Phil de Semlyen

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.