Phil de Semlyen

It’s an old cliché about biopics that if the story wasn’t true, you probably wouldn’t believe it. The Keeper takes it a step further: you know it’s true and you still don’t believe it.

For brain-free Friday night viewing, you could do much worse than spend 90 blood-soaked minutes with not-so-gentle Ben.

The third part of Berg’s unofficial Americans-in-crisis trilogy will play better for US audiences than overseas, but it’s still a pacy and often enthralling disaster movie.

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.

A high-altitude horror – think a Bram Stoker reworking of *The Shining* or Shutter Highland – of real craft. Ultimately, though, the plot turns out to be thinner than the air.

Ridley Scott delivers a spectacular but flavourless French history lesson.

Still, if his doc is as toothless as Cookie Monster 2.0, it’s still a nostalgic treat to spend time with the man who gave us Kermit, Big Bird and the Goblin King.

This fun, pacy addition to the dino disaster franchise doesn’t do much that’s particularly new – though what it does, it does with a fair whack of panache.

As a supernatural chiller, In Flames finds itself undermined by its own everyday horrors.

Generic, sure, but gripping enough, Apex has located a corner of God’s own country where the devil reigns.

You’d call it Tarantino-esque but for the pacing and lack of a soundtrack. (Even Tarantino might have cut a couple of these baggy subplots.)

It’s not nearly as good as Logan or X2, but it’s a whole lot better than the eyeball-poking affliction that was X-Men: Apocalypse. On the flipside, it still feels like a fairly pointless retread of Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s The Dark Phoenix Saga, which we’ve already seen (and hated) in Brett Ratner’s 2006 disaster X-Men: The Last Stand.

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.

Life in The Damned Don’t Cry is brutally unfair, and Boulifa offers no easy answers. But thanks to the compassionate filmmaker and his two impressive leads, it’s a compelling watch.

If the final act is a bit dull and the anarchic Reynolds factor ends up muzzled, director Rob Letterman makes sure not to lose that self-aware edge altogether, while providing enough Pokémon Easter eggs to satisfy the most demanding fan. He’s also helped invent a whole new movie genre: cuddly noir.

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.

Even by the writer-director’s standards of naturalistic, middle-class restraint, it’s a ruminative experience that borders on slow-going. But The Eternal Daughter is also an ode to mothers and daughters that will leave a few teary messes in the stalls, and it’s beautifully acted by Tilda Swinton in not one, but two roles.

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.

As it is, it’s an atmospheric, sporadically disquieting depiction of fatherhood in freefall.

Kangaroo has a love for the people, landscape and wildlife that leaves a warm glow. It’s not doing anything wildly different or unexpected, but it’ll put a smile on your face.

A more restrained effort from Araki than the headrush of Kaboom, there’s plenty of fun to be had in Eva Green’s Joan Crawford-esque turn as the vanished lady

It’s the visuals, though, that really soar. With master cinematographer Roger Deakins again lending his eye as consultant, the camera weaves in and out among photo-real flora and fire-breathing fauna.

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.

Not top tier Jarmusch, but still a funny, soulful anthology worth seeking out.

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

Imagine Pedro Almodóvar directing Sicario and you’re close to the tenor of this exuberant cartel-thriller-stroke-musical – which, as if those elements weren’t heady enough, comes with a tender trans twist.

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.

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.

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.

Sharply scripted with a melancholic charm.

The songwriting verve of Lin-Manuel Miranda is missed, too. Composers Barlow and Bear chip in with some catchy ditties, but there’s nothing to match How Far I’ll Go and You’re Welcome.

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.

It’s just got enough fresh ideas, laughs (mostly intentional) and queasy jump scares to make for a raucous Friday night at the movies.

The odd duff fight scene aside, Waititi is so good at this stuff, and he directs it all like a circus master eager to keep the entertainment coming.

It has a kernel of raw torment and an unforgiving streak that hints at still-unreconciled wounds, too. It’s not the best film of the year, but it’s definitely one of the most personal.

Newton is a fun addition as the bubbly Faith, but the game Weaving is MVP again: a sharp finger in the eye of the one percent. This is a broader sequel, though, that only has more of the same for her to do. It’ll pass an evening but it won’t blow your mind.

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

Unfortunately, its 39 minutes unfold in such motor-mouthed haste, it feels like a dad belting through a bedtime story while the football’s on downstairs.

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.

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.

Splicing in montage footage of marching soldiers, shots from Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V, and even archers in action, and layering in discordant sound design, Boyle reinvents the zombie movie as a bloody pop-art installation.

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.

After the nuance of what comes before, it’s annoying that the knottiness vanishes in an ending that wraps everything up in a neat bow.

The predictable fish-out-of-water comedy gradually gives way to something deeper, as conflicting world views are exchanged, homespun wisdom dispensed and minds broadened.

The combination of Gyllenhaal’s easy charm, some Florida sunshine and at least one fight scene for the ages make this Road House worth stopping by. Just try to grab a seat in a quiet corner.

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.

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.

While watching a bunch of Nazis get offed in a variety of grisly ways offers some midnight movie thrills, the stakes only get lower and lower.

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.

It’s a pungent articulation of American chaos. The problem is that it’s not telling us much that we don’t already know.

If the pay-off aims for the gut and misses, the journey to that point provides a searing microcosm of a corrupt and degrading system.

It’s often enthralling – especially with Murphy at its heart – though rarely explosive.

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

Thelma is neither as funny nor as Marmite-y as Little Miss Sunshine, a kindred spirit in the quirky indie realm, but its light shines in myriad little character beats.

It’s hampered by a pedestrian script and an improbable ending, but always catches fire when the supercharged Law is on screen.

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.

The two parallel stories never quite gel, more often pulling focus from each other just a major revelation seems to be in the offing.

Heady with cordite fumes and high on its violent spectacle, this Chris Hemsworth-fronted action-thriller makes for a surprise-free but passable lockdown watch.

Gran Turismo may ultimately be a glossy marketing exercise, but there are moments that’ll leave you with the right kind of whiplash.

You have to hope that Hardy is not this annoying in real life, because by the time Dashcam’s supernatural menace reveals itself, you’re firmly on Team Blood-Spewing-Zombie. Maybe that’s the point. It’s hard to tell.

It’s all heading somewhere special as Kelly muses on masculinity and colonialism, but then coherence gives way to flashy visuals and bursts of expressionistic violence.

In short, the raw materials are there for a fun – if throwback – genre piece of the kind that kept ’90s cinema stocked with stiffs. Alas, the tension dissipates in a tangle of muddled subplots, sluggish pacing and some strange decisions from director Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). The result isn’t a Bone Collector, never mind a Se7en.

It feels a little too skin deep; a film content to get by on its vicarious thrills. And the rush eventually wears off.

A humdrum remake of a crackerjack thriller, this never gets out of second gear despite a classy cast and intriguing premise. Credit to Dean Norris for playing a character called Bumpy with an entirely straight face.

For all its freedom to reimagine her life and rescue her from cultural victimhood, Blonde is just a bit too willing to chuck her overboard and watch her flounder.

Not all of these vignettes are duds – Amy’s meet-cute with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell, excellent) over pints and pool in a Camden boozer is genuinely terrific – but they don’t make a script that already feels soft-soaped to get the Winehouse’s estate’s approval, feel any less pedestrian.

Slick but forgettable, Fuqua’s suicide squad is a macho posse movie that could use a jab of fun. It’s The Magnificent Seven, but the “magnificent” is silent.

A curveball from the man who made "2012" and "Independence Day" and probably only a brief respite for the world's major cities.It's more of an interesting curio to a blockbuster career but there's fun to be had here if you look hard enough.

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.

It’s a movie that got up on the wrong side of the bed and compensated with four quadruple espressos.

Burdened with an underwritten part, the curiously flavourless Styles struggles to match Pugh for intensity as husband and wife fly at each other – one’s ambition at risk from the other’s intuition – and the couple’s chemistry fizzles out. It’s a crucial flaw in a film that needs to sell us at least one thing that feels real in its world of artifice.

A romantic fantasia set in Istanbul, George Miller’s mystical confection operates like the genie at its heart: it’s full of visual sleight-of-hand and boasts plenty of storytelling power, but soon disappears from your mind in a puff of smoke.

Best of all is the reliably brilliant Rose Byrne, whose scathing Republican strategist turns up to torment Zimmer.

You can see the sweat on stage, but it’s harder to detect in the filmmaking.

No one expected this long-delayed piece of Michael Jackson pop-aganda to lay bare the man behind the myths and myriad controversies in forensic style. And yet… this soft-ball character study of the King of Pop only doubles down on the former, while completely ignoring the latter, hitting all the usual dreary biopic beats along the way.

A winning double act never quite gels in a fish-out-of-water road-trip caper — think ‘National Lampoon’s Gringo Vacation’ — that leans hard on its stars’ charms and very lightly on coherent plotting.

Zemeckis’ old-school romance has its moments and Cotillard gives it her all, but it lacks the zip and chemistry to truly spark.

Terrence Malick’s Hollywood tale is a frustratingly fleeting experience, a sleepwalk through Tinseltown that beguiles you with its visual artistry but leaves only the faintest of impressions when the curtain falls.

The class satire, the strongest suit of its Ealing ancestor, is blunter than a burglar’s cosh. The murders should be the juice in this devilish cocktail, especially with Zach Woods, Topher Grace and Ed Harris as the marks. But the deaths are throwaway affairs.

Even with the original stars returning, the sequel feels weightless, disposable and hardly the stuff of Skynet nightmares.

It’s a patchy but sincerely felt spy thriller that could be harshly described as The 39 Missteps.

It’s oh-so-familiar terrain, yet writer-director Scott Wiper lets a deadening sense of inertia creep in, leaving the payoff feeling like a Guy Ritchie movie played at the wrong speed.

It starts strongly, with the gory deaths coming thick, fast and often unexpectedly, and Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse’s script giving the viewer no purchase on the unfolding mayhem. The underrated Gilpin is a steely, lib-owning presence, too. But the surprises soon dry up.

The action here is visceral and slickly handled, especially in the kind of expository opening credits sequence that Snyder is a master of (see also: Watchmen), but the patter is perfunctory and there's little grab to hold onto in this cadre of underdeveloped expendables as they negotiate the Vegas Strip, hotel corridors and the odd dull family dispute. Aliens is also a showcase for the kind of cut-to-the-bone editing Army of the Dead could have really done with. The zombies are fast here; the pacing definitely isn’t.

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

More damagingly, director William Eubank (‘The Signal’) can’t decide if Underwate’ is a disaster flick or a monster movie. It ends up sinking between the two stalls: too unfocused for the former; not scary enough for the latter. All that early promise vanishes into the murk.

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).

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.

This take on Alan Bennett’s pre-pandemic play, a love letter to the NHS set on a geriatric ward in Wakefield’s beloved-but-threatened Bethlehem Hospital (‘The Beth’), ticks along amiably enough for an hour or so. Then, like a hand grenade in a tombola, a harrowing third-act twist detonates beneath it and narrative and tonal destruction ensues.

And that’s the major problem here. When the first Scream hit, it had a ball deconstructing ’80s and ’90s horror movie tropes. Six movies and three decades on, it’s become the very thing it was built to deconstruct, trapped in its own lore and fumbling about for its old smarts. The genre has moved on. Scream needs to get with the times.

‘Please don’t be boring,’ Nelson’s villain beseeches Wilson in a clutch moment. Who wants to tell him?

While the tartness and wit is missing to elevate this anywhere near the romantic-comedy canon, the overall vibe is so cosy and frothy, you’d need a heart of steel to hate it.

The tonal lurches – from jokey to earnest and back again – will have whiplash setting in by the time its eccentric fourth-wall-breaking coda comes around, while some odd casting choices (and accents) drain gravity from the serious moments.

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

If you’re not a #ReleasetheSnyderCut signee, you’re still better off watching the original, patchy as it is. At least it’s short.

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

Even in those well-executed gnarlier moments and winky character beats, Scream VI feels a lot more dated than the genre it’s deconstructing.

The performances are solid - Goodbye Lenin! actor Florian Lukas is the standout - but ponderous pacing makes this true-life tale a lot less enthralling than it might have been.