem and human community.

Preposterous though it may be, this is a terrific family movie in a style audiences may not have seen since Mary Poppins.

This is a bracing guide to a brilliant individual who declined to conform.

Matilda is a tangy bit of entertainment, served up with gusto.

This is rich and valuable testament to Chilean courage.

This feels like something LaBute wrote in an afternoon on the notes app on his smartphone while thinking about something else.

This is a big, bold picture with the vivid presences of Davis, Lynch, Atim and Mbedu giving it some real voltage.

Like many fan favourite follow-ups, Hocus Pocus 2 is stuck, trapped somewhere between different times, audiences and tones, trying to do so much yet, in this instance, achieving so very little.

There is something weirdly heavy and foggy in Amsterdam that feels like it’s working against the lightness and nimbleness needed for a caper. It’s the reality of the history, which the movie makes explicit in the closing credits.

Viewers may be split on the question of exactly how satisfying it all is in the end. The performances are strong.

This is such a vivid, lovable triple-decker performance from Milonoff, Kauhanen and Leino.

The movie is a shard of comic and cosmic spite, and the image of the malign smile carries force.

The school is no more dysfunctional than any other institution and a lot more intelligent and self-questioning than many. A very engaging film.

The action of After Yang, bizarre and exotic as it is, meditates on what it is to be human and how that may in the future be modified, but it also addresses loss in the present day: our anguished and futile human instinct that death must surely be fixable.

Well, there’s no doubting that de Armas gives this everything she’s got and that is a very great deal, an expert analogue performance digitally deepfaked into various hallucinations. . . . Her performance is great; the film itself is self-satisfied and incurious.

This documentary is a spirited rebuke to the “sellout” narrative which has been allowed to grow up around his career, and a paean of praise to his commitment, talent and heroism.

It is a gentle, heartfelt relationship drama about – and for – intelligent adults.

Perhaps Schrader will indeed defiantly return to his accustomed theme for his next film – and this brilliant, restless director might well make it work. Sadly, this one doesn’t.

This watchable, undemanding drama rolls along capably, enlivened by unmistakably Bennettian gags and drolleries which come along every minute or so.

Ticket to Paradise may well do great business to those looking for some escapist fun, and that’s entirely understandable. But I found the wacky double-act of George and Julia slightly hard work.

An elegantly horrible coming-of-age.

Everything about this film means well and it is acted with professionalism and commitment. But there is something too easy about it.

This is an engrossing, well-acted story – disturbing but also tender and sad.

It’s a strange film; it rattles fiercely along, but its relentless cynicism and nihilism leaves a sour taste and opinion may divide as to exactly how funny it is. Podalydès gives an entertainingly blase performance as the worldly image consultant, trying to seduce Alexandre over lunch.

Empire of Light is a sweet, heartfelt, humane movie, which doesn’t shy away from the brutality and the racism that was happening in the streets outside the cinema.

Love Life is an inexpressibly tragic and painful human drama about complicated lives, a movie that interleaves the utter desolation with a dry understated comedy and a sense of emotional tangle and chaos, a film that moreover blindsides its leading female character – and us, the audience – with an entirely unexpected coda section.

It’s almost too perfectly contoured as a Hollywood narrative.

The Son is a laceratingly painful drama, an incrementally increased agony without anaesthetic.

There’s a very entertaining daftness and theatre nerdery to See How They Run (the title sounds uncomfortably like Run For Your Wife) as director Tom George takes the same approach to The Mousetrap that Ken Russell took to The Boyfriend: playing up the artificiality of it all. The comedy is shallow in the right way, and Rockwell’s bleary world-weariness contrasts nicely with Ronan’s saucer-eyed idealism.

There’s real intimacy and emotional generosity to this psychological mystery from Joanna Hogg – a personal movie which appears to come from the same universe as her earlier Souvenir films – or one very much like it.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, it superciliously pinches ideas from other films without quite understanding how and why they worked in the first place. It spoils its own ending simply by unveiling it, and in so doing shows that serious script work needed to be done on filling in the plot-holes and problems in a fantastically silly twist-reveal.

There are plenty of genuine laughs in this movie, but each of them seems to dovetail into a banshee-wail of pain.

Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.

It is a thoroughly intelligent production, a film festival event that could not exist in the rough-and-tumble of regular movie distribution but will I hope find a home on streaming services.

Maybe there is a kind of saintliness in the film which is occasionally difficult to take, but it’s an accomplished, tremendously shot piece of work.

The film itself is terrifically accomplished and horribly gripping, with golden-age movie pastiche and dashes of Psycho and The Wizard of Oz.

It’s spectacular and immersive, with a sensational opening. But it gets bogged down in its own one-note, one-tempo uproar and open-ended parkour camerawork – impressive though that is – and suffers from a number of sneaky false-flag get-out clauses that feel like a cop-out.

Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism.

Ava is made with superb technique and real style.

In a way, it is amazing that Flatley is able to fulfil a 12-year-old boy’s fantasy of being a secret agent, with a 12-year-old’s idea of what a secret agent actually does. The acting and writing are like the non-sexy bits that come between the sexy bits in a porn film made in 1985.

It is made with real panache – so much panache, in fact, that you can forgive much of the film’s outrageous narcissism. Iñárritu could, if he chose, tell us an equally painful but less grandiose and auto-mythic story about his own life – but he has exercised his prerogative as an artist and given us this confection instead. It is certainly spectacular.

It’s a garrulous, yet almost static movie, and weirdly for a film about narrative there is no single overwhelmingly important storyline.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.

Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

Mr Malcolm’s List has no great ambitions other than to amuse. But that is always harder than it looks.

Here is a documentary for anyone who’s ever suffered from impostor syndrome or ever fantasised about going back in time to their school days, to reverse all those heartbreaks and humiliations. In other words: all of us.

The whole thing is performed with relish and high spirits, and the digital fabrications of the Tower itself, rising out of the ground in stages with hair-raisingly dangerous structural work, are entertainingly contrived.

The crude, tedious action sequences with their video-game aesthetic are an incredible trial and there is nothing interesting or glamorous about these vampires at all.

The performance styles of Behrens and Hoya are quite different – Hoya is more opaque – but this is a pointed, candid drama.

It’s another film to leave you sighing over New York’s lost 70s heyday of gritty reality and creativity and danger.

Everything about this robotically made movie looks derivative and contrived; the videogame aesthetic is dull and the quirky high concept plays like a pound-shop knockoff of Inside Out and Soul.

It rattles strenuously on and on and on with unexciting and uninterestingly choreographed fights, cameos which briefly pep up the interest and placeholder non-lines where the funny material should have gone.

Every actor involved sells it hard and it’s good natured, but the unbelievability factor is just too high.

This family could be blown into pieces. And yet an irrepressible defiance and comic energy bubbles under every scene.

They really were amazing personalities: almost like children, although they came to be depressed that their work was not inspiring governments to work on evacuation protocols.

Veteran French director Jean-Jacques Annaud serves up some high-octane film-making with this old-fashioned disaster movie, composed in a docu-realist style, about the catastrophic fire that engulfed Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral in 2019.

A very touching and insightful film.

[A] decent retelling of an amazing true-life story.

The raffish charisma and sinister, saturnine handsomeness of Javier Bardem is what raises this movie above the standard of soap-opera … mostly.

Despite the film’s historical interest, it plays like a Carry On film without the gags, and the way it is shot makes it look like a coffee commercial.

It’s a relentless surge of solemnly ridiculous nonsense in the style of romdram maestro Nicholas Sparks (creator of The Notebook and Message in a Bottle) culminating in a courtroom trial with Edgar-Jones’s free-spirited heroine in the dock as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murder Suspect.

There is something clotted and heavy about this film, with sadly not enough of the humour for which Peele justly became celebrated in his double-act days with Keegan-Michael Key. It’s not the positive response I wanted to have.