Robbie Collin

But in its best moments, there’s a yarn-spinning intimacy to it too – an old war story told around a spectacular campfire.

While it never achieves, or even reaches for, The Lego Movie’s unexpected profundity and emotional bite, in purely logistical terms, The Lego Batman Movie is a thing of wonder. There are around four (great) films’ worth of action and jokes here, crammed into a story so streamlined it might have been assembled in the Lockheed wind tunnel.

Some films based on dramatic true events offer us a snapshot of a life: I’m Still Here shows us a life of snapshots.

Ferrara has come up with something pretty special here: a subtle, seductive, lamp-lit hymn to one artist’s talents from another in the process of rediscovering his own.

Goodbye June is a keenly observed, nicely played drama about a family whose members are still working out how to muddle along with one another, despite three of its four adult siblings having long flown the coop.

Tran, a practised sensualist, is superb at depicting food as a vehicle for pleasure.

Mendes...lets the quieter moments breathe.... But Mendes is rather good at being loud, too, and his nine times Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins makes the wildly ambitious action sequences the most beautiful in Bond’s 50-year career.

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.

Marvel films are all about anticipation: they’re designed to make you crave the next helping before you’ve even swallowed the current one. But this is the first in a while that I’ve found myself immediately hungry to revisit.

There is a complex yet recognisable psychological dynamic at work here, and Squibb navigates the muddle of it nimbly.

This is bewitchingly smart science fiction of a type that’s all too rare. Its intelligence is anything but artificial.

If the action in Wonder Woman comes less frequently than you might expect, it’s also thrillingly designed and staged, with a surging sense of real people, from all sorts of backgrounds, swept up in the wider conflict’s churns and jolts.

This is another hugely admirable entry in the Dardenne canon: nothing all that new, perhaps, but as thoughtful, humane and superbly composed as we have, very fortunately, come to expect from them.

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.

A melding of old and new modes of animation, in which the attentive artistry of the past coexists with the hyper-detailed, computer-generated present.

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.

Byrne’s film is concerned with the process and practice of myth-making: the way the right person, or action, or face, can capture a moment, or galvanise a movement – and, for both good and ill, transform politics into something like art.

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.

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

Navigates tricky emotional territory with a perceptiveness and tact that isn’t just great storytelling, but could be a real comfort to parents and children alike who unexpectedly see themselves in Dory’s plight.

You might imagine that easy-breezy, Hakuna Matata-chanting middle act would only work when drawn by hand. Yet cinematographer Caleb Deschanel’s expert command of "natural" spectacle and the sheer exuberance of Rogen and Eichner’s performances make it the film’s most purely delightful section.

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.

I loved every minute of Filth, and couldn’t have stomached another second of it.

It’s a critic’s instinct to auto-praise any blockbuster that tries to do something different, but Catching Fire is so committed to carrying on the fine work started by its predecessor that the applause flows utterly naturally.

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.

Disney, when minded, can still do this stuff as well as anyone – and in the pleasurable spring and snap of its animation, its at-times-unsettlingly comely character design, and set-pieces that swarm with humour and panache, Zootropolis 2 is proof.

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

Wind River confirms the director as a rising talent who can be trusted to beat his own enticing path through inhospitable ground.

“Everyone is looking all the time; you just have to train yourself to look harder,” Hockney explains. This warm, affectionate, perceptive film makes looking harder look easy.

Indeed, in a genre infamous for feints and teases, Gunn’s kitchen-sink approach feels refreshingly generous, and his excitement for the character shines through.

The film is immaculately cast, and the chemistry between its four heroes holds your eye with its firework fizz.

Keeps playing its two winning cards over and over again, and is smart enough to realise they are more than enough. The first is the giant animal carnage itself, which crackles with fun ideas and flourishes throughout. The second is the comic chemistry of a superbly picked cast who bring everyone in on the joke.

What we’ve seen since the beginnings of the Marvel serial in 2008 is an ongoing stretching: bigger casts, grander set-pieces and more intricate interplay between characters, with no clear end in sight. Ant-Man scuttles off in the other direction. Brisk humour, keenly felt dramatic stakes, and invention over scale. You know: small pleasures.

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.

Frantz is the work of a rascal, but a rascal in an unusually reflective frame of mind. Even with its mysteries solved, you can’t help but keep turning it over.

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.

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]

Wright’s inkily beautiful, imaginatively structured picture - drama bleeds into newsreel and archive footage - is another excellent new film about the strange ways British landscapes (and here, seascapes) work on British minds.

The film doesn’t stint on emotional complexity, but it might be Baumbach’s most accessible to date.

A welcome reissue of the 1984 creature feature in which a Capra-esque idyll is besieged by ravening beasties.

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.

This cherishable Irish B-picture is one of those rare horror films with an unimprovable premise.

This is a skewer-sharp and scabrously funny film, stuffed with quotable deadpan exchanges, often punctuated by that now-trademark Lanthimos camera manoeuvre, the wide-angle whip pan that seems to ask “now what?”

In every shot, the mix of gritty local colour and artful digital augmentations is riveting: you’re always vaguely aware that what you’re looking at can’t all be real, but the line which splits reality from fantasy is impossible to spot.

This is a complex, bewitching and melancholy drama, another fearlessly intelligent film from Assayas.

Its sombre sincerity and hypnotic, treasure-box beauty make Crimson Peak feel like a film out of time – but Del Toro, his cast and his crew carry it off without a single postmodern prod or smirk. The film wears its heart on its sleeve, along with its soul and most of its intestines.

Southside With You all but begs you to unpick every line and gesture for shivery echoes of the future, and it’s to first-time writer-director Tanne’s credit – and, equally, that of his perfectly chosen leads, Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter – that the film not only withstands but thrives under such scrutiny.

Beatty’s casting of Collins and Ehrenreich is inspired: it’s easy to imagine both of these beautiful young things thriving in the Hollywood of the 1950s and 60s, in much the same way Beatty himself did.

It’s the kind of handsome, rousing, rigorous entertainment you can’t help but play along with.

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.

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 is something about the cast’s doughy physiques that has allowed Park’s flair for caricature to run completely berserk, with every character model pushed right to its expressive limits.

There is also a wonderful range of archive materials apparently dug out from Sievey’s cellar, including footage of Frank’s transfixingly odd appearances on Saturday morning children’s television, skulking around behind Andy Crane on Motormouth and riffing with Andrea Arnold on No. 73.

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.

Coppola’s uproarious and bitingly timely film feels every inch a necessary artwork.

The mood flits between solemn and rascally, and the pacing is measured: this is storytelling at a mosey rather than a trot.

The World’s End is a fitting end to the trilogy: it is by turns trashy, poignant and gut-bustingly funny, and often all three at once.

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.

A heady hybrid of comedy, polemic and period crime drama, it could have been scattergun stuff, and there are patches of preachy overkill. Much more often, though, there’s a rollicking drive and focus to it.

What gives the film its lip-smacking, chilli-pepper kick is that we are never entirely certain who is conning whom, or even if what we are watching has any truth to it at all.

The first full run-through of the crisis, in the White House Situation Room, is perhaps a little dry. But as things replay from various angles, the steady build-up of context effectively compounds the tension, and soon we’re every bit as lost as President Elba, desperately searching for clarity in a chain of events that necessarily precludes it.

The first film’s very specific pleasures are comprehensively encored.

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

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.

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

Where the film moves from compelling to revelatory is in its use of archive footage of Fox – from his films and shows, but also televised personal appearances – to reveal a join-the-dots picture of what was actually going on behind the hot-young-star facade.

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

Favreau’s film is a sincere and full-hearted adaptation that returns to Kipling for fresh inspiration, but also knows which elements of the animation are basically now gospel, and comes up with a respectful reconciliation of the two.

First Reformed doesn’t come off as pastiche, or a raking-up of old ideas – largely because Schrader and his cast commit to the project with sharpened and unblinking seriousness, even when the going gets mesmerically weird.

Hit Man trips along on great writing, Linklater’s witty, light-touch direction and a rich sense of place, but what makes it especially pleasurable is Powell and Arjona’s naturally steamy rapport.

On a first viewing, I wasn’t quite convinced by some of the glitchy japes Bonello deploys here and there . . . But perhaps he wants us to think of the film itself like its torn heroine: a strange machine whose ghost refuses to give up.

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 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.

It’s a chewy watch, heavy on the socio-political carbs, and its method can be a little exhausting. But its determination to do right by its subject – and Gitai’s own country too – is soberly compelling.

Think of Destroyer as film noir with the brightness turned up. Karyn Kusama’s Los Angeles-set thriller has the bleary, beer-dank air of an overlong house party at which the host has just snapped on the lights: fun’s done folks, now check out the mess.

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.

Frears’ film is all nostalgia and inertia – a tale ablaze with historical import and contemporary resonance, reduced to commemorative biscuit tin proportions.

Alpha Papa’s biggest laughs explode from moments of pure inconsequence.

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.

For all its seeming modesty, this is a mature, contemplative and mostly rewarding experiment: no awards-season bruiser, but a worthwhile B-side for Ashby’s venerable American classic.

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.

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.

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.

The brothers' mission is like a Spy vs. Spy strip crossed with a Friz Freleng Pink Panther cartoon.... It’s consistently funny, with the kind of well-orchestrated slapstick moments where you can actually feel the stick slap.

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.

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.

Once the initial thrill wears off, it’s a hollow kind of fun, which is almost certainly the point.

There are lightning-flashes of pure, ornamental brilliance throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, although there’s not much happening on the landscape they illuminate.

While there’s nothing here to remotely trouble young minds, there’s nothing much to stick in them either. For the most part, the film just seems to waft along, and though Charlie Brown's life is low-key by nature, the stories are mostly flimsily low-impact.

Farhadi’s screenplay does an artful job of keeping vital fragments of each of its characters secret until the very end. But the climate of over-determined melodrama is rather less involving: characters synopsise their grievances so often, and so thoroughly, that many pivotal scenes have the corny texture of a “previously, on last week’s show” clip reel.

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.

Sisters is entertaining as far as it goes, but it only occasionally feels like it’s going far enough.

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.

The film unquestionably dices with slightness. But you don’t leave the cinema feeling that something was missing, and Tomlin, who appears in every scene, constructs a persuasive and highly watchable character.

Eastwood doesn’t care about the legend. Instead, he shows us Kyle much as he saw his targets: with that strange combination of extreme intimacy and extreme remove that a long-range sight confers.

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.

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.

It’s here to burnish one performer’s legend while laying the foundations of another’s. But there’s still lots of fun to be had in its twisting, telescoping hall of mirrors.

Stripped back to basics, Saw’s appeal (if that’s the word) is certainly clearer than it’s been for a while; the series isn’t really horror at all, but a revenge thriller taken to deliberately appalling test-your-nerve extremes.

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

Wan’s film is a sturdily built supernatural chiller, with next-to-no digital effects or gore, and it delivers its scares with a breezy lack of urgency.

As supposedly taboo-smashing comedy, it’s never on full thrust, settling more for tentative gags with underwear firmly in place.

Joe represents a return to the independent-spirited storytelling that characterised Green’s early career.

It’s an odd sensation to watch a Fast & Furious film and find yourself wishing the special effects lived up to the writing, but – well, here we are.

You see San Francisco and Los Angeles falling apart very loudly and dangerously, and in great computer-generated detail. But there’s nothing memorable or beautiful about the carnage; no specific moments to replay in your head once the film is over.

The film defaults to gentle comedy too often, and feels afraid to dig deep enough into its underlying themes to draw blood.

There’s no question The Rewrite is underpinned by the same story mechanisms it draws attention to... But there are moments here when sunlight breaks through the shtick.

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 film moves like a pyjama case full of angry weasels, and finds ingenious ways to cram every scene with just one more loopy, disposable gag or slapstick thwack. It may not be the year’s best animated film, but it’s almost certainly the most.

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 role fits Farrow like a silk slip, but its kooky premise doesn’t quite shake up the by-now familiar narrative concerns.

What a relief, then, that this isn’t terrible – though to get the best out of it, you may wish to convince yourself that it’s going to be.

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.

You’ve seen almost everything here before, but never within the same film.

The film bears its real-world resonance as lightly as a button, thanks both to the steady supply of well-turned one-liners and the rippling chemistry between Nanjiani and a never-better Kazan, who’s so disarmingly funny here that I kept catching myself pulling puppy-dog faces whenever she was on screen.

For those of us old enough to have been terrorised the first time round, it delivers a nasty-but-nice-enough childhood flashback.

While the camaraderie of the Flossy Posse might be raucously imperfect, at least it’s real.

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

It is vivaciously, even triumphantly, OK. If there was an Oscar for Most Adequate Picture, we’d be gearing up for a sweep.

About Time is itself a film less directed than quilted: it’s a feathery old patchwork under which you might snuggle at the end of a tiring week.

While the film never shocks it almost always compels, and Breillat crafts some images that keep tingling in the mind long after they’ve faded from sight.

In order to be “clever” – scare-quotes extremely necessary – the film sweeps away all of its hard-earned smartness, and the previously gripping uncertainty around the exact nature of Marlo and Tully’s connection is tidied up in a way that feels jarringly cheap.

It’s absorbing and well-acted enough that at times you could almost forget you were being asked to emotionally invest in which company gets to slide its wares onto a rich young sportsman’s feet.

I’ve always enjoyed the idea of the Fast & Furious films more than their execution, but this feels like the series’ strongest, even though some of its action sequences are so muddled they can barely walk straight.

Pike and Oyelowo have a hearty, wholemeal chemistry together, and play their small moments with sincerity and a light elegance.

Only God Forgives is the spectacle of a brilliant young director spinning out in style. It’s a beautiful disaster.

The film’s scope is limited, but as far as it goes, All Is Lost is very good indeed: a neat idea, very nimbly executed.

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 new film Dog is essentially an hour and three quarters of Channing Tatum rolling around with a dog – and quite frankly, for many of us, that’s enough.

Sin City 2 glowers and sulks and is determined to show you the best bad time you’ve had in years. It’s neither high art nor noir, but it’s what a Sin City film should be.

The key to the film’s success, and the reason it often left me hooting with laughter, is Aniston, and her character’s struggle in vain to maintain her sweetheart persona.

Oddly bloodless, but thought-provoking in a discussion group kind of way, it’s less successful as a film than as an exercise, but at least it’s a worthwhile one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

His recollections are as sobering as his images, and a great many of both will embed themselves in your head.

Director Camille Delamarre and Luc Besson, who co-wrote the screenplay, relocate the story to Detroit and tone down some of its (admittedly broad) social satire — although the Parkour remains centre-stage, and is mostly hair-raising.

The Miracle Club’s own manoeuvrings can, at times, feel a bit pat and convenient. But its final moment of reconciliation – Smith and Linney back home by the shore, having pruned back 40 years of emotional overgrowth – justifies the trip.

The plotting meanders its way to the very brink of incoherence, but as the scenes tick past, the vague sense of a many-tendrilled mystery being solved does gradually descend.

This is a fascinating and outrageous next step for Escalante, with a strong central concept and some oozily plausible special effects. It’s just a pity that its human side doesn’t measure up to its inhuman one.

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.

Even when the heist gets underway, the film takes its time about everything: what Zahler has essentially done is put a 15-minute mid-blockbuster set-piece on the rack and stretched it out until its cartilage pops. The duration is part of the point – you can’t do gnawing fatalism in a hurry – but the repetitions and languors here can feel presumptuous.

The whole package is still charming on its own cosy terms – the film equivalent of a loveable old hound that fetches your favourite slippers, rolls over for a tickle, curls up on your feet, contentedly passes wind, then nods off.

The film’s tendency to go broad wherever possible renders it fairly un-scary, while in place of Get Out’s deep and needling cultural allegory we instead get pointed jabs at American film and television trends. It’s all good fun as far as it goes, but Story and his cast could have afforded to sharpen their own blades a bit.

The whole thing is out-and-out tinsel-dunked tat, but oddly honourable with it – the Christmas spirit might be just a few steps up from bathtub grade, but it still packs a kick.

This pensive science-fiction three-hander, adapted by the Lion and Mary Magdalene director and Iain Reid from the latter’s 2018 novel, quickly settles into its solemn, elliptical groove – and then sticks to it so doggedly, it becomes a tonal rut from which the film increasingly struggles to escape.

Transformers has ambition and attitude in its pores, and spectacle to spare. Bay shoots cars like they’re women, and people like they’re cars, and tosses around metal like it’s made from thin air. The film wasn’t meant to make you think, but it does. For better or worse, it’s cinema.

It’s smart and watchable in a miniseries sort of way, and sets the current war in Ukraine in an instructive wider context – while Dano is ideally cast as the unreadable vizier serenely pulling strings behind the scenes. But it’s also overlong.

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.

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

The film has a scrappy optimism about it that’s often very winning, but it never draws itself up to its full height.

Since Servillo is too great an actor to settle for caricature, he undercuts his monstrous role with pangs of sympathy: the carousing has a late-life wistfulness, the breakdown of his marriage to his apparently still-beloved Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci) rings with genuine regret.

Of course it’s lightweight, bordering on disposable.... But it’s also genuinely warm-spirited, with three lovable central performances from Gadon, Powley and Reynor

The First Purge is as visually hair-raising as its predecessors, with the usual range of inventively horrible masks worn by the Purgers (the costume designer is Amela Baksic), and a brilliantly achieved transition from a hard-edged, social-realist visual style in the film’s opening act to the overtly John Carpenter-esque gloss and throb of Purge Night itself.

The fourth-wall-smashing is fun in a Ferris Bueller kind of way, but it’s never pulled off with the devious panache of Blazing Saddles, let alone Funny Games or Hellzapoppin’. Since it's this stuff, rather than the ongoing thud-thud-thud of bad language and gore, that feels mould-breaking, it’s a pity Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s screenplay doesn’t have the courage to experiment a little more.

Effectively the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup with a Cuban spin. It looks cheap, which is funny in itself, and satire and spoofery are crammed in until it bulges at the seams.

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.

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

Flawed but compelling ... [A] hallucinatory gimmick feels a few rewrites away from working smoothly, and the thematic linking of Philippa’s plight with that of her subject’s never quite convinces. But Hawkins is quietly impressive.

A slight but necessary palate-cleanser, as crisp and tangy-sweet as raspberry sorbet, and Dolan’s most conventional and accessible work to date.

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

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.

As a low-stress package tour of will-they-won’t-they romance highlights, it does the trick.

The Sheep Detectives is a profoundly odd viewing experience – entirely pleasant, lightly funny and easily absorbed, yet every so often you find yourself thinking hang on a minute, I am watching a flock of sheep investigate a murder, and feel like you are having a stroke.

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.

A searching, timely drama about the dehumanising effects of waging war at a distance.

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.

If 300’s human touch largely came down to Butler’s roaring and screaming, it’s left entirely to Green to goose the sequel into life. Happily she obliges.

In its present form – hyperactive, dopey, and hammered into shape like a Hollywood sitcom – it’s a passable school holiday jaunt.

Its star isn’t exactly overburdened with Hollywood charisma, and its various argumentative manoeuvres are pulled off with the grace of a reversing bin lorry. But it still politely seizes you by the lapels, makes its case with range and precision, and sends you home with a carbon-neutral fire in your chest.

It’s eye-opening, well acted and darkly entertaining.

This is bold and uncompromising stuff from Scott; a Biblical epic to shake your faith in the order of things, not reaffirm it.

Spider-Man: Far From Home offers a breezy, Europe-set intermezzo between Avengers: Endgame and whatever is coming next – a kind of sorbet in blockbuster form to punctuate the binge.

Even when the film feels like a circuitous, effortful mess, it’s often an intentional one – and for everything in the film that doesn’t quite connect, that element of self-portraiture, with the artist as sap, strikes a wistful chord.

An interesting film rather than an engrossing one, and it’s hard not to wish it was a little more energised by its subject’s enduringly transgressive spirit.

While the plot often has a trudgy, through-the-motions feel, the same can’t be said for the animation itself, especially in the musical interludes.

Mockingjay – Part 1 is all queue, no roller-coaster. The third of four films in the successful and admirable Hunger Games series is any number of good things: intense, stylish, topical, well-acted. But the one thing it could never be called is satisfying.

Nouvelle Vague stylishly captures and celebrates a certain approach to making cinema – reactive, incautious, free-range – but leaves you wishing there was a little more of it in the film you just saw.

To borrow a screenwriting buzz-phrase, "fun and games" is all you get, and the lack of meaningful connective tissue between the antics means the film begins to flag far earlier than it should.

The Lone Ranger is a grand folly that, in a sane world at least, would never have been made, although I’m really rather glad someone did.

This is an innovative, occasionally provocative, often frustrating film, but one whose perspectives on guilt and victimhood offer a new angle on a notorious case.

Willis himself could not appear less enthusiastic in the role, and doesn’t phone in his performance here so much as clip it to a nearby pigeon and hope for the best. Yet perversely, his apparent lack of interest works rather well: McClane, after all, is now a grizzled back-number who has bumbled his way into a younger man’s action movie.

While you can’t imagine the film ever making it to Cannes under anything other than its own steam, the jaunt proves to be a surprisingly worthwhile one.

You miss the lingering after-sting of catharsis that was a regular signature of Lumet’s work, but in the heat of the moment, Money Monster’s bluster and nerve keeps you hooked.

While it too often sands the complications off what you sense should feel like an uncomfortably splintery issue, in its best moments, it’s a quietly fearsome piece of drama.

The film is unquestionably a curio for converts rather than the meatier exploration it will leave many sceptics (including this one) hankering after, but it leaves you with plenty to chew on – along with that Satanic cadence echoing in your bones.

Like the original, T2 is happy enough spending time with its characters whatever they get up to. Very little that happens in the film seems to affect where it’s going, and the few things that do feel dashed off, almost as an afterthought. It’s also littered with callbacks to the first film – some as stirring as they are subtle, others exasperatingly cute.

The third Night at the Museum film starts strongly, with its heart in the past... It’s an exciting opening, and perhaps too exciting for the film’s own good. It’s hard not to be disappointed when the plot moves back to the present and settles into the time-honoured formula of digitised creatures running riot and famous people in fancy dress doing shtick.

Fanaticism – even in one so young and theoretically still savable – is a uniquely bad match for the brothers’ methods.

There are no depths to which The Meg won’t sink. But as trashy cinema goes, it all feels a little too well behaved.

The film passes the time with breezy good cheer and the odd well-wrangled cringe, but fades from memory in much the same way. There’s just nothing about this guy that gives you cause to remember him.

Age of Uprising falls awkwardly (but not altogether unappealingly) into the gap between art film and horse opera.

It is an outrageously ambitious and intermittently staggering piece of work, though it completely lacks the kind of discipline or focus that might have made its themes or images really stick.

Maoz’s control of tone is meticulous and his technique swaggeringly assured, making Foxtrot a film that works best in the spine-prickling moment.

Its fuse fizzes dutifully from A to B, but the dynamite never ignites.

A shade more playfulness would have gone a long way. This Orient Express clatters handsomely along, but I left the cinema wishing it had had the nerve to jump the rails.

Goosebumps 2 is a lively and colourful ghost train ride, with some well-judged scares that would have been at home in its 1980s Amblin forerunners, such as The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes.

Hawke expertly captures Baker’s angular fragility, both in his languidly crumpled face and his voice.

The film’s secret isn’t much of a secret at all. It just remembers why Neeson was such an oddly inspired choice for a grimy revenge thriller back in 2008 and does its best to repeat the trick.

Throughout the film [Escalante's] camera tends to be lurking in the middle distance; coolly observing everything that passes through its inquisitive frame, leaving the messy business of reaction to us.

It’s an engaging, sometimes touching, slightly narrow depiction of a great filmmaker in the winter of his career who’s intent on somehow recapturing the spring of it.

It's an accomplished disappointment: the zealous cast, surplus of attitude and sinewy set pieces never quite compensate for the thinly sketched characters, unfocused plot and general gnawing sense of potential not being met.

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 legend loses something in the retelling, but what’s new here is mostly worth the trip.

As cautionary tales go, The Front Runner is of an unusually cautious bent. It presents the evidence, then sits back and folds its arms.

Nothing about the plot or craft astounds, but the qualities above are all far rarer in studio movies these days than they should be, which makes The Amateur remarkable – in its own stonily workmanlike way.

Director Cave stages some nicely gripping scenes of suspense, toggling between camp and grit as nimbly as the swoony soundtrack, which occasionally cuts out for comic effect.

An enjoyably silly police thriller,

The film leaves you enlightened and disillusioned, but still furious at Armstrong, who seems to have drawn the conclusion that he is now a tragic hero.

It’s the Pixar film that has to remind its audience what a Pixar film is.

It’s tough stuff, though the skateboarding interludes, full of low-gliding camerawork and Jackass-like gallows camaraderie, go a long way towards leavening the gloom.

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.

Patriots Day is stirring, well-acted, moving and built with conviction and flair. But a film about such a senseless attack shouldn’t be scared, now and then, to make a little less sense.

The hardship of the trek is vividly and stomach-lurchingly portrayed, particularly when the storm sets in, but it never makes the crucial leap from the screen into your bones.

Unlike Walter Salles’s recent adaptation of On The Road, which embraced the Beat philosophy with a wide and credulous grin, Kill Your Darlings is inquisitive about the movement’s worth, and the genius of its characters is never assumed.

This is cinema as decathlon – a string of tribulations to sap your stamina and make your ligaments burn.

while every detail matters, they don’t all point towards a kick-yourself climactic revelation. All you have to do is climb aboard, keep checking your blind spots, and enjoy the rackety ride.

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

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.

Audiard’s expressionistic flourishes are in shorter supply here than usual, although the shootouts have a dreamlike quality, with pistols blasting showers of sparks like miniature steam train funnels.

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.

Woodley and Dern breathe a ghost into the machine. Willem Dafoe has fun, albeit not too much, in a brief, vital role as a creepy writer. Most crucially, the words that survived from Green’s novel did so for a reason.

You’re left wishing that Adler had focused more on the no-win moral tangle of the handler-informant relationship, and less of the mechanics of its execution.

We all know Smith can deliver barbs like blow-darts, but Parker’s screenplay gives her a too-rare chance to do something more – and when she delivers a bittersweet, profound monologue towards the end of the film, it feels like you’re watching a classic Ferrari reach the end of an average speed check zone and whistle off into the distance.

Think of it as a slightly self-nobbling version of Enchanted, the wondrous (and original) Disney blockbuster that both sent up and celebrated the Disney princess musical tradition in 2007.

Given his otherwise grim recent form, Allen himself may have simply got lucky with this one, but the charm and sparkle here are real.

In the end it amounts to not much, but in the moment I laughed a lot.

To describe Wonder Park as Paramount Animation's Inside Out would be significantly more of a stretch, but it gets to the heart of what this efficient Easter holidays time-passer is trying to do.

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

Sleekly enjoyable.

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.

It’s a brawny, inventive action romp that’s as happy firing rockets at helicopters as it is contemplating the Cartesian model of mind-body dualism, which gives it a satisfying, sweet-and-sour tang of its own.

It’s a watchable national identity crisis in microcosm.

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.

This is a fun piece of play-acting for as long as it lasts, but it never quite feels like much more. Things may become kinky in front of the lens, but you can sense Polanski lurking behind it throughout, always ready with his safe-word. Cut!

[Sachs'] subtle, often quite special film shows us a shared life as a series of impositions: sometimes we’re imposed upon, and sometimes we do the imposing, and love is the net result.

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

It’s hard to shake the suspicion that Depp is playing a type – almost as if he’s trying to replicate the kind of performance Nicholson might have given in the same role. You long for him to roll his sleeves up and grasp the character’s shape and soul himself, ideally without the aid of those distracting prosthetics.

For a series that has always torn through technical boundaries at speed but whose storytelling stays scrupulously between the lines, it’s business as usual to the last.

The scares are mostly very scary indeed, and that means the film does its job.

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.

Rather than do something freshly cinematic with Saint Laurent’s precise, elegant creations, the film is content to exhibit them.

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.

You can’t help but feel disappointed that a film with a relatively spicy premise becomes, in the end, so risk-averse.

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

The film feels like a personal project for Portman, but thankfully never a vanity one. It’s a fine piece of work – and you sense there’s better to come.

It’s an absorbing but disappointingly tasteful watch.

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

The tone is almost identical to the Horrible Histories television series, albeit very slightly fruitier, with jokes that should play just as well to intelligent children and immature adults.

The short and salty-sweet Destination Wedding is less of a conventional romantic comedy than it is a high-concept chemistry experiment.

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

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

When the film gets going, it’s hard not to be bustled along with it, thanks mostly to León de Aranoa’s talent for punchy comic dialogue – doubly impressive, given this is his first English-language picture – and the plot’s habit of thwarting your expectations as to where the most morally upstanding course of action might lead.

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.

The action sequences here are armrest-gripping fun, and you only wish DeBlois and his animators had been even more confident; held their shots even longer; allowed us to enjoy the whistle of the wind and the curve of the dragons’ flight paths without hurriedly cutting away to another angle, and another, and another. When the film flies, it soars.

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 action sequences are executed with rhythm and punch, and our heroine swoops and swirls around like Iron Man in a sheath dress. Maleficent may be short on true enchantment, but until we find a superhero who can pull off a black silk cocktail gown in battle, she’s very welcome.

As metaphors for life go, wine has a very high yield, and Gilles Legrand’s sensitive screenplay tramples out every last drop of juice.

Lilo & Stitch has been tamed into one of those naughty-pet family comedies that used to roll off studio production lines with thud-thudding regularity, until the form fell out of fashion somewhere around 1994.

Amalric transcends mere dishevelment here: in some scenes which flash back to the start of his relationship with Sylvia, the former Bond villain looks like a pile of leaves with a coat thrown on top. [Cannes Version]

Its conclusions rarely make your head spin, but it meticulously shows its working out. (If it was an exam paper, it’d be impossible to dock it any marks.)

Tonally the film is all over the rink, but it leaves you more convinced and entertained than you’d expect.

A large portion of Star Trek’s audience may well be satisfied by a film that amounts to not much more than an incredibly pretty and sporadically funny in-joke. But think back to the corny romance of that original mission statement, recited by William Shatner on many a rainy school night. Strange new worlds. New life. New civilisations. Boldly going where no man has gone before. That pioneer spirit? It’s gone.

Everything is adequate might not have the same ring to it, but it would make a fitting jingle for The Lego Movie 2.

It’s a welcome surprise: sharper and funnier than its doom-laden predecessor, with a fantasy setting immersive enough to distract from the narrative’s various chips and cracks.

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

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 something glib, and occasionally maddening, about the film’s use of loveable fauna in peril to sentimentalise and sweeten what is, after all, an account of real human bravery in the face of an endlessly horrifying historical event.

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

That tension niggles away within The Highwaymen, a sporadically stodgy, dour production which often seems painfully aware that the really fun stuff is happening out of shot. But then Costner and Harrelson get to talking, the light lands on their features just so, and the film casts its own curmudgeonly spell.

This is Penna’s debut feature, and he has set himself a high bar which he just about scrapes over, with Mikkelsen giving the entire project a super-strength leg up.