Peter Bradshaw

It takes time to grow on you, but for me, there is a demure watchability.

Ritchie’s film is at all times over the top, crashing around its digital landscapes in all manner of beserkness, sometimes whooshing along, sometimes stuck in the odd narrative doldrum. But it is often surprisingly entertaining, and whatever clunkers he has delivered in the past, Ritchie again shows that a film-maker of his craft and energy commands attention.

A huge amount of talent here, including Joanna Lumley and Eddie Izzard. Sadly it goes nowhere.

The film is very capably made, with forceful, potent performances from Waterston and Fassbender. That franchise title is, however, looking increasingly wrong. It is a bit familiar.

It is superbly directed and shot with great scenes.

It is every bit as beautifully made and intelligently acted as you might expect, with some wonderful visual imagery at the very beginning. Yet I was disappointed.

Cleverly, it gives us enigmatic backstory hints that may or may not help explain the sudden direction change the film takes in its third act, leading to a denouement of toxic ingenuity. And of all it driven by the sensuality and rage of Pugh’s performance.

The performance is austere and challenging, it takes us through the grim events, their aftermath and the long endgame of King’s life, but without the emollient or lenient notes that a Hollywood treatment might attempt. It is a requiem of a sort, and a sombre indication of all that has not yet healed, or been fixed.

It’s fun, though GOTG2 doesn’t have the same sense of weird urgency and point that the first film had. They’re still guarding, although the galaxy never seems in much danger.

The physical suspense is all but unbearable: a sexualised hunger, fear and need. Fingleton writes and directs with gusto and flair.

It is a film of immense humanity and charm: the very best kind of date movie.

A decent, heartfelt, robustly presented drama.

This is a two-dimensional piece of work.

Fans of smurfiness may well like it, and Gargamel gets some nice lines, but I have to say that both script and animation are entirely predictable, as if generated by some computer software.

It’s a beguiling film: subtle, sensuous and delicate.

It’s a spectacular movie, watchable in its way, but one which – quite apart from the “whitewashing” debate – sacrifices that aspect from the original which over 20 years has won it its hardcore of fans: the opaque cult mystery, which this film is determined to solve and to develop into a resolution, closed yet franchisable.

It features laborious acting and directing, and a screenplay whose revelations are uninteresting, even were they not guessable long in advance.

It’s a serviceable, watchable, determinedly unoriginal film.

Get Out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.

There is a creeping and depressing awfulness to this sentimental silver-years comedy.

What is very impressive about Raw is that absolutely everything about it is disquieting, not just the obvious moments of revulsion: there is no let up in the ambient background buzz of fear.

The whole movie is lit in that fascinatingly artificial honeyglow light, and it runs smoothly on rails – the kind of rails that bring in and out the stage sets for the lucrative Broadway touring version.

This is a sympathetic, serviceable but respectfully unintrusive documentary about the Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin.

There are some nice touches, but it unwinds into dullness and silliness and the hi-tech conceit is basically abandoned in favour of low-tech analogue violence and punch-ups.

LA film-maker Anna Biller achieves an ecstasy of artificiality in this amazing retro fantasy horror, delivered with absolute conviction.

This fantastically muddled and exasperatingly dull quasi-update of the King Kong story looks like a zestless mashup of Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now and a few exotic visual borrowings from Miss Saigon. It gets nowhere near the elemental power of the original King Kong or indeed Peter Jackson’s game remake; it’s something Ed Wood Jr might have made with a trillion dollars to do what he liked if he’d been given a trillion dollars – but minus the fun.

It’s low-key and modestly budgeted, but perfectly well made, and Watts maintains a cool and steady presence.

It shouldn’t work, but it does, due to the intelligence of the acting and the stamina and concentration of the writing and directing.

The film is watchable in its quirky and wayward way, with some funny moments – though shallower than it thinks.

Unassuming and old-fashioned funny entertainment isn’t exactly what we associate with this film-maker, but that’s what she has very satisfyingly served up here. It’s not especially resonant or profound but it is observant and smart, with some big laughs in the dialogue. The whole thing is enjoyably absurd though not precisely absurdist.

There is something frustratingly subdued and constrained dramatically about this slow and unsyncopated film, which indulges in quite a few cliches about wartime Paris.

The sclerotic staginess of The Dinner means this is one to miss.

It’s an anticlimactic oddity of a film, and a slightly wasted opportunity – but with curiosity value.

The heart of the movie is the unexpectedly poignant relationship between Xavier and Logan: I’d be tempted to call them the Steptoe and Son of the mutant world, although in fact Logan goes into Basil Fawlty mode at one stage with his own pickup truck, attempting to trash it – perhaps to teach it a lesson. Logan is a forthright, muscular movie which preserves the X-Men’s strange, exotic idealism.

It’s a highly entertaining portrait of the two men, and Tucci’s own directorial brush strokes are bold and invigorating.]

Franco deserves points for attempting something with idealism. But the execution falls flat.

This has been a regular payday for Beckinsale and she certainly gives it her all, but you have to wonder why she bothers, certainly now that we know what she can do with more interesting material.

A decently acted, heartfelt film.

The movie’s operatic claustrophobia makes its mark. Cult status beckons.

Deeply strange and politically incorrect, ­baffling, and often funny.

As must be obvious to real connoisseurs, I am hardly a natural consumer fit with this franchise. It may well play with fans, but will in all probability make no converts.

This debut feature from Yorkshire-born actor and first-time director Francis Lee is tough, sensual, unsentimental, with excellent lead performances from Josh O’Connor and Alec Secareanu.

For me the superpower idea can only work with humour and lightness of touch: and there is a persistent and disconcerting joylessness about this.

Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting is everything I could reasonably have hoped for - scary, funny, desperately sad, with many a bold visual flourish.

Vin, great ridiculous beefcake lunk that he is, does provide us with some fun.

The Founder is an absorbing and unexpectedly subtle movie about the genesis of the McDonald’s burger empire.

The Portuguese Nun (2009) was a gem of gentle comedy, and his new drama, The Son of Joseph, has the same droll innocence and lovability. With its carefully controlled, decelerated dialogue, it is weirdly moving in just the same way.

Not so much a documentary, more a sleek two-hour commercial for itself, Reset is a glossily produced non-look behind the scenes at the Paris Opera Ballet.

By the end of a long two hours, there’s not much life left.

There are substantial talents involved in this film, but it doesn’t come together.

A disappointment.

The film is a bit stagey sometimes, but ambitious and insightful. Tovey is excellent as he shows someone progressing from innocence to fear and then to loneliness.

It’s rare to see a film quite so lacking in animus. It exists only to gouge money out of gamers. They might well want to stick to the game.

This is another really entertaining fantasy with fan-fiction energy and attack.

This horrifyingly yucky, toxically cutesy ensemble dramedy creates a Chernobyl atmosphere of manipulative sentimentality, topped off with an ending which M Night Shyamalan might reject as too ridiculous.

With ambition and reach, and often a real dramatic grandeur, Scorsese’s film has addressed the imperial crisis of Christian evangelists with stamina, seriousness and a gusto comparable to David Lean’s.

It’s a film destined for iTunes rental status, but kept from flatlining with a pretty dependable string of stupid yet funny one-liners, and a nice turn from TJ Miller as Aniston’s slacker brother.

This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.

It is such a beguiling performance from Richard, natural, unaffected, unselfconscious, you find herself rooting for Ana, although what form success might take for her is a mystery. Very impressive work from Lang.

The complete jigsaw doesn’t fit together, hampered by plot implausibilities and unrealities.

Director Robert Zemeckis is usually known for his zestiness and zippiness; but this is arduous. Screenwriter Steven Knight scripted smart movies such as Locke, Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, and there are some nice touches, but it resembles an unconvincing and sluggish pastiche of a war movie.

It is a well made, well controlled film, and its sullenly monomaniac quality – perhaps partly a function of the star doing the writing and directing – is entirely appropriate for the subject matter.

Maybe the final five minutes are a little too over the top, but the overwhelming impression is that Dounia has ambition and vision, a conviction that she might still be able shape her own future. It’s an exhilarating film.

It is a thoroughly absorbing and moving film, especially when Hull has a dream about recovering his sight and seeing his children. The tone is sober, unflashy, and Hull’s reflections on God are presented without any hectoring or special pleading. Affecting and profoundly intelligent.

That entertainment enchanter JK Rowling has come storming back to the world of magic in a shower of supernatural sparks - and created a glorious fantasy-romance adventure.

It's an intriguing movie, in some ways, but its contrived and even bizarre final revelation depends on coincidences of almost Hardyesque proportions. It is not really believable, and yet if it is not taken literally, but as a cinematic prose-poem, it has undoubted force.

It is a picture of something inexpressibly gentle and sad, something heartbreaking and absolutely normal, but something stirred up by a violent, alien incursion. Something lands with an almighty splash in this calm millpond of melancholy regret.

Brings a new urgency to an old subject: the ivory trade, which is threatening the world’s elephants. This threat has not been cancelled or brought under control, as I had assumed. The film persuasively argues that it is all but out of control: so much so that elephants are in danger of being wiped out in the wild in just a matter of years.

It’s a tremendously engaging and likeable superhero ride, in which the classiest of casts show they know exactly where to take it seriously – and where to inject the fun.

Into the Inferno is an intriguing, unnerving documentary.

There is no juicy high-concept baddie this time around, but there is a lot of enjoyable hokum and cheerful ridiculousness.

Once upon a time, this wackiness had some novelty value. Now it’s tedious.

Pure uncompromising yuckiness is what this comedy delivers. A grossout smack in the face. Deplorable. Unspeakable. Often funny.

The complicated web of narrator-switches, flashbacks and POV-shifts seems clotted and Emily Blunt – usually so witty and stylish – is landed with a whingy, relentlessly weepy role in which her nose hardly ever resumes its natural colour.

Fire at Sea is masterly film-making.

Some critics have expressed reservations about melodrama and overworked symbolism, but I found it gripping, with an edge of delirium.

Maybe any biopic risks naïveté in suggesting the agony of postwar Africa can be soothed by a love story about a handsome prince. But this movie has candour, heartfelt self-belief, and an unfashionable conviction that love conquers all - though not immediately.

Cillian Murphy is excellent as the fiercely committed Josef Gabčík; Jamie Dornan does very well in the slightly more reticent role of his co-conspirator Jan Kubiš. An intelligent, tough, and gripping movie.

What sealed the deal for me – by a whisker – was the gigantic physical comedy that Dempsey, Zellweger and Firth uncorked as they try to get through the hospital revolving door as Bridget is about to give birth, the traditional romcom rush to the airport having been re-invented for this maternal drama.

Some of the scenes in the LA art world are a bit broad. But this is a terrifically absorbing thriller with that vodka-kick of pure malice.

The result is a supernatural mystery thriller, slightly overcooked and tonally odd – and uncertain if its juvenile lead is supposed to be cute or sinister. But it is watchable and even intriguing in its weird way.

Arrival is a big, risky, showy movie which jumps up on its high-concept highwire and disdains a net. And yes, there are moments of silliness when it wobbles a little, but it provides you with spectacle and fervent romance.

The Light Between Oceans isn’t subtle – that swoony title should tip you off – and it’s a fair way from the realist grit of the less obviously commercial pictures Cianfrance has made previously. There’s more corn in the recipe here, a bit more ham and cheese. But he carries it off with forthright defiance and with strong, heartfelt, ingenuous performances from Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender.

I was utterly absorbed by this movie’s simple storytelling verve and the terrific lead performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone who are both excellent – particularly Stone, who has never been better.

It is an interesting work, delicately and discreetly animated, with a quiet visual coup in its final moments.

Sands is still an opaque figure by the end of this film. We have his sombre writings and journals but, interestingly, there are hardly any clear photographs, and we learn little about him as a human being.

It’s more silly than funny, and audiences can be forgiven for wondering if an actor of restricted growth should have been cast.

This Swallows and Amazons is decent enough: but probably best savoured on the small screen after tea on a rainy Sunday.

It’s a clotted and delirious film, with flashes of preposterous, operatic silliness. But it doesn’t have much room to breathe; there are some dull bits, and Leto’s Joker suffers in comparison with the late Heath Ledger.

A toxic cloud of anger, suspicion and sadness hangs over this documentary.

The Snowden/social media plotline of this film does a bit to make Bourne more relevant. But the ingredients are basically the same.

The lack of development in the supporting cast is a problem. Nothing, or almost nothing, of any consequence happens to these people. The title is a bit misleading: there is no real communal plot development.

London Road was a mighty success on stage. Now it is a unique triumph on the movie screen.

It is well acted, well shot, earnest and high-minded in its eroticism, but with a certain Mills-and-Boony-swoony-ness that creates something unsubversive in the love affair itself.

This plumply preposterous film from director Mika Kaurismäki (brother of Aki) is an unconvincing and solemn account of the controversially mannish Queen Kristina and her secret sapphic yearnings in 17th-century Sweden.

It’s flawed by a slightly unconvincing and anticlimactic gun-related ending, but well acted, forthright and confident in the universe it creates.

This could provide some small-screen entertainment for bored kids on a rainy day. But really: enough.

[A] richly enjoyable documentary tribute.

This new movie could arguably have given Elba more to do, earlier in the picture, but it is the inter-relationship of the Enterprise’s crew which is the real source of drama. An entertaining adventure.

This is a derivative movie, whose comic entanglements are perhaps there to provide an alibi for the obvious plot implausibilities - but it’s well made, great looking, and nicely acted.

It’s not ground-breaking, but there are laughs, and it is a good audience movie.

[A] terrifically stylish work.

It’s a winning and likable film.

It’s a one-note drama of simmering resentment. That note is sustained with impressive conviction.

Reasonably good fun.

Joyless and tedious, a reboot quite without the first film’s audacity and fun... It’s a movie that is going through the intergalactic motions.

For me, King Jack relies too much on violence for its dramatic voltage, but it’s a well-acted movie with heart – and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Léa Seydoux, in all her haughty and sullen sexiness, dominates this well-crafted piece of suspenseful if curiously pointless hokum from French director Benoît Jacquot; it leads its audience up an elegantly tended garden path to nowhere in particular.

The President is a striking movie - and a bold and challenging change of directorial pace from Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

A deafening explosion of energy, gruesome violence and chaos.

The Ones Below is an intimately disturbing nightmare of the upper middle classes, with tinges of melodrama and staginess, entirely appropriate for its air of suppressed psychosis.

Zero Days is an intriguing, disturbing watch.

Graduation is an intricate, deeply intelligent film, and a bleak picture of a state of national depression in Romania, where the 90s generation hoped they would have a chance to start again. There are superb performances from Titien and Dragus.

It’s terrifically watchable, a high-octane automobile of a film with dodgy steering, but exciting in a world of dull and prissy hybrids.

The Salesman is a well-crafted, valuable drama.

An incoherent, inconsequential picture which sometimes looks worryingly as if it is being made up as it goes along.

Ma Loute is a fascinatingly made film, theatrically extravagant and precise, although perhaps a little over-extended.

The proceedings are claustrophobic, intense and alienated – often brilliant, sometimes slightly redundant.

What a lovely film Paterson is.

Ma’Rosa is made with control and clarity, a narrative purpose which is held on to despite an apparently aimless docu-style, and a clear sense of jeopardy. My reservation is that it doesn’t reveal much of what is going on in Rosa’s mind and heart.

The story is told with stark and fierce plainness: unadorned, unapologetic, even unevolved. Loach’s movie offends against the tacitly accepted rules of sophisticated good taste: subtlety, irony and indirection.

It’s a richly detailed character study, immersing the audience in the life and mind of its imperious main character.

Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness – and yet a brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction.

It’s an action-thriller with punch; Bridges gives the characterisation ballast and heft and Pine and Foster bring a new, grizzled maturity to their performances.

It is actually Assayas’s best film for a long time, and Stewart’s best performance to date.

There is a great performance here from Sasha Lane and this is another step onwards and upwards for Andrea Arnold herself.

Here is a film with its heart in the right place, an anatomical correctness coexisting with heartfelt, forthright conviction and an admirable belief in the virtue of simplicity and underplaying.... But this restraint sometimes sags into a kind of absence, and means the film itself is a bit rhetorically underpowered.

When Fanning is off screen, we are marooned in a fashion shoot in a hell of silliness. Yet her star quality gives The Neon Demon what substance it has, and Refn’s film-making has self-belief and panache. Take it or leave it.

The Unknown Woman is an odd, dramatically stilted and passionless quasi-procedural concerning a mysterious death; it depends on a series of unconvincing, and in fact borderline-preposterous, encounters and features a bafflingly inert performance from Adèle Haenel, whose usual spark appears to have been doused by self-consciousness.

The film is very funny – but asks its audience to wonder if being funny, if wanting to make people laugh, and particularly if using comedy for family-bonding, really is the sign of being relaxed and life-affirming in the way people who are talented at comedy often assume.

What a delicate, elegant marvel these movies have been.

You might argue that there is a kind of hubris in all this, and its very giganticism condemned it to marginal status and a kind of cultural smallness. But what excitement there is in these folies de grandeur.

This is not as richly compelling as other Almodóvar films, but it’s a fluent and engaging work.

[Black] creates some outrageously contrived and protracted shootouts and one or two good old fashioned action explosions. But he also keeps the dialogue cracking along.

It seems pointless to say that the big friendly giant is the star of The BFG. But casting has never been more crucial. A typically distinctive, eccentric and seductive star performance from Mark Rylance absolutely makes this movie what it is.

This is no masterpiece, but it’s amiable slice of popcorn entertainment.

Woody Allen’s Café Society is a sweet, sad, insubstantial jeu d’ésprit, watchable, charming and beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro – yet always freighted by a pedantic nostalgia for the 1930s golden age in both Hollywood and New York, nostalgia which the title itself rather coercively announces.

The idea of an apocalypse means every dial has to be turned up to 11 and this film certainly provides bangs for your buck, although there is less space for the surreal strangeness of the X-Men to breathe, less dialogue interest, and they do not have the looser, wittier joy of the Avengers. But the more playful episodes with Cyclops and Quicksilver are welcome and everything hangs together.

The movie cleverly spins a meta-fictional "origin" myth for Captain America: explaining that he was in fact a propagandist comic-book superhero before becoming a real one. The final scene of the film, and Captain America's very last line, are rather brilliant – though admittedly less brilliant if their sole purpose is to set up sequels.

This pretty routine follow-up has some decent material and amiable bad taste, heavily diluted with gallons of very ordinary sequel product: more of the same.

It’s a bit silly maybe, with a plot that requires you to overlook the implausibility of a certain smartphone with no passcode protection. But there is a nifty premise.

Special Correspondents shows that Gervais has a plausible Hollywood career, but there’s a baffling lack of real laughs and performance chemistry between the leads, and very little of the acid characterisation and cynical discomfort which is vital to his screen presence.

It’s a huge aspartame rush of a film: a giant irresistible snack, not nutritious, but very tasty.

It’s an engaging and garrulous film, and Hockney is now a cheerful, grandfatherly figure, and an object lesson in taking the boy out of Bradford, and not the other way around.

This feature is a very funny, if derivative panto-ish romp about the early life of Shakespeare.

A gentle and charming entertainment.

A terrifically enjoyable piece of old-fashioned storytelling and a beautiful-looking film: spectacular, exciting, funny and fun.

It really is a nuclear war of dullness.

It is a high-minded, often touching movie which replaces the nihilism and miserabilism often to be found in social realism, and replaces them with a positive vision of what the state can – and can’t – do to help.

This movie doesn’t really follow through with its own ideas, either in the natural realm of the ageing couple’s relationship or the supernatural arena of an eerily possible apparition.

Here is a scary movie that is so hammy and so clunkingly written it will reduce your brain to the consistency of muesli mixed with diesel.

There are no prizes for guessing what happens, but it’s a smart scary movie that relies on atmosphere and characterisation – not just jump-scares – for its effect.

There is some surreal fun at the beginning as everything collapses.... But then it’s the same thing over again.

The film has an impeccable technical finish, but it is insipid, contrived, solemn, and ever so slightly preposterous.

Emma Thompson gives us a scene-stealing performance which is enjoyably macabre.

Richness, warmth and tenderness pulse from this lovely documentary.

Grimsby has the occasional laugh and a succession of finely wrought grossout spectaculars which are reasonably entertaining.... But with its cod-Bond and mock-action material it carries a weird overall feel, like kids’ TV but produced on a lavish scale with added filth.

It’s a bit derivative, with borrowings from a handful of other films, but there are some nasty moments.

The story is clotted and overloaded, lacking the necessary clean tautness and suspense. And Kate Winslet's turn as a hatchet-faced Russian mob matriarch is a bit on the ridiculous side.

All good stuff from Depp, although by sending up Trump’s 1980s period, it feels a little off the money, and this is a figure who has already somehow absorbed derision into his skin and made himself immune to it.

There are always some laughs to be had here, and Ben Stiller’s couture legend now has an endearingly muppety look.

Deadpool is neurotic and needy – and very entertaining. An innocent pleasure.

Perhaps no film can entirely compete with the simple fact of this novel/museum’s existence, but the movie circles around the dual conceptual artefact beguilingly.

The ideas here were far more interestingly rehearsed in movies like Tropical Malady and his Palme-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. A diverting footnote to the main body of work, no more than that.

It’s hard to escape the sinking feeling that this is a waste of talent – and that this is a good-natured, well-meaning but pointless kind of Brit-comedy ancestor worship, paying elaborate homage to a TV show that got it right the first time.

It’s written to a machine-tooled formula, with two more episodes naturally planned to gouge cash out of the fanbase, and whatever interest this film has dies about five minutes before the closing credits.

There is something interestingly non-argumentative and personal about this documentary. It is gentle and reflective, a paean to his own youth and idealism that have been preserved in the ice.

Unassuming, likable entertainment.

This could be one of those rare and terrifying serial killer cases where the psychotic culprit apparently intends to bore and embarrass everyone to death with bad acting.

A Simple Life is a tear-jerker, but thoughtful and intelligent, with an anti-sentimental dimension.

The Force Awakens is ridiculous and melodramatic and sentimental of course, but exciting and brimming with energy and its own kind of generosity. What a Christmas present.

Tarantino has created another breathtakingly stylish and clever film, a Jacobean western, intimate yet somehow weirdly colossal, once again releasing his own kind of unwholesome crazy-funny-violent nitrous oxide into the cinema auditorium for us all to inhale.

Hard to Be a God creates its own uncanny world: it is beautiful, brilliant and bizarre.

It’s silly and poignant and funny.

A very valuable film.

David O Russell’s Joy is an intriguing but weirdly subdued and stylised film.

What is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control and he unspools great meandering, bravura travelling shots to tell it: not dissimilar, in some ways, to his previous picture, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin.

With its sheer warmth and likability, this good-natured documentary won my heart.

Jimmy Ellis’s story really is stranger than fiction.

The Good Dinosaur looks great, of course, but it’s not in the league we’ve come to expect.

Too often it’s just silly.

There’s real energy.

With In The Basement, [Seidl] seems to falling back on the same old shocks. The freakiness is losing its capacity to disturb.

McCullin emerges as an unsentimental, plain-speaking, thoughtful man, disgusted at the inhumanity of war – and yet candid about how he is also personally and professionally drawn to its drama.

It’s a crunching disappointment: a dull, crass, formulaic and frankly misjudged chiller.

It’s deeply silly but uproariously entertaining. At the end, I almost felt guilty for enjoying it all quite so much - almost.

Guillermo del Toro’s gothic fantasy-romance Crimson Peak is outrageously sumptuous, gruesomely violent and designed to within an inch of its life.

Bridge of Spies has a brassy and justified confidence in its own narrative flair.

A fascinating film.

It is deeply intelligent, intensely and painfully political, and yet attempts, and succeeds, somehow to transcend politics and perhaps even history itself.

Pattinson gives what is simply a dull performance in a dull role: something in the casting and conception is wrong from the outset. Maybe he would have been better as Dean.

It is a handsome-looking film, though it has a promo look to it occasionally, like a lavish tourist ad. I loved the horse’s-eye view Spender gave us at one stage, careering around the track.

This romp is just embarrassing.

Smith’s performance, honed from the previous stage and radio versions, is terrifically good.

It’s an engaging portrait - film-making which works from the ground up.

Francofonia is a fascinating essay and meditation on art, history and humanity’s idea of itself.

Collette is a potent, unsentimental presence and Hardwicke and Banks know how to connect with the audience.

This film is making a wheezing, spluttering sound: the sound of a profitable YA franchise running out of steam.

As with I Am Love, Guadagnino has put together something utterly distinctive here, a cocktail of intense emotions, transcendent surroundings and unexpected detours. A real pleasure.

It is superlatively well performed and well directed with a real narrative grip.

There are some plausibility issues in Room, but this is a disturbing and absorbing film, shrewdly acted, particularly by Larson. It lets the audience in; it does not just let the nightmare stun them into submission. You make a real emotional engagement.

Scott Cooper’s Black Mass is a big, brash, horribly watchable gangster picture taken from an extraordinary true story and conceived on familiar generic lines.

Spotlight never hits the heights of passion, but capably and decently tells an important story.

Fukunaga brings flair, muscular storytelling, directness and a persuasively epic sweep to this brutal, heartrending movie.

Everest is a frustrating movie in many ways – despite some lurches and shocks, it doesn’t quite deliver the edge-of-your-seat thrills that many were hoping for, and all those moderately engaging characters mean that there is no centrally powerful character.

It's a tough, absorbing and suspenseful drama, excellently acted by its three non-professional leads.

Taxi grew on me. It is not as angry and painful as his previous work, the samizdat This Is Not a Film, but it is subtle, humorous and humane. It tells you more about modern Iran, I think, than you’ll discover on the news.

The psychological thriller form has imposed on Dolan some discipline, and brought out his talent and energy.

There’s some nice early-60s period production design and the whole thing moves along smoothly, if unhurriedly. But it never delivers anything like the punch of Tom Cruise’s M:I adventures, nor the wit and distinctiveness of 007.

This is terrific film-making – enough to bring a rush of blood to the head.

It's solid entertainment.

This is an attractively unparochial drama with a bracing interest in excellence.

It is refreshing that this story does not simply unravel into miserablism, but the film’s weird narrative leaps are implausible and jarring.

It’s impossible not to enjoy this big-hearted and sweet-natured British family movie.

It is all intensely controlled, although this is a drama that goes by the book, in all senses; there are no unabsorbed events to disorder the parable’s secular/religious alignment, and the Greeneian miracle it eventually conjures is arguably a little too pat. Yet it is also strangely moving.

We’re always waiting for something important or interesting to happen, but it never really does.

A terrifically enjoyable and exciting summer spectacular: savvy, funny, ridiculous in just the right way, with some smart imaginative twists.

Tim Roth is excellent as David: impassive and enigmatic, withholding the truth about himself, but radiating in repose a sadness and a swallowed pain.

The movie is a distillation of the assassin’s life of watchfulness, survival and fear. At other times, it has a dreamlike quality: a floating hallucination. The Assassin baffles, but more often it quietly captivates and astonishes.

By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable.

The pure work-in-progress energy of all this is exhilarating, and if the resulting movie is flawed in its final act, then this is a flaw born of Jia’s heroic refusal to be content making the same sort of movie, and his insistence on trying to do something new with cinema and with storytelling.

There is a lot of sound and fury in this Macbeth, but not without meaning. It’s not perhaps a very subtle version, and I felt that Kurzel should have perhaps worked more closely with Fassbender with the contours of his speeches, and shown the painful mind-changing and nerve-losing in the early stages. There is an operatic verve.

This buttock-clenchingly embarrassing movie from director Valérie Donzelli is a pre-Revolutionary period drama from the quality end of the sugary French market – theatrically tricked out with one or two annoying and clumsy Brechtian touches of stylised self-aware modernity.

Mon Roi, directed and co-written by Maïwenn (that is, film-maker and actor Maïwenn Le Besco) is an unendurable confection of complacent and self-admiring nonsense: shallow, narcissistic, histrionic and fake.

Mia Madre is a tremendously smart and enjoyable movie.

The film is quiet, understated and gentle, allowing the audience to take pleasure in teasing out its narrative subtleties, and presented with wonderful freshness and clarity.

For all its apparent sombreness and thoughtfulness, The Sea Of Trees is an exasperatingly shallow film on an important and agonisingly painful subject - depression and suicide. This it slathers in palliative sentimentality.

Blunt’s performance has an edge of steel. She brings off a mix of confidence, bewilderment and vulnerability, which functions very well against the alpha male characters higher up the chain of command.

Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time, lost film projects, lost love and all those beautiful women that you never got to sleep with.

It’s hardcore, yet much softer-core than Noé’s earlier movies, without the terrifying shock factor of Irréversible and Seul Contre Tous, and without the visual brilliance of Enter the Void, and Love is preposterous and badly acted and talky in a way that porn films haven’t been since they were designed to be shown in cinemas.

A rather silly, pointless and directionless film.

Garrel struggles to unearth anything new. The mechanics of the relationships on show fail to lead anywhere unexpected while the dialogue is often flat and on-the-nose.

It is such a strange film in its way, stranger still if you are not accustomed to Weerasethakul’s work, and it needs a real investment of attention. But there is something sublime in it.

It is a masterpiece of black-comic bad taste and a positive carnival of transgression. The secret is the deadpan seriousness with which everything is treated.

It is a creamily sensuous, richly observed piece of work, handsomely detailed and furnished: the clothes, the hair, the automobiles, the train carriages, the record players, the lipstick and the cigarettes are all superbly presented. The combination of all this is intoxicating in itself.

Irrational Man is a good idea, a sketch for a movie, but the movie itself is unrealised.

It hasn’t anything as genuinely emotionally devastating as Up, or the subtlety and inspired subversion of Monsters Inc. and the Toy Stories which it certainly resembles at various stages. But it is certainly a terrifically likeable, ebullient and seductive piece of entertainment, taken at full-throttle.

It is an overwhelming story, and despite everyone knowing the ending, it is as gripping as a thriller: Kapadia has fashioned and shaped it with masterly flair.

It’s an adventure which begins by being bizarre and hilarious but appears to run out of ideas at its mid-way point, and run out of interest in what had at first seemed to be its central comic image: humans turning into animals.

That adjective in the title is accurate. Extravagantly deranged, ear-splittingly cacophonous, and entirely over the top, George Miller has revived his Mad Max punk-western franchise as a bizarre convoy chase action-thriller in the post-apocalyptic desert.

It could be the finest hour for both of its lead actors.

It's a confident, well-made film that ends up in a blind alley of cynicism.

A pleasing, high-minded film; also something of a palate-cleanser.

It’s all operatically mad, and the city-destroying final confrontation is becoming a bit familiar, but Whedon carries it off with such joy and even a kind of evangelism.

There is ultimately something very unbalanced in this movie: the female lead and one male support are outstanding; another supporting male is fine and the third is frankly uncomfortable and miscast.

The spectacle of highly competent professionals going about their work is always absorbing, and Simons is an interesting man: reticent, calm, shy, intensely focused but apparently never losing control until the end.

There can hardly be a bigger waste of time than this piece of twee nonsense.

It is a strange, clenched movie: weirdly compelling, with an undertone of absurdity worthy of Woody Allen’s Love and Death.

The movie moves on to some grandstanding moments, before finally painting itself into a corner. The ending is frustrating: it runs out of ideas before the final credits. But Johnson packs an almighty punch.

Chappie is a broad, brash picture, which does not allow itself to get bogged down in arguing about whether or not “artificial intelligence” is possible. It has subversive energy and fun.

Mitchell brings off some sensational setpieces of fear and suspense. I can’t remember when I was last so royally freaked out in the cinema.

Opinions will divide as to the film's final moments: some may find it all too much, and the film does not quite digest everything it wants to encompass. But there an energy and boldness in the debut work from Daniel Wolfe.

There are moments of visual brilliance here, moments of reverence and even grandeur. He is always distinctive, and anything he does must be of interest. But his style is stagnating into mannerism, cliche and self-parody.

It is grown-up, respectable and historical, perfectly competently made, lots of accents and period dressing-up … and just the tiniest bit dull.

It is an elegant if slight piece of work, touching and intriguing by turns, but hampered structurally in that it relies on two separate flashback sections.

It’s all very chaotic and entertaining, like a bizarre cult sci-fi TV show that somehow survived a threat of mid-season cancellation.

Without Ronan’s performance, Brooklyn might have left a sugary taste. But she is the ingredient that brings everything together: her calm poise anchors almost every scene and every shot.

With a sly dreaminess, Vikander steals the movie from the two males.

It’s a strange, naive work, with something fundamentally misjudged about the drama, characterisation and casting.

Queen and Country is an entertaining and sympathetic guide to a lost world: a rite of passage that Britain was to find it could do without.

It’s a little hammy and soapy, with an occasional Pythonesque sense of its own importance but this film, directed by Richard Laxton, is performed with gusto.

It’s difficult to know what subtitle to give this. Taken 3: Not Again, or Taken 3: Seriously? or Taken 3: This Is Getting a Bit Much Frankly.

This inevitably doesn’t have the charge of the first story, but it is still interestingly weird and dreamlike, and quite disturbing. A commercially driven sequel, sure – but still effective.

It may be no more than the sum of its parts, and the slightly soap-operatic finale doesn’t entirely distract your attention from untied plot threads, but there is some great fancy footwork in the narrative and fierce satirical strokes that recall Tom Wolfe.

Greg Barker’s documentary is a heartfelt, if historically disjointed, tribute to individuals who took part in the Arab Spring.

About Elly confirms Farhadi's shrewd judgment of pace, dramatic technique and formal control of an ensemble cast.

This is an extraordinary record. But be warned. Once seen, these images cannot be unseen.

It's a richly conceived treat.

Perhaps any screenwriting teacher could explain why romantic comedies such as this frontload it with all the jokes in the first act, and then get progressively sentimental and humourless. This one becomes gooier and squishier until the comedy has entirely gone.

Private Peaceful is a small-scale story in essence, which works efficiently on the non-epic scale in which it's presented.

It's a fascinating story.

Binoche's performance – tiresomely radiating a martyred integrity – is mannered and self-conscious, and her character's professional work is naively imagined.

Citizenfour is a gripping record of how our rulers are addicted to gaining more and more power and control over us – if we let them.

Fury is a punchy, muscular action film, confidently put together and never anything other than watchable.

Clayton brilliantly uses slow dissolves to create ghostly superimpositions, and the harmless squeals of bath-time fun, or squeakings of a pencil, suggest uncanny screams.

There is talent and ambition here: the film has style, mood, references – and, inevitably, a great opening and credit sequence – though it's short on substance.

The movie is intensely acted, with a sense of interior longing possibly inspired by Terrence Malick, but it is also sometimes contrived and straining self-consciously for dramatic mood and moment.