Peter Bradshaw

Good Madam is an intriguing, atmospheric movie which doesn’t quite tie up all its sinister portents and implications in a satisfying ending. Yet there is something very unsettling in it.

The rock’n’roll bad boy of tennis is watchably if uncritically celebrated in this documentary portrait by Barney Douglas; it is a film that leaves unsolved the riddle, if it is a riddle, of John McEnroe’s confrontational on-court personality.

Two solid hours of efficient Netflix content is what’s on offer here, the action-thriller equivalent of a conscientiously microwaved Tuscan Sausage Penne from M&S.

Jane Austen’s calm, subtle novel gets the Fleabag treatment in this smirking romcom; it has more wrong notes than an inebriated squadron of harpists, including everything but a last-minute rush in a barouche to Bath airport.

It isn’t easy to develop a sketch-length idea into a feature film and not easy to pivot from ironic comedy into dark Straw Dogs-style menace, and then into a sweet-natured happy ending. But Earl, Hayward and Archer have managed it. It’s the bromance of the year.

The film is probably on its strongest ground with the most purely absurd touches.

This is a laborious movie whose final intertitles rather superciliously assure us that Inter Milan has made greater advances than other European clubs on protecting its young players’ mental health. That claim is as cloudy as everything else.

It is captivating and agonising all over again to see how dazzling Diana was, how simple and spontaneous she was compared with both the stuffy royals but also the secular celebrity class – how she instinctively knew to work with the press when it was still essentially sympathetic, but how panicky and dysfunctional she became when this same press became boorish and predatory.

It’s a film which needs an investment of attention, but there is a great observational intelligence and sympathy at work.

Although the character of Gru is mildly funny, the minions are unfunny without him and have never convincingly attained spin-off hero status. This is another of those intellectual property concepts whose trademarked quirky voices and characters should be laid to rest.

The film clunks on, acted with no flair or charisma by anyone in the cast and no energy or interest in the direction. A Rodriguez or a Tarantino – or, indeed, a Schrader – might have found something in the film’s episodic structure and its gallery of grotesques, but, as it is, this is just leaden.

The film conforms to the coming-of-age template in that romance is followed or superseded by friendship and maturing personal growth. Urzendowsky keeps it all together.

When the wisps of khat smoke clear away, it is perhaps not easy to decide exactly what is left behind, or to decide if khat is a cultural practice to be celebrated or rejected: but there are some marvellous images and moods in this misty, impressionistic study.

Kokkali persuasively enacts both the emotional hurt and emotional healing.

This is a fluent and very watchable work, and Johnson and Burghardt carry it.

Pleasure doesn’t take a doomily disapproving line on porn, and real pornstars and agents are given cameos. Yet neither is it necessarily celebratory or porn-positive. The people in charge are overwhelmingly male and Thyberg shows how the power relations in the business are really the same as they ever were.

The film just bounces along, zipping through its running time.

A nice, creepy performance from Hemsworth, with Teller gamely going along with the script, but having stretched out the story idea to feature-film length, the film doesn’t really give the sense that it knows where it is going.

The film has charm as well as a certain deja vu for audiences, although for me it didn’t quite have the distinction of Marnie.

It’s acted with such terrific panache that not enjoying it is impossible.

A dead-eyed Chris Pratt presides over this convoluted mess of Bond-style villains and toothless action that even the original cast can’t save from extinction.

Like Werner Herzog, Kier’s German accent lends a deadpan drollery to everything he says, but there is a gooey soft-centre to his film, and Kier carries that off reasonably well, his face becoming almost boyish. Another intriguing persona in the Udo Kier gallery.

This struck me as that kind of comedy horror in which (like much romantic comedy) the “comedy” half of the equation has gone missing.

Hepburn is in the boho-gamine mode, and this has a brittle charm, (arguably more than in Breakfast At Tiffany's four years later) but there is something unconvincing in the May-to-December pairing of 28-year-old Hepburn and 58-year-old Astaire and also something grumpy and not particularly classy about the way this film shrieks with laughter at silly modern women filling their empty heads with trendy Parisian intellectualism.

A valuable if slightly passionless and reticent movie.

The film declines to offer up its meaning, or its reason for being, and asks us to think about something outside the passage of time.

This is a glossy piece of Netflix content, but it relies very heavily on NBA fan buy-in for the drama fully to work; there is a continuous series of recognition jolts provided by the stars and legends playing themselves.

[A] terrific debut feature.

It is a tough story, told with conviction.

This documentary does something very few films can: it makes you grin with pleasure.

This is a genuinely bizarre, startling, freewheelingly lo-fi and funny indie picture with the refreshing bad-taste impact of Todd Solondz or Robert Crumb.

Everything in Showing Up is certainly valid, but I confess I thought it lacked some perspective on Lizzie’s life, and it is sometimes a bit studied and passionless, especially compared with Reichardt’s previous film, First Cow. But there is sympathy and charm and food for thought.

Albert Serra’s bizarre epic is a cheese-dream of French imperial tristesse, political paranoia and an apocalyptic despair. It is a nightmare that moves as slowly and confidently as a somnambulist, and its pace, length, and Serra’s beautiful widescreen panoramic framings – in which conventional drama is almost camouflaged or lost – may divide opinion. I can only say I was captivated by the film and its stealthy evocation of pure evil.

Here is a film about a very complicated and painful kind of coming of age, or maybe a meditation on “coming of age” as something that never actually happens; it also examines the illusory dividing line between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, present and past.

There’s no doubting the force of this drenchingly sad story.

The movie is fundamentally silly, with tiringly shallow characterisation and broad streaks of crime-drama intrigue, which only underline the fact that not a single word of it is really believable.

Sad to say, it goes down like a cup of tepid, milky and over-sugared tea.

Epically tiresome. ... What is exasperating about the film is its reluctance to dramatise the teaching: to show the young people themselves simply getting better at acting.

Mario Martone’s beautifully shot and superbly composed film teeters on the edge of something special. And if it doesn’t quite achieve that, settling in the end for something more generically crime-oriented, it’s still very good.

Leila’s simmering rage at the contemptible mediocrity of her father and brothers, and the exhaustion of trying to save them from themselves, is the emotional energy that powers the movie, building to that climactic wedding scene. It is a great performance from Alidoosti, first among equals in a great ensemble cast.

There is a simplicity and clarity of purpose here that I responded to and the Dardennes have got excellent performances from their young leads.

Abbasi undoubtedly conveys the brutal attitudes which create victimhood.

This film touches on her keynote themes of sexuality and colonialism, in its 21st-century manifestation, though maybe the romantic passion and duplicity don’t come across as strongly as they might have done with leads who had a stronger chemistry.

I’m not sure this is my favourite Skolimowski film, but it is engaging in many ways: beautifully photographed, sentimental and surreal in equal measure; and also stubborn – as stubborn as its hero – in its symbolism and stark pessimism.

It’s not a movie so much as 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same time, with no variation of pace.

It is not exactly a horror film, despite some spasms of disquiet, but an uncanny evocation of how, when left utterly on our own, we spiral inwards into our memories, dreams and fears.

It’s a movie that is boldly anti-clerical, juxtaposing the spectacle of faith with a hidden reality of corruption and hypocrisy – although in the final act I sensed that it perhaps did not quite have the courage of its satirical convictions.

This film has mystery and passion, it climbs mountainous heights and rewards you with the opposite of vertigo: a sort of exaltation.

It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.

It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming.

It’s an extraordinary planet that Cronenberg lands us down on, and insists we remove our helmets before we’re quite sure we can breathe the air.

RMN is a sombre downbeat movie, whose sudden flurry of dreamlike visions at the very end is a little disconcerting. But it is seriously engaged with the dysfunction and unhappiness in Europe that goes unreported and unacknowledged.

In many ways this is a study in anger, and it is an austere and angular picture. Krieps gives an exhilaratingly fierce, uningratiating performance.

This is exasperatingly nonsensical and humourless: it is full of grand gestures, gigantically self-important acting, big scenes (though often bafflingly truncated), big emotions and smirkingly knowing dialogue. Yet I admit there is technique and gusto to the way it is put together.

With remarkable confidence, [Wells] just lets her movie unspool naturally, like a haunting and deceptively simple short story. The details accumulate; the images reverberate; the unshowy gentleness of the central relationship inexorably deepens in importance.

For all its tendency to soap opera, it has a lovely happy-sad sweetness.

Strident, derivative and dismayingly deficient in genuine laughs, Ruben Östlund’s new movie is a heavy-handed Euro-satire, without the subtlety and insight of his breakthrough movie Force Majeure, or the power of his comparable Palme-winning spectacle about the art world, The Square.

Perhaps this film doesn’t entirely work all the way through, but it is a shard of malevolence that jabs into your skin.

This is undoubtedly a vehement and very watchable drama – far superior to Serebrennikov’s previous film, the sprawling and unrewarding Petrov’s Flu. If there is a narrowness in its emotional and tonal range, that gives it force.

Gray has given us tough, sinewy and memorable New York movies in the past such as The Yards and We Own the Night, but this is weighed down with a sentimental and self-regarding staginess.

The tricky mother-son relationship is well managed and Moore always brings to this kind of Oedipal drama a seriocomic intensity (as in Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace from 2007, playing opposite Eddie Redmayne).

The Innocents is a nightmare unfolding in cold, clear daylight.

The result is something appreciably sillier and more eccentric than the original ... It’s certainly far from the sophistication and gloss for which Hazanavicius became famous ten years ago with his silent pastiche The Artist; it’s closer to his spy spoof series OSS 117. But it’s likeable and goofy.

Vortex tells us something else about old age, something which a severe and high-minded movie like Michael Haneke’s Amour would not grasp: death is chaotic, like life. It ends with things undone and in messy disarray. This is a work of wintry maturity, and real compassion.

There’s plenty of rock’n’roll fighter-pilot action in this movie, but weirdly none of the homoerotic tension that back in the day had guys queueing up at the Navy recruitment booths set up in cinema foyers. Weirder still, it is actually less progressive on gender issues than the original film.

This mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time.

It is an unsubtle and schematic but very well-acted Brit folk-horror pastiche from the writer-director Alex Garland; it feels like a reverse-engineered version of The League of Gentlemen, with the overt comic intention concealed or denied.

The multiverse madness is treated with genial high-energy panache, though I have to say that this infinite profusion of realities does not actually feel all that different in practice from the shapeshifting, retconning world of all the other Avengers films. And infinite realities tend to reduce the dramatic impact of any one single reality, and reduces what there is at stake in a given situation. Nonetheless, it’s handled with lightness and fun.

Sophie Marceau delivers the cringe in this clunkingly bad LA dating comedy: tin-eared, cliched, unfunny and misjudged in every horribly unconvincing syllable, sadly sounding as if it has been written by someone who has never been to Los Angeles or met any human beings.

What an uncanny, exhilarating experience.

As hammy, silly, and undeniably entertaining as ever.

At just 72 minutes, this is a brief, intense feature: it’s possible that Wandel envisaged it as even shorter than it actually is, and perhaps its narrative tendons slacken a little after the initial spasm of horror. But what an incredible performance from Vanderbeque: an intuition of fear and pain and moral outrage that goes beyond acting.

There are some entertaining meta-touches here, but the entire Gutierrez plot is strained and borderline dull. Pascal isn’t a natural comic and the movie winds up fudging his crucial bad-guy status.

The drama mimics Anne’s own sense of denial, her own refusal to remember or imagine the catastrophe. What we get instead are clinical inspections functioning as chilling parodies or inversions of that sexual intimacy that has upended her life.

This film comes to life in the two scenes when its hushed note of kindly reverence is broken.

Operation Mincemeat is watchable enough, but perhaps can’t find a fictional way into the stranger-than-fiction outrageousness of the scheme itself.

This is all amiable enough, with the all-important dimension of laughs: Tatum and Bullock showing that they are smart enough to know how silly it is, and that they know that we know that they know.

A complex, subtle, tender and heart-rending story of a young girl’s upbringing in a village menaced by the drug cartels and people traffickers.

Grosev is all about data: by getting hold of passenger manifests, travel details or call records – and everything digital leaves a trace – he can put together an objective picture, even retrieving the culprits’ passport photos. It is quite staggering.

All this is acted with smouldering intensity and authenticity, particularly by Filipovic, although it’s possible to wonder if there is anything unexpected to come in the third act, or if we can roughly guess where it’s all heading.

Here is a really well-made, old-fashioned anti-war epic in a forthright and robustly enjoyable style from director and co-writer Arthur Harari.

Samani’s film-making language has consistency and urgency, and there is an interesting streak of atheism that goes alongside this movie’s spiritual aura.

The Northman is a horribly violent, nihilistic and chaotic story about the endless cycle of violence, the choice between loving your friends and hating your enemies – which turns out to be no choice at all, and the thread of fate down which masculinity’s delicious toxin drips. It’s entirely outrageous, with some epic visions of the flaring cosmos. I couldn’t look away.

Without that initial fanbase buy-in, Julia feels like a redundant tribute, with something very indulgent about the “foodie” rhapsodising.

Maybe a little unexpectedly, Amazon Studios have given us a very watchable and classily upscale espionage drama-thriller in the spirit of John le Carré.

Wilson and Burke give formidably good performances: a woman who desperately wants to give and receive love, and a man who hasn’t the smallest idea what any of that means.

It’s good-natured entertainment, though there is still something weightless and formless about the narrative.

This could have been a good premise, but the basic idea of the pandemic and bubbling up itself now feels spurious and dated, and there just aren’t enough funny lines to carry this film through its punishing 126-minute running time.

It really is an amazingly pointless and dumb film: the good/bad setup between Morbius and Milo is muddled and cancelled by the not-especially-compelling moral struggle within Morbius himself. Both Leto and Smith have to keep doing the evil demonic face-change growling thing, and it is intensely silly. Let’s hope the extended Spider-Man universe extends far enough to include something more interesting than this.

Youth is a great theme of Linklater’s, but presented without any great directional moralising or emotional narrative. Being young just is. This is a film of enormous charm.

For all the spectacular action set pieces, there’s something silly and tedious that sets in well before the two-hour mark. It flatlines.

In its unexpected way, this film speaks to the new agony of banishment now being felt by millions of Ukrainians, and to the profound unease and concern and impotence spreading westward across Europe.

This is a richly intelligent drama, in which every word and every shot counts.

The movie shrewdly creates a shiver of nausea in the institutional use of “diversity” as another prestige-marker.

Just occasionally, Lyne brings the right kind of flash, brash and trash to this fantastically silly and unbelievable story. But the film plods along in such a disconcerting way: there is no ratcheting up of tension, or plausible psychology.

Dinklage always holds the screen with his natural charisma.

There is a fair bit of sentimentality here, but an awful lot of affection and energy as well.

Paxton’s movie sketches out the sinister dread just under the happy-family surface; she is in expert control of her film, achieving her effects with economy and force. It is really unnerving.

Great Freedom is a formidably intelligent and well-acted prison movie and also a love story – or perhaps a paradoxically platonic bromance, stretching from the end of the second world war to the moon landing.

Letts is a brilliant entrepreneur, an inter-disciplinary artist and eloquent speaker about what life was like in the punk era, and despite his (correct) refusal to see things in these tiresomely nostalgist or sentimental terms, there is a pang in recognising the spark of that time.

There’s a propulsive, driving force to the way the film is directed, but there are some things that don’t entirely track.

Lemercier’s weirdly grinning, gurning face superimposed on the child’s head creates an unnatural chill that the film fails to shrug off, even after Aline as an adult is supposed to be glammed up with her teeth fixed.

This film may stretch your patience to the limit and beyond. It’s minor work – but there is always something there, some restless wounded intelligence, a pugnacious worrying-away at something.

This is an engaging ensemble piece, acted with vehemence and sincerity, though it concludes a little melodramatically.

The ending is tiresome and shark-jumping in the extreme.

Pure evil permeates this brief, 80-minute film, whose cold visual brilliance reminds me of the recent movies of Paweł Pawlikowski. It wasn’t until some time after it had finished that I grasped one of the reasons it was so oppressive: there are no women in it at all. There is a chill of political fear.

The estimable Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters has bafflingly decided to try everyone’s patience with this insufferable vanity project: a violent gonzo grossout that sadly conforms to the horror-comedy tendency of being neither properly scary nor properly funny.

This engrossing film is a time capsule of London itself – the faces not so very different from those you would see in the 40s or 50s.

Perhaps it’s more for insiders and specialists, but this film is a taste of Italian life.

It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere.

Perhaps this one doesn’t take Seidl’s creative career much further down the road to (or away from) perdition, but it is managed with unflinching conviction, a tremendous compositional sense and an amazing flair for discovering extraordinary locations.

There is something lighter, almost flippant and French-farcical about this new Von Kant: a man brought low by l’amour, inviting from the audience hardly more than a worldly, sympathetic shrug.

This is a film that doesn’t set out to push your emotional buttons all that hard, or even at all. But it covers a surprising amount of narrative ground and there is always something engaging and tender to it.

The film stands or falls by its claims to deadpan comedy – but this is heavy-handed and unsatisfying.

This film may not have all that much new material but it piercingly asks the right questions about Chaplin’s elusive reality.

[An] engrossing, unnerving but unexpectedly sympathetic drama of family dysfunction.

It’s an entertaining, fairly overwrought piece, a little tightly buttoned.

Dario Argento’s return to directing after a 10-year absence has its moments of macabre and melodramatic invention.

Claire Denis’s new film is a seductively indirect love triangle, a drama of the mind as much as the heart. It’s intriguing if contrived and anticlimactic, though acted at the highest pitch of sensual conviction.

Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.

Incredible But True has a wacky premise that Dupieux very possibly had no idea how to develop. And yet I found myself laughing quite a lot of the time. The sheer silliness and zen pointlessness is entertaining.

It’s a huge greenscreen action-adventure with a reasonable bang-buck ratio, but a box office algorithm where its heart is supposed to be.

Jennifer Lopez is radioactively humourless and Owen Wilson is robotically bland in this stinker.

This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time.

Branagh brings something spirited and good-humoured to the role of Poirot, but the film’s attempt to create some romantic stirrings to go with the activities of those little grey cells is not very convincing.

It is an intriguing story, although I have to admit to feeling a bit bemused at the arbitrary way the Beast story is inserted into the already tense and interesting situation of Suzu/Belle and her relationships with people at home and school.

Here the formulaic silliness, sometimes part of the enjoyment, is just tiring.

“This isn’t a Mensa convention!” says one player. Is that disingenuous? Isn’t there, in fact, some advanced showbiz intelligence and surrealist savvy in the way Jackass is set up and edited? Either way, it has a horror-comedy impact.

The film allows you to ponder not just the mother-child bond – strong enough to confront fascism – but the way everyone has to let their children be influenced by strangers; the unintended upbringing of being out in the world. What an emotional experience.

It feels like a screensaver, a movie generated by an algorithm, the same algorithm that calculated the likely profit on extending the Sing franchise.

Perhaps Good Luck to You, Leo Grande does not aspire to a piercingly profound analysis of sex and the human condition. It is, however, an amusing, compassionate and humane drama acted and directed with terrific panache.

A gentle, exquisitely sad film.

Boyega’s performance has an essential sympathy and dignity that are vital to this drama; an unshowy sense of self-worth that keeps it together.

Director Denzel Washington and his stars do their best with this bland, shallow and awkwardly structured film.

Mass is performed with impeccable intelligence and sensitivity, although sometimes it feels like an exercise in award-winning acting. But I admit it: the final, unexpected dialogue scene, though arguably as stagey and showy as everything else, does deliver a punch.

This film has a horribly ingenious premise and there is something chilling in the central concept.

Perhaps there is less zap in Scream nowadays and archly invoking the newer generation of indie horror - Jordan Peele is mentioned, with absolute respect - only serves in the long run to remind you how elderly Scream is. But it’s still capable of delivering some piercing high-pitched decibels.

A well-meaning but hammy and perfunctorily sentimental heartwarmer in the familiar Britfilm style.

Bollaers works well with co-star Benoît Magimel and together they do their best to raise the standard of this well-meaning but basically unsatisfying work.

Very real issues are suffused with an oppressive, unearthly, compelling unreality.

Cue all sorts of strangely tired, laugh-free goofiness, with none of the funny lines and wit that come as standard with Pixar/Disney films. I guess it would pacify very young children.

Steel brings a very distinctive kind of control and restraint to his film, both in terms of its subdued colour palette and an emotional language which despite explicit scenes of both sex and homophobic tension and paranoia, has something opaque and elliptical about it.

An ingenious, elegant counterfactual drama.

What emerges is Ailey’s lifelong seriousness and his vocational purpose in dance.

This is a heavy-footed reboot which doesn’t offer a compelling reason for its existence other than to gouge a fourth income stream from Matrix fans, submissively hooked up for new content, and it doesn’t have anything approaching the breathtaking “bullet time” action sequences that made the original film famous.

George Clooney has long been a force for good in movies and public life – but what a bafflingly bland, indulgent, gritless oyster of a film he’s directed here.

Mahershala Ali gives a heartfelt performance in this elegant and rather melancholy sci-fi mystery with which Irish film-maker Benjamin Cleary makes his impressive feature debut.

What is great about Colman’s performance is that it is always teetering on the brink of some new revelation about Leda: her face is subtly trembling with … what? Tears? Laughter? A scowl of scorn?

Like a great big playful un-neutered pitbull, Matthew Vaughn’s new Kingsman movie comes crashing into our cinematic lives this Christmas, overturning the furniture and frantically humping everyone’s leg before rolling over on the carpet for you to tickle its tummy or anything else that comes to hand.

There is something, for me, unrevealing about the drama, and almost sentimental about the final moments. But Hovig and Skarsgård are both very good.

The issues involved here might have been discussed a little more extensively and the provenance and context of the TV interview archive material could have been labelled more clearly. But this is a decent film.

This film could have done something more convincing with that mode of reverse-vertigo hinted at in its title: that fear and willed blindness about what looms over us. But if the movie helps to do something about climate change, such critical objections are unimportant.

An oddity, in which all the characters seem to be avatars for the loquacious Sorkin himself.

The film pinballs cheerfully about the place, from crisis to crisis, from losing the tickets to getting back the tickets, with no great narrative purpose other than fun.

This is confident, distinctive work.

Ameen has perfectly plausibly brought off a high-gloss mainstream picture with a big heart and a very nice supporting cast, including Stephen Dillane as Shirley’s new boyfriend. For Ameen, it’s another step on the way to Hollywood stardom.

West Side Story is contrived, certainly, a hothouse flower of musical theatre, and Spielberg quite rightly doesn’t try hiding any of those stage origins. His mastery of technique is thrilling; I gave my heart to this poignant American fairytale of doomed love.

Subtlety and nuance are not exactly this film’s strong points.

Silent Night is not exactly a satire of well-off and well-connected people as such – everyone is supposed to be basically pretty adorable. But there is something undoubtedly startling and bizarre about seeing the end of the world generically grafted on to this jolly Britcom mode.

It would be really obtuse not to marvel at the exuberance, energy and vivid moment-by-moment immediacy of this movie: Sorrentino is a film-maker who is always on the move, on the attack.

Did the whole nation and its governing class go into denial after the Kennedy assassination as a way of managing their shock and grief? Perhaps. But this documentary, for all its factual material, is frustrating.

The plot’s twists and turns, which were manageable in a three-part TV drama, look contrived and unlikely in a feature film and Bullock has little to do but look self-consciously solemn and martyred for the entirety of it.

In the end, this is Lady Gaga’s film: her watchability suffuses the picture, an arrabbiata sauce of wit, scorn and style.

Berry brings commitment and focus to the drama. She wins on points.

The keynote is vanilla blandness.

The Power of the Dog is a made with artistry and command: it is one of Jane Campion’s best.

It’s such a delectable film: I’ll be cutting myself another slice very soon.

There are some nice moments and sweet showtunes, but Encanto feels like it is aspiring to exactly that sort of bland frictionless perfection that the film itselfis solemnly preaching against, with a contrived storyline which wants to have its metaphorical cake and eat it.

Lin-Manuel Miranda gives us an unashamed sugar rush of showbiz rapture and showbiz solemnity in this heartfelt tribute to Broadway talent Jonathan Larson, played here by Andrew Garfield.

There’s a creak of old leather (and other things) in this outrageously dated and hokey sentimental western, made from a script that’s been knocking around the industry for decades; it’s a Swiss cheese of bizarre plot-holes set in 1979, clearly because that is when it was conceived.

This is a world of brutality and fear from which the movie averts its gaze at key moments, but the chill is unmistakable. The title appears to refer to a light which is inexorably fading.

It is a fierce and impassioned denunciation of evil.

It is mainly a rather silly high-concept dramedy intercut with maudlin moments, and the sentimental keynote inevitably dominates by the end.

This an enjoyably strange spectacle, perhaps best appreciated by taking it less seriously than its creators intended.

There are some nice touches and an attractive new diversity worn lightly, but this is an underpowered and uncertain film.

An adorable trio pootle around a post-apocalyptic world in this sentimental sci-fi that curiously lacks any sense of danger.

Schrader has carpentered a strong and vehement film, hypnotically watchable and squalid with nightmarish flashbacks and a typically apocalyptic ending that grows plausibly enough out of what has gone before. There’s a horrible, queasy urgency to this high-stakes game.

It’s a movie bristling with ideas and ingenuity.

Moll has given us this audacious, witty and absorbing mystery thriller, a tale of adultery and amour fou with a gamey touch of the macabre.

There is such sensitivity and intelligence in the performances from Thompson and Negga and the cinematography from Eduard Grau and production design by Nora Mendis are both ravishing. It’s a very stylish piece of work from Hall.

The contemporary half of the film is for me less interesting, particularly in the overextended third act.

Maybe the Indian influence on the Beatles’ music didn’t last, but India’s own prestige, its soft power in the west, was immeasurably enhanced.

Rylance is good casting as Maurice: his delicate sing-song voice and sometimes faintly unfocused gaze fit nicely with our hero’s lovably awkward determination, as well as Flitcroft’s sense as a natural comedian that there is something more than a little absurd in the game of golf.

In the end, this film suffocates you with ersatz compassion and personal growth.

Labyrinth of Cinema is indeed labyrinthine, a maze of jokes, film references, quirky back projections, bargain-basement effects and melodramatic confrontations. But at its centre is something deeply serious: a belief that, as the sole country to have experienced a nuclear strike, Japan has a terrifying exceptionalism. This awful truth is marked by a tonal cymbal-clash, both acidly comic and desperately sad.

Villeneuve is superb at juxtaposing the colossal spectacle with the intimate encroachment of danger and a mysterious dramatic language that exalts the alienness of every texture and surface.

There are moments of inspiration that light up this film like flashes of lightning.

A fog of menace descends on this hauntingly photographed, oppressive and driftingly directionless movie from Lucile Hadzihalilovic. It has the intensively curated atmosphere of body-horror noir – if not the conventional plot structure – and some way into the running time you might find yourself awakened from its reverie of formless anxiety by a sudden, horrifying stab of violence.

Enjoyable and well-crafted as it is, this movie can’t quite decide what to do with the tougher, darker side of Richard Williams.

The supposedly important themes of immigrants and Syria are cancelled by its naive flippancy.

An intriguing and drily comic film.

Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air.

Though flawed, its old-fashioned movie-making energy commands attention as well as its ingenious, if overextended three-act Rashomon structure, retelling the same story from three different standpoints, mostly without insisting on tricksy discrepancies.

There’s a rich confectionery of strangeness, sadness and fear to this very absorbing film.

Love letters to the past are always addressed to an illusion, yet this is such a seductive piece of myth-making from Branagh.

It’s entertaining, though composed with algorithmic precision, and it winds up suspiciously neutral about whether kids really should abandon digital enslavement in favour of real-life human friends.

It’s an impressively contrived film, almost a machine for winning awards, a monochrome reverie of midlife yearning.

It’s not a vanity project (Brühl does not seem in the least vain) but an actor’s project, nonetheless.

John and the Hole is well enough photographed and acted, but is really an oppressive and exasperatingly pointless piece of work, without consistency or the courage of its realist convictions.

It’s a fierce, thoughtful drama.

Every shot, every scene, every exchange from The Harder They Fall is combat-ready and garishly tensed for violence – and Samuel certainly brings the freaky mayhem, with gruesome relish and high energy. My feeling, though, is that there is a diminishing return on it, and the big reveal at the end is slightly silly and somehow retrospectively discloses that we haven’t really found out enough about Rufus Buck’s backstory.

A good-natured love story, doomed to flower and fade in the space of a single holiday, leaving behind the traditional coming-of-age realisation that friends and family are what’s important right now.

This is a Rocky Horror Picture Show of cluelessness and misjudged Judy Garlandification. I can imagine masochists getting together for Diana: The Musical parties, just to sing the most nightmarish lines along with the cast. The rest of us will need a long lie down.

Life can be desperately embarrassing in your first year at university when you are trying out new identities and personalities. This film replicates that agonising discomfort.

No Time To Die is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and perhaps most of all it is big: big action, big laughs, big stunts and however digitally it may have been contrived, and however wildly far-fetched, No Time To Die looks like it is taking place in the real world, a huge wide open space that we’re all longing for.

The visual brilliance of this film combines with shroomy toxicity and inexplicable moral grandeur: what a stunning experience.

The movie hits its stride immediately with a taut, athletic urgency and it contains some superb images – particularly the eerie miracle of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, with Malcolm’s soldiers holding tree-branches over their heads in a restricted forest path and turning themselves into a spectacular river of boughs. This is a black-and-white world of violence and pain that scorches the retina.

The film’s freakiness and wooziness might have been a bit grating were it not for the glacial authority that Ferrara brings to every scene and shot – centred, of course, in the craggy gravitas of Dafoe himself.

Michael Gandolfini is goosebump-inducing as the young Tony Soprano, amid race riots and antagonism towards rival African American gangs.

It’s a poignant and compelling Venn diagram of passion and heartache.

The tone of the film is sometimes a little opaque. There is some slightly cliched 16mm footage of subway scenes and indulgent home-movie material and Huntt’s own voiceover has something of the student graduation piece about it. But there is a rich, dense texture to this very questioning, personal film.

The Survivor wins on points, a decent and honourably intended picture about one man’s ordeal in the horror of the Holocaust and the heartbreak that came afterwards.

The broad characterisation, dialogue and scene transitions probably worked better on stage, but they give a bounce to this feelgood Britfilm version.

This is a celebratory film, and it’s easy to agree with its praise for Fauci’s intellectual heroism, especially when reactionary anti-science charlatanism is running rampant across the internet and the political right. But the documentary maybe doesn’t nail the historical paradox at its centre: Fauci has been vilified twice in his life, from different directions.

It is a superbly shot, viscerally acted ensemble drama.

It all adds up to less than we hoped, though Pearce’s direction is never less than confident.

Director Will Sharpe is a potent talent whose early movies Black Pond and The Darkest Universe I loved – but this is a strained film, overwhelmed with self-consciousness at its own unearned period-biopic prestige.

Benediction is not an easy experience and some of the caustic, brittle dialogue scenes with Sassoon’s celebrity acquaintances are grating – yet deliberately so. The sadness is overwhelming.

Contrived and possibly overheated though the film might be at times, there is real storytelling gusto to it, and Laurent punches it across with relish.

Every implausible scene, every unconvincing character, every contrived dollop of symbolism, every toe-curlingly misjudged and unearned emotional climax seems as if it has been concocted in some secret bio-warfare lab for assaulting your mind with pure, toxic nonsense.

Perhaps to overcompensate for the lack of conventionally opened-out dramatic action, there is some big closeup acting from Gyllenhaal, but it’s a well-made and watchable picture of a man in the secular confessional box, a sinner forced to occupy the place of a priest.

As with all documentaries about art, we are left uneasily wondering if the galleries of the world are full of “wrong attributions” or straight-up fakes.

There’s a strong basis of originality here, and the warmth and good nature of the movie carries it along.

This is a long, laborious movie whose every scene feels hackneyed at some level and which is always drifting towards its own misjudged secular gospel of simplistic salvation and life lessons learned. But an artist’s life is more complicated than that.

Anne Zohra Berrached’s film is ambitious and interestingly intended, but naive and flawed, with a fundamental problem, which is right up there in the title.

There is sweep and confidence in this movie

The explosively potent Graham does deliver a colossal, intimate ending, acted with complete and affecting sincerity. He has presence, potency and force.

It’s a potent drama – and a melancholy reminder of the talent that Irish cinema and TV lost in McGuigan

Any movie that helps us to talk about dementia is to be welcomed, and they are becoming more commonplace. But the pure treacliness of Here Today is very dispiriting and there are some tonal missteps.

Writer-director Kay Cannon’s new Cinderella isn’t bad, and Camila Cabello makes a rather personable lead, carrying off some of the movie’s generous helping of funny lines.

Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this weirdly unreal and sentimental Britmovie in the last-journey-with-someone’s-ashes genre. But it is certainly acted with commitment and integrity by Timothy Spall.

A film full of people smiling knowingly and laughing delightedly at each other’s not-especially-funny-or-interesting remarks, and it’s all the more insufferable for things the film gets fundamentally and structurally wrong.

This is a film that swerves away from categorisation. It’s an 80-set picture that wears its period locations and its musical references lightly. It’s a city trader film where the main bad guy doesn’t do coke. And it’s a scary movie whose disturbing supernatural interludes happen almost incidentally, a sideshow to the emotional collapse.

The movie has a streak of sentimentality amid its melancholy and a certain formal theatricality: director Emma Dante has adapted the movie from her own stage play, but has opened it out very plausibly and cinematically.

Binoche’s performance and the movie are elegant, ingenious and sexy.

Karia is a smart film-maker and this is a valuable beginning.

This film is a very tasty confection of satire and scorn.

It’s an entertaining romp, although the formulaic quality is becoming a little obvious.

Here it seems that Death Row Records was simply a criminal organisation, of which rap music was a byproduct. The talent it somehow nurtured in this way looks even more tragically fragile.

The Fever is a calm and quiet and subtle film, a little inert perhaps, but deeply engaged with the hidden lives of Brazil’s indigenous people. There is poetry in it.

On the most basic level, it is a warning of what inequality can cause in the future and what it is effectively causing right now. Perhaps there is something nihilistic here, but New Order very effectively persuades you that a real-life revolution might well be every bit as ugly, horrifying and un-Hollywood as this shows – and that it is on the way.

I was disappointed with a film whose crises and dilemmas seem laborious and essentially predictable; it does not fully work as sci-fi or satire or comedy.

Jed Rothstein’s very entertaining documentary is another horror story from the tulip-feverish world of tech startups.

Free Guy isn’t going to have many MA theses written about it, but it has entertainment value.

Now this has been turned into a very entertaining lowlife crime comedy from director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, a film that preserves the fishy flavour of the online original – if perhaps only semi-intentionally – and has interesting things to say about the exhaustingly performative and self-promotional world of social media.

It is simultaneously exasperating and magnificent that he shows no interest whatever in asking the Mael brothers anything about their personal, emotional or romantic lives.

Settlers isn’t perfect: some of the storytelling beats aren’t hit as clearly as they could have been. But it’s a quietly impressive piece of work.

Not everything works here, but the sheer crazy confidence-through-chaos of the Suicide Squad and their bizarrely dysfunctional MO makes for a mighty spectacle.

It is a desperately unhappy story, sympathetically told by film-makers Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri.

The spark that was there in the opening section disappears and the film splutters out into something directionless and derivative and dull.

The film squanders one or two promising plot ideas, and winds up making a hamfisted paean of praise to the idea of “open carry” gun ownership.

Fastvold’s film is distinctive in that she shows us how physical constraint and violence are part of the fabric of living.

Some French films, like wine, don’t travel. This one turns to vinegar.

The elements of silliness and deadly seriousness are nicely balanced and although I wasn’t absolutely sure about the ending, which has maybe too neat a bow tied on it, this is just very enjoyable and I was on the edge of my seat, not knowing whether to flinch or laugh, though I did both.

It’s an engaging piece of work from Merlant who has a real sense of directing an ensemble of actors.

It can be overwrought and even absurd but lively and heartfelt.

In narrative terms it never really develops any of its characters or relationships, yet its two utterly heartfelt lead performances make this a grimly authentic spectacle.

No one could doubt the technical mastery of this movie and its formal audacity. But for all that, I found something unliberating in its mercurial restlessness.

I’m not sure that Les Olympiades says anything too profound about any of its cast of characters, but Audiard achieves something very watchable and entertaining in anthologising them. This is a connoisseur date movie.

Nitram is a hypnotically disquieting movie.

In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.

This is a well-intentioned film with some forthright performances, although there’s a fair bit of actorly shouting going on and the smiley spaciness of Bruni-Tedeschi can sometimes feel a bit affected.

It is all presented earnestly and engagingly, though self consciously, and if the political debates are unsolved, well, that could be because they are unsolved in real life. It’s certainly a heartening demonstration that new ideas can flourish in a religious society.

Neither of the two worlds of the film’s English title is illuminated clearly enough

With Red Rocket, Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine.

The richness and strangeness of the comedy is somehow simply down to Dujardin’s frowningly serious and haughty face.

What is invigorating about The Story of Film is that each new clip, each new comment, is an exercise in back to basics, an exercise in looking, and looking again and looking harder – something that’s even more difficult when it feels like we’re drowning in content.

For its sheer silliness and towering pointlessness, Julia Ducournau’s gonzo body-horror shaggy-dog story deserves some points.

Where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur.

A Hero is an engaging and even intriguing film, but I wonder if its realist mannerisms are concealing a slightly unfocused story.

There is something very heartfelt and committed about Andrea Arnold’s film: a poignancy and intimacy.

Despite the bone-chilling cold of its location in Murmansk in Russia’s remote north-west, there’s a wonderful human warmth and humour in this offbeat romantic story of strangers on a train.

It might not be at the very zenith of what he can achieve but for sheer moment-by-moment pleasure, and for laughs, this is a treat.

This is a great documentary about people who are serious about music and serious also about art, and what it means to live as an artist.

It is a lovely-looking, lovely-sounding movie, handsomely designed, meticulously shot and impeccably performed — and it also has interesting things to say about the emotional toughness and the Greeneian splinter of ice in the heart, that is needed by a writer. But I have to admit that, despite my liking for slow cinema, I found something a bit indulgent and classy about the unvarying andante pace.

I am not entirely sure that Haroun entirely absorbs into the drama the shocking act of violence, with all its necessary consequences. But the sheer seriousness and urgency of the deceptively unhurried story give it power.

Another type of drama would put the issue-led handwringing at the centre of things. Not this film. It is just the hinge on which the family drama turns, and the performances from Dussollier and Marceau are quietly outstanding.

As it begins to explain more and more about what drives its leading character, the film becomes less and less interesting and the stridently melodramatic finale, as well as being highly unlikely in ordinary plot terms, feels a little bit self-exculpatory.