Peter Bradshaw

Although no amount of revisionist gallantry can conceal how terrible Yoko Ono’s vocals are, this has a historical fascination as they were Lennon’s only full-length concert performances after the Beatles’ split.

It is an amusing and gruesome premise, which writer-director Damian McCarthy stretches out into a convoluted, bizarre extended narrative.

The coming-of-age parts of the film centred on Frances work a little better, but for all that, and despite Lithgow and Colman’s commitment, this is very uncertain.

It’s cheerful and watchable, if a relentlessly on-brand fan promo, corporately policed and controlled, using vintage archive photos and video rather than closeup talking-head footage of the band now.

The emphasis is more largely upon discipline and commitment in the service of art, a vocational self-immolation in which the transformation of pain into beauty is the whole point.

This is good-natured, buoyant entertainment. It’s wearing well.

Opera director Damiano Michieletto makes his underpowered cinema debut here, and the whole film, with its lifeless staging, uninteresting performances and laughably naive ending can only be described as the school of Salieri.

The film scoots smartly past the death and brings us briskly on to the entertaining business of sheep-oriented crime detection. It’s all very silly, although, as with Babe, I have to confess to agnosticism about digital talking animals, even if the technology here is next-level. It’s an entertaining tale of ovine law enforcement.

It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

This is an elegant, chilly dream of despair.

Antoine Fuqua’s demi-biopic of Michael Jackson gives you the chimp, the llama, the giraffe … but not the elephant in the living room. It’s like a 127-minute trailer montage assembling every music-movie cliche you can think of: the producers’ astonishment in the recording studio, the tour bus, the billboard chart ascent, the meeting with the uncool corporate execs in their offices.

As this film’s producer-star, Angelina Jolie shows honesty and courage in tackling a story that so closely mirrors her own experience of having a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer. But sadly, the film itself feels specious and shallow, insisting with bland and weirdly humourless confidence on the glamorous importance of the fashion world in which it is set.

For all that this film is about the revolutionary and disruptive business of art, it takes a pretty un-subversive view of art and artists, compatible with the museum gift shop. But I have to admit, it’s executed with brio and comic gusto – the “past” sections, anyway – and Lindon’s performance has charm.

It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.

It is another highly sympathetic performance from O’Connor, who converts the British reticence of his earlier roles into Dusty’s strength and quiet vulnerability.

The Blue Trail is a generic mashup: it partly has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant old people, and partly it has something far more subversive and disquieting. The mix of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.

It sometimes seems as if each Jude film is almost to be viewed once only; if you press play again, or go to the cinema to see it a second time, there will be only a blank screen, as if Jude and his ragged company have folded their tents and vanished.

François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.

It all rattles along watchably enough, taking in more locations than just boring old London, though you’ll find your credulity stretched almost to breaking point.

It’s now commonplace to compare programmatic stuff like this to AI, but this is almost a second evolutionary step downwards; it looks as if humans, using AI, have tried to copy something that was originally AI generated, creating a bland, simplistic template that can be sold in all global territories where it can be dubbed by local voice talent.

There are one or two interesting moments: including an intriguing discussion of the idea that Tinder is anti-love and in fact just promotes addiction to the app, which is inimical to actually finding a long-term partner. But really this is a very tiring and mediocre film.

It offers us a provocation, a jeu d’ésprit of outrage, a psychological meltdown that is more astutely articulated than in many other more solemnly intended films. And it gives us what it promises in the title.

This is a serious and worthwhile film, though one that tells you what you know already, and yet somehow perhaps doesn’t tell you enough.

The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.

Ben Wheatley’s Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is a hothouse flower of misery, sprouting dozens of resentment-buds under artificially controlled conditions.

A pale imitation.

This is a Hail Mary pass that Gosling just about manages to catch.

The movie’s ironies and cruelties clatter across the screen, but Komasa also allows the audience to consider who it is Chris really wants to train.

It is a resoundingly confident drama.

Without Buckley, this would have been lacking; with her, it’s a very bizarre and enjoyable spectacle of married bliss.

It is quite a vision: mordant, satirical, brutal.

The film perhaps suffers from a loss of nerve about how villainous to make the villain, but it zaps along very entertainingly.

Hüller’s quiet, sinewy performance provides the film’s form and musculature.

Bronstein is brilliant at conveying mounting panic and a terrible, all-consuming sadness.

You may find yourself wondering why we are going over this ground again, but it’s an engaging film, and there is always something mesmeric in McCartney’s face: cherubic, and yet sharp and watchful.

The performances of Jonsson and Blyth are fierce and overwhelmingly convincing.

[Berg] uses Jeff’s answering machine messages and archive 90s material, including the unmistakable, moody black-and-white MTV footage, to tell a very sad story with sympathy and urgency.

There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi.

This tender and sweet animation from film-makers Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is an involving, poignant study of early childhood; how fragile it is, and how strong you feel yourself to be to have outlived or surpassed it.

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

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

There’s a rigorous chill to this Hamlet.

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

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

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

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

An amusing vignette.

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

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

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

This is an absorbing, compassionate film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audiences might, by the closing credits, think they still don’t quite know what happens to Helen and Mabel in the end, or perhaps at any time, but then again real life can feel messy and unfinished in just this way.

The film’s poetry resides in its thoughtful inactivity, its vernacular spirituality and its gentleness.

It has a seriousness, an unsentimental readiness to look reality in the face.

This is an utterly absorbing and outstandingly acted film.

Hersh emerges as a tough, combative, peppery personality from this movie.

What seems to be most therapeutic is their contact with the dogs. As one teacher puts it: “You are more than good enough for that dog just the way you are.”

Magazine Dreams itself, though flawed by a cumbersome flashback structure in which he is talking to a counsellor, has powerful moments and Majors is very good, especially in the bizarre scene when Killian insists on going onstage at a bodybuilding event just after being beaten up.

The sad thing is that there doesn’t appear to be much space for someone like Ardern in modern politics; less space than ever in fact.

The pure craziness is a marvel.

As with the previous Knives Out films, the characters are not, in fact, equally important and equally capable of murder. An inner core of suspects emerges and their guilt discloses itself incrementally at the end, as opposed to being withheld for a final reveal. What a treat though, with cracking turns from one and all and O’Connor the first among equals.

Sweeney has already shown what a superb and detailed performer she is in the FBI interrogation movie Reality, but this is far inferior: a stodgy, lifeless piece of work.

Sirāt is a path to nowhere, an improvised spectacle in the Sahara; it is very impressive in the opening 10 minutes but valueless as it proceeds, and a pointless mirage of unearned emotion.

There are a few laughs in Z2: of course there are. But they are algorithmically generated and corporately approved. It’s the kind of movie you put on an iPad to keep the children quiet on a long plane or train journey; nothing wrong with that of course, but the heart and soul are lacking.

Quite simply: when the crow is off the screen, the drama starts to be involving and affecting. Once the crow is there, the film looks self-conscious.

What a performance from Erivo; it is genuinely moving when the Prince has to convince Elphaba what we, the audience, have always known: that she is beautiful.

Russell Crowe is rather wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall Göring; it’s the best he’s been for a long time, a sly and cunning manipulator playing psychological cat-and-mouse with the Americans. But there is a deeply silly performance from Rami Malek as Kelley.

This cynically Christmassy movie is leaden, unconvincingly acted and about as welcome as a dead rat in the eggnog.

The Running Man sometimes feels retro-futurist and steampunky, though it is always watchable and buoyant. Wright has hit a confident stride.

It’s a stark, fierce, wonderfully acted film.

Greg Kwedar has adapted the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson; the director is Clint Bentley, and they have created a lovely looking, deeply felt film, clearly absorbing the influences of Terrence Malick in some of the low camera positions, sunset-hour compositions, narrative voiceovers, and epiphanically revealed glories of the American landscape.

The humour is delivered with the same conviction and discreetly weighted force as the sadness, and the same goes for this film’s determinedly unbowdlerised view of sex.

This is a movie with, in the Scots phrase, no small opinion of itself; a movie of big scenes, big performances, big images, epiphanies and hallucinations. Not all of them work, but the presence of Day-Lewis settles and moors it.

The sheer pointlessness of everything that happens subtracts the oxygen and even Fanning’s imperishable star quality can’t save it.

The work is the most important thing and Addario’s speaks for itself.

There are some very coolly orchestrated scenes in the big city and Mackenzie ratchets up the tension in style.

The effect is tender, sympathetic, diverting and often very elegant and indirect. But it withholds from us the full, real pain of damaged love.

None of these characters quite flares passionately into life but all are persuasively portrayed, and it’s a vehement reminder of what doesn’t get taught in British schools.

An intriguing, bittersweet family study.

The film is a derivative, if well intentioned, piece of fan fiction.

This is a movie whose absurdities need to be indulged.

& Sons doesn’t deliver on the promise of all its film-making talent but Nighy is always amusing.

Gender, sexuality, status and power are all in flux here, a playful effect that is however withdrawn when we arrive at the sacrificial seriousness. It is a sweet tale which floats self-consciously out of the screen.

It’s a terrific performance from Hawke.

It’s a movie of big moods and grand gestures, undercut by the banal inevitability of losing.

There’s an amazing lineup of collaborators and stars, and it’s good to see Candy’s uniquely likable and buoyant screen personality, but the tone borders on the stultifyingly reverential.

It sounds fun on the face of it, and the sheer silliness of the situation almost keeps it afloat, but the cardboard quality of the drama gets soggy.

A very sombre picture of American crime and punishment.

There is no drama or jeopardy or human interest anywhere. This franchise now looks about as urgently contemporary as an in-car CD player.

It’s a powerful, immersively detailed film, with three outstanding performances.

Perhaps some of the narrative tension flags between their arrival in Turkey and then the all-important border, but this is a well-acted, spirited piece.

The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre.

The movie sweeps ambitiously across Europe and the Middle East and shows us a complex world of pain.

This movie lodged in my mind a little more than Hong’s earlier films, perhaps because it is less contrived and it features a genuinely funny and complex opening scene.

One Battle After Another is at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen – an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. The title itself hints at an unending culture war presented as a crazily extreme action movie with superbly managed car chases and a final, dreamlike and hypnotic succession of three cars through the undulating hills. And is the central paternity crisis triangle an image for an ownership dispute around the American melting-pot dream?

The unreality of the film never quite equates to dishonesty about what exactly happens when two people not in the first flush of youth decide to be in love, but it takes an effort of will to suspend disbelief and submit to a well-intentioned fantasy.

It’s another really bold and distinct statement from Jenkin.

It’s an entertaining and sympathetic movie, if a bit route one, and audiences might possibly feel that TV shows like Sex Education and Heartstopper go a bit further and with more contemporary nous. But nice performances from Anders and Small bolster this movie’s likability factor.

It’s an eerie, disquieting experience.

There’s lots of good stuff here, some witty reboots and reworkings of gags from the first film and sprightly update appearances from minor, half-forgotten characters currently residing in the “where-are-they-now?” file.

It’s refreshing for a film-maker to opt for subtlety, and there are good performances from Riley, Martin and Farthing.

A heartbreaking collection.

The film, though eventful enough, does not quite succeed in its tacit claim to be a study of poverty; the author behaves like a student who is stoically accepting some temporary dodgy accommodation.

It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.

A drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour.

The personae and performances of Pacino, Domingo and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic nastiness of the affair, and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious: a display of, not heartlessness, exactly, but a shrewd professional sense that pity and fear were emotions that could only benefit the kidnapper.

There is a reckless, ruthless kind of provocative brilliance in what Ben Hania is doing.

The film is very silly and always watchable in its weird way.

I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.

The film does not really permit the various emotional crises and issues to supersede the importance of fighting all that much, and the fighting itself is not transformed or transfigured in the drama.

This is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain.

The Wizard of the Kremlin just feels pointless in its knowing cynicism, right up to the silly, unearned flourish of violence at the very end.

Basically, there is a contentment and calm here, an acceptance and a Zen simplicity that is a cleansing of the moviegoing palate, or perhaps the fiction-consuming palate in general. It is a film to savour.

I still can’t be convinced that Megalopolis is anything other than an (honourable) failure. But Figgis’s documentary is an absorbing success.

Finally, inevitably, at the end of the protracted tale, we get to the question of which of the two is the “real” monster. The answer, in this high-minded and eventually rather sanctified romance, would appear to be – neither of them.

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions.

The movie is clenched with its own sense of contemporary relevance and risky blurred lines, saddled with an almost deafening score that often grinds straight through the dialogue; the drama becomes an atonal quartet of self-consciousness.

Cine-narcissism like this is always tiresome, and it isn’t any more palatable in a European setting.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre and amusing new film has a predictably strong performance from Emma Stone, an intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score from Jerskin Fendrix and, most importantly, a wonderful montage finale – but frankly it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump.

Maybe this film, concluding as it does on a distinctive note of euphoric sentimentality, does not add up to quite as much as the director thinks; but it intrigues, it exhilarates and it shows that Sorrentino is Italian cinema’s heir to Antonioni.

Caught Stealing is a very enjoyable spectacle.

The movie has a high gloss and sheen, like something by Nancy Meyers, which creates a diverting disconnect, yet it flinches from the recognisable, tragicomic reality of a bad marriage.

There’s a fair bit to enjoy here, with the club sometimes resembling a kind of senior-citizen X-Men group whose collective superpower is invisibility; old people can do things without people noticing them.

This solid roster of acting talent can’t do much about how frankly uninteresting and unfunny The Toxic Avenger is most of the time. As satire or spoof of both superhero movies and scary movies it is abysmally obsolete, and on its own terms as horror-comedy it achieves neither scares nor laughs.

Sex is earnest, but cerebral and challenging.

This sequel from Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto, co-written by the writer of the original, Derek Kolstad, really doesn’t have much of the humour and the storytelling chutzpah of the first film.

Haugerud has something of Eric Rohmer, and perhaps a little more of Hong Sang-soo; a readiness to simply talk, and talk and talk some more. It’s surprisingly cinematic.

When the decision is made, the final act has an almost morosely elegiac mood, as it must, as various speeches and set pieces reconcile its rather trudgingly earnest direction of travel with the witty, savvy materialism of the movie’s premise.

Benesch brings a tough, smart, credible presence.

Viet and Nam is a film that first feels opaque and elusive, and yet it becomes drenched with emotion.

There are fierce and overwhelmingly authentic performances here from first-timers in Julien Colonna’s terrific mob drama.

This is an engaging and thoroughly worthwhile movie.

It’s Curtis who embodies the story’s wacky spirit.

A likable, admirably intentioned if slightly more predictable entertainment, in which the good guys and the bad guys are more obvious.

Chernov is armed only with a camera, to the astonishment of many soldiers he encounters, and the film was constructed by editing his footage together with that of solders’ helmet cameras and drone material. Chernov shows us how drones are now utterly ubiquitous in war, delivering both the pictures and the assaults.

The whole thing is underscored by barnstorming performances from Wong and Hawkins.

There is no reason for this new Naked Gun to exist other than the reason for the old ones: it’s a laugh, disposable, forgettable, enjoyable.

I found something a little unfocused and even slightly indulgent or redundant in the way the images are put together (accompanied by a clamorous musical score by Evgueni Galperine) without making it clear to the viewer what we are looking at and where. Yet the film is so striking, especially on the big screen, almost itself a kind of land art.

Gazer’s atmosphere of looming disaster and dreamlike oppression crowds in on you as the movie progresses; an intriguing, genuinely scary picture.

Overall a very silly movie – though it’s keeping the superhero genre aloft.

This top-notch cast gives it their considerable all, but to my taste the syrup content was in the end too high.

This very uninteresting and uninspired story plods along for an hour and a half, though there are some almost-interesting surreal scenes when our heroes find themselves in weird alt-universe dimensions.

It’s possible to read Friendship as a plausible, if far-detached character study, a cringe-comedy Single White Male heading for disaster. Then it swerves away, following its nose towards something weirder.

A calm and interesting introduction to an important dissident author.

This lavishly produced and costumed European co-production is handsomely cast – but the range of talent here feels wasted on what is a fundamentally dated and stereotypical drama, whose Bohemian passion is diluted.

Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title.

Democracy has never looked so vulnerable.

From the very beginning, this new Superman is encumbered by a pointless and cluttered new backstory which has to be explained in many wearisome intertitles flashed up on screen before anything happens at all. Only the repeated and laborious quotation of the great John Williams theme from the 1978 original reminds you of happier times.

It feels relaxed and sure-footed in its Spielberg pastiche, its big dino-jeopardy moments and its deployment of thrills and laughs. Maybe the series can’t and shouldn’t go on for ever: we need new and original ideas. This one would be great to go out on.

The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London which caused 72 deaths is now the subject of Olaide Sadiq’s heartwrenching and enraging documentary, digging at the causes and movingly interviewing survivors and their families, whose testimony is all but unbearable.

Now we have 28 Years Later, an interesting, tonally uncertain development which takes a generational, even evolutionary leap into the future from the initial catastrophe, creating something that mixes folk horror, little-England satire and even a grieving process for all that has happened. And there are some colossal cameo appearances.

Overall, it’s an entertaining bit of summer fun.

There’s a fair bit of macho silliness here, but the panache with which director Joseph Kosinski puts it together is very entertaining.

There are some laughs and it’s always likable.

There is no radical reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet here, and the staging, costumes and performances look as if they come from something as trad as Zeffirelli’s 60s version … only it’s modern-language. Not worth the two hours’ traffic of their stage.

The estimable cast all do their utmost but the overall effect is frustratingly implausible.

It doesn’t, in fact, quite fall into place.

Four John Wick films with Keanu fetishising his guns and sporting his increasingly werewolfy facial hair have been increasingly heavy going but now de Armas mixes things up and she is a smart screen presence. As for the ballet, the emphasis is on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; nothing wrong with that, of course, but if the Ballerina sub-franchise continues, let’s hope that different works are chosen and we see de Armas actually getting out there on stage in a tutu as opposed to simply racking up the kills.

Perhaps there can be nothing totally new to say on film about Hitler and nazism, but Lang is interesting on the hidden disbelief and fear that existed among the leaders.

It’s impossible not to be carried along by the delirious rush of silliness in this knockabout screwball comedy.

This film has an audience, certainly, but it feels very derivative.

Perhaps the full story of the encampments has yet to be told.

The fierce sinew of Shaw’s performance gives the film some shape and keeps it grounded. Mackey and Krieps, both formidable performers, give the film their presence and force.

Its fervency and its eroticism give the film its currency.

The pure strangeness of the movie commands attention and there is a charismatic lead performance by Japanese actor-musician Mitsuki Kimura, or Kôki.

Vie Privée canters along to a faintly silly, slightly anticlimactic conclusion and audiences might have been expecting a bigger and more sensational twist. Yet Foster’s natural charisma sells it.

It’s a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives – and how they come to love and understand him just at the moment when they come to see his flaws and his weaknesses.

With icy provocation, Israel’s ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of 7 October.

There is such simplicity and clarity here, an honest apportioning of dignity and intelligence to everyone on screen: every scene and every character portrait is unforced and unembellished. The straightforward assertion of hope through giving help and asking for help is very powerful.

The dreary details of post-heist calamity are as pertinent as the main event. It is this that attracts Reichardt’s observing eye and makes The Mastermind so quietly gripping.

This is a story about the randomness of life in the big city, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV soap feel to its succession of escalating crises.

More than any comedy or even film I’ve seen recently, this is movie driven by the line-by-line need for fierce, nasty, funny punched-up stuff in the dialogue, and narrative arcs and character development aren’t the point. But as with Succession, this does a really good job of persuading you that, yes, this is what our overlords are really like.

Simón has an instinctive and almost miraculous way of just immersing herself within extended freewheeling family scenes – her camera moving unobtrusively in the group, like another teenager at the party, quietly noticing everything.

Its riddling quality, combined with its spectacular visual effects, may leave some audiences agnostic – and I myself wasn’t sure about the silent-movie type effects. Yet it’s a work of real artistry.

Everything here is out of the top drawer of production value: but it never really comes to passionate life.

It’s a baggy comedy, sentimental in ways that are not entirely intentional, but there is value, too.

This frankly odd film is misjudged and naive about the implications of its Holocaust theme. Its bland, TV-movie tone of sentimentality fails to accommodate the existential nightmare of the main plot strand, or indeed the subordinate question of when and whether to put your elderly parent in a care home.

It is burdened by a trite and naive sentimentality that it doesn’t know how to make realistically plausible or transform into romanticism or idealism.

It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema.

It is another powerful, absorbing picture from Campillo and a fitting swan song for Laurent Cantet.

It is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side.

It’s an elegant directorial performance from Herzi.

It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.

This movie, visually and dramatically superb in every way, moves with unhurried confidence across the screen, pausing to savour every bizarre bit of comedy or erotic byway, or note of pathos, on its circuitous path to the violent finale.

It’s high-minded, valuable work.

The madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can’t overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant.

This is a big, muscular picture which aspires to the crowd-pleasing athleticism of Spike Lee’s sports icons; it’s very enjoyable and there’s a great turn from Washington.

It is engaging and sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory setpiece sequences, and is challengingly incorrect thoughts about the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.

A deeply humane and emotionally literate piece of work.

The house is just there and the characters waft through it. Gray admirers might prefer Gray Matters, Marco Antonio Orsini’s documentary on the subject.

It is always entertaining, and delivered with the usual conviction and force but with less of the romantic extravagance than we’ve seen before, less of the childlike loneliness that has been detectable in his greatest movies.

None of this, arguably, is inaccurate. But it’s all very smooth: a slick Steadicam ride through a historic, tumultuous moment.

It hardly needs to be said that subtlety is not really among this film’s attributes - but it is fierce, angry, engaged, and intensely, sensually alert to every detail of its own pleasure and pain.

It’s a confident, often engaging mix of music and no-frills theatrical performance, with Bono often coming across like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created but then suppressed due to undue levels of rock’n’roll pizzazz.

It borders on cliche a little, but there is compassion and storytelling ambition here.

There is no accumulation of drama or tension or intellectual revelation and the setpiece shootout is ultimately valueless. What exactly is it saying that we didn’t know already? The wait for Aster to recover his directorial form goes on.

It is dense with fear and sadness.

This is a really exhilarating, disturbing picture which foregrounds excellent writing and performances.

It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I.

It is very intelligent and humane, and what a great performance from Collias.

Andres Veiel’s sombre documentary tells the gripping, incrementally nauseating story of Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl, the brilliant and pioneering German film-maker of the 20th century who isn’t getting her name on a Girls on Tops T-shirt any time soon.

Attenborough matches the natural world’s grandeur with his own intellectual and moral seriousness.

Evans certainly brings the craziness and the violence but, for me, without the stylish martial arts of his Raid films and without any plausible sense that anything is believably at stake.

The final half-hour seems to be a neo-western style melee which seems to go on for ever. Odd … and unrewarding.

Blichfeldt has made an elegant debut.

Last Swim looks slightly callow sometimes, but forthright and likable and Hekmat’s performance has delicacy and intelligence.

It’s always good to witness Young’s authentic acoustic presence.

Weirdly, I felt that this odd film might have worked better if it was just about the lonely man and the penguin without the Argentinian tyranny – or just about the lonely man and the Argentinian tyranny without the penguin. The real non-CGI bird itself is very sweet.

However earnest and heartfelt, the film doesn’t tell us nearly enough, or really anything, about Joe.

Jones certainly shows Mr Burton’s sad and dignified loneliness.

It’s a film that mixes small screen zeitgeist fragments and madeleine moments, a memory quilt of a certain time and place, juxtaposing Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg with Richard Nixon and George Wallace, John and Yoko in concert with ads for Tupperware – all inspired by the fact that John and Yoko did an awful lot of TV watching in their small New York apartment of that time, with John in particular thrilled by the American novelty of 24/7 television.

Interestingly, it has the crowd-pleasing energy of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator films. There is real sinew here.

For many, the movie could as well do without the supernatural element, and I admit I’m one of them; I’d prefer to see a real story with real jeopardy work itself out. But there is energy and comic-book brashness

As for Malek’s performance, his line readings and screen presence are very distinctive, but I have to say the moments when he has to present anguished emotion to the camera do not quite work, and feel eccentric.

The movie is its own show of force in some ways, surely accurate in showing what the soldiers did, moment by moment, though blandly unaware of a point or a meaning beyond the horror.

It’s an interesting, strange film, with a key moment withheld from the audience – and yet its omission, and the resulting ambiguity and mystery, is something we are almost supposed to forget about.

Writer-director Sandhya Suri has made a tense, violent and politically savvy crime procedural set in India: a film about sexism, caste bigotry and Islamophobia that doubles as a study in the complex relationship between two female cops, a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie.

This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.

There is a kind of solidity and force to the film in its opening act, but its interest dwindles and we get little in the way of either ambition or moment-by-moment humour.

This is a movie that strains and contorts for its effects; the performances are strong – strong enough to carry the big twist – and Labed might have absorbed Agnieszka Smoczynska’s comparable film The Silent Twins, although that was unselfconscious and heartfelt in a way that this isn’t. It’s a film that feels actorly rather than real.

Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end.

German screenwriter Constantine Werner has adapted a story from fantasy author George RR Martin and the resulting dialogue lands like a series of sandbags on a concrete floor; director Paul WS Anderson handles the material with stolid determination.

It’s a great comic turn from Apte who deserves to be better known.

Over-the-top it may be, but Love’s film-making has an attacking force that some of the more respectable Brit films are lacking.

Peck’s film, in which LaKeith Stanfield narrates a kind of heightened, fictionalised first-person account from Cole’s own writings and diaries, is devastatingly sad. It is the sadness of an artist who becomes estranged, not merely from his homeland, but from his art and his livelihood.

The Electric State is a fundamentally unsatisfying and muddled film, even leaving aside the deja-vu.

Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp.

Three big names doing a professional job … but the target isn’t found.

It is a strong turn from Anderson, though, whose fans are entitled to wonder if it is she, and not Demi Moore, who deserves this year’s “comeback queen” crown.

Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas – a scattershot fusillade of scorn. It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair.

It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.

The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised.

This is an amiably talky film, and yet I never for a moment considered that the central relationship was being presented with anything less than seriousness, and there is much dry comedy to be enjoyed.

It’s eerie, startling — and yet also unexpectedly benign.

Perhaps it is inevitably going to be of limited interest, and as intelligent as the two performances are, neither Whishaw nor Hall is tested very much. But it is an intriguing experiment in recovering the moment-by-moment reality of a lost time and place.

Out of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film, evidently inspired by a real-life situation in film production.

Brave it might be, but there’s nothing all that “new” about the world revealed in this latest tired and uninspired dollop of content from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Though I was willing myself to enjoy this fourth film, about the heroine’s adventure with a younger man, the Bridget Jones series has frankly run out of steam.

Overall, this is a likable and well-researched film, but there is something unsatisfying in ignoring the band’s later stages. Perhaps Part II is in the works.

In plot terms there is something unsubtle, unconvincing and even absurd in where it’s all heading.

There’s an odd, disconcerting tone of solemnity to this slice of cultural history.

In its engaging and eccentric way, Hong’s film-making is diverting and intriguing and then it capriciously concludes, leaving things up in the air, yet without making you feel shortchanged. Perhaps this one is slighter than his recent work, but it has a comic charm.

It is a deconstruction of genre and a meta story of failure from which the director salvages a teaspoonful of success.

Not a knockout, by any means, but a win on points.

Everything about this film is very well observed.

The film is, of course, very silly, but diverting and ingenious, and contains game performances from Wahlberg, Dockery and Grace.

It is well-acted, disciplined and intimate as a play. But for me it is marred by an early, unsubtle moment of overt supernatural creepiness, which signals a retreat from ingenuity and restraint.

It’s entirely ridiculous, but performed with absolute seriousness and the result is an innocent amusement.

Even with Noémie Merlant as her lead and no less a film-maker than Rebecca Zlotowski working with Diwan on the screenplay, this Emmanuelle 2.0 comes across as inert and self-conscious, confusing torpor with languor, and endowing the non-sex scenes and also the sex scenes with blankness rather than tension or anticipation or pleasure.

The dreamy quirkiness keeps you watching and the folksy warmth of performances from Tom Hanks and Robin Wright encourage you to cut it some slack.

The transformation scenes are passable – including time-honoured fingernail- detachment moments – but far inferior to comparable scenes devised long ago by John Landis or David Cronenberg. Those estimable performers Garner and Abbott look exposed by a film project that simply feels rushed and undeveloped.

The hippo, as a German tour guide tells us at the very beginning, may look fat and placid and rather cute, but it’s fast-moving, aggressive and dangerous to humans; perhaps the film itself, so mysteriously distended with huge digressions and non-narrative scenes, is as exotically fleshy and strange as a hippo. Yet it has bite. And the hippos themselves are entrancing.

The film drifts along to a strangely implausible non-denouement with impermanent effects; she has all the backstory with work and family and he is weirdly blank in ways that don’t feel entirely intended.

Both Culkin and Eisenberg are excellent and this is such a pleasure.

Maria is the most persuasive and seductive of Larraín’s trilogy of great women at bay, after Jackie about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer about Princess Diana.

It’s silly and flimsy but sometimes oddly daring; director and co-writer Caroline Vignal coolly protracts certain scenes, extracting their potential for softcore eroticism where the standard-issue romcom would cut smartly away, having coyly established what was going to happen.

I felt that the film was evasive about the uncinematic reality of what serious illness and death actually looks like, and the final choice is too simplistic. But the film is still something to see, if only for the marvellous performances from Garfield and Pugh.