Phil Hoad

[A] somewhat bemused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time.

The finale is more of a schmaltzy salute to the guide-dog ethos than intimate documentation of the new owners’ stories. The street training sequences, though – shot in swooping knee-high Steadicam – are thrilling; mini kerbside action movies.

Even in terms of its attempted emotional cross-section of the pandemic, Convergence spreads its net too wide.

It is a shame that either Chinese authorities had a word, or producers decided to aim for brownie points by fitting No More Bets out as an anti-fraud public-messaging spot – because Ao Shen’s thriller is otherwise a snappily directed and intriguing entrée to the industry of online deception.

With Hewlett Jr often chronicling events in cool monochrome, shooting in close proximity if not exactly total intimacy, this snappy scrapbook tips the hat to the infectious creativity of Albarn’s travelling circus.

The film coheres quietly, thanks in no small part to the two excellent child performances.

Initially performed with a slightly incongruous general chirpiness, the film then blazes over the top into a cartoonish frenzy. But otherwise it’s a well-conceived disintegration, with clear sight of the terrain, both outer and inner.

The directors and Dastmalchian – high on his own bogus gravitas – have fun with a fresh premise that reminds us that light entertainment is the anteroom of hell.

The apparently depressing twist gives Linoleum’s entropy-defying optimism successful lift-off.

This intelligently performed film is still a welcome look at a vital and underappreciated duty of state.

The tech may be on the blink, but this striking debut makes humanity seem like a beautiful malfunction.

Restricted to short line readings presumably because of his well-publicised health difficulties, Bruce Willis is not exactly in fighting shape here. But Corrective Measures is still a bracing combination of super-schlock and social commentary.

If following The Unholy Trinity’s various tracks is sometimes frustrating, it’s still rare enough: a red-blooded and essentially satisfying western.

Dockery maintains rigour and bite at the centre as the genial jailer, and there’s an edginess to Spielberg’s direction, the camera roving around this posse of junior desperadoes and suggesting she may have inherited a certain cinematic intuition. But, like the abomination upstairs, she takes a ragged first bite here.

With his reedy voice and fractionally mis-set eyes, Segan exploits his unsettling qualities in a deadpan performance that he lifts, as director, with pleasingly snappy, almost comic-book-like direction.

The four-part shuffle keeps it lively, and Naud is an imposing black hole.

Despite the uneven execution, Condor’s Nest has just enough bite.

At one point, Michel Troisgros insists that cuisine is not cinema, but real life. But Wiseman continually spotlights the importance of close observation in ingredients, taste, preparation and presentation that enables the elevation of the material world into art; from creme brulee forensics, to the staff finicking with the tableware until the setting is just-so.

Right down to its blaspheming finale, The Exorcism of God burns with a subversive desire to rip back the veil on the church’s earthly corruption – but the iconoclasm is somewhat undermined by the daft horror mechanics Venezuelan director Alejandro Hildalgo props it up with.

Fleshed out in 3D animation, the action – feinting, pivoting and occasionally soaring high above the stands – feels resplendently immediate.

It’s hard to deny Fuhrman’s pinch-faced vehemence and the film’s hallucinatory verve.

Barfoot taps into liminal terrors more effectively through the visuals, from the gracefully shot fugue states experienced by stepmother and surrogate son, to a sinewy barrelling nightmare-beast that has apparently escaped from a Chris Cunningham video.

Becoming Cousteau is no hagiography, but greater distance might have also allowed Garbus to reflect more on the man’s environmental legacy.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, but the hybrid of old-style battle manga with a more modern oneiric sensibility feels a little different from standard superhero loudhailing.

Dolph Lundgren and Scott Adkins make a fine odd couple in this meatily satisfying action film – once it gets moving.

How Herbig fails to capitalise on the sheer physical terror of their flight – the balloon’s basket is more a flimsily strung boxing ring – makes you wish someone like Werner Herzog had mounted this mad escapade for real.

Rose looks great – her androgynous poise reminiscent of the young Angelina Jolie – and does a capable job carrying Vanquish. But you wonder if this noir-filtered, John Wick-apeing thriller is a little too stripped-back for its own good to advance her career.

Sadly, this tonally shaky and borderline-sociopathic outing doesn’t have the class or skill to be part of the much-needed renaissance for the genre.

Ivo van Aart’s movie gives full rein to that desire and is snappily directed – but in the end there is something self-satisfied and sententious about his feminist revenge flick.

There is little narrative, beyond the Wembley gig approaching; and, more crucially, little conflict, outer or inner.

Bar Fight! wants to be the best night out of your life, but – mistaking dodgy drunken acting for ambience – it feels pretty ersatz throughout, like one of those pseudo-Irish bars that has bought in all its decor.

All the exertion – fleshed out in visuals that veer from Astro Boy-aping cutesiness to interestingly rough closeups, as if the animation itself is fraying in the heat of battle – pays diminishing dividends. The panoply of powers begin to seem interchangeable, the character arcs dim.

Hounded’s take is caricatural enough to neuter much sense of actual threat and stop it from being the Brit multicultural answer to Deliverance it sometimes feels like it’s stretching for.

Perhaps this works for gamers, or within the context of the larger Sword Art Online mythos, but it seems a painfully rote instalment – a bit like being stuck watching a particularly garrulous and boring YouTube gamer.

Liu almost manages to throttle up how Lei and the instructors push themselves and their planes into something dramatically interesting, but it never ignites. In the meantime, this is less a movie, more a flying foreign policy document.

For a film that aims to promote religious diversity and freedom of thought, its metronomic alternation between time frames, narrative slavishness and laughable coda have a suffocating sense of orthodoxy.

Dark Asset finally finds a semi-satisfying groove as John’s grand design is revealed, even if it consists of too many borrowed parts to be a real quantum leap.

Visually ravishing though it is, Scarlet is a hefty disappointment from director Mamoru Hosoda, a leading light from whom we expect more than an incoherent and overbearing fantasy.

This tale of freelance underworld fixer Akilla Brown, played with careworn wisdom by Saul Williams, doesn’t live up to its sharp tailoring and has too much faith in fatigued beats from the gangster-film locker.

It may think it is tilting at the dream factory, but Somnium simply feels tired.

This is the cinematic equivalent of the stopped clock telling the right time twice a day: a film full of stylistic overkill suddenly runs into the material that justifies it.

A film about a virus-ravaged country under lockdown should be able to hit cogent parallels at will at the moment – but a numbing repetition is sadly the main payout.

Doeren clearly has a feel for the bear necessities, but the human interest hardly gets its boots on.

The net effect of Debbie Harry popping up at 10-second intervals on the soundtrack to top up levels of ironic sass is to highlight how that quality is in generally short supply in the script.

The directing is serviceable, but some rote imagery – especially the ominous crow of death – also likes to hit us over the head. Reddick should have concentrated on giving the characters that kind of treatment.

Amid this farrago, the political critique comes over more like accidental backspatter than meaningful statement.

The daft title tries to promise splatterhouse brazenness, but actually fesses up to the film’s lack of imagination.

Casas has an undeniable nose for middle-class peccadilloes, but tone is everything.

This is lightweight, forgettable stuff.

Charbonier and Powell like moving through the apartment in Steadicam but this results in a soupy style that seeks to cover for the lack of positional imagination and rigour in the script.

With scant visual bite, perhaps it should’ve been called Evil Ear.

The rangy and trenchant Eckhart does convincingly bring the ruckus in a way that suggests an ageing 007. But if that’s a promising sign for this new phase of his career, he can do better than this dour and charmless parade.

It’s both by the book and dispiritingly vague.

The cranked-up pitchside action is hilarious, like a live feed from inside Cristiano Ronaldo’s head as he replays his own goals reel. . . Translating football into the battle royale format only goes so far, though.

The visually overworked Dark Match feels oddly underworked at the same time.

There is little payoff, with Fickman running shy of the full-blooded commitment to make his film a proper weepie and instead constantly reverting to sassy, annoyingly self-aware comedy that makes light of everything.

It might work if Rita was a more appealing protagonist, capable of wringing out gallows humour or personal tragedy from her predicament.

Neither slicing under the genre’s surface, nor dicing the heritage well, this reboot is more an unseemly act of IP cannibalism.

There is a certain Cartesian buzz to be had from Sensation if you abandon all hope of following the plot, and let it wash over you. But that won’t help when it tries to land a final twist that is supposed to bend minds, but is more likely to exhaust patience.

The close-knit ethos might well explain the franchise’s gleefully perverse sense of fun, but the truth is this love-in features too much filler.

It doesn’t help that the film takes itself with Deliverance-like seriousness, and fails to really acknowledge its absurdity.

Like the drilling operation, this was a script in sore need of a clean-up operation.

Patric’s inscrutable performance recedes intriguingly while Elwes over-reaches, suggesting a man locked in internal combat.

Partly set in the Mumbai underworld, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s boxing drama aims at Raging Bull grit but has an unfortunately irresistible drift towards late-Rocky melodrama.

Given the inherent lack of drama in the kind of unbreakable faith on display here, anyone wishing to tell the story needs to work much harder than this laboured treatment to wring any nuance, conflict or indeed true sublimity from it.

Tradition of course demands that the pert teen sacrifices in such gore fodder be satisfyingly dislikable. It isn’t easy, though, to make stupidity interesting, and Shark Bait is always one-note in its exploitation of its characters.