Peter Bradshaw

It is possible to come away from the film less than convinced, but very impressed by the sheer force of Petzold’s film-making talent (recently so stunning in his drama Transit) but which has been here deployed for something which is a bit flimsy and silly.

Charlatan is a film that does not quite satisfy the curiosity it arouses.

It is a deeply personal drama about culture, family, community and what it means to represent – though it can also be self-indulgent and even a bit self-involved, though this is arguably a function of the story.

Minamata is a forthright, heartfelt movie, an old-fashioned “issue picture” with a worthwhile story to tell about how communities can stand up to overweening corporations and how journalists dedicated to truthful news can help them.

For all that this film has something exasperatingly opaque and inert about it, it has an uncompromising insistence that ideas matter. These people’s thoughts, although debatable, are not simply presented as absurd. Malmkrog is a long, demanding experience – a real festival event. But that bizarre dreamlike eruption lives on in the mind.

This is not animation which is there to exalt, or soothe, or celebrate human loveliness: it is animation which takes a fiercely miserable satirical stab at the world and itself, a language which is unreconciled, unaccommodated.

Dark Waters is a movie that works marvellously well within its own generic terms, and perhaps after the fey disappointment of Todd Haynes’s previous, rather insufferable fantasy Wonderstruck, this tough, clear movie was what Haynes needed to clear his creative palate.

What DAU. Natasha shows is the bizarre way that, in totalitarian societies, the normal and the abnormal, the banal and the grotesque, and the human and the inhuman live together side by side.

As ever with Miike, the sheer profusion of material, the torrent of wacky creativity, means that there is always something to hold the attention. It’s bizarre and very unwholesome. But weirdly inspired.

Somehow Lorentzen shows that it is not the Ochoa family who are the bad guys, but the whole rotten system.

I’m not sure that I was completely on board with this film, which appears to have smoothly carpentered its narrative in the edit. Is it almost too good to be true?

It is a film with its heart in the right place, but the dialogue and characterisation are both plonkingly unconvincing.

[A] bafflingly insipid, zestless, derivative film.

It balances what is with what might have been and what could still be, and, although the result is maybe a bit less substantial than Castro intended, there is a certain literary elegance in the way he sketches it out.

It is a sombre, realist study of what day-by-day, moment-by-moment abuse actually looks like.

Vivarium is a lab-rat experiment of a film, with flat, facetious humour and a single insidious joke maintained and developed with monomaniacal intensity. In its way, this film is an emblem of postnatal depression and simple loneliness.

It is a tremendously engaging story which does something that very few movies do: mention money. Something very palpable is at stake, the jeopardy is real and it’s a question of survival.

Sometimes the casting and staging work well, sometimes not so well.

The result is a bit corny, a bit cheesy and you might feel self-conscious going, “Aww …” at creatures that are not real dogs but laptop fabrications. But it’s a robust and old-fashioned entertainment with some real storytelling bite.

What Sheen, born in Gwent, makes of Downey’s accent can only be imagined. It really is horribly inert, and every time Downey opens his mouth to say something unintelligible, the film dies a bit more.

It needed bigger laughs and more of the big, ironic comedy that Erskine can clearly deliver.

This film is a blitz of bad taste, a cornucopia of crass, and it is weirdly diverting – more than you might expect, given the frosty way Suicide Squad was received critically – and engagingly crazy. Watching it feels cheerfully excessive and unwholesome, like smoking a cigarette and eating a chocolate bar at the same time.

Hauser is the star and he keeps the film on track: poignant, lonely and vulnerable – maintaining the tricky balance of laugh-at and laugh-with.

Director Marielle Heller and screenwriters Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue have adroitly set up the tightrope that Tom Hanks has to walk across, stretching it between irony and belief, and the result is a really entertaining and touching film.

Queen and Slim doesn’t entirely work. The credibility factor isn’t too high sometimes and there are big set pieces that don’t gel. . . . Yet this is a punchy, watchable film.

Beanpole is moving, disturbing, overwhelming.

The rapport between Law and Lively allows the movie both to relax and pick up the pace. Morano puts together good fight scenes, robust stunt work and tasty car chases. It’s destined to be viewed on a million long-haul flights, but it works perfectly well as a thriller.

This film makes explicit the implied sexuality in the original, which isn’t necessarily a wrong thing to do at all, but everything is very ham-fisted and crass.

It’s amiable, but the real action thrills and the chemistry between the leads isn’t there.

There’s a puppyish charm here.

This is a film in touch with modernity, but I wonder if the livestreamers were quite as apolitical as this film makes them appear. And I was unsure about Zhu’s decision to correct all the images from colour to black-and-white, an arthouse-ification that the film didn’t need.

A powerful, personal piece of work.

There are big scenes, big performances, big emotions here, and audiences will have to recalibrate their antennae for these, especially for the stunning shock that arrives around halfway through. The waves of emotion can get very high, yet they bring exaltation with them.

It’s comedy-drama that is not funny enough to count as a comedy and not plausible enough to count as a drama. You’re going to need a very sweet tooth for it – sweeter than the one I have.

Pamela B Green’s hectic, garrulous, fascinating documentary recovers the story of French film-maker Alice Guy-Blaché.

Her photographs are like very bad dreams and simply looking for any period of time at dead bodies is a very strange experience.

[A] good-natured and well-intentioned film.

The film never quite rings true.

It’s a cinema of pure energy and grungy voltage, and the Safdies make it look very easy. This will be the year’s most exciting film. You can take that to the bank.

The whole thing is shot and lit in that dull flat way that is mandatory for Hollywood family comedies, and the script is mainly dull, though I concede Key has some nice lines as he gets cross with Brynn’s sarcastic attitude.

There is such artistry and audacity in this new film by the 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hallucinatory experience whose sinuous camera movements take you on a long journey into memory and fear and a night full of dreams.

There are no insights to be had – and no laughs.

However preposterous, The Rise of Skywalker is socked over with such energy, such euphoric certainty. And it’s such fun: full of the rackety exuberance of the now forgotten Saturday morning movie serials that were an influence on George Lucas.

Oldman delivers his lines with a strange lethargy and tonelessness, as if – just before speaking – he has just realised that income tax will have to be deducted from his fee.

Ritchie has made an entertaining return to his mockney roots.

It’s warbling warbling warbling piffle.

Given that a fair amount of creative licence has been exercised here, it is strange that Bruce Lee has such a small part to play.

It’s a film that ostentatiously concerns itself with contemporary, zeitgeisty issues such as digital culture and the internet, and whether this is undermining the world of reading and books. But strip out the strained speechifying on that subject and it could have been made at any time in the last 40 years.

As with so many family animations right now, I felt that the script stays on the safe side, with fewer smart lines and ironic gags than I might have wished for, but this is a good-natured entertainment.

Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela is an absorbing and disturbing spectacle, a sensory film about the climate crisis, and it begins with what might be the soundtrack to the end of the world – a persistent tinkling, crackling, trickling.

For pure gonzo outrageousness and steroidal silliness, this action spectacular made for Netflix by Michael Bay has a certain amusement factor and thumpingly unsubtle oomph.

Lauren Greenfield’s film about the Philippines’ former first lady Imelda Marcos reveals a grotesquely self-pitying, wholly unrepentant and very rich woman.

Honey Boy is a fluent, heartfelt, tightly structured and well acted personal story.

What gives Jumanji its likability is that it has the emphases and comedy beats of an animation, but also the performance technique of live action – and the occasional reshuffling of avatars and players lets the actors show off a little bit further. Jumanji’s next level is rather satisfying.

So Long, My Son is a piercingly, profoundly moving picture that peels and exposes the senses.

It is a strange film in some ways, speckled with powerful, insightful moments but also with some strained acting, pulled punches and fudged attitudes, unable to decide if its heroines are compromised through having been loyal Fox staffers.

Disappointingly, it is a borderline dopey, sentimental children’s adventure mostly without the wit and spark that converted grownups and kids to the Lego films.

The story has a moderate charm, but is less baroque and ambitious than many Japanese animations.

What we have is a straightforward murder mystery, but it is told with gusto and humour.

1917 is Mendes’s most purely ambitious and passionate picture since his misunderstood and under-appreciated Jarhead of 2005. It’s bold, thrilling film-making.

This is such a beguiling, generous film from Gerwig. There is a lot of love in it.

What keeps the film going is simply the factual chaotic bizarreness of what is happening: an improvised deal on Iran-Contra levels of crookedness. Sudeikis is authentically bland and slippery.

Despite the film’s obvious interest, it is a bit conceited and stately, a little like Wim Wenders’ movie about Pope Francis, though without the sycophancy.

Boseman carries off the drama with flair and style.

The pure silliness of this idea is enjoyable. The children give guileless performances, and Nyong’o gamely plays the broad comedy for all its worth.

The Report is a cool, dry look at the facts.

Berman is guilty of one of the most tiresome cliches in documentary – solemnly playing the audio of a phone conversation, with subtitles, over an exterior shot of the building where it is taking place, giving the impression that this is smoking-gun proof of something sensational, or at any rate interesting, when it is pretty ordinary.

This wonderfully sweet, sad and funny film simply delivers more moment-by-moment pleasure than anything else around.

Everything about this clunks.

It’s nice to see these figures again, but I couldn’t help feeling that there is something a bit underpowered and contrived about the storyline in Frozen II: a matter of jeopardy synthetically created and artificially resolved, obstacles set in place and then surmounted, characters separated and reunited, bad stuff apparently happening and then unhappening.

This movie rattles along with terrific energy and dash and the flashback sequences show that it’s actually far more daring and ambitious that you might expect. It’s a great duel between McKellen and Mirren.

This a watchably stylised period film, with interesting visual setpieces and faces looming up at us out of intricately contrived backgrounds.

I was less taken with the wait-is-this-really-happening moments that tend to undermine the emotional currency in which the drama is presented to us. Some real tremors, though.

Gives us an amazingly candid and rather shocking study of the legendary fashion designer, and his apparent physical and mental deterioration at the age of 60.

The mystery has been dialled down, the treacle dialled up, and what we are left with is basically Eat Pray Love 2.

Here is a valuable and deeply felt documentary, celebrating the work of the sound designers, sound editors and Foley wizards in the cinema, and if it feels like a feelgood in-house promotional video for Hollywood technicians … well, they’ve got an awful lot to feel good about.

It is more than half an hour longer than the Stanley Kubrick film, although it seems more than that – laborious, directionless and densely populated with boring new characters among whom the narrative focus is muddled and split.

Farming is a tough film on a tough subject. There’s not much light and shade – but there can’t have been much light and shade going through it in real life – and Gubu Mbatha-Raw’s role as the concerned teacher is weakly drawn.

Ozon has made a decent and valuable film, though it often seems like the drama part of a docudrama: some of the scenes feel like respectful re-enactments that could have gone into a documentary.

It’s good to see Hamilton getting a robust role, although, sadly, she has to concede badass superiority to Davis. This sixth Terminator surely has to be the last. Yet the very nature of the Terminator story means that going round and round in existential circles comes with the territory.

This Maleficent is disappointing, although Jolie certainly sells it hard, as does Fanning, who takes it as seriously as anything else in her career.

No-one but Scorsese and this glorious cast could have made this movie live as richly and compellingly as it does, and persuade us that its tropes and images are still vital.

It’s a diverting scenario, though maybe it doesn’t quite have the “danger – high voltage” thrill of Morris’s other works.

Chalamet gives it his all as the pudding-bowl-hairstyled young king. But so much of the poetry and the sense of loss has gone from this decaffeinated version of the story.

Here’s a defanged, declawed yeti in an animation whose every beat, character and narrative component feels as if it has been algorithmically tested for commercial safety by a computer programme.

It’s a heartfelt, funny, satisfying film.

It’s a charismatic performance from Adewunmi, and Amoo’s camera often comes in close to his face and his gaze, suggesting that Femi is on the verge of some kind of epiphany or vision – and it’s nothing to do with the drugs.

Wells’s coolly indirect way with dialogue prevents the movie becoming insufferable in the way that it might have done in other hands. It is like a short story that insouciantly signs off before you’ve quite decided what it means.

[Gibney's] film does present Khodorkovsky in context in a way that I haven’t seen before. He was the oligarch smart enough – and ruthless enough – to do as well or better than anyone in the Yeltsin/Putin free-for-all years, and then his smartness and ruthlessness perhaps gave him a perspective on it all.

A movie with flair and force.

The digital novelty is striking for the first 10 minutes, silly for the next 10 minutes, and by the end of the movie you’re pining for the analogue values of script and direction.

This film is a distinct, articulate pleasure.

Jamie Bell’s tough performance carries this forthright, earnest, if limited drama.

Everything rattles and zings like a pinball machine, and it’s a bracing, entertaining, richly satisfying experience.

This Joker has just one act in him: the first act. The film somehow manages to be desperately serious and very shallow.

It’s a disquieting parable of iniquity.

I would have liked (in a spirit of devil’s advocacy) to hear from an economist about the measurable benefits or otherwise of this brutal approach, and perhaps to ponder the climbing global population. These reservations hardly diminish the film’s force.

The film always looks good under the eye of cinematographer Roger Deakins, and screenwriter Peter Straughan renders some elegant and amusing dialogue, but this Goldfinch stays earthbound.

It is heartfelt, but its periodic attempts at thriller-style bouts of excitement are redundant, and I wondered sometimes if the film-makers were sure what exactly their story was.

There is such tenderness to this film. I was overwhelmed by it.

Cringemakingly written and clunkily directed, and even the final action sequence runs out of steam after a minute or so.

It is, perhaps, a little derivative and maybe finally fudges the dark mystery of the quest’s end point. But this is a film with thrilling ambition and reach.

What a thoroughly likeable and funny film.

There are, arguably, scenes in this film which are less than subtle – and there were times when I wanted something more indirect. But Manville and Neeson have a real empathy and intimacy on screen.

It’s a deafening misfire, like the most unbearable, unwatchable daytime TV soap filled with the most awful self-conscious hamminess, parodic emoting and pointless shouting-at-each-other acting.

It is a very grueling spectacle, often brilliant, sometimes slightly redundant and perhaps not able to maintain the storytelling rush of its first act. But it is always weirdly plausible in its pure strangeness and in the oddly poignant moments

An enjoyable double-act – but not an infallible one.

It’s a heavy meal to digest, but this is a strong, vehement film with a real sense of time and place.

It is a witty, intriguing film in many ways ... But I also feel the film is unsure of how much to disturb its audience, unsure whether to pursue the chaos and embarrassment of a bungled, noir-ish crime and an unsightly psychological disorder, or to contrive something more emollient: to finesse some sympathy and even heroism for the story’s troubled female lead.

Greed isn’t especially penetrating about money or power. ... Winterbottom chucks everything up to and including the kitchen sink into this movie: sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

The result falls somewhere between a slave-escape drama, an action thriller, a western and even an unexpected kind of superhero film. It’s a winning combination, although Lemmons does not immerse us in the agony and injustice of slavery as such; she puts together a well-crafted movie that is the showcase for an excellent performance from Erivo.

It is a film with charm and the chemistry between Jones and Redmayne has something rather platonic and even sibling-like, but that isn’t to say there isn’t a spark of sorts.

It is crammed with unearned emotional moments and factory-built male characters whose dedication to their sport we are expected to find adorable and heroic by turns.

The plots are rickety and the characterisation has the depth of a Franklin Mint plate, but there are some funny moments and Kevin Doyle, playing the overexcitable servant Molesley, pretty much steals the entire film.

Like the first film, it becomes a virtual non-narrative anthology of standard jump-scares that could be reshuffled and shown in any order. The second time around, your tolerance for this is tested to destruction and beyond because, unlike the first movie, it is just so pointlessly long.

The Informer is spread over a big canvas, but by the time of its big finale it is leaking energy. It might have made better sense as an episodic drama on television but it is brash and watchable, its world reeking with cynicism and fear.

What an intriguing and unexpectedly watchable film. Bait is an experiment – and a successful one.

An entertaining showcase for two first-class performers.

Zellweger gives us a tribute to Judy Garland’s flair and to that ethos of the show needing to go on being both a burden and driving force. Yet Garland’s terrible sadness is mostly invisible.

We get some lovely photography of the Highlands and the breathtaking landscapes all around Inverness, and Hancock is always a potent presence. But she could have done more, conveyed more, with a story that wasn’t so basically simplistic and familiar.

The intelligence of Kent’s direction and the humanity she reveals in both Clare and Billy give the film its arrowhead of power.

It’s a very forthright performance from Dern, but Stewart is simply too opaque and subdued in the role of Knoop. The film itself pulls its punches, unwilling to satirise either her or the egregious Albert too fiercely; it is inhibited about really attacking the vanity of the situation.

There are toe-curling culture clash moments.

The strangeness of this story will live in your bloodstream like a virus.

Some massive laughs, a huge Stephen Merchant cameo and the most impressive school play on film since Wes Anderson’s Rushmore are all on offer in this very funny teen – or rather tween – comedy.

Screenwriter Mark Bomback has adapted the three-hankie property from author and movie producer Garth Stein, and Simon Curtis directs. They have created a film aimed with lethal efficiency at your tear ducts like Chuck Norris putting his boot into your kidneys.

It’s an entertaining and watchable film, with horribly convincing reconstructions of what shopping centres and jobcentres looked like in 1987.

Brando’s charisma sells the climactic scenes with Willard; without his presence, the literary musings would be a little callow.

An intensely angry and persuasive piece of film-making, though maybe letting Bill and Hillary off the hook, a little bit.

Some of the wisecracking dialogue falls a bit flat and the narrative line is occasionally uncertain, but Grainger creates a watchable quarterlife crisis.

Some enjoyable stuff, although a slightly weird deployment of Jim Croce’s bittersweet song Time in a Bottle at the film’s beginning and end – perhaps inspired by its use for Quicksilver’s slo-mo scene in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

There is no doubting the verve and style of Eklöf’s film-making – and the brutality from people on an open-ended holiday from ordinary human empathy.

The drama – featuring the kind of flat, chirruping upper-middle-class English accents that aren’t usually voiced on screen – is intriguing and uncompromisingly high-minded, right on the laugh-with/laugh-at borderline, but interestingly unafraid of mockery.

Never Look Away is not without ambition and reach, and there is a real storytelling impulse. But the central performance of Schilling looks shruggingly uncertain, as if he is bemused by what is going on.

Marianne Ihlen emerges as someone of enormous gentleness and dignity.

Cartol gives a very persuasive performance as Eve, whose inner life is always simmering and bubbling under, while she must maintain a facial blankness as cloudless and pristine as the towels and sheets.

Anyone who says voting is a waste of time needs to watch this film.

It has an intriguing premise and a gripping first act. But the ending fizzles when it should explode, giving us neither the twisty and suspenseful entertainment that it seemed to promise, nor the serious response to sexual politics in Pakistan that also seemed to be on offer.

Despite the hefty talent involved, there’s a preposterous pass-agg tweeness to this film.

There is great sadness in this film – and great anger.

Bland, incurious and passionless, this documentary about the great tenor Luciano Pavarotti is like a promotional video licensed by a team of copyright lawyers – and about as challenging as a Three Tenors gig at Wembley stadium.

Our Time, for all its moments of brilliance, takes almost three hours in leading us nowhere very rewarding at all.

Really there is very little chemistry between Bautista and Nanjiani, the cameo from Karen Gillan is disconcertingly fleeting, and if you compare this with something like the Beanie Feldstein/Kaitlyn Dever comedy Booksmart, the dialogue really does sound a bit pedestrian.

What emerges from Klayman’s film is how very important Brexit Britain is as a self-vivisecting research animal in Bannon’s experimental thinking.

Basically, this new Lion King sticks very closely to the original version, and in that sense it’s of course watchable and enjoyable. But I missed the simplicity and vividness of the original hand-drawn images.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, a crescendo of paranoid trippiness building to an uproarious grossout in its final moments.

It is weirdly opaque and internalised, and doesn’t ever really come to life.

In Fabric is indulgent, certainly, and I regretted the fact that the excellent Jean-Baptiste is not as centrally important to the film as I had assumed she would be. When she is gone, the voltage drops a bit. But it is just so singular, utterly unlike anything else around.

Support the Girls is a shrewdly observed, day-in-the-life-style portrait of a woman under pressure. It’s way too early to be thinking about awards season, but Regina Hall could be in line for some silverware.

Somehow, it doesn’t look like something that happened 50 years ago – but rather an extraordinarily detailed futurist fantasy of what might happen in the years to come, if we could only evolve to some higher degree of verve and hope.

Holland is very good but he needs someone to play against, someone with Downey’s heft. That someone could well be Zendaya, as MJ, the great love of Peter Parker’s life. We shall have to see how the Marvel franchise plays this romance in forthcoming episodes.

The best of this is Yorke’s music, which is fierce and propulsive. But, as visual spectacle, there is a strong so-what? factor.

A good performance from Tom Hollander can’t save this stodgy, ungainly and strangely reactionary family drama from the French writer-director Amanda Sthers.

Child’s Play bubbles with entertaining bad taste.

In the Aisles is a poignant and richly sympathetic film.

It may only be a repeat of earlier ideas and plotlines, but compare it to the fourth films in other franchises and Pixar’s latest is an amusing and charming gem.

It’s time to wave the neuralyzer in the face of every executive involved and murmur softly: forget about this franchise.

This is an immersive experience, like being plunged back into the 70s. There is passion there. No matter how chaotic or bleary things get, no one is in any doubt that the music counts.

It is an interesting story, and yet the film doesn’t quite summon up the atmosphere of the raft. It doesn’t fully plunge you into that strange milieu, nor does it quite analyse exactly what was going on.

At heart, Late Night is a romcom and like so many romcoms, the funny stuff recedes after the first act, as the plot and its relatability imperative gets into gear. Yet Kaling is very good at conveying the paradoxical misty-eyed idealism of those working for this long-running TV institution.

Whether or not you have seen the original film, there is a terrific performance here from Moore, and an equally good one from Turturro, who may be entering into his own golden years of bittersweet character work.

The point of a phoenix, dark or otherwise, is that it rises from the flames. But these are the flames in which this franchise has finally gone down.

Fundamentally, Sybil is not funny because it is not convincing, and some of the acting is not of the highest order. Efira’s “drunk” turn is something she may wish to omit from her showreel.

It is a drama that attempts to behave like a tough police procedural in a quasi-Melville vein, but also like a musing prose-poem about the vanity of human wishes.

There are times when the passive, elusive quality of It Must Be Heaven, as with other Suleiman films, eluded me and felt mannered and superficial, but they are stylishly made with a distinctive signature.

Insufficiently diverting ... Lux Æterna shows Noé reverting to the self-parodic silliness that Climax had taken him past.

The film has the authoritative air of official history: sometimes brash, sometimes stolid, sometimes with flashes of inspiration and sometimes with long stretches of courtroom dialogue.

Bizarre, colossally self-indulgent ... This one feels as if Kechiche has simply given us three-and-a-half hours of his unused beach and nightclub footage from the first film.

There is such tenderness and gentleness in this film.

The scenes have no fire or lightness and sometimes they are embarrassing. ... Sachs is such a talented film-maker, but this is a baffling misstep.

A luxuriously watchable and satirical suspense drama.

It never quite catches fire, but it has a curious atmosphere of its own: menacing, pregnant with unease.

Once the wounds have healed, Anvari may wish to make a film with the strength and distinctiveness of his debut.

Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers.

Porumboiu gives us a knotty, twisty, nifty plot that’s quite involved but hangs together well, and there’s an amusing juxtaposition of gloomy, rainy Bucharest and the sunny terrain of La Gomera. We also get a neat and unexpected coda.

It is an involving story, with a strong lead performance.

I felt that we were not permitted much access to the character’s innermost thoughts, and so some of the film’s romance, and its fatalism, did not have the piercing impact as the visual masterstrokes. But there’s no doubting Diao’s style.

Kapadia’s film is a gripping account of Maradona’s playing career until the mid-90s, though it is flawed by a lack of new material of the sort he had for his previous film about Amy Winehouse.

A superbly elegant, enigmatic drama ... I was on the edge of my seat.

The director may want to confront these issues head on – the racism and violence just below the surface. Indeed, raising it above the surface is the point. But much of the drama and humanity get blitzed by the molotov cocktails.

A strange, faintly frustrating but diverting film.

Very few films can make you scared and excited at the same time. Just like the lighthouse beam, this is dazzling and dangerous.

Malick does succeed, to some degree, on his own terms; he attempts to give some (stylised) sense of this man’s inner life: his emotional and spiritual architecture. It is admirably serious but static.

Port Authority is vehement, urgent and sensual – not perfect, and I would have liked to have seen more extended dance sequences. But it is made with storytelling gusto and heart.

Opaque and unrewarding.

It’s an immersive and exotic experience. Howard is a revelation.

As ever, Almodóvar has made a film about pleasure, which is itself a pleasure: witty, intelligent and sensuous.

It’s fierce, open and angry, unironised and unadorned, about a vital contemporary issue whose implications you somehow don’t hear on the news.

None of this is represented in any compelling dramatic style, and the actors – all very talented and assured – have perhaps not had clear enough direction. It is a mood piece. Whose mood leads nowhere.

It is a really strange film, beginning in a kind of ethno-anthropology and documentary style, becoming a poisoned-herd parable or fever dream and then a Jacobean-style bloodbath. It is an utterly distinctive film-making, executed with ruthless clarity and force.

Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.

Rocketman is an honest, heartfelt tribute to Elton John’s music and his public image. But the man itself eluded it.

As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film was over.

When The Unseen works it has an interestingly airless atmosphere, a weirdly disconnected, alienated quality that mimics the couple’s fraught emotional state. But the tension and sense of fear were lacking.

Jim Jarmusch’s undeadpan comedy is laconic, lugubrious and does not entirely come to life, despite many witty lines and tremendously assured performances by an A-list cast.

I felt wrung out at the end of this film. How incredible must it have been for those who were there in person.

The romantic relationship with the “good Nazi” is a little too glib (quite as it was in the film version of Suite Française) and the camp scenes have a misjudged sheen of romanticism and come perilously close to the bad-taste border. But Stenberg’s performance is good.

It’s an intriguing, startlingly restrained and even cerebral piece of work from Ferrara, an unimpeachably serious homage, with an assured lead performance from Willem Dafoe.

Anne Hathaway detonates a megaton blast of pure unfunniness in this terrifying film.

Although this film can be a bit hokey and uncertain on narrative development, the puppyish zest and fun summoned up by Curtis and Boyle carry it along.

There is something basically unsatisfactory about this glassy-eyed biopic of the satanic dreamboat Bundy.

This is a very male world and perhaps the inner life of Edith remains a mystery (as perhaps it might have been for Tolkien), but its earnestness and idealism are refreshing.

This is the sort of British movie that I can imagine being made by Michael Reeves or Robin Hardy back in the 60s and 70s, drama that’s all about strong characterisation and heady atmosphere.

What a commanding performance from Cassidy. And Scott Walker’s orchestral score offers a sinister caress.

Elsie Fisher is magnificent as a vulnerable teenager facing trouble at school and at home in Bo Burnham’s gripping drama.

Birdman is a delicious and delirious pleasure.

I have to admit, in all its surreal grandiosity, in all its delirious absurdity, there is a huge sugar rush of excitement to this mighty finale, finally interchanging with euphoric emotion and allowing us to say poignant farewells.

It’s a flawed, undigested film that, like Sorrentino’s movie Youth, is knowingly indulgent of old men’s foibles. But there is one great scene in which Berlusconi, just to prove he’s still got it, cold-calls a woman out of the blue posing as a realtor and tries to sell her an apartment off-plan.

The Fleabag star’s detailed performance in this missing-child thriller makes its myriad implausibilities all the more dismaying.

In all her signature deadpan intimidation, Huppert somehow gives the impression of being an exceptionally intelligent and self-possessed person who has never before acted in a film.

This is a long film, but there is something so horribly compelling about its unhurried slouch towards the precipice.

Quite simply, there is not enough Dench, not enough Old Joan, not enough about how she feels about the decades of deceit, and tension, and becalmed ordinariness, far from the drama of espionage.

I enjoyed it more when Hill showed a lighter touch.

Buckley provides a vitamin boost in every scene.

It couldn’t be more boring than this. It seems counterintuitive to say it, but there is something pretty soulless about this new Hellboy franchise.

The comedy is fundamentally hobbled by the split in narrative focus between Jordan and April. We are never sure who is the heroine here, who has the comedy underdog status, who we are supposed to be rooting for.

An opaque, but beautifully composed film.

Happy As Lazzaro itself is a weightless enigma, an unfathomable promise of happiness, gently tugging you upward, like a balloon on the end of a string.

It’s a supernatural chiller about our fear of death - and our longing for death as an end to this fear. This brutally effective and convulsively disturbing story is something to compare with WW Jacobs’s classic Edwardian ghost story The Monkey’s Paw or maybe even Franz Kafka’s stage-play The Guardian of the Tomb.

The violence was for me almost unwatchable, but it’s a well-made and worryingly plausible film.

It’s a very powerfully performed, intimate piece, perhaps inspired at some level by the classic adventure The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Mullan is very good at suggesting the careworn wisdom of someone who has to be a father figure, or even grandfather figure to men who don’t have his skill in self-control and self-denial.

It’s appropriate that this absorbing, tender documentary has been driven by a surge of fan loyalty and love.

This has been painfully de-tusked.

It’s a sentimental film about New York and the way it sees itself: tough, big-hearted, assimilated and patriotic.

This is a fluent, watchable piece of work, though not quite as lucid as it might have been. A poignant tribute, at any rate, to the lost innocence of skateboarding.

Hare cleverly suggests Nureyev’s mixture of courage, hauteur, emotional damage and cool self-appraisal; the Soviet authorities cannot threaten him through his family because he long ago left them behind. An athletic, confident, undemanding film.

The sheer sustained intensity of the drama and performances carry it through.

The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.

Gyllenhaal is terrific as a teacher and wannabe poet who exploits a child prodigy in this gripping psychological drama.

At all events, it pays due homage to Edwards as a courageous pioneer.

It’s an enjoyable enough way to spend two hours but without any commentary or real depth, it’s in need of a bit more suspense or conflict to really oil the wheels, the film too often ambling along when it should be racing.

I wanted a clearer, more central story for Captain Marvel’s emergence on to the stage, and in subsequent films – if she isn’t simply to get lost in the ensemble mix – there should more of Larson’s own wit and style and, indeed, plausible mastery of martial arts. In any case, Captain Marvel is an entertaining new part of the saga.

What is interesting about Sauvage is that it shows how savagely boring Leo’s life is, quite a lot of the time.

It is a haunting portrait of emotional undeadness.

Foxtrot is a movie from Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz that is structurally fascinating yet also structurally flawed: its accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned by a whimsical final reveal.

Comedy and irony are not allowed to encroach on the film’s upbeat message, and the drama doesn’t reach out beyond a wrestling fanbase.

Chiwetel Ejiofor has made his debut as writer-director, and the result is exhilarating and rather inspiring – a story of success against the odds, of ingenuity and resourcefulness, of a father and son painfully coming to terms with each other.

Even without Liam Neeson’s bizarre promotional “rape revenge” anecdote, this violent movie would leave a weird taste in the mouth, lumbered as it is with odd sub-Coen, sub-Tarantino stylings.

There is passion and compassion here, and Labaki’s film brings home what poverty and desperation mean, and conversely what love and humanity mean.

Subtlety isn’t this movie’s strong suit and it’s often needlessly chary about drawing the parallel between sexism and racism. But it’s got a worthwhile story to tell.

It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.

Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.

Giovannesi’s movie is watchable enough, but often looks like a smoothed-out, planed-down version of Garrone’s Gomorrah: Gomorrah without the rough edges, like a classy television version.

Audiences may come to this film expecting the conventional pleasures of a spy thriller – excitement, tension, suspense – along with the additional values associated with the very best of the genre: character nuance, emotional complexity, plausible human dilemma. The Operative utterly defeats all of these hopes, chiefly in being at all times extremely boring.

Mr Jones is a bold and heartfelt movie with a real Lean-ian sweep.

The Kindness of Strangers is one of those terrible ideas for a film: ensemble dramas that are superficially attractive because of all the big names shoehorned into the cast-list.

The movie is not without interest, but I found it mannered, derivative and opaque.

In the end, Gully Boy runs on very traditional lines, and maybe comes too close to cliche, but is always engagingly dead set on entertainment.

Apart from its grisliness, its hopelessness, and its pointlessness, what strikes you most about this true-crime movie is its brownness.

What begins as a sprightly, shrewd, visually striking satire from Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska deflates in its second act into something unconvincing, sophomoric and dramatically redundant.

Writer-director Isabel Coixet has taken a real-life love story from 20th-century LGBT Spanish history and turned it into something bafflingly passionless, joyless and excessively tasteful, an anti-alchemy assisted by stately monochrome photography that makes every frame look like a postcard from an art shop.

What could have been a pretty dull film just for motorbike fans and devotees of the Isle of Man TT race, achieves real human interest and excitement due partly to a focus on one competitor: likable motormouth Guy Martin.

It’s a film jam-packed with very good actors and big names, and suffused with a puppyish willingness to please. But where is the bite?

In the course of a mammoth, horribly absorbing four-hour film from Charles Ferguson we are immersed in a world of milky TV news footage, big lapels, bulbous combovers, dirty tricks, sweat, jowls and guilt.

An arrestingly bizarre experience.

The film’s relative failure to engage with the more quotidian details of Colvin’s behind-the-scenes existence is a shame, because it is here that some real clues to her personality might have been found.

It spends its time among unfeasibly beautiful young people in microscopically tiny swimming costumes, and moves with them in a trance of heightened physicality, drifting across beaches, bars and dancefloors. The mood is dreamy unseriousness qualified occasionally by temporary stabs of jealousy or misery. The sexiness isn’t promiscuous exactly; more directionless.

In some ways, If Beale Street Could Talk is a portmanteau movie with great performances from KiKi Layne, Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry, a succession of scenes from interrelated lives, constellated around the main narrative arc and supercharged with an ecstasy of sadness and knowledge.

At all events, it shows how homophobia creates credulous, fearful people vulnerable to the snake-oil con trick of “conversion”.

The Souvenir is an artefact in the highest auteur register. Its absence of tonal readability is a challenge. But there is also a cerebrally fierce, slow-burn passion in its austere, unemphasised plainness.

Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell. A vanilla dystopian romance.

A very cinematic spatial impossibility is conjured up by Robitel as he allows the audience to ponder how exactly these rooms are supposed to fit together. The film has a vicious streak of throwaway black comedy.

All the fire and lifeblood of this idea has been sucked out and we are left with something bland.

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen are two excellent actors outclassing their material in this amiable feelgood-liberal entertainment, inspired by a true story.

The law about movie characters needing to be sympathetic is defied in this horribly fascinating true-crime black comedy.

The second Lego Movie is even better than the original: a sophisticated new adventure that gives us a new look at how the universality of the Lego universe was more gendered than we thought.

It’s a movie that rescues the tired zombie trope – without insisting on metaphor or satire.

A truly terrible Working Girl knock-off.

It’s a sentimental tale of hokum, carried by Eastwood’s star quality.

Destroyer reverses the gender polarity and ethos of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant: with Ferrara, the cop is the abuser and with Kusama the cop is the abused, but both are cops who have descended into hell and whose compulsive, addictive behaviour may be an effort to escape it – or to enter further into hell in an attempt to cauterise the pain.

Nadia is shown always surrounded by crowds, almost crushed by them. But her utter loneliness is heartbreaking.