Robbie Collin

The debut feature from 33-year-old Raine Allen-Miller adjusts and updates the classic Curtis formula to a small urban chunk of contemporary south London – and captures the place’s clatter and bustle with such undisguised love, it makes the blossoming of romance there feel like the most natural thing in the world.

Even with the steady supply of clichés and occasional leaps of logic, the dramatic scenes smoulder away nicely.

As things go on, Cross’s plot doesn’t so much thicken as coagulate into nonsense. Serkis’s evil plans don’t always make much sense, even when factoring in the whole murderous psychopath thing, while the grislier imagery is often too poseur-ish to unnerve.

As in Landon’s terrific body-swap horror comedy Freaky, there’s often a surprisingly thoughtful undercurrent to these zany riffs, and the tone is nicely judged for younger teens. But where Freaky was relatively honed, this rambles to a fault, taking numerous optional detours . . . en route to an emotional climax that doesn’t quite land.

It’s a grinding disappointment all round, though at least now we know that what bears famously do in the woods can extend to their film work.

Your Place or Mine is thoroughly mild, considerate and well-behaved. But where’s the fun in that?

It’s mostly very charming, if perhaps a bit self-consciously so, given Fleischer Camp’s tendency to gurgle delightedly on camera at every other line.

Bizarre, beautiful, moving and playful, this is an oddity to cherish, with depths that only reveal themselves – entirely aptly – on the hoof.

There’s an entire pick ’n’ mix stand of eye candy here – more than enough to satisfy younger viewers. But alas, it’s all empty calories.

Despite a morose colour palette that can feel a little eat-your-vegetables at times, the film is beautifully performed and gripping in a chewy, nuanced, contemplative way – as its title suggests, the talking, as well as the thinking it kindles, is the point.

For a franchise in need of refreshment, it’s anything but a quantum leap.

For the microscopic subset of cinema-goers who watch Magic Mike films for the plot, Last Dance may prove disappointing. Returning screenwriter Reid Carolin doesn’t come up with anything novel to do with the hackneyed let’s-put-on-a-show premise.

The thing about Spielberg these days is he makes this stuff look easy.

There’s lots to enjoy in this aviation disaster thriller slash tropical shoot-em-up, with its uproariously blunt title high on the list.

In spirit, it’s all very Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But in execution, it’s far closer to Meet the Parents with a heavy dose of identity politics.

It’s a modest but polished psychological drama that keeps threatening to mutate into an old-fashioned toxic relationship thriller – and the tension between what it actually is and where it might be going makes it an enjoyably nerve-jangling watch.

The Nicolas Cage aficionado carries two hopes into each of the 59-year-old actor’s new films. The first – not often met, truth be told – is that it will be good. And the second, failing that, is that it will be mad. Alas, this thin and lumpy western is neither.

Banderas is good value, playing the role a few shades more seriously than it deserves, while first-time director Richard Hughes deploys much fizzing neon and halogen to strike a convincingly sleazy tone. But even at 90 minutes the plot feels padded, and it’s all so preeningly sordid.

Having slyly slipped the bonds of the past, Corsage eventually allows its heroine to make a very modern break for it in the film’s (wholly fictional) final act. It’s a fun, coolly outrageous manoeuvre – and the final shot is so freeing, it’s as if the laces on your own invisible corset had suddenly been cut.

Seydoux is coolly enthralling throughout: her mask-like face, often streaked with a single, strategic tear, mirrors the fundamental blankness of her line of work. Thanks to her performance, France is never less than intriguing. But it’s also extremely hard to get along with – a broadcast-news parable whose sense of purpose keeps fuzzing in and out.

The film is thrillingly reckless enough to make you genuinely dread what’s coming next.

For all its world-building sprawl, The Way of Water is a horizon-narrowing experience – the sad sight of a great filmmaker reversing up a creative cul-de-sac.

Emancipation is a finely crafted, unflinching pursuit thriller about a slave seizing his freedom in 1860s Louisiana, and the first notable thing about it is that Smith is terrific in it.

The script, co-written by Del Toro and Patrick McHale, is perhaps a little slick when it comes to hustling the plot towards the next moral lesson. But the storytelling itself is unashamedly old-fashioned, and forays into the political and the macabre are all carefully tailored to younger viewers.

Like its precursor, Glass Onion doubles as a dazzlingly engineered gizmo and a raucous cautionary satire, with implications that billow out into the world even as its mechanisms snap satisfyingly shut.

Parts of The Menu taste familiar. There’s a dash of Michael Haneke’s winking mercilessness; a soupçon of Midsommar’s black-hearted mischief; the sheeny satire of super-wealth comes straight from Succession. But the cast and filmmakers’ commitment to nasty delight is unswerving, while the dinner ends in the most gratifying way imaginable: just deserts.

Adams almost makes it work through sheer force of musical-comedy will: her mimicry of “classic wicked stepmother poses” is a scream, and despite the thin material, she never looks less than fully, beamingly engaged. Even so, it’s hard not to wish she’d just stuck with her happily ever after first time around.

The first Enola Holmes was colourful, spirited – and made for cinemas, though it was fast-tracked onto streaming during Covid. The sequel, however, has the silty pall of content: scenes often look dreary and move more drearily still; you’d swear in the fight scenes the actors are just taking it in turns to be hit. Elementary? Not really – just basic.

Against this enticing, enigmatic backdrop, the odd sops to mainstream taste – some comic shrieking, a sprinkling of toilet humour – feel unnecessary, but forgivable. It’s the sort of film you’re relieved to discover still exists.

Only Nyong’o and Winston Duke, whose avuncular mountain tribe chief M’Baku makes a welcome return, actually feel like human beings. Elsewhere it’s drainingly apparent we’re just watching the nth round of chess pieces being rearranged. Like Namor with his dinky ankle-wings, this franchise has become super-heroically adept at treading water.

If we’re reaching for something, anything nice to say here – and we absolutely are – Theron’s black trouser suit and trench coat is a strong look.

Against serene and haunting backdrops, the animation itself has a raucous energy that’s constantly thrilling, and leans into the children’s vulnerability as well as their high spirits.

This quietly courageous debut feature from Anastasia Tsang, which had its world premiere at this year’s Tokyo Film Festival, is an elegy for that lost Hong Kong – and suggests that in certain corners of the city, its old spirit still fizzes and glows.

The idea is that Chickie’s experiences will challenge his simplistic view of the conflict, but Farrelly frames his jaunt as a glorified gap year, with various atrocities repackaged as opportunities for personal growth. Napalm

Amsterdam might encompass 15 years of history, straddle two continents and throw in innumerable subplots, but it becomes increasingly hard to shake the sense that you’re watching a very thin idea twiddling its thumbs.

Dunham’s film has the kind of winning light touch that’s impossible to fluke.

Schrader can do this stuff in his sleep, and in Master Gardener you sometimes wonder if he might be.

Heidi Thomas’s screenplay, cannily expanding a little on Bennett’s glisteningly witty original script, shows its hand with tactical finesse.

The film contains deeply felt work by Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby, but it’s an otherwise drab, simplistic, mechanical thing that wears its workings right on the surface.

Blonde is severe and serious-minded almost to a fault: you rather wonder how many viewers at home will soldier on to the end when it lands on Netflix after a limited theatrical release. In the cinema, though, it swallows you up like an uneasy dream, at once all too familiar and pricklingly unreal.

Robert Zemeckis, who should be well above this, imprints a bit of personality on this nightmare exactly twice.

The Eternal Daughter is a minor film at least partly by design, but it leaves an ethereal trail of sadness and creepiness.

Things keep barrelling along thanks to both Pugh and the plot’s punchy critique of certain recent trends in the internet’s more testosterone-raddled dark corners. With a smudgy red-lipsticked grin, Don’t Worry Darling drags them out into the blazing desert light.

This is an often shoulder-shudderingly funny film, whose comic dialogue is dazzlingly designed and performed. But McDonagh leaves fate itself with the last, black, bone-rattling laugh.

Fraser’s casting is so moving in part because we can still recognise this beloved figure under the blubber, but it’s also because Fraser’s own performance doesn’t court pity. His Charlie is complex, flawed, funny and otherwise fully and radiantly human: a rounded character in more ways than one.

In her first outright lead role Goth is straightforwardly tremendous, and gets to move through the considerable breadth of her talent even within individual shots.

Russell, a revelation in Trey Edward Shults’s under-seen Gen-Z melodrama Waves, is career-makingly good here, while Chalamet’s tender, tousled allure and razor-edge of raw danger powerfully recall the late River Phoenix: his Lee is a hustler to the core, always calculating where his next meal is coming from, and who he’ll have to sink his teeth into in order to get it.

Iñárritu has cooked up a personal epic of the most exhaustingly swaggery type, man-spread across three hours of screen time during which flashes of genuine, startling brilliance occasionally manage to push their way through the strenuously zany macho-visionary fug.

The film wields its intelligence and style with total effortlessness, and its every move holds your gaze like a baton’s quivering tip.

For this usually understated filmmaker, it’s a madcap outlier, and often resembles an early Steven Spielberg film having a nervous breakdown.

Fiennes is admirably open throughout, with seemingly no thought of a public image to burnish.

Kormákur captures the action in a series of long, prowling, hold-your-breath takes, which both convey a vivid sense of place (the whole thing was shot on location in South Africa) and afford the viewer endless opportunities to anxiously scan the background for lion-shaped ripples in the long grass.

[An] impish and riveting talking-heads piece.

This second Fisherman’s Friends is not without its moments, but the aftertaste calls for a strong menthol lozenge.

As a motor-mouthing smart-ass, the 58-year-old Pitt is badly miscast – every detail here seems tailored to Ryan Reynolds, director David Leitch’s Deadpool collaborator – while the film's bulging cast and bloated running time recalls those all-star capers of the 1960s: imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with a migraine. For the sake of all that’s holy, take the bus.

Luck contains all the warmth and ingenuity that was nowhere to be found in Pixar’s own recent Lightyear, and has the attitude – if not always the supreme clarity and craftsmanship – of his old studio’s vintage productions.

Howard’s film is a paean to the courage and canniness of the seasoned non-professional: subterranean heroism has never looked so down-to-earth.

For Hollywood’s armies of unsung craftsfolk, Nope turns the blockbuster rules on their head: an expansive science-fiction thriller whose heroes rise up and claim their heroism from behind the scenes. For the rest of us, it’s an outrageously good time.

Around halfway through a sustained shootout in Prague, the sheer thundering mindlessness of the whole enterprise becomes impossible to ignore.

Forget computer-generated spandex: that top must be the single most psychologically precise piece of costuming in the entire Marvel project. That it also looks completely at home beside Hemsworth’s scarlet cape and induction-hob breastplate might be the neatest encapsulation to date of the franchise’s charms.

The animation is technically wondrous – the colour and detail amazes, while the Minions themselves have never looked more bouncily robust – but it’s always in service of the overriding slapstick agenda. Even the flat, side-on compositions – less than ideal for showing off graphical prowess – feel like knowing evocations of the deadpan staging of vintage cartoons.

In terms of sheer energy and invention, it more than holds its own, and boasts action scenes whose wit, vibrancy and gracefulness make Lightyear look low on batteries.

It’s enjoyably acted and astutely put together, with plot details that bleed out at just the right speed. But it lacks the thrilling existential dizziness and lingering chill of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, to which it owes a considerable and obvious debt: in fact, it’s essentially the Ex Machina you can follow while making cups of tea and checking your phone, which may be all that Netflix wanted from it.

Perhaps some blind spots were only to be expected: there’s more to this topic than a single feature could possibly cover, particularly a debut one. But Thyberg knows which angles she wants to work – and my goodness, does she go for it.

For perhaps the first time in the studio’s canon, every idea in this ‘origin story’ of the Toy Story astronaut feels woefully half-baked.

This is a film as delicate as dripping water, with depths that are quietly waiting to be plumbed.

This series' sixth film has a daft plot, groans with lousy action and makes the poor old dinosaurs humiliatingly surplus to requirements.

It’s a witty and affectionate if rather slight archive documentary.

Serraille, whose debut feature Jeune Femme won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2017, has returned with a film that feels like a jewellery box of telling moments: there is precious stuff here, and real sparkle too.

Close is a great film about friendship, but perhaps an even greater one about being alone.

Stars at Noon is at its best when it has Trish and Daniel suspended in horny limbo, with Denis building an atmosphere of sultry languor that makes the film feel as if it’s constantly stretching and circling, like a sleepy cat.

Yes, it’s a bright and splashy jukebox epic with an irresistible central performance from Austin Butler . . . But in that signature Luhrmann way, it veers in and out of fashion on a scene-by-scene basis: it’s the most impeccably styled and blaringly gaudy thing you’ll see all year, and all the more fun for it.

It wouldn’t be quite right to describe Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men as a horror film. Rather, it’s the kind of thing the victims in a horror film might watch, just after pulling it from the cellar of a derelict harbour cottage, and shortly before succumbing to some blood-curdling maritime curse.

Seydoux gives the film’s best performance: even wrenching moments are played at a glassy remove. But unlike Cronenberg’s Crash, which shook Cannes to the core in 1996, there’s no shock of the new in Crimes of the Future – a crucial requirement for every true festival coup de scandale.

The points of Östlund’s Triangle are far from subtle. Vanity is toxic; fortunes corrupt; everyone loves to see an Instagrammer getting their comeuppance. But across its well-earned two-and-a-half-hour running time, epic schadenfreude keeps edging into genuine sympathy, and we feel just sorry enough for these awful people for the next humiliation to sting just as hard.

While Swinton and Elba make smooth work of the fairy-tale-toned dialogue, they simply lack the chemistry to make their tryst convince as romance. And the fantasy flashbacks too often sink into chintz.

Much as it would be nice to report that the film lived up to its director’s triumphant return, it’s unfortunately a swaggering chore: watching it feels like competing in a sort of art-house cinema Krypton Factor, with a barrage of interpretative dance interludes, unflinching full-frontal male nudity, pulverisingly bleak mise-en-scene, and writhing mental collapse.

For shoestring charm, One Cut of the Dead remains unbeaten, but Final Cut brings off the same hugely satisfying Tetris symphony of emotional and narrative blocks falling into place.

Thrilling, moving and gloriously Cruisey, Joseph Kosinski's sequel to the 1986 hit is unquestionably the best studio action film in years.

It’s the sort of film that rattles you in three ways at once: through the grim candour of its themes, the chill precision of its craft, and the nightmarish throb of its images.

But the idea that Raimi’s signature touch amounts to rewarming old flourishes from his work over the last four decades is a wildly embarrassing and juvenile way to think about filmmaking: what you actually get here is the Marvel house style with Raimi flavouring sprinkled on top, and anything that feels outrageous only does so in the context of the franchise’s fussily restrictive rule set.

Vitally, Wandel doesn’t ramp up the misery here for dramatic effect, but rather successfully makes the fairly everyday unpleasantness feel as chest-clutchingly hopeless as it would to – well, a seven-year-old.

“We have to be able to enter the 1930s with our heads held high,” Dockery says – another hint that further Downtons may just keep roaring down the road, Fast & Furious-style. But it’s hard to believe that any could serve as a better send-off than this.

The Lost City is what could be described as knowingly dated: it’s a film designed to make you regret they don’t make ’em like this any more, even when “this” means escapist Hollywood fluff.

So many sequences here feel like free-floating trailer fodder: surplus to plot requirements, but too expensive to cut.

Some of the jokes here are so bad they may be legally actionabubble, even prosecutabubble, and will cause toes to curl on the feet of the hitherto unembarrassabubble. There are scenes now seared upon my memory through sheer force of murderous un-funniness which I fear may prove to be unscrubbabubble.

High-speed antics have never felt this slow.

Leto throws himself into the role with a steely commitment that would be easier to understand if the film surrounding him weren’t so thuddingly generic.

Speeding vehicles are clunked and donked into one another with xylophonic zeal, while the camera snakes and tears between them faster than seems physically possible. I mean it as a compliment when I say there are entire sequences here which look as if they might have been shot by a monkey in a jetpack.

Deftly adapted by director Audrey Diwan from a novella, Happening is a period piece, but it’s acted and shot with a shivery immediacy.

It works as beautifully as it does because the film’s comedy has been machined with Swiss precision, and all of its characters written with obvious love.

The two stars generate an astonishing sensual charge in a brilliant addition to the Batman canon that refuses to behave like a blockbuster

At least Watts’s bright-eyed charisma and obvious commitment passes the time – while director Phillip Noyce, who also had Angelina Jolie running for her life in 2010’s Salt, does his best to keep things visually fresh.

The Duke is that rarest of things: a comedy that knows that a twinkle in the eye and a fire in the belly needn’t be mutually exclusive.

It’s less a film than a compound disaster scenario for comedy: to say I didn’t laugh once is to understate the sheer volume and vehemence of not-laughing I was doing during each of its 106 agonising minutes.

With Kimi, director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp have dazzlingly updated Rear Window for the work-from-home age: their film puts a thrillingly contemporary spin on a vintage paranoia-drenched premise.

As portraiture, it’s also unapologetically (and therefore unfashionably) complex: the unsavoury aspects of his personal life are frankly addressed, but never used as a stick with which to beat the work. Rather, the signature tone of the narration – nicely delivered by the Doctor Who actress Pearl Mackie – is one of curiosity. And the fascination proves infectious.