Robbie Collin

Not all of it clicks, but given how bizarre much of it is – Williams’s 2003 Knebworth gig is interrupted by a platoon of heavily armed monkeys, for instance – the hit rate is impressive.

This expensive-looking follow-up, which tells the story of Simba’s father’s own coming-to-power, sheepishly papers over all of the now-unfashionable concepts on which its forerunner was built.

The rocker is too mercurial a figure for a biopic to ever fully capture him – but this gorgeous film comes as close as you could hope.

Lopez is particularly good at this stuff, giving another of the messy lioness performances at which she’s excelled in the past.

While the animation itself doesn’t quite match the dazzle of its inspirations, it’s energetic and bright, and springy with wit.

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo don’t come close to defying gravity in this bloated, beige screen adaptation of the Wizard of Oz prequel.

There’s a haiku-like purity to it: Look Back is as neat and yet also as overflowing as the four-panel strips in which its leads once diligently honed their craft. And if something so beautiful also feels too brief – well, that may be the idea.

Beneath the charming sparkly wrap, there’s just more of the same underneath: an endless round of pass-the-parcel that never actually coughs up a gift.

While Paul Mescal impresses in Ridley Scott’s riveting sequel, a stellar Denzel Washington rather eclipses the rest of the cast.

Piece by Piece is a razor-sharp pronouncement on the nature of stardom in 2024. That you leave the cinema wanting to buy toys and records isn’t simply the idea of the story: it’s the moral.

It’s an intimate film with a roomy embrace.

The result is an empty film about emptiness, and therefore doubly depressing.

The amatory mechanisms here are so basic they make 1970’s Love Story look like Wuthering Heights, but at least Love Story had the courage to wring every last drop of pathos from its tragic-romance premise.

Fortunately, the writing’s sentimental and/or smirky longueurs are remedied by the animation itself, whose cosy charm has a distinctly British sensibility – from the architecture to the landscape and even the colour palettes, everything is satisfyingly just right.

Flow might be a digital confection, but it’s also open, alive, elemental. In every sense, it’s a breath of fresh air.

As last dances go, it’s the Macarena in film form.

Adams is already a six-time Oscar nominee: it’s very possible that for this, she could finally nab one outright. From out of its sitcom-neat package, Nightbitch unleashes something primeval and wild – thought it might seem cuddly, hot spit flecks its jaws.

It’s hard to recall a time when the state-of-the-art felt this much like art.

Merlant’s film isn’t being unladylike: rather, it’s asserting that ladylike is what all of these things really are, and it’s high time cinema admitted it.

McQueen’s film is big-picture British cinema, of a scale and depth which hasn’t been seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Both London and the countryside are shot with a classical elegance that calls to mind David Lean, while the sequences portraying the bombings themselves flare with panic and horror.

A Different Man mulls how cinema – and art more broadly – deals with disfigurement, but has even more fun holding its audience’s toes to the coals.

While there’s still (arguably) some fun to be had with this independent comedy’s double-entendre-friendly title, the laughs – such as they are – don’t extend a great deal further than that.

Kahn never allows his filmmaking to pull focus: at times, the camerawork could almost be documentary footage. But his craft is crisp, and the supporting cast so well picked that the arrival of each witness on screen comes with the satisfying thunk-y feel of an arrow hitting its target.

One of those films whose plot and texture are entirely inseparable.

Baby Invasion, which premiered at Venice tonight, may be the stupidest film I have ever seen. And I use the word “may” only because I’m not entirely sure this thing actually is a film in the first place.

As a repeat performance – even a cunningly subversive one – Folie à Deux can’t quite match its predecessor for dizzying impact. But it matches it for horrible tinderbox tension: it’s a film you feel might burst into flames at any given moment.

Queer doesn’t scrimp on provocation and pleasure, but it’s also a beautiful film about male loneliness, and the way a solitary life can so easily shade into a life sentence.

Almodóvar has always been the sole screenwriter of his films – but perhaps in this case, keeping an English assistant in a nearby antechamber might have been a wise move.

As a state-of-the-US historical epic, it boasts all the thematic heft of Once Upon a Time in America or There Will Be Blood. (How did the wave of postwar immigrants remake America in their image – and how did America remake them in return?) But it’s also acted with the colour and fizz of a classical Hollywood comic drama, and shot with the loose, rangy energy of a 90-minute indie cult hit. The tonal mix feels completely unique, but it works.

The Order also works as a gripping procedural in its own right – a long-form game of investigative join-the-dots, built around a series of lethally disciplined action scenes.

Electrifying.

Jolie is given ample space to dazzle, but less to surprise. Dazzle she does though, with a fine understanding of just how camp she can go without proceedings becoming too operatic for their own good.

The baseline for these things should be a little higher than ‘doesn’t retroactively sour you on its predecessor’. Even today – never mind in another 36 years – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the option of watching the source plumping for thi

It’s a funny, insightful, sensationally acted account of art’s capacity to dissolve walls, and heighten, broaden and deepen the reach of our lives.

Romulus might inject an appalling new life into the Alien franchise, but it won’t do much good for the national birth rate.

This bright children’s adventure, loosely adapted from a picture book about a young boy whose drawings become real, feels like the sort of thing Jim Carrey might have made in his first flush of success. It’s silly, relentlessly amiable, and embraces the low-stakes playfulness of its conceit.

The film is so myopically gripped by the idea of Marvel as endlessly fascinating corporate soap opera that in five years time, you wonder if it will make any sense at all.

The visual effects tower and terrify, but crucially, never as effects. The prevailing sense during every chase, escape and scramble for cover, is one of watching real people battle nerve-wilting odds.

At a time when digital animation is breaking radical new ground, it can be tempting to view the hand-drawn sort as its old-fashioned forebear, with no more scope to evolve. But Momose’s film elegantly proves otherwise: it has the artistry, but also the visionary spark.

“This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls,” ran the mischievous campaign for last winter’s musical remake of that millennial hit. But this absolutely is your father’s (and grandfather’s) Beverly Hills Cop, and for all its brazen route-one idiocy I ended up wanting to give it a hug.

As before, the act of watching with an audience is part of the fun, with each pin-drop-silent sequence playing as a challenge to viewers to maintain their collective hush at all costs. This is the pleasant surprise of the summer so far. See it. Don’t bring crisps.

This is pure filmmaking-by-paycheque: you can virtually hear the clock card machine crunching at the start of every scene, as cast and crew punch in dutifully for another shift.

Hopkins’ performance isn’t good, exactly, but it’s certainly interesting to watch, as the actor seems to swipe his lines of dialogue from the shelf in passing, as if playing a script version of Supermarket Sweep. Goode is restrained by comparison, but then the film does a lot of restraining on his behalf.

Crucially, Kelsey Mann’s film, co-written by returning screenwriter Meg LeFauve, gets Pixar back to doing what they always did best: juggling big concepts in fun and ingenious but also surprisingly wise and moving ways.

The film itself is a mesmerisingly gripping and controlled parable-thriller in which the paranoia, misogyny and rage of the Iranian state are mapped seamlessly onto an ordinary family unit.

It’s a black-and-white period piece invested with a supremely eerie folkloric edge – a bleak historical chapter made timeless, and all the more troubling for it.

Every character in Anora might be an utter nightmare, but they’re also a joy to spend time with, and the cast understand them down to their smallest behavioural tells.

The premise sounds as though it must invite a satirical reading, and there are many well-aimed ironic jabs at aspects of the leaders’ national character and the box-ticking rigmarole of modern politics. But directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – three beloved cult Canadian experimentalists – also poke fun at the notion that their intentions could be so clean-cut.

The main problem with Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice is that the film is a character study with very little character to study. ... Still, what the film lacks in revelatory insight into the Trump psyche, it makes up for in enticing context.

The film is earnest yet hopeful, with crisply drawn characters - but perhaps its full grandeur won’t be fully realised until part two.

Getting along with Hoard requires playing along with it too. But it’s easier to warm to than you might imagine, thanks to how well it captures the half-dazed tone and flow of early 1990s teenage life.

As for kindness itself, I can’t say much jumped out on a first viewing, unless it was of the you-have-to-be-cruel-to-be sort. But it’s exactly the sort of film that makes you want to look again.

Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in this full-body sensory bath movie which follows a struggle for power among the elites of New Rome.

The film may handle differently to its predecessor, but it’s clearly been tuned by the same engineers. After the pared-down drag racer, here comes the juggernaut.

It’s all thumpingly corny, but in the way good family films often are.

Dupieux elevates it by seeding entire swaying crops of confusion: we can never be entirely sure where scenes end and the mess of making them begins.

Sincerity and conviction are now rare qualities in the blockbuster field, but this is a film that puts its monkey where its mouth is.

Would the film have ideally been a bit smarter? Perhaps. But it gets all of the dumb stuff just right.

But nothing here or in the previous instalment will make you give the slightest fig who wins. Yes, the world of Rebel Moon is richly imagined, even if its origins as an aborted Star Wars project still remain far too obvious. In place of storytelling, though, it’s built on unwieldy lore dumps: we’re given hundreds of details about this galaxy far far away, but no reasons to care about any of them.

Beneath the mousy indie stylings of Rachel Lambert’s new film, adapted from a 2013 play by Kevin Armento, beats a proudly mushy romantic-comedy heart.

Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far.

Romance and cinema are ideal bedfellows for all sorts of obvious reasons, but on screen, the beauty of friendship can be harder to pin down. This wise and wondrous (and wordless) animation does it better than any other film in recent memory – and in ways a six-year-old could effortlessly grasp.

This is otherwise rough-hewn, hard-bitten entertainment – with an irresistible puppyish grin on its face.

Civil War moves in ways you’d forgotten films of this scale could – with compassion for its lead characters and a dark, prowling intellect, and yet a simultaneous total commitment to thrilling the audience at every single moment.

Kung Fu Panda’s knee joints these days are creaking like a haunted flight of stairs.

There’s some commendable trippiness towards the end, but for the most part Godzilla Smooch Kong is all too ready to fall back on delivering the bare minimum promised by its title. It’s giant monsters fighting, the thing constantly shrugs: what else do you want? Ideally a bit more than this.

There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else.

It’s not entirely without redeeming features. Margaret Qualley’s game lead turn would fit into the joint Coen canon on its own merits, and the final line (yes, I’m reaching, already) does land with a certain Billy Wilder-esque comic grace.

Çatak’s film turns out to be less intrigued by where the missing money actually goes than how the school reacts to its disappearance: as a sort of loose organism purging itself of impurities as its collective survival instinct kicks in. It’s a sound lesson in politics – or is it biology? – but more importantly, it’s a chalk-snappingly tense watch.

Garrone knows exactly where he’s leaving both his heroes and his audience: on the agonising cusp of a happily-ever-after his film makes you want to will into existence.

There’s a leaden-footedness to the direction, too. Where Burton’s camera lurched and crashed, Williams’s has a habit of hanging back sheepishly, fluffing visual gags and sapping scenes of the unhinged energy they need.

When the culprit is revealed to the audience after an hour or so, and the film attempts to dig into the psychology behind their reign of terror, it quickly finds itself out of its depth.

Wenders’ obvious affection for Tokyo itself, his keen feel for texture and neat avoidance of cliché all suggest Perfect Days is likely to age well as a portrait of a great city’s everyday side.

Denis Villeneuve's sequel to his 2021 sci-fi epic is a bold and visually astonishing piece of filmmaking.

All in all, it’s a new low in a mini-franchise comprised almost entirely of new lows: Venom, Morbius, and now this.

If Lopez’s screen career has often tended towards the unsurprising, well, here is the antidote: perhaps the least predictable film ever made. What’s most exciting about it, though, is that behind the lunacy, so much of it works.

It’s a gorgeous performance overall – [Ben-Adir's] Marley is so alive to the potential of music as both an art form and cause, it’s as if you can see the creative energy flowing up from the earth through his legs to the tips of his fingers and dreadlocks.

The quietly ingenious ending is the opposite of having your cake and eating it, and leaves your stomach rumbling for a resolution this film is too smart to provide.

The action is slapstick-driven, yet the set-pieces are all so transparently bogus – with fourth-rate CGI and actors’ digital doubles flopping about the place like haunted marionettes – that they play as insulting rather than outrageous.

Love Lies Bleeding’s total lack of filter is its greatest strength. It’s the sort of film you instinctively want to tuck under a mattress: hot, nasty and mouth-wateringly disreputable, this is cinema with nothing to lose.

In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.

The generational rewrite has been deftly done, with enough timeliness braided in to make it feel freshly relevant, but all the gags fans want to hear again left reverently intact.

Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon's suburban horror feels like an adaptation of a Stephen King story that he never got round to writing.

After a while, it’s as if Thomas’s self-loathing begins to rub off on the script, which keeps undercutting should-be-resonant moments with smirking references to other films.

The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so.

This is an all-singing, all-sobbing weepie with sequins, featuring comedy, uproarious choreography, and a suite of soul R&B and gospel numbers that will have you bopping along in your seat.

As yarns go, it is all comfortingly chunky and luxuriantly spun – winter comfort viewing that treats its audience as gallantly as its heroes treat their mission, while taking itself just seriously enough.

The monster mayhem scenes are obviously the main draw, and they’re terrifically staged, with clean visual effects that look anchored to the real world. And a careful balance is struck between spectacle and horror.

This first half of Snyder’s diptych (the second is due in the spring) is more of a loosely doodled mood board than a functioning film – a series of pulpy tableaux that mostly sound fun in isolation, but become numbingly dull when run side by side.

Like any good chocolatier, King has obsessively focused on texture and flavour. And it’s those qualities – tuned to mass-market tastes, yet held in connoisseurish balance – that give his film its irresistible velvety sweetness.

The film looks good and moves well. It earns its initially forbidding running time. It’s driven by human behaviour you might actually recognise.

Absurdly, the film ends up flouting its own self-imposed rules to reach a suitably syrupy conclusion – and thereby avoid the more bittersweet, thought-provoking landing you find yourself wondering if it has the courage to go for. Well, it doesn’t: Genie is a sugar-only zone. But then, it is Christmas. Or near enough.

Disney's centenary animation feels like an attempt, after a wobbly decade, to return the brand to first principles – but it doesn't come off.

Fennell has a sharp eye for outrage, and an even sharper one for hotness, crafting any number of scenarios and images here that may elicit sotto voce phwoars against your better judgement.

The director’s 28th feature is a magnificent slab of dad cinema, with Phoenix a startling emperor and Vanessa Kirby brilliant as his wife.

The Hunger Games prequel plunges us back into the futuristic empire of Panem – but fails to live up to the first films of the franchise.

The shortest of the films yet is also the most interminable, a knot of nightmares that groans with the series' now-trademark VFX sloppiness.

A lot gets packed in here, none of it good.