Peter Bradshaw

Overall, it is a highly watchable spectacle, leaving a sizzling streak of rubber on the tarmac.

It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.

There’s a rigorous chill to this Hamlet.

Perhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu.

I’d like to see a film about a comedian who, like Bishop, really does flower into being funny.

Rabbit Trap loses focus, but not before it has shown us a scary performance from Croot.

It’s a time-honoured and perfectly enjoyable setup, and the first act, when the new reality dawns on clueless Bradley, is watchable. But the plot twists are derivative and the action then becomes dependent on weird stabs of grisliness that are not convincing or consistent with the characterisation.

An amusing vignette.

It’s ingenious and watchable stuff, with cheeky twists, although the final escalation to full-on action mayhem is maybe a step too far towards pure absurdity. The film is also a bit lenient on AI: “Human or AI – we all make mistakes.” Uh … yeah. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Raven and Judge Maddox revive their human-digital chemistry for a sequel.

This intriguing documentary from Croatian film-maker Igor Bezinović is partly a comic opera and partly a chilling message from the past.

You have to make friends with the jauntiness and zaniness of this film and to forgive its sometimes rather laborious quality, and Lara’s deadpan drollery is always watchable.

This is an absorbing, compassionate film.

It is bafflingly complacent in its sentimentality and its sheer, fatuous implausibility, which makes it valueless and meaningless as drama and comedy.

This is an exciting, forthright, energised – though very gruesome – film in which there is real human jeopardy and conflict. Non-zombies are more cinematic.

Some interesting material here, but the punches don’t land.

This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same time.

Holding Liat is a valuable work, not least for showing us that Israel and Netanyahu are not synonymous.

This is a never-say-die story and its cheerful optimism makes it a calorific Christmas treat.

We get some tastily over-the-top acting and some huge rewind POV shifts to explain what has really been going on – and, of course, the heady whiff of gaslight as Millie can’t quite be sure she really understands anything that’s happening. Silly it may be, but Feig and his cast deliver it with terrific gusto; this is an innocent holiday treat.

Avatar is as gigantically uninteresting and colossally impervious to criticism as ever: a vast, blank edifice that placidly repels objection.

There’s nothing wrong with a weepie or big emotional moments, but for me Goodbye June is too unreal, too contrived in its sugary farewell.

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.