Phil de Semlyen

It’s rare for something this necrotic to feel this fresh.

The ending offers only a slightly clichéd vision of emancipation that leaves the picture not much clearer. After showing how hard life can be, it feels a little bit too easy.

The ending doesn’t quite land, but this timely right-wing allegory promises there’s much more to come from Corbet.

It’s hard to draw too much old-school romance from this world of sponsorship, celebrity and sports washing, but F1 manages it on the back of Pitt’s earthy charm. Watch it rev into the canon of great sports movies. Motion sickness tablets recommended.

You get why the pair would fall for each but you also get where the faultlines lie. Cullen maps it all out in an impressive, touching debut.

It’s refreshing to see a grown-up big-screen thriller this well crafted – and one that cares for its grounded characters and their predicaments. If it comes off the road once or twice, it’s still well worth the ride.

By whatever metrics you measure a Bond movie – tight plotting, gnarly villains, emotional sincerity – Craig’s final outing is a rip-roaring success.

It’s anthropology, not violence, that provides the sting in the tail – a thought-provoking coda to an often pulse-pounding survival horror.

Still, cumbersome plotting aside, there’s enough gory mayhem and genuine zingers to make Deadpool & Wolverine a fun ride in a packed and up-for-it cinema.

Finally, someone has returned to The Damned United’s cunning formula for a good football movie: don’t show any football.

For Gunn, who has injected superhero movies with a winningly irreverence since his R-rated indie Super, ridding the DCEU of its bombast and self-seriousness is a step in right direction. Whether, like his alien hero, he can arrest the march of time and reinvigorate this tired genre is another matter.

Its world is weirdly familiar and yet alien. It’s also darn scary.

There’s more than enough here to hope that Cronenberg still has a masterpiece or two yet to be emerge from within.

A few flaws keep Black Widow a rung or two below top-tier Marvel, including a sluggish final act, some generic villainy and yet another overlong runtime – seriously people, two hours is fine – but if you’re after a big, expertly-crafted, self-aware chunk of blockbuster entertainment to watch on the big screen, Marvel, as usual, has your back.

‘The most dangerous thing about Pandora,’ someone muses sagely at one point, ‘is that you grow to love it too much.’ Jim Cameron disagrees. He can’t love this place enough – and it’s infectious. 

It’s not quite Roman Holiday, but it’s got a charm of its own.

The big challenge for The Last Duel is to depict a world in which women are marginalised and disempowered without doing the same thing to its female characters. Maybe it should have ceded more of its cold stone floor to Marguerite.

T​his​ smart and taboo-defying social ​​horror draws you in before abruptly bearing its teeth.

Kubi is often wildly funny in Kitano’s straight-faced style, and it’s never less than a lot of fun. Fans of visceral, cynical action movies will lose their heads over it.

It’s a lurid psychological horror that’ll thrill midnight movie crowds.

So, sure, the plot is overstuffed, the cross-cutting is frenzied, and Pegg’s goofy asides are the only light relief from the underlying somberness. If you’re looking for flaws, The Final Reckoning definitely has them. But with action sequences this adrenalised, no one is leaving short-changed.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has more going for it than those MCU B-sides, but it still falls a long way short of recapturing the exhilarating glories of director Ryan Coogler’s 2018 smash hit. The visual and storytelling flaws here are only exacerbated by the seriously unsnappy runtime (they’re really not kidding with the whole ‘forever’ thing).

Rebirth knows it needs to make its scaly stars frightening and surprising again and manages it in Spielbergian style.

Courtenay is heartbreaking as a broken man crushed under the wheels of a callous system.

It’s brimming with fascinating insights into the skill, conviction and sheer slog that went into tackling several rogue states, climate change and the odd dead cockroach on the West Wing floor without losing optimism, sanity or custody of the kids.

As a piece of watch-through-your-fingers outdoors filmmaking, The Alpinist stands right up alongside the Oscar-winning Free Solo.

It’s a testament to the deftness and love with which Brian and Charles is made that its sweetness never becomes saccharine, and the eccentricity never feels forced. The result is a total delight – the surprise package of the year.

With no Ghibli film in the offing (although My Neighbor Totoro is getting a UK cinema re-release in August), The Imaginary is an often delightful way to fill the anime gap.

The authenticity is immersive, even if the historical exposition occasionally feels like prep for an exam no one’s warned you about.

Abbasi offered a brilliantly leftfield perspective on immigration and otherness with his 2018 debut Border, and his follow-up takes no prisoners in his critique of Iranian society’s built-in misogyny and fake piety.

It falls short of enchanting but it's never less than fun and likable. Watch it through the eyes of your inner teenager and you’ll have a blast.

As with The Shape of Water, del Toro makes no secret of where his sympathy lies and who the real monsters are, but there are surprises here. Not least of which is how moved you might feel in the end.

Its trump card, of course, is Zellweger, who blows through the film in a gust of jittery energy, wounded ego and half-buried star quality. The transformation is startling.

And Pattinson? He’s solid enough, but the role seems to neutralise his greatest strengths, stifling his edgy, eccentric charisma under a morose, dutiful shell. He’s just another ever-searching crusader in a shadowy world. Hopefully next time he’ll be able to find the fun.

That’s a lot of years to wrangle into one biography – even before you take in the rags-to-riches, zero-to-hero-to-popular-villain arc of his life – but this snappy and searching doc makes a very solid fist of it.

A mesmerising John Boyega lights a fuse under this poignant but by-the-numbers depiction of an Atlanta bank siege in 2017.

If the story construction is intricate, the tennis is ferocious.

Widows' Cynthia Erivo supplies dramatic weight to a project that squanders it on awkward action moments and simplistic showdowns.

It’s a long movie and when its star isn’t on screen and cracking wise, the boundary-pushing shocks and endless self-references wear thin. Still, if you’re the Deadpool fanatic who recently had Reynolds’s name tattooed on his arse, you definitely won’t be grumbling.

Cheesier than a wheel of Stilton and about as edgy, Downton Abbey bows out with a cosy but loveable final instalment that will leave few dry eyes among long-time fans of Julian Fellowes’ British TV thoroughbred.

It all makes for an immersive evocation of time and place, and a more sober, if still stylish, filmmaking flex from Wright. Gone are the trademark crash zooms and whip pans, and the hairpin cuts of his recent action thriller Baby Driver. Gone, too, the comforting cameos and goofy banter of the Pegg and Frost trilogy – in ice-cream parlance, this one is more Twister than Cornetto – and that unmooring from the director’s previous work makes this an especially satisfying trip into the unknown. Like its eerie Soho back alleys, you’re never sure what’s around the next corner.

Vaguely redolent of Salvador, only slowed right down to a walking pace, or The Passenger without its seductive sense of place (and Jack Nicholson), The Stars At Noon is a mercurial thing and, as an unsuccessful Denis film, a rare one too.

If you’re on the hunt for a diverting slice of prestige espionage hokum that comes with a side helping of real history, Operation Mincemeat is a satisfying night at the pictures.

Nemes wants to let the chaos and noise of Sunset overwhelm the audience, but like Irisz herself, it’s hard not to get a bit lost in the clamor.

Don’t expect anything on the sames scale as Cumberbatch’s last spy thriller, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, because this is a film of claustrophobic interiors and snatched exchanges that eventually tapers down into a man’s quest for survival. If you’re on the hunt for an old-fashioned spy flick, through, The Courier has just enough le Carré-ish thrills to get by.

It takes a steady hand to pull off a horror film as outlandish as Dangerous Animals – a movie, lest we forget, that is literally about dangerous animals – but Byrne has pulled off something slick and confident here. It’ll keep horror fans out of the water for years.

Stopmotion feels born out of the sheer mental challenge of being trapped in a room with macabre creations that come to life over weeks of painstaking labour.

With its peppy cast, streamlined story and about a bazillion pixels’ worth of VFX cyclones to sweep you back in your seat, it’s a fun and refreshingly old-school night at the pictures.

Kids will love its primary-coloured wonderland that teems with weird and wonderful beasts, and only the stoniest-hearted grown-up won’t be moved by its inclusive celebration of family across generations.

Redmayne is up there with Richard Attenborough in 10 Rillington Place as a terrifyingly mundane embodiment of evil.

Beyond the regular crunch of fist on bone, The Smashing Machine is an unexpectedly gentle, soulful character study that has Johnson undercutting his crowd-pleasing ‘The Rock’ persona with vulnerability and boyish uncertainty.

For a movie that looks this sleek, there’s a lot of scrappiness around the fringes. Paul Walter Hauser is fun as subterranean mastermind Mole Man, but gets barely a toehold on the plot. Half of whatever Natasha Lyonne’s character, a teacher with a thing for The Thing, was due to be doing is surely on the cutting room floor. The Four’s droid helper H.E.R.B.I.E. doesn’t leave a massive impression.

Like the musical style it’s named after, it plays slowly. But hang in there and you’ll find an enthralling requiem mass to a dying breed of hardscrabble gangsters and dirty cops that boasts a clutch of juicy performances.

Newcomer Abraham Wapler as video artist Seb and Zinedine Soualem’s high-school teacher Abdel are standouts in the likeable ensemble, but the Adèle timeline, a sepia-tinged coming-of-age tale with a backdrop of characters to put Madame Tussauds to shame, is the film’s heartbeat. It’s a great excuse to revisit this gilded age in French history.

Like its xenomorphs, Romulus is best when it’s single-minded, streamlined and ferocious. See it on IMAX and hold on tight.

If Frozen was about coming to terms with who you are, Frozen II is about transformation. Does it offer further evidence for those who saw "Let It Go" as Elsa’s covert coming-out anthem? Sadly not, though she remains an intriguingly elliptical canvas on which to project genuinely groundbreaking ideas about empowerment and identity.

For an evening in, it’s reliable entertainment. That’s thanks mainly to Stranger Things’ charismatic Millie Bobby Brown, whose charming, brilliant and surprisingly fighty sleuth steps out from the shadows of her more famous brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill), in a sparky story of young feminists socking it to corrupt 19th century gents and bent coppers.

While his bandmates are happy to fade into the background, Martin – part puppy dog, part jack-in-the-box – is a magnet for the camera. He’s restless, funny, insecure and likeable – often all at the same time.

Weaponising the cinema’s Dolby Atmos into a delivery mechanism for frights is a clever ploy that Undertone never maximises.

Beyond the music, Meet Me in the Bathroom makes a compelling study of the whole idea of a ‘scene’: how does it happen, why does it end and what’s it all about?

Cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s handheld camera work, some really slick editing and canny use of real news footage, combined with impressive CGI, give it all a pulse-raisingly immersive quality, like a plunge into the underworld.

An Alpine study of ageing and creativity that’s as fresh and bracing as the mountain air, although occasionally just as chilly.

Every trick and technique here, from ingenious match cuts, to split screens and even comic-book cells, works to soup up the storytelling.

Ridley Scott delivers a spectacular but flavourless French history lesson.

Notre-Dame on Fire is really good at conveying an iconic building’s place in a nation’s soul, and the grief that its potential loss can provoke. Most of its symbolism is well-earned and resonant.

If co-directors Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom paint a sometimes confronting picture of the price of ‘free love’, that never tarnishes their subject. You’re left with the sense that she was a butterfly neither the Stones nor any of the other men in her life could ever trap – a fitting epitaph to a mercurial life.

Yes, it’s basically an episode of the show stretched out to two hours, but like the Crawley family silver, it’s so polished you can practically see your face in it.

It might veer towards hagiography at times, but its subject is so entertaining you don't even care.

But for all its flaws, it’s a colossally entertaining ride that never stints on its efforts to wow you with its scale and spectacle.

In Saeed Roustayi’s Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family’s slow disintegration, it’s the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion.

It’s a CGI-heavy fantasia that will pop your eyeballs, but giddy as it is, it never quite sells its characters or gets much purchase on your emotions.

A cinematic Rorschach test, it’s more likely to reaffirm your views on the man than challenge them.

South African director Oliver Hermanus finds plenty of deep feeling and sincerity here but his beautiful-looking, measured period piece gets stifled by its own languors – especially in a first half that needs a slug or two of moonshine to inject some life into it.

The Bad Guys will work better for kids than adults: the comedy is broad, with farting not just a major source of laughs but an entire plot device, and the characters aren’t quite as lovable as the movie thinks they are, despite a winning voice cast that also boasts Marc Maron, Zazie Beetz and Awkwafina.

Most of all, it’s a colourful journey lit up with great tunes and a deep love of music – an ingenious, infectious new spin on the music doc.

McAvoy gets good performances from his cast, with Ross a boyish yet broken presence as the spiralling Bain, but ultimately the journey is more satisfying than the destination.

For the majority of the film, Östlund’s combination of sledgehammer and scalpel work a treat. They’re fast becoming the hallmarks of a satirist who’s unlikely to run short of subject matter any time soon.

For a man so singular, the film’s chronological approach feels conventional and there’s little of the spark or fantasy he infused into his work in evidence.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is one of those nice surprises, a so-called legacy sequel made with love and executed with flair. Think Top Gun: Maverick with better hats.

Long-time fans will love it, even if its charms wear a bit thin for anyone who doesn’t already have Kurupt FM on their dial.

Ron Howard has come through with a frisky space caper that zips along like a speeder on a bed of air. It’s far from perfect, but it’s much better than it has any right to be.

While you know the stakes are high, Call Jane never seems particularly interested in proving it.

With the faintest debt to The Exorcist and HR Giger, and a barnstorming turn from Imelda Staunton turn as a nun with some dark secrets of her own, Garai has found an arresting way to position male sexual violence: as an age-old curse that brings with it the bitterest of consequences.

Still, powered by its own helter-skelter momentum and the wild-eyed Keaton, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice just about holds all its macabre threads together. It’s not Burton at his very best, but like its fiendish antihero, it does the trick.

If, though, you’re looking for a more probing look at the man behind the balls of fire, or a pan back to place him in a broader context, Coen’s rockumentary will fall just a little short of satisfying.

Even leaving aside the fan-pleasing sight of Burton’s Dark Knight and Penguin sharing the same big top, the Batman parallels are inescapable. Keaton tears a page from the Jack Nicholson Joker playbook with his most deliriously huge performance in years.

Theroux’s first big-screen doc is an entertaining affair, peppered with surreal moments and wry wit, but its elusive subject remains out of reach.

Sure, some of the historical detail is terrible (did Henry V really get crowned topless?) and Shakespeare purists may scream heresy, but director David Michôd has done something genuinely fresh and confident with this well-told piece of English folklore.

It’s not a bad movie, by any means, but it strains to turn a seriously introspective story into something cinematic.

Like Aftersun on a gallon of SunnyD, this warm and freewheeling comedy-drama about a girl connecting with the dad she’s never met proves that working-class stories don’t have to be all misery and angst. Sometimes, that kitchen sink can be filled with bubbles.

When the foot comes off the gas, the cracks become apparent.

The Informer is a film that favours brawn over brains, punching its way through any plot predicaments. A smart hairpin or two would have made it a juicier watch.

There are memorable cameos from collaborators (Josh Homme take a bow) and a triumphant coda, but most of all, the rather melancholy sense of a visionary struggling to stay relevant.

Emotionally charged, Last Breath offers a forensic study of cold professionalism in the face of unfolding disaster. It’s deepened, too, by a rich cast of supporting characters, including Lemons’s fiancée in Scotland, the surface crew who recall the fateful night and his teary-eyed dive leader and mentor.

A handsome and well-acted rumination on memory, boyhood and ageing that sees Ritesh Batra deliver a solid rather than inspired interpretation of Julian Barnes’ prize winner.

Sluggishly paced, stodgily scripted and curiously edited, it’s not so much a bullet ballet as a creaky dance across an abandoned saloon.

Entertainly, director Michael Mohan, who worked with Sweeney on the 2021 thriller The Voyeurs, twigs that the Catholic Church isn’t just a source of spiritual tension, but a terrific arsenal too. Immaculate makes imaginative use of crucifixes, rosaries, and at least one crucifixion nail in all kinds of ways the Papacy didn’t intend.

Where the movie truly comes into its own is in its boldly framed, heart-wrenching coda.