Robbie Collin

It shares a vague shape and a handful of specific, linchpin scenes with its predecessor, but everything about it lands differently: characters that were previously empty or ludicrous now have real grit and depth, while action sequences that were once incoherent, lightweight and garish now number among the most thunderously spectacular in the genre.

One hopes the golden age isn’t quite over yet, although as Moxie galumphs from one glib, soulless scene to the next, it’s hard not to fear the worst.

A sensationally funny and gently science-fictional German rom-com.

Refn and Flemming Quist Møller’s screenplay is very good at showing how a destructive belief system such as Nazism can slowly seep through institutions, thanks to nothing more sinister than ordinary people deciding not to rock the boat.

Cherry might represent a drastic shift in scale, tone and subject matter for its directors and leading man alike, but there’s a blockbuster-sized gap where its point should be.

The film bounces along predictably but charmingly, and parents whose cringe threshold is as low as my own will be relieved to find its sense of humour is gratifyingly un-tacky throughout.

The film is crammed with so much transporting spectacle and visual invention, it feels epic even at living-room size.

The cast’s performances are all so beautifully observed that you may end up wishing the film had given their characters a few more moments of quiet.

Dead Pigs’s intermingling of grit and polish is hugely satisfying: a potent combination of pearls and swine.

Macdonald and his team pull out enough affecting stories to hold your interest, whose scopes range from sweeping to intimate.

You sense that Washington and Zendaya do both believe in the material, and they certainly throw themselves at it with gusto, but their best moments here are invariably the ones in which they’ve not been given anything to say.

Unusually for a contemporary western, News of the World makes no attempt to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it hammers it diligently back onto the axle, before striking out on a journey whose contours and pitfalls we already know well. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to experience it once more with companions like these.

In some passages, the film abides by the biopic rulebook more carefully than it needs to; its best moments are the ones where King and his cast create some tension then simply let it cook.

Wheatley and his collaborators have produced something that some of us thought would be impossible: an outrageously entertaining film that feels utterly rooted in the bleak era in which it was made. Lockdown project or not, it’s a milestone.

Glass could hardly have asked for two more game accomplices than Clark and Ehle, who play the…well, the you-know-where out of their respective roles, and are both naturally attuned to the film’s murkily sensual, dread-laden wavelength.

There is a special cupboard in Purgatory for films that are blissfully unaware of what they’re actually about, and a place is reserved on its shelves for Love Sarah.

The irresistible comic elegance of the premise – a remarried widower is tormented by the ghost of his first wife – is lost in a mass of pointless embellishments and tinkerings.

The shape of its story is ultimately conventional, and the way in which it’s told can sometimes feel familiar – like a Sunday evening drama smuggling in big ideas. But the line it draws between the earthy and the ethereal stays with you: it’s a well-timed double dose of consolation and escape.

Its supremely frank and unflinching treatment of its essentially taboo subject gives it a certain brandy-slug of consolatory warmth, despite the bitter chill that blows through most of its scenes.

It’s a punchy, propulsive watch, blown along by snappy editing and a hip-hop-driven soundtrack that stresses that there’s still much fun to be had when hefty themes of inequality and geopolitics are being tackled. And honestly? There really is.

Great animation can communicate wildly complex ideas with head-spinning clarity and wit, as Docter capably proved with Inside Out – a film which staged the interplay of emotions in an 11-year-old’s head like a vintage sitcom. If anything, Soul pushes this capacity for revelation even further: there are moments of true Blakean mystery and wonder here, expressed with a crispness that feels like a lightbulb snapping on above your head.

So if Wonder Woman 1984 is playing near you, should you pounce? If it even remotely appeals, I’d say absolutely – even though the film itself, a direct sequel to 2017’s Wonder Woman, is a bit of a marshmallowy muddle.

It’s a project driven by ideas but made for a mass-market audience, which are always welcome in principle. The problem here is the good ideas are all extremely familiar, and the handful of new ones aren’t much to write home about.

Redemption may have eluded Michael Corleone, but his third film was more fortunate.

In a story that could have offered a parade of vivid character roles, only Foy and Glen really register: a kindly park ranger (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) deserved more screen time, while the various surly faces on the Manhattan carriage-toting scene are only thinly defined.

Mank feels like both a film for the ages and one hauled up from them: a forbidden tale grave-robbed from the Hollywood catacombs.

It’s the opposite of what a Borat film should feel like: business as usual.

Rocks would rather reckon with – and in the end, celebrate – youthful potential itself, and its extraordinary ability to flower in even the most unpromising soil.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is both a courtroom drama for the ages and an urgent shot across the bows.

There may be no more fitting snack for a film that exudes casual bon-vivant allure, but is fundamentally nibbles and froth.

It's as simultaneously chilling and warming as a slug of ice-cold vodka, and just as liable to make your mind swim and eyes prick.

The film makes no attempt to grapple with the American school shooting as a nihilistic cultural phenomenon.

Thanks to both its mesmerising cast and McQueen’s flawless command of atmosphere and mood, it pulls off what I can only describe as a kind of cinematic jiu-jitsu – heaving you back to that precise moment in history, then lifting your soul out of your skin in one seamless move.

King’s fluid direction of her four actors means the snug setting never feels dramatically constricting, while their jostling performance styles make each combination of voices feels like its own distinct treat.

The sheer compassion of Zhao's direction is one of the film's most elemental pleasures, while McDormand is one of those rare actors who can somehow make the act of listening as thrilling as a barnstorming speech.

One of the finest films of the year: a shiveringly passionate period piece.

A surging tsunami-crash of creativity and beauty.

Perhaps more than any other Disney live-action remake to date, Mulan feels like a blockbuster version of great mime – it’s performed with such consummate precision and showmanship that at times you would swear you were watching something with a heart.

The depth, subtlety and wit of Pattinson and Debicki’s performances only becomes fully apparent once you know where Tenet is going, or perhaps that should be where it’s been. Still confused? Don’t be. Or rather do be, and savour it. This is a film that will cause many to throw up their hands in bamboozlement – and many more, I hope, to clasp theirs in awe and delight.

Sleekly enjoyable.

One of the great pleasures of the collection is watching human ingenuity at work almost in real time, as each filmmaker in turn fathoms what’s possible, then keeps pushing, to regularly thrilling effect.

Sending up the Eurovision Song Contest is like flattening Salisbury Plain: one quick look at the thing should be enough to reassure you that the job took care of itself long ago. Nevertheless, Will Ferrell has decided to give it a shot, and the result is this pulverisingly unfunny and vacuous two-hour gauntlet run of non-tertainment.

The end product is all but unfollowable, thanks either to a screenplay that was incoherent to begin with, or an edit so slicingly brutal that almost every trace of the plot’s connective tissue was chopped out.

With a story that straddles two generations and stretches from Trump’s United States to the Vietnam jungle, Da 5 Bloods is one of Spike Lee’s most expansive films to date. But it’s built with the precise, snap-shut mechanisms of an ancient moral fable – a Pardoner’s Tale made about and for unpardonable times.

Like its absurdly named hero, Extraction gets a serious and deeply silly job done in style.

Incoherent two-hour fantasy epic isn’t quite accurate: it’s more of an incoherent one-and-a-quarter-hour fantasy epic, plus an all-star warm-up.

To watch it is to be waterboarded by joy. In terms of both visual dazzle and invention and sheer comedic stamina and pep, it handily surpasses the original Trolls from 2016, which itself set an impressive new standard for films based on novelty keyrings and pencil toppers.

Elephant is set in a world without poachers, developers or tourists: the picture it paints is beautiful and educative, but doesn’t feel quite complete

If you want to watch an elaborate metaphor being wrung out like a bathing suit for an hour and a half, The Platform might be the film for you.

If Hollywood really is an elite liberal bubble, Damon Lindelof might just be the prick it needs.

A wild and righteous provocation.

Thanks to one of the most indestructible poster campaigns ever designed, the words Les Misérables can’t help but call a child’s face to mind.

Leigh Whannell’s film – one of the smartest and scariest yet to roll off the production line at horror specialists Blumhouse.

Children encountering the faux-ET format for the first time may enjoy it well enough, but signs of life, extra or otherwise, are low to nil.

While writers Lena Waithe and James Frey make Queen and Slim’s initial decision to flee convincing, and dramatically spiky – it’s striking that even a lawyer doesn’t fancy her chances on the legal route – their screenplay is rather less good at coming up with excuses for the string of colourful and picturesque pit-stops the two keep making afterwards.

Showy and ambitious, desperately sincere and self-absorbed, and bursting at the seams with potential, Waves isn’t merely a film about teenagers, it’s virtually a teenager in film form. It’s also the kind of cinema that keeps you young.

I can’t recall the last time I was so staggered by a film’s craftsmanship while feeling almost nothing else about it at all – little fear, less sadness, and barely a spark of actual excitement at anything beyond the high-wire nature of the filmmaking enterprise itself.

Why are they are so relentlessly endearing and funny? Comic timing is a big part of it: every skit and pratfall is staged to split-second perfection.

The Gentlemen is a valiant, often raucous bid to drag the tried-and-true old Ritchie formula into the present, and while the result feels like he got about as far as 2005 – with lip-service acknowledgements of grime music and YouTube – for the purposes of this film, it’s close enough.

The Rise of Skywalker completes a saga no one sane screenwriter would have dreamt up from scratch, but does so with such pluck and showmanship that the result feels strangely precious: a busked epic whose every individual move comes straight from the heart.

Though Weathering With You tells a story of a makeshift family enduring uncertain times, its dominant emotion is amazement – at the power and persistence of first love, and the everyday wonders of the world in which it flourishes against the odds.

The whole package is so sleekly watchable, if risk-averse to a fault, that I can’t recall a recent time at the cinema where I learned more by thinking less.

The themes of mob justice and socialised misogyny could have hit a little harder if they’d been explored rather than simply harped on about.

For all its feints and innovations, Frozen II knows its audience inside out, and wants to ensure every last subdivision leaves feeling both seen and satisfied. That’s obviously good business. But it’s also generous, deeply charming filmmaking.

The film is nearly two hours long and passes in what feels like 45 seconds. It is wildly entertaining and blaringly ridiculous, and I want to watch it every night for a week.

Slaloming between Hoffman’s testimony at DeLorean’s trial and the caper that got both men there for no obvious reason beyond it being the way these things are usually done, the film obediently pads through the shaggy-dog motions.

It’s a pleasure to see Hamilton and Schwarzenegger back in action as leathery veterans, though the script shunts the cast onto some unexpectedly topical terrain, including a heroic escape from a US-Mexico border prison camp, with detainees’ cages flung open in triumph. Yet it’s Davis’s brusque and androgynous Grace who turns out to be Dark Fate’s most stonily compelling asset.

It is the most arrhythmia-inducingly tense film I have seen in years: by the end, I felt as if I’d spent the last two hours being dangled by my ankles over a crocodile pit.

Robert De Niro is sensational in Scorsese's history-making mob masterpiece.

The 22-year-old Van Patten is a more than capable solo lead: the breakout star of Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, she has an invaluable knack for making her characters’ worst traits their most compelling features.

If Blackbird shows us anything it’s that no matter how carefully we plan, life resists perfection, right up to the end.

As satire it’s a dismal dereliction of duty; as comedy, a one-note joke that wears out fast.

This is a sober, stiff-collared procedural, handsomely shot but also oddly bloodless until the more conventional paranoid-thriller rhythms of its final act kick in.

Historical epics are rarely light on their feet, but The King sets new standards in the field of galumphing: the film moves like a rhinoceros through porridge.

Skarsgård’s ripe performance, with its wicked childishness and sarcastic self-pity, remains an asset Muschietti knows how to use. But the Losers are a mixed bag, convincing less well as a unit than they did as children.