Robbie Collin

This is a film which simply wouldn’t have worked in any medium but animation: in an hour and a half we come to know Amin intimately without actually setting eyes on him at all. It’s an ingenious way to tell a story that’s both extraordinary and commonplace: only with the teller’s anonymity tactfully preserved can the tale itself be hauled fully into the light.

Every frame is so obviously green-screened, airbrushed and otherwise climate-controlled that it unfolds without a squeak of peril – the stakes couldn’t have felt lower if an extra-life counter were sitting in the corner of the screen. As for the script, you can almost hear the words NEEDS TO BE FUNNIER written in capital letters in the margins at least once per scene.

A Wolf of Wall Street-like treatment of this story could have been a scream – and the details are more than bizarre, crass and damning enough to have supported it. But cheeks aside, this is flat, colourless stuff.

The Princess tells us nothing we don’t already know, but there’s bracing value in seeing it crisply spelled out.

It can’t be denied that as a piece of cover-all-bases, hi-sheen, lo-thought, built-to-order corporate product, the film runs with a steady and satisfying whirr.

It’s a film that could have so easily smacked of an exercise, but its beauty feels thrillingly natural, and its considerable emotional power is honestly earned.

A terrific, despair-drenched final scene is the viewer’s reward for staying the course: pitilessly cruel, spare and shivery, it’s got everything the rest of this strangely stiff and synthetic film lacks.

For all the placidity of its cud-chewing subject, Cow has a thrillingly alien charge.

The film has the heft of Shakespearean tragedy, but a more generous cosmic outlook. Maternal love goes a long way. [14 Mar 2015, p.10]

In place of depth, MacKay and Niewöhner invest Legat and Hartmann’s relationship with a watchable if uncomplicated friction, but it’s when the Führer himself first appears, more than half an hour into the film, that things really start to cook.

Rather than doing anything novel or surprising with the basic spies-gone-rogue template, The 355 just repackages it in girl-power wrapping: it’s the film equivalent of a high-fructose, corn-syrup-based fizzy drink being passed off as chic in taller, slimmer cans.

It is what these films always are – source material for its own advertising campaign – but in this instance, it’s little more, which might have been a problem if said campaign hadn’t already proven such a roaring success.

So no, The King’s Man doesn’t take itself especially seriously – until it suddenly, jarringly does.

The effects have a pleasingly retro patina, but the action itself is drab, the jokes scarce, while the town itself is both entirely characterless and oddly deserted, giving the impression that nothing’s really at stake. It’s just what we were warned about all those years ago: something weird that don’t look good.

At a time when the corporation’s live-action output keeps doubling down on the franchise grind, here from just over the garden fence is a lesson in storytelling that feels at once elegantly classical and zingily fresh.

At a glance, A Boy Called Christmas looks delightful enough, with its snowy landscapes, cosy knitwear, and scenes of Jim Broadbent larking around in a periwig and frock coat. But beneath its Paddington-meets-Potter storybook exterior, its bloodstream runs with purest gloop.

It’s a hard film to recommend, but it works on its own gutsily perturbing terms.

You suspect Sorkin relishes the clash between Ball’s fundamentally fatuous show and the razor-smartness of his take on it. And it is smart. It just isn’t much else.

A nicely maintained amiable tone takes the edge off the inevitable lavatorial humour, while the 14-year-old Camp, of Big Little Lies and The Christmas Chronicles, strikes up an impressively plausible emotional connection with her goofy, lolloping co-star (not Whitehall, the dog).

There’s no need for Spielberg and Kushner to tease out topicality here. Aspects of West Side Story feel as pertinent today as they must have done on its 1957 Broadway debut. But relevance is easy: timelessness is the real artistic feat. And Spielberg has magnificently pulled it off.

Ridley Scott's crime drama feels like a soap opera with airs, but its star's sheer chutzpah ensures it's never less than watchably raucous.

In a world of algorithmically sorted content, Anderson’s ninth film, and his first since 2017’s Phantom Thread, is irresistibly hard to pin down: you’d have to go back around 50 years, to the likes of Hal Ashby’s Shampoo or Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, to find another that runs on a similar kind of woozy clockwork.

If Miranda’s tendency towards showmanship can leave Tick, Tick…Boom! feeling a little insistent in places, it also means the film shares its hero’s jet-propelled determination to do his own thing – whether the world happens to be braced for it or not.

It’s a pity this one isn’t a little more distinctive and sharply honed.

It’s lots of fun until you notice it doesn’t quite add up.

The last thing you want to feel about the end of the world is that you’ve seen it all before.

This superb debut feature from Andreas Fontana puts an ingenious spin on the paranoid thriller: its main character is determined to behave as if he isn’t in one.

Perhaps the hope was that Marvel’s 26th film might rattle the franchise out of its comfort zone. But the franchise is nothing but comfort zone, which renders its latest entry an instant white elephant.

The Phantom of the Open is a rousing salute to a very English strain of nincompoopery – and a wise and witty reminder that that the pleasure of doing something spectacularly badly can outstrip the satisfaction of a job well done.

The Last Duel, which was adapted from a non-fiction book by Eric Jager, is a knotty, stimulating drama with a piquant #MeToo edge and the heft and splendour of an old-school historical epic.

It feels like a Blazing Saddles gag writ large – no bad thing – and the jab of Mel Brooks humour it provides feels considerably more inspired than the hackneyed split screens, freeze frames and wobbly zooms which are regularly deployed in the rest of the film for winking grindhouse cred.

The talking heads offer little but platitudes and clichés, while the endless racing footage is dry in the extreme. Here is a life not sugar-coated by cinema so much as rolled in powdered alum.

Each vignette has the subcutaneous prickle of folklore – unapologetically weird as they are, you can feel their hooks snagging on your psyche’s most deeply buried regions.

There’s zero latitude in the spare, naturalistic script for actorly showboating – but the performances, as captured by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s searching, empathic camera, are quietly tremendous.

it’s often very funny indeed. The mood is often closer to the perkier passages of the Connery films, and the humour feels contemporary and British: the Phoebe Waller-Bridge script polish evidently yielded the desired result.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth may be the best-served by cinema, with terrific, distinctive adaptations over the years from Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, and most recently Justin Kurzel, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Coen’s is something different again – though new would be entirely the wrong word. It resonates with the ancient power of a ritual.

Time and again, the film corrals their characters into situations it lacks the emotional delicacy to get them through unscathed – not least a weirdly frenzied sex scene which begins with so much off-screen grunting and puffing I assumed it must be the set-up to a joke, and the camera was about to pan across to the pair shifting furniture.

Dupieux is clearly aware there’s no real dramatic mileage in Mandibles’ absurd premise, but it’s the opposite of a problem: Mandibles becomes funnier the longer it wanders around aimlessly, kicking at rocks.

The film is ultimately little more than a trifle, but Hudson is the cherry topping: as this messy, crafty, grasping nightmare, the actress is more fun than she’s been in years.

It’s a film that creaks as reassuringly as leather.

Drag is what it is, and drag is what it does.

Any film that hands Sofia Boutella a katana can’t be dismissed as an entirely fruitless exercise. It’s the Algerian actress and dancer, rather than Cage, who proves to be Ghostland’s greatest asset. And when your damsel is evidently capable of dealing with her own distress, thank you very much, the rescue mission can’t help but feel a touch redundant.

What Halloween Kills lacks in ideas it partially makes up for in gruesomely authentic slasher texture. From cinematography to editing, casting to oozy prosthetic gore, Green and his crew have recreated the feel of the Carpenter original with an almost academic diligence, particularly in an extended 1970s-set opening flashback.

The sheer unsparing intimacy of Gyllenhaall’s film gives its thrills an excitingly illicit quality. Watching it feels like reading someone else’s diary – and then finding yourself mentioned in its pages.

Wright is both a gifted stylist and master technician, and Soho moves as smoothly as a Maglev train, gliding on an invisible cushion of its own meticulous craft. Its pristine pop-art finish occasionally feels at odds with the grit of its milieu; as it barrelled along, I felt a constant contact-high, yet little contact grubbiness. But the high is rich and giddying, and the weaving of allure and horror gleamingly assured.

The 31-year-old Stewart – who will be instantly and justifiably awards-tipped for this – navigates this perilous terrain with total mastery, getting the voice and mannerisms just right but vamping everything up just a notch, in order to better lean into the film’s melodramatic, paranoiac and absurdist swerves.

Denis Villeneuve's new adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel – starring Timothée Chalamet – is an awe-inspiring piece of work.

Its icy conviction and unblinking Bressonian rigour generate their own particular, intoxicating strain of doom-laced excitement.

Sorrentino and his cast make these teenage recollections twinge with freshness. Like our own sharpest memories of adolescence, the haze of nostalgia doesn’t dull their edge.

The film is often hard to watch, but Campion and her uniformly excellent cast leaven the discomfort with a constant sense of prickling intrigue around what precisely we are watching play out here, and how far the ritual will go.

Even when Almodóvar plays on easy mode – and nothing about Parallel Mothers could be described as difficult – the results are irresistible.

It’s a film about memory which itself feels like the kind of thing you vaguely remember seeing 25 years ago. I’m not sure future slow-burn classic status awaits, but at a time when few studio films even seem to be striving for it, you have to applaud the attempt.

There’s an inevitable and perhaps unavoidable hitch. People in sitcoms generally don't change at all, while people in films can rarely afford not to – and a movie-sized plot, with its multiple emotional crests and dips, isn’t the kind of environment these characters were built to thrive in.

Cooke’s sturdy, old-fashioned approach to staging and shooting pairs well with his leading actor’s precise, engaging performance, and makes scenes like this anxious backstreet exchange – or Greville and Penkovsky’s two visits to the ballet, each one serving as a clever psychological pivot-point – all the more fun and absorbing.

Wright seems determined to bring in some new blood, and his film is a thrillingly persuasive recruiting tool. For existing fans, it’s a fond and nerdily comprehensive celebration – or perhaps vindication – of the siblings’ extensive, courageously eccentric output.

At the very end of Janicza Bravo’s Zola, just as you’re struggling to comprehend what on earth the film is supposed to amount to, there is a wonderful moment when you realise that’s the entire point.

The Suicide Squad (note the definite article) is such a drastic improvement in every respect that you almost – almost – feel sorry for the earlier version: it’s dazzlingly colourful and riotously crass, but also emotionally alive

Hamaguchi has made a profoundly beautiful film about making peace with the role in front of you, and playing it with all your might.

The recurring fungal and archeological imagery suggest a conception of consciousness as a kind of mushroom patch, with human experience blooming from and feeding on the experiences that came before, all the way back to its unknowable cosmic beginnings.

There is something utterly perplexing about this British comedy, in which three middle-aged women go on an Interrailing trip with the daughter of a recently departed friend: it’s as if the cast and crew were planning to make a musical, then got to the set and decided they couldn’t be bothered.

Like the muddled plotting, risible climax and wearisomely foul-mouthed script, Jolt’s budgetary shortcomings might have been endurable if its action scenes passed muster. Alas, they’re barely community theatre standard.

This foursome’s lives intersect in consistently thrilling and surprising ways, thanks in no small part to the fundamental volatility of contemporary young urban lives.

Casablanca Beats just about gets by on restless teenage energy and its bustle of winning young faces. But it’s a new arrangement of a very familiar old song.

Belle is a beautifully observed, dazzlingly animated sci-fi fairy tale about our online-offline double lives – it’s Hosoda’s finest film since 2012’s Wolf Children, and perhaps his best to date.

The action always feels rooted in the greater story of the city of Shiraz itself: even a scene as simple as Rahim walking through a shopping centre becomes naturally soundtracked by a musical instrument salesman tuning a dulcimer in his booth.

Titane is the kind of film that makes quibbles over plausibility seem foolish: you just have to sit back and enjoy being ridden over, or at least accept that’s what the exercise is about.

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch feels like four films in one, and contains enough ideas for at least another six.

The Velvet Underground is not the kind of music documentary that dutifully walks the viewer through the greatest hits and bitterest feuds. Instead, it re-conjures the moment that made the hits possible and the feuds inevitable, via a whirl of archive footage and interviews new and old.

A late narrative gambit made me worry that Hansen-Løve was pushing her conceit a little too far into the realm of the meta, but it pays off with thrilling clarity and elegance.

This controlled unveiling of a fuller picture is certainly engaging, but the film has the respectful air of a tribute – to Bernheim, as opposed to her father – and its sheer seemliness means it lacks the intellectual and erotic fizz of Ozon’s best work.

Dylan and Penn do share a few lovely scenes . . . . In such moments, the project suddenly and charmingly perks up. The rest of the time, ‘flag’ is about right.

McCarthy keeps dragging the film away from thriller and procedural territory and back to this blossoming domestic setup – but while Damon and the kid share some cute scenes, it simply isn’t that interesting, and all the would-be colour (see: Virginie’s acting career) adds nothing but extraneous detail.

Carax has an unparalleled knack for constructing scenes that feel like vividly remembered dreams – some of the images here carry such a strange dual charge, by turns eerie and drily comic, that you find yourself wondering afterwards if they actually happened, or if your subconscious has been playing join-the-dots.

It’s the kind of format that works as long as the characters aren’t all completely unbearable – which is, alas, not the case here.

When it’s in the mood, horror can be a sexually subversive genre; it can also be a flagrantly non-PC one. Freaky treads a treacherous line between the two with aplomb.

There’s an unmistakeable timidity to director Leigh Janiak and Phil Graziadei’s screenplay: it feels odd to watch an 18-rated horror that feels as if it’s going out of its way not to offend.

For the most part it’s as briskly enjoyable as the studio’s output tends to be, with likeable characters trading polished repartee while large computer-generated objects explode convincingly in the background. Yet perhaps for the first time, the briskness often doesn’t sit right with the material at hand.

When the film gets up to speed it remains dependable fun, but the steering’s spongy, the acceleration sluggish. The journey continues, but the saga is running out of road.

In place of Bay’s provocative humour and unparalleled eye for destructive spectacle are brain-numbing quantities of strong language, action scenes that look as if they were edited with a knife and fork, and a blasé attitude towards violence that renders every shootout pointless, since the bad guys are invariably mown down in seconds while the heroes saunter off with barely a scratch.

In all kinds of ways, Luca is the smallest film that Pixar has made, but it’s also unquestionably one of the studio’s loveliest.

It feels like summer on film – the thing radiates Factor 50 good vibes, and boasts a cast so preposterously attractive, and with such sweltering chemistry, that a couple of hours in their company may make you feel as if you’ve had a holiday fling by osmosis.

Seligman’s command of the flow and swell of comic tension is thrillingly intuitive – she knows exactly when to let it well up, and when to pop it for maximum effect.

Here and elsewhere, you sense the film knows more than it’s prepared to share, which gives it the queasy sheen of a PR exercise.

There’s fun to be had here of an undemanding sort – but anything fresh, or memorable, or remotely unexpected? Neigh, neigh and thrice neigh.

The mood is one of acid-tipped wackiness, and both Stone and Thompson understand exactly what’s required to bring it to life.

This is his and Swinton’s first film together: in fact, it is the Spanish master’s first English-language production. But the two are an obviously good creative match, each one well-versed in the interplay of depth and surface, and capable of switching moods from ripe to heartfelt in a blink.

What sense there is of big ideas being thoughtfully chewed over stems largely from Rapace’s steely, wounded central performance, which often feels like a decade-later echo of her work in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films.

The trouble is, Rare Beasts lacks the razor wit, merciless candour and stylistic panache of Fleabag and I May Destroy You – not to mention Piper’s own Sky Atlantic series I Hate Suzie, made after Rare Beasts with the playwright Lucy Prebble, and broadcast last year.

You could hardly ask for a sharper reminder of blockbuster cinema’s charms than the crescendo from swelling dread to snappily choreographed chaos that comprises the film’s tremendous 10-minute prologue.

Army of the Dead is a kindred spirit of, rather than sequel to, Snyder’s earlier film – but it still cleaves faithfully to the Romero template, with its gaggle of abrasive, slippery lead characters that don’t obviously qualify as heroes, and its generous dousings of vinegary cynicism and apocalyptic dread.

To call the film “repellent” would do it too much credit. The combat itself (sorry, kombat) is so clumsily shot and edited that the fights have no discernible dramatic shape or flow, while the fatalities are rendered in bland, businesslike computer graphics that have you yearning for the honest, artisanal gloop-by-the-bucket of a Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street.

The Mitchells vs the Machines is like an encounter with a sentient doodle pad, crammed with ideas that might be the cleverest things anyone’s ever thought of, or the most ludicrous, or probably a jumble of both.

A film so frivolous and twee I felt as if my brain were leaking out of my nostrils as I watched.

He remains a master of composition, subtly guiding your eye towards details that reveal the kind of stories we might usually overlook – in life as well as in the cinema itself.

Via breezy metaphysical farce, Palm Springs identifies this very recognisable strain of millennial malaise, before skewering it with merciless accuracy.

Disasters: well, they said it. The new film from Dennis Dugan is a frighteningly inept stab at a romantic comedy in the Nancy Meyers style.

Essentially – astonishingly – the Tom and Jerry sections of Tom & Jerry are a sideshow, used to punctuate the human scheming and blundering around Preeta and Ben’s forthcoming nuptials.

Those in the market for domestic drama, sexual tension and humorous mishaps against a backdrop of sawing and sweeping would be advised to try any home renovation show over this.