Robbie Collin

It’s summer-holiday eye candy with a sherbetty experimental fizz.

Interstellar is Nolan’s best and most brazenly ambitious film to date.

Scrapper rummages around with style. It puts bubbles in the kitchen sink.

It’s a nocturnal fantasy, seductive and ablaze with threat.

Its generation-spanning story has serious power, and, in its masterful opening chapter and final sequence, brushes against greatness.

Nothing here looks like a genuine interaction between real human beings: Spacey may be the first actor to give a comedic performance in which his own smile looks like it had to be green-screened in at a later date.

The problem isn’t that this unusual combination of genres doesn’t click. It’s that the jokes are so stale, the performances so broad, and the plot so greased up with improbable short cuts, that Audrey’s journey feels less like a voyage of self-discovery than a coach tour of the form’s dustiest landmarks.

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

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.

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.

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.

Its control of tone can be a little uncertain, particularly during the ambitious epilogue – and I wish it had allowed itself a little more freakiness in its most savage moments. But at its best, it could be Bergerac reimagined by Nicolas Roeg, with its tangled character psychologies and great shudders of dread that seem to ring through the soil underfoot.

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

The greatest trick this studio wants to pull, at this point, is to make more of the same feel either exhilaratingly fresh, or sufficiently retro-inflected to qualify as a nostalgia trip. As both, Thor: Ragnarok counts as some kind of double peak.

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.

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

Every frame has been composed with cerebral coolness, and the hotel and its surrounding forests are shot with a dream-like lucidity. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before, and I’m still not sure that I have even now. This is the kind of film you have to go back to and check it really happened.

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.

Kore-eda has crafted a piercing, tender poem about the bittersweet ebb and flow of paternal love, and his status as Ozu's heir becomes ever more assured.

First-time writer-director Chloe Domont beats a sly, perceptive path across this tricky psychological turf.

Put simply, you care about the Katwe kids because he does, and in the same way, too – not with high-strung melodramatic concern, but a warm glow of empathy in your gut. That’s stoked up in part by the film’s keen eye for telling, truthful-feeling detail.

Wheatley’s extraordinary film shakes you back and forth with a rare ferocity, but the net result is stillness.

Director Chris Smith builds the film around Ridgeley’s mother’s scrapbooks of photographs and memorabilia – and perhaps partly because of that, it ends up feeling like little more than a leaf through the milestones. It’s been made for the fans, but they’ll know every last detail already: it’s pop history as singalong.

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

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

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

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.

When absurdism feels this wrong, you know it’s being done right.