Robbie Collin

It is like watching British cinema undergo a deathbed hallucination.

Dramatic things keep happening in the love lives of its two central couples, yet handily for Gen-Z viewers who like their protagonists morally spotless, none is responsible for any of it. It sometimes feels as if you’re watching a couple of hours of incredibly bad luck.

While a late twist may potentially dismay, it also allows Mackenzie to raise the stakes in a battle of wits whose participants previously felt more like opponents than foes. It gets personal – nasty, even – and this ice-cool throwback suddenly bursts into flames.

This wintry tale of art blooming in adversity is far from a schematic feel-good jaunt. . . it’s an anthem for doomed youth in a familiar Bennett key: wry, melancholic, sneakily profound.

Nothing about it should work as a film, yet almost everything does.

It’s perhaps Wright’s first feature to feel, in a positive way, like the work of a director for hire: every flourish and trick here isn’t in service of a singular creative vision so much as a great, rumbling excitement machine.

Human moments are few, and overwhelmingly feature Christy’s fellow fighter Lisa Holewyne, a rival-turned-rock tenderly played by Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian. The relationship between Sweeney and O’Brian might be the gentlest, most unassuming part of the film – but it’s what stays with you.

If you don’t actually want to make a film out of a Roald Dahl book, this critic’s advice is: don’t.

What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration.

It all pays off elegantly when Blanc delivers his grand summing-up, a sequence which in vintage Knives Out fashion playfully subverts the cliché – but not too briskly to break it and spoil the fun.

A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.

Its two central performances pair perfectly. Bean is subtle, reactive, intuitive, funny – he, too, is on terrific form – while Day-Lewis is every bit the marvel you remember: every gesture, every glance, every twinkle comes freighted with wiry intention. You could watch these two go at it for hours, which for the most part is what Anemone offers, with two indestructible Day-Lewis monologues to serve as dramatic bookends.

This madcap urban warfare thriller has heists, showdowns and two of the best car chases in years.

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.

There’s a subtle, astute parable here about the media’s role in the shaping and streamlining of public morality – happily wrapped in a romp.

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 Smashing Machine is a crunchily satisfying fight movie that innovates subtly.

The free-range majesty and fine-grained, muddy-fingernailed detail of Fastvold’s film, though, is entirely its own thing: like Ann, I was left wobbly and breathless by its grandeur and nerve.

Over two and a half hours, the pop-gothic intensity can get a little much – at times I felt like a fire extinguisher was going off in my face – but you wouldn’t necessarily want to lose any of it.

It’s tense, absurd, desperate and daft, all at once: seldom have so many contradictory tones been so gainfully employed.

It’s a film that prowls around with blood in its nostrils, watching us as intently as we watch it, and waiting for just the right moment to strike.

As a filmmaker, Baumbach is sharp enough to call out the clichés of his trade, but also generous enough to put them to good use anyway.

Stone and Plemons prove ideal co-conspirators, with carefully balanced performances that have them taking turns as hero and villain without ever quite annihilating our sympathies or winning them outright.

Perhaps La Grazia is enjoyed best as a more optimistic B-side to either Il Divo or Loro, Sorrentino’s lewd and scurrilous biopics of the former Italian prime ministers Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi – both of which, incidentally, were also played by Servillo. But I know which ones I’d rather put on for fun.

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.

As an occasional source of broad and undemanding chuckles, the film doubtless serves its purpose. But the mystery itself unfolds with such plodding expediency that there’s little suspense to speak of.

With a fresh joke in almost every line of the script, even if only one in five worked, you’d still be laughing more or less continuously through to the credits – and for me, at least, the hit rate was often considerably higher than that.

There’s no bold genre reinvention afoot in this reboot, and its thwart-the-baddies plot remains bound to familiar equations, though at least now the equations actually balance.