Robbie Collin

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The Telegraph
For 1,122 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Robbie Collin's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Sentimental Value
Lowest review score: 0 Christmas Karma
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 601 out of 1122
  2. Mixed: 424 out of 1122
  3. Negative: 97 out of 1122
1122 movie reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Ad Astra
    Emotionally, the film operates in a classic Gray area, with barely perceptible eddies that build to a mighty existential wrench. All of which, it should be said, rests on Pitt’s shoulders – which feel like very different shoulders, somehow, to the ones that slouched so appealingly through Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. His performance here is as grippingly inward and tamped down as his work for Tarantino was witty and expansive – it’s true movie stardom, and it fills a star-system-sized canvas.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Marriage Story
    Marriage Story may often resemble a tug of war between its stars, but it’s on both of their sides.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Truth
    The film defaults to gentle comedy too often, and feels afraid to dig deep enough into its underlying themes to draw blood.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    J.T. Leroy
    As a masterclass in having as little fun as possible with an irresistible premise, JT LeRoy is a hard act to beat.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Dora and the Lost City of Gold
    Dora and the Lost City of Gold has contraptions to spare – falling platforms, lava pits, a water slide that pays homage to The Goonies – but its storytelling is commendably lean and faff-free. In the depths of summer break boredom, it’s a treasure horde of fun.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Playmobil: The Movie
    No child deserves to be subjected to this kind of blaringly witless branding bombardment; as for adults, I felt like I was being beaten around the head with the Argos catalogue.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    The Art of Racing in the Rain
    The result is a film with the depth and decorative value of an inspirational fridge magnet – yet there is a certain degree of fun to be had in hearing Costner monologuing about tapeworm and then picturing him in the voiceover booth, possibly with his head in his hands.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Varda by Agnès
    Varda by Agnès is unquestionably one for the fans ... But this film also serves as a tantalising crash-course for newcomers.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Lion King
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    In Fabric
    As In Fabric transitions from one plot to the next, it is as if the film itself is nodding off, in order to reach a conclusion a conscious mind could never have found. The effect is wholly and deliberately bewildering, both in the moment and for days and nights afterwards.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Spider-Man: Far from Home
    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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Child's Play
    For those of us old enough to have been terrorised the first time round, it delivers a nasty-but-nice-enough childhood flashback.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Toy Story 4
    Toy Story 4 reaffirms that Pixar, at their best, are like no other animation studio around.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Dark Phoenix
    Superheroes do progressive politics these days as a matter of course, and here it just feels like shtick – a box to be dutifully checked, rather than a theme to be meaningfully explored.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Lighthouse
    Everything about The Lighthouse lands with a crash. It’s cinema to make your head and soul ring.
    • 10 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
    In short, it’s a bum trip and then some. Kechiche has always been an admirer of the female posterior, but here he shifts styles into what could be called gluteus maximalism, filling the screen with frantically gyrating hindquarters for literal hours on end.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Zombi Child
    Zombi Child is the kind of lithe and lucid dream that gets its tendrils round your brain stem, so that when all hell finally breaks loose, you can’t jolt yourself awake from its grip.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Matthias & Maxime
    A slight but necessary palate-cleanser, as crisp and tangy-sweet as raspberry sorbet, and Dolan’s most conventional and accessible work to date.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Parasite
    A raucous and blood-splattered social satire.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    There’s a gleeful toxicity here that will launch a thousand think-pieces – Pitt’s character is capital-P problematic, absolutely by design – but the transgressive thrill is undeniable, and the artistry mesmerisingly assured.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Young Ahmed
    Fanaticism – even in one so young and theoretically still savable – is a uniquely bad match for the brothers’ methods.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Rocketman
    Not only does Egerton have Elton’s look and mannerisms down to an uncanny degree, he also musters up enough of his subject’s signature showmanship to give a performance that’s joyously at peace with its own preposterousness.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Dead Don't Die
    This is a winningly eccentric film, as attuned in its own way to the rhythms of ordinary life as Jarmusch and Driver’s (even better) 2016 feature Paterson. But there is a pessimism gnawing away in its gut that can’t be laughed off.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Souvenir
    In tackling a story that is presumably, and perhaps painfully, close to home, [Hogg] has made her farthest-reaching film yet.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Destination Wedding
    The short and salty-sweet Destination Wedding is less of a conventional romantic comedy than it is a high-concept chemistry experiment.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Hustle
    The switch from male to female leads has been done with so little apparent regard for how it might actually affect the plot that entire tracts of the film, including its finale, now land like poorly tossed pancakes.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    It's by no means the Pokémon film anyone would have asked for, but it’s one I’m delighted exists.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Yesterday
    The film has lots of fun with its premise – until America beckons, then suddenly it seems to lose its head of steam. ... Yet it rallies in style for a beautifully judged and surprisingly moving finale.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
    The much-vaunted fresh perspective on a notorious figure turns out to have been so much sweet talk.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Tolkien
    Well-informed, enlightening writing on Tolkien’s life and creative process is hardly scarce. But his genius stems from his scholarship, which doesn’t obviously lend itself to cinema, even with Derek Jacobi on hand as a professor-cum-mentor fruitily declaiming in Gothic as he potters around the quad.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Avengers: Endgame
    An alternative title for this one might have been Avengers: Encore, since the film knows its entire audience has been here for the long run – even beside Infinity War, Endgame would be completely impenetrable to a novice. Think of it as a kind of victory lap, in which a decade-plus of painstaking team assembly is re-run at top speed, then paid off with thermonuclear dazzle and force.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Loro
    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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Mid90s
    After its slight 85 minutes had passed, I wasn’t immediately sure how much of it had mattered. It was a lovely, strangely reassuring feeling.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Hellboy
    While the del Toro Hellboys were postmodern Frankenstein fables, shining with pathos, fun and fairy-tale allure, this unsolicited reboot is ugly, obnoxious and yowlingly witless, with nothing to say for itself that doesn’t start with the letter F.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Wonder Park
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Highwaymen
    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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Out of Blue
    Unfortunately, its odd mix of hard-boiled noir and cod-metaphysical waffle comes together in a way that defies you to take any of it seriously.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Dumbo
    The problem with this latest entry in Disney’s ever-expanding range of recycled classics isn’t that it hews too close to the studio’s original animated masterpiece, but that its many departures only muddle the original’s nursery-rhyme simplicity and neuter its famous sustained emotional wallop.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Shazam!
    Casting is a strong suit here, and even the incidental characters are distinctive and precise.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Minding the Gap
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Us
    It is unquestionably Nyong’o’s film, and the 12 Years a Slave actress gives a nerve-flaying double performance. As Adelaide, every facial expression seems to embody an emotion in its purest, uncut form, while her evil double has a twisting, buckling physicality that comes close to avant-garde butoh dance.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Ben Is Back
    The whole is rather less than its constituent parts – which didn’t really fit together in the first place.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Fisherman's Friends
    Even in the realm of scrappy British underdog comedy, there is a clear line between endearingly ramshackle and downright slipshod. Fisherman’s Friends blithely crosses it, never to return, from the moment it chugs out of port.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    What Men Want
    Henson is a natural at this kind of broad comedy, and throws herself into the goofy-cringe set-pieces with enough energy to elicit giggles, if not outright guffaws. The result rarely looks like something anyone might want, male or otherwise, but it passes the time, just about.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Captain Marvel
    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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Fighting with My Family
    For a film that spends so much time with its thighs around other people’s throats, it has a surprisingly delicate touch.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Foxtrot
    Maoz’s control of tone is meticulous and his technique swaggeringly assured, making Foxtrot a film that works best in the spine-prickling moment.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    One Cut of the Dead
    In its own ingenious way, One Cut of the Dead cleaves true to the most important zombie rule of all: survival has always been a team effort.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    Everything is adequate might not have the same ring to it, but it would make a fitting jingle for The Lego Movie 2.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Vice
    It is a head-spinning shock-and-awe satire that comes in hot then cranks up the thermostat to infernal – a Molotov cocktail of biopic, documentary and black comedy, with a thrillingly short fuse.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Destroyer
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Front Runner
    As cautionary tales go, The Front Runner is of an unusually cautious bent. It presents the evidence, then sits back and folds its arms.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Welcome To Marwen
    The film is such a crackpot tangle that it is even hard to fathom what a successful version might have looked like.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Mary Poppins Returns
    For the most part, Rob Marshall’s film hews painstakingly close to the original in style and structure. But it comes to life thanks to its own consummate artistry and rafter-rattling gusto – watching it feels like reliving a classic, rather than merely retreading it.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Aquaman
    For all its sporadic wackiness and wonder, on balance Aquaman still comes out a bore. But they’ve given it a heroic shake.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Bumblebee
    As a toy-advert movie full of artistry and heart, it’s as slyly progressive as it is shamelessly nostalgic.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Mirai
    Mirai bathes ordinary family life in a beautiful new light.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Mary Queen of Scots
    The film is led by a performance of thrilling regality and nuance from Saoirse Ronan as Mary.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Christmas Chronicles
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    Telling an audience this stuff is important is one thing: making them actually feel that it is is the magical part, and Grindelwald bungles the trick.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Outlaw King
    This is an exultantly old-school blood-and-thunder retelling of the rise of Robert the Bruce.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Grinch
    If the very best animation feels like nourishment for the soul, think of this adaptation of the beloved Dr Seuss tale as the spiritual equivalent of a double helping of chocolate-flavoured breakfast cereal: not exactly clean eating, but packing an irresistible sugary kick.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    They Shall Not Grow Old
    By applying cutting-edge restoration techniques to footage shot at the time, Jackson has crafted an historical portrait of matchless immediacy and power, in which young souls lost in a century-old war stare out across the years and meet our gaze.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Stan & Ollie
    It is eccentric, sad and stirring to the core. Oh yes – and incredibly funny, too.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Hunter Killer
    The pacing seems intentionally designed to break your spirits, with a climactic set-piece that rages on forever, despite being comprised of nothing but shouting and torpedos. It makes Crimson Tide looks like a masterclass in international relations.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    Too hectic to be scary, and with a plot that’s regularly bogged down in optimistic franchise-building spadework, The House with a Clock in Its Walls never quite grasps what made its inspirations tick.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    The Predator
    While the Black magic of old was a great fit for Iron Man 3 – the writer-director’s last venture into franchise territory – it turns The Predator into a shrill, murky, retrograde bore, whose handful of punchy ideas get lost in the cracks of its terminally haywire plot.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Charlie Says
    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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    22 July
    It is less a true-life thriller than a kind of justice procedural – and a sharp, scouring work of moral seriousness from Greengrass.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Vox Lux
    All-pervasive millennial unease – the sense the world no longer works as it used to, or should – is Vox Lux’s plangent root-position chord, and the film offers no easy cure – beyond Celeste’s genuinely great, and Gaga-like, music.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Dragged Across Concrete
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Sisters Brothers
    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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Suspiria
    Dispassionate engagement won't fly here. You either stagger out early or plunge in up to your elbows.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Peterloo
    There is a danger of filing Peterloo away as an “important film” – but it is also a complex, rousing and rewarding one for anyone prepared to meet it on its own unapologetically ambitious terms.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    Half-fish, half-fowl and altogether inspired, it is a dazzling mosey through the creeks and canyons of the Coenesque, whose scattershot format and by turns bizarre and macabre sense of humour belies a formal ingenuity and surgical control of tone that keeps the viewer perpetually off-guard.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    A Star Is Born
    The story of A Star Is Born may be as old as show-business, but it is also electrifyingly fresh – a well-known melody given vivid, searching new force.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Other Side of the Wind
    Its relentless, almost hallucinogenic craziness makes it a hard film to engage with, and the viewer drop-off rate when it launches on Netflix later this year will undoubtedly be steep. But as a mad satire of movie-world tumult, and a furious love letter to the business that made and unmade its maker, it could scarcely be improved.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Favourite
    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?”
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Roma
    Every individual scene feels filled with the lucid detail of a formative recollection or a recurring dream.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    First Man
    Chazelle has always specialised in virtuoso endings, and his sure hand and sharp eye brings this ambitious character study smoothly into land.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Damascus Cover
    Despite the clumsy writing and production design, Thirlby and Hurt acquit themselves perfectly well, and Jürgen Prochnow makes an enjoyably ripe appearance as a former Nazi who unwittingly helps direct Ari towards his target.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    Teen Titans Go! To The Movies may be unflaggingly daft, but outright silliness is rarely this smart.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Meg
    There are no depths to which The Meg won’t sink. But as trashy cinema goes, it all feels a little too well behaved.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    The first film’s very specific pleasures are comprehensively encored.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    As music documentaries go, it’s one of the quietest you’ll see – but it’ll be ringing in my soul for a long while yet.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The First Purge
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    Perhaps a Sicario series would make sense after this, though part of me wants to keep this story for cinema: if the market wants franchises, let’s have more like this, please.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Hereditary
    This is categorically not a film that will be universally admired – but even as it cleaves to old formulas, it transports your mind to new terrain that feels genuinely and frighteningly hostile, and leaves you with plenty of mental souvenirs by which to remember the trip.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    The film staples together two snazzy-sounding ideas – an ecologically inclined disaster movie with dinosaurs, and, later, dinosaurs on the loose inside a stately home – without considering whether the end product’s sheer snarling hideousness might just prove an intelligence-insulting turn-off.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Sorry Angel
    Though the film resists easy categorisation, it often tumbles along like queer screwball, which chimes with its original French title: Plaire, Aimer et Courir Vite, or Give Pleasure, Love and Run Fast. It’s a fine manifesto, and Honoré’s film excels at all three.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Shoplifters
    Shoplifters is compassionate, socially conscious filmmaking with a piercing intelligence that is pure Kore-eda. This is a film that steals in and snatches your heart.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Capernaum
    A social-realist blockbuster – fired by furious compassion and teeming with sorrow, yet strewn with diamond-shards of beauty, wit and hope.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Dogman
    Dogman unfolds its relatively straightforward story with both thrilling style and serious moral force: it’s a sensation judged on either bark or bite.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Wild Pear Tree
    Ceylan expertly draws your eye and ear to the drama behind the drama, and gives the most gently naturalistic scenes the weight and grain of visions. The word visionary has been flogged by the film business to the point of redundancy, but with The Wild Pear Tree, Ceylan reminds us he has earned every letter of it.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    The House That Jack Built
    It is two and a half hours of self-reflexive torture porn with an entire McDonald’s warehouse of chips on its shoulder, and a handful of genuinely provocative ideas which, exasperatingly, go nowhere much.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Solo dutifully fills in key moments from Han’s backstory.... But it also expands and enriches the Star Wars galaxy with thrilling new texture and detail – Solo might be a fun adventure, but it’s a dream come true for cosplayers, and features an even-more-extraordinary-than-usual new range of costumes and knick-knacks to goggle at.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    BlacKkKlansman
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Arctic
    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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Climax
    Noé has created a churning, repellent, wildly sexy tanztheaterwerk of pure Boschian decadence and derangement. It’s nice to have him back.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Mandy
    Mandy exists in its own supremely unnerving horror dimension.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Get the Gringo
    Gibson wisecracks with a weary panache, and the tech credits are sharp: production designer Bernardo Trujillo and director of photography Benoît Debie make El Pueblito look almost as disreputable as their leading man’s pebbledashed phizog.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Red Sparrow
    The question of where Dominika’s true loyalties lie isn’t nearly as ambiguous as the film seems to think, while the question of the mole’s identity becomes a footling side concern as the film ties itself up in Lawrence and Edgerton’s is-it-for-real-or-isn’t-it flirtations.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Square
    Östlund’s film is a sleek rejoinder to Christian’s disastrous PR team, who believe cutting through the noise of modern life requires short, sharp shocks. The Square shows that slow burn, when it’s kindled just right, has a cumulative heat that makes you wilt in your seat.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Peter Rabbit
    Gleeson and Byrne actually make for an appealing double act, and their scenes together are fun enough to make you wish that Gluck had ditched the digital animals and made an all-human countryside screwball instead.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Mary Magdalene
    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.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Watching del Toro’s film felt like playing with toys as big as skyscrapers, but everything about this successor feels trinket-sized.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
    It is a confection in every sense, but plump with natural sweetness.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Beast
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Tully
    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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Mary and The Witch's Flower
    This art-form has long been thought to have reached its twilight years, but Yonebayashi’s film brims over with the bounce and spark of childhood.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    7 Days in Entebbe
    The film’s determination to remain politically even-handed robs much of the drama of any sense of urgency or purpose.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Everybody Knows
    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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Journeyman
    Considine resists the usual narrative urges to bring down any kind of judgement or redemption, or to “make sense” of Matty’s story beyond the sense he himself can make of it. The film is not looking for a scapegoat. It just lets its characters live.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Titan
    It’s an entirely calamitous turkey, riddled with plot holes and bewilderingly miscast, which steals ideas from films as diverse as The Fly, Avatar, Soylent Green and Prometheus before fumbling every last one of them, and looks as if it was shot in a show home for £99.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    Truth or Dare is the kind of film that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but its initially appealing premise – what if a demon possessed a drinking game? – quickly falls to pieces under its own self-generated confusions.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Rampage
    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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Sweet Country
    Sweet Country is tough, spare and lyrical right down to the bone.... It is also a work of moral conscience that rules out easy answers, with acridly funny moments of black comedy and a sense of awesome natural spectacle that is inseparable from its dramatic impact. It has a power that makes the cinema shake.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Devil and Father Amorth
    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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Ready Player One
    Once the initial thrill wears off, it’s a hollow kind of fun, which is almost certainly the point.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Fullmetal Alchemist
    It all feels grindingly perfunctory – gloopy with jargon and lore, and with no concessions made to newcomers, the film feels less like a worthwhile film in its own right than an invitation to existing fans to buy a ticket, just to see how things turned out.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Fifty Shades Freed
    This is a film in which one of the more emotionally detailed performances is given by a product-placement Audi.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Black Panther
    As with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or Coogler’s 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed, Black Panther isn’t a novelty, but a fresh perspective on a well-worn format. Not to get all Rosa Parks about it, but the film walks into the multiplex like it’s insane that it hasn’t been allowed in there all along. And it is.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Last Flag Flying
    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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Early Man
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Brad's Status
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    In its present form – hyperactive, dopey, and hammered into shape like a Hollywood sitcom – it’s a passable school holiday jaunt.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    The Greatest Showman
    But the only sense of wonder the film instils is this: if we have to wait so long between movie musicals, who on earth thought it would be a good idea to wait for this one?
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    All the Money in the World
    As ever with Scott, the film unfolds in a richly realised world and moves with an addictive, free-wheeling swagger. And his four main actors – Williams, Wahlberg and the Plummers old and young – have all been astutely cast.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    It’s less Star Wars as you’ve never seen it than Star Wars as you’ve never felt it.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Phantom Thread
    The odd scenarios keep coming, fast and thick. Phantom Thread is built along the theoretically familiar lines of gothic romance – if you had to pick a predecessor, it would probably be Hitchcock’s Rebecca – but it’s very hard in the moment to work out where on earth it’s going, or even how conventionally romantic Reynolds and Alma’s relationship actually is.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Post
    Shot and edited by Spielberg and his team in less than six months, The Post is very evidently a strike-while-the-story’s-hot kind of project, and it finds the master filmmaker at his most thrillingly supple and intuitive.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
    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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Justice League
    It feels like a sheepish feature-length retraction of the franchise to date. It’s consistently embarrassing to watch, and features plot holes so yawningly vast they have a kind of Grand Canyon-like splendour: part of you wants to hang around to see what they look like at sunset.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Murder on the Orient Express
    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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Call Me by Your Name
    Stuhlbarg, who’s a treasure throughout, gets a fatherly monologue towards the film’s end that’s so observantly and tenderly performed, you can barely catch your breath. It’s one beautiful moment in a film that’s filled with them – gone in a heartbeat, but leaving the kind of ripples that reach across a lifetime.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Geostorm
    Geostorm’s disasters are just barrages of drab, anonymous digi-porridge, with a very occasional unhinged flourish thrown in, such as a stadium that’s struck by lightning and immediately explodes.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Thor: Ragnarok
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Blade Runner 2049
    That Blade Runner 2049 is a more than worthy sequel to Scott’s first film means it crosses the highest bar anyone could have reasonably set for it, and it distinguishes Villeneuve – who’s masterminded all of this, somehow, since making Arrival – as the most exciting filmmaker working at his level today.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    This crazily overlong and tiresome follow-up...doesn’t seem to have the first idea what to do with itself – not least when it comes to its much-vaunted all-star cast, the majority of whom are barely even in it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Our Souls at Night
    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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Leisure Seeker
    The canon of Alzheimer’s films doesn’t lack for performances piled up with compassion and fine-grained observation, from Iris all the way to Still Alice. But as their faded Winnebago wends its way to the coast, Ella and John show there’s room for two more.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Victoria and Abdul
    Frears’ film is all nostalgia and inertia – a tale ablaze with historical import and contemporary resonance, reduced to commemorative biscuit tin proportions.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Villainess
    Scrambling to keep up is part of the fun, but nowhere near as much fun as the parts where the film settles on a good idea for a set-piece and just gallops with it.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    American Assassin
    American Assassin seems to have a certain target audience in mind, and it’s probably not one you’d want to be considered a part of.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    It all makes for soaringly satisfying viewing, yet the satisfaction comes from blistering performances and virtuosic screenwriting, and absolutely nothing else.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Human Flow
    Human Flow makes a virtue of its vastness, creating an epic tapestry of souls that stretch from as far away as Syria, Kenya and Burma to the Calais ‘Jungle’ encampment on Britain’s doorstep.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    mother!
    A sick joke, an urgent warning and a roar into the abyss, Mother! earns its exclamation mark three times over and more.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Suburbicon
    It’s a hectic, sour and muddled film – a flailing counterfeit of satire that keeps slipping on its own banana skin supply, and never remotely gets to grips with what it thinks it’s sending up.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Shape of Water
    Like the best bath you’ve ever had, it sends tingles coursing through every part of you that other films don’t reach.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Downsizing
    “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” Dr. Seuss once memorably counselled – and that’s as good a binding philosophy as any for Alexander Payne’s exhilaratingly odd new film.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    Substance-wise, there might be enough going on here to sustain a five-minute short.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    A Ghost Story
    It exists in an eerie cinematic in-between, and is completely unlike anything else you’ll see this year.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Hitman's Bodyguard
    The Hitman’s Bodyguard simply doesn’t put in the effort, with the result that almost every aspect of the film proves wildly irritating, from its central odd couple to the dubious green-screen work that regularly has them pulling nonchalant faces in front of exploding buildings.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Detroit
    Once the significant shock of the film fades, what stays with you are its implications – the way it shows division digging in and self-perpetuating like cancer in bone, with each flare-up making the next more grimly probable. This is history retold in the blistering present tense.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Girls Trip
    While the camaraderie of the Flossy Posse might be raucously imperfect, at least it’s real.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Big Sick
    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.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Wish Upon
    Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here.... But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Emoji Movie
    As dismal to contemplate as it is persistently horrendous to even look at, there aren’t enough Patrick Stewart-voiced emojis in the world to express what an ugly, artless exercise this is.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    Valerian is a film to wallow in, not follow, and if you’re tuned to its extra-terrestrial wavelength, you wouldn’t cut a second.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Maudie
    Art was a labour of love for Maud Lewis: that much Lewis’s film makes clear. But by zeroing in on both the love and labour of it, the art itself – and the point of Maud’s life story, by extension – gets exasperatingly short shrift.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Dunkirk
    Christopher Nolan’s astonishing new film...is a work of heart-hammering intensity and grandeur that demands to be seen on the best and biggest screen within reach. But its spectacle doesn’t stop at the recreations of Second World War combat. Like all great war films, it’s every bit as transfixing up close.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Spider-Man: Homecoming
    A little of the new Spider-Man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade, spun off from an initially intriguing premise that deflates around you with a low whine as you watch, like a punctured bouncy castle.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Endless Poetry
    Endless Poetry may not quite live up to its interminable billing, but there’s certainly lots of it, and a little goes a long way indeed. But a long way is the distance Jodorowsky wants to take you.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    A Good Day to Die Hard
    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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Despicable Me 3
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    War for the Planet of the Apes
    Reeves marshals more than his fair share of battle scenes and sweeping set-pieces, but never forgets the flicker of a face can provide all the spectacle that cinema requires.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Transformers: The Last Knight
    If you’re not staggered by the technique on display here – the stuff that sets Bay’s work miles above the Fast & Furiouses, X-Men: Apocalypses and Tom Cruise-chasing Mummies of this world – you’re not paying attention.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    In This Corner of the World
    Confronting the horrors of history head-on can make for cinema that’s impossible to shake, but Katabuchi’s painterly, introspective film proves a sideways approach can be just as indelible.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Dough
    Its fusion of maudlin social commentary and banana-slipping pratfalls is graceless in the extreme: picture an episode of Chucklevision directed by Ken Loach.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    My Life as a Zucchini
    This isn’t just good writing, it’s humane and honourable.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    From the Land of the Moon
    From the Land of the Moon is a story about how good it feels to feel very, very bad – and how a life lived in rapturous misery is somehow more valuable than mild domestic contentment. That might ring truer if Garcia wasn’t working in such a starchy register.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Wonder Woman
    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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Based on a True Story
    Nothing in this feeble psychological thriller rings true for a moment, though its unhinged machinations feel as pedestrian as soap opera in execution.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Ismael's Ghosts
    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]
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Double Lover
    It’s a fantasy not of sexual satisfaction but sexual accomplishment, and perhaps no director other than Ozon would have the imagination and panache to carry it off.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Loveless
    The script, co-written by Zvyagintsev and his regular collaborator Oleg Negin, scrupulously extends to each of its characters the dignity of complexity, and both excellent leads repay the favour tenfold, investing what could have easily been petit-bourgeois caricatures – the preening shrew, the oafish office drone – with riveting sincerity and nuance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    A Gentle Creature
    Loznitsa’s construction of this world apart – which is, of course, a grotesque allegory for Russia itself – is as immersive as it is unnerving.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    War Machine
    A fantastically dreary and flatulent anti-war satire.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    When absurdism feels this wrong, you know it’s being done right.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Beguiled
    It’s every inch a group achievement, and the film’s best scenes are its ensemble ones: prayers before bedtime, musical recitals, meals by candlelight.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    The film doesn’t stint on emotional complexity, but it might be Baumbach’s most accessible to date.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    The Journey
    Almost every last breath of The Journey is extraordinarily badly written, from the various contrivances that bring the two men together without supervision, to the verbal sabre-clashing that ensues.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    A Dog's Purpose
    Visually, narratively, every creative choice forks off down the most obvious route.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Unlocked
    With just a scattering of stumbles, Unlocked could have conceivably ended up as a romp whose flaws and idiosyncrasies gave it character. But there’s only so much character a film can take.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Frantz
    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.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    The Secret Scripture
    A variously lukewarm and lugubrious melodrama adapted from a 2008 novel by Sebastian Barry.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Wind River
    Wind River confirms the director as a rising talent who can be trusted to beat his own enticing path through inhospitable ground.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    The gonzo-Wagnerian backstory the franchise subsequently built up hasn’t been sufficiently pruned – and with so many characters to juggle, the story feels less like a coherent chain of events than a bundle of obligatory subplots.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Alien: Covenant
    Scott’s Alien: Covenant is a mad scientist film – arguably, one of the maddest. It’s grandiose, exhilarating, vertiginously cynical and symphonically perverse.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    Ritchie’s film...is so misshapen and inert, your imagination and memory never come close to being sparked by it. Just sticking with the plot soaks up every ounce of concentration you have.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Their Finest
    It’s the kind of handsome, rousing, rigorous entertainment you can’t help but play along with.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Rules Don't Apply
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Zookeeper's Wife
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Heal the Living
    Throughout, Quillévéré keeps asking her cast for the impossible, and gets it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    That sense of gooey euphoria runs through everything that’s good in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Fate of the Furious
    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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Going in Style
    With Caine, Freeman and Arkin, you know what you’re going to get. In Going in Style, it’s all you get.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    A Silent Voice
    Yamada makes a point of contrasting the agonising complexity of high-school life with the clean simplicity of the moments that really count: hushed conversations on a bridge in springtime, a shared roller-coaster ride under empty blue skies.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    CHIPS
    Often the film resorts to that unforgivable cheat move of having the supporting cast laugh at its leads’ antics on screen, in the hope of prompting us to do likewise. Instead I found myself curling over in such a paralysing cringe, my body had to be rolled out of the cinema afterwards like a dented bicycle wheel.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Saban's Power Rangers
    The ugly and incomprehensible big finish we get appears to have been shot by the Hunchback of Notre Dame and edited by a monkey wearing oven gloves, and if there’s a single clear shot of the Dinozords in action in there, I must have missed it.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    The Time of Their Lives
    There’s little chemistry and less comic frisson, thanks in part to the weird seams of pettiness and condescension running through the script.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Baby Driver
    The mechanisms at work in Baby Driver, while calibrated with hair’s-breadth precision, are nothing new. Here’s what is: the sheer glee with which the film prods around in its own clockwork to show you what spins what.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Song to Song
    Song to Song was formerly known as Weightless, which would have suited its drifting, twirling rhythms. At least its new title doesn’t invite an en-masse sigh of: “well, quite”.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Kong: Skull Island
    A large part of the enjoyment comes down to the sheer earth-shaking lunacy of Kong’s daily grind, even before the human intruders are factored in.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Patriots Day
    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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Logan
    Logan is a film for people, like me, who thought the only good bit of X-Men: Apocalypse was Michael Fassbender crying in the woods, and left the cinema wishing that had been the whole thing. It’s something no-one could have expected: a creatively risky superhero movie. And it deserves to pay off.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Founder
    It’s eye-opening, well acted and darkly entertaining.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    The Great Wall
    From blundered opening to risible conclusion, it’s a wall-to-wall fiasco.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Lost City of Z
    A film as transporting, profound and staggering in its emotional power as anything I’ve seen in the cinema in years.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Fifty Shades Darker
    The awkward middle course charted by new director James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Cards) and his cast is unsatisfying in terms of head, heart and, well, elsewhere. It’s an alleged 18-rated, adults-only filth-fest that behaves like a flustered PG.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The LEGO Batman Movie
    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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    T2 Trainspotting
    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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Split
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Jackie
    Jackie, the English-language debut from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows you the past in a hall of shattered mirrors – fractured and unsettling, with every surface sharp enough to draw blood.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Assassin's Creed
    Assassin’s Creed is leaps and bounds ahead of kitchen-sink-hurling flapdoodle like X-Men Apocalypse – it’s only the second-worst Fassbender star vehicle of 2016 – but it never allows him a sober moment, as that film did in a hushed Polish forest, where his talent, as opposed to his biceps, gets a stern workout.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Collateral Beauty
    I still can’t quite believe it exists, though I may yet find myself shouting about it on the street.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    But in its best moments, there’s a yarn-spinning intimacy to it too – an old war story told around a spectacular campfire.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Silence
    It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    100 Streets
    Intertwining, Altman-esque social tapestries are all well and good, but the connections between characters should ideally run a little deeper than having them occasionally stroll past each other in the street.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Allied
    Allied, swathed in larger-than-life, luxurious imposture, is the real heart-racing deal.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    The film is immaculately cast, and the chemistry between its four heroes holds your eye with its firework fizz.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Zootopia
    It’s almost certain to be the most existentially probing talking animal cartoon of the year.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Queen of Katwe
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    The Accountant
    The one thing there’s no accounting for in The Accountant is taste.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Your Name.
    The only way to understand it is to swim in it for yourself, feel your own heart braid around these two interwoven lives, and gaze up in awe at the silvery arc those falling stars trace across the sky.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Free Fire
    Far more than his previous films, which tend to unfold in a dream-like daze, Free Fire is a mad contraption, bristling with bravado and black, sardonic wit.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Storks
    A densely funny, lovingly orchestrated hour and a half of amiable chaos.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Inferno
    While the plot’s endless lurches and jinks are designed to hold you in a constant state of pleasurable bafflement, the cumulative effect is desensitisation: no single thread holds long enough to give you anything to cheer for or believe in.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Moonlight
    Moonlight, the new film from Barry Jenkins, is a nuclear-fission-strength heartbreaker. It’s made up of moments so slight and incidental they’re sub-molecular – but they release enough heat and light to swallow whole cities at a stroke.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Southside with You
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    It’s another flick through a familiar and by-now bulging scrapbook, but it leaves you craving less – and more.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Untamed
    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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    A United Kingdom
    Pike and Oyelowo have a hearty, wholemeal chemistry together, and play their small moments with sincerity and a light elegance.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Blair Witch
    Blair Witch styles itself as a love-letter, but it’s pure transcription.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    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.)
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Nocturnal Animals
    Everything that works in Nocturnal Animals is intoxicating, provocative, delicious – and happily, so is everything that doesn’t.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Hacksaw Ridge
    Hacksaw Ridge is a fantastically moving and bruising war film that hits you like a raw topside of beef in the face – a kind of primary-coloured Guernica that flourishes on a big screen with a crowd.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Bad Batch
    Its salvaged parts combine into an internally incongruous but crazily unique whole.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Light Between Oceans
    Both Fassbender and Vikander explore their characters’ various thorny moral quandaries and shifting states of mind in breath-catching depth, drilling down through the plot’s melodramatic crust to the swirling ethical magma underneath.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Arrival
    This is riveting, dizzying stuff from Villeneuve.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    La La Land
    La La Land wants to remind us how beautiful the half-forgotten dreams of the old days can be – the ones made up of nothing more than faces, music, romance and movement. It has its head in the stars, and for a little over two wonderstruck hours, it lifts you up there too.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Robbie Collin
    Nine Lives
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Bobby Sands: 66 Days
    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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Swallows and Amazons
    This is high adventure in safe hands.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Shallows
    Collet-Serra’s rigorous craftsmanship and Lively’s muscular-in-every-sense movie-star performance – the film takes Olympic-level pleasure in watching her swimming, leaping, fighting, scrambling, enduring – ensure every attack and counterattack convulses and grips.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    David Brent: Life on the Road
    Happily, what’s in no short supply is the same mix of uproarious failure and sledgehammer pathos that Brent at his best was always all about.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Suicide Squad
    When you compare Suicide Squad to what James Gunn and Marvel Studios achieved in Guardians of the Galaxy – low-profile property, oddball characters, make-it-fun brief – the film makes you cringe so hard your teeth come loose. But it’s a slog even on its own crushingly puerile terms.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Maggie's Plan
    Don’t underestimate the knitwear in Maggie’s Plan. This comedy from Rebecca Miller says more about the human condition through its cardigans than most films this summer have managed in their scripts.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Ghostbusters
    Its jokes, effects and sparkler-bright cast chemistry need nothing to fall back on.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    In Order of Disappearance
    You’ve seen almost everything here before, but never within the same film.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    Absolutely Fabulous: The 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Elvis & Nixon
    Perhaps this meeting of suspicious minds really was an unsung crux of modern American history, but Elvis & Nixon feels like a trifle about a trifle.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    The Secret Life of Pets
    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.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Robbie Collin
    Independence Day: Resurgence
    This isn’t just lazy, it’s borderline nonsensical. Resurgence inflates the scale of the alien threat to such a preposterous degree – the mothership takes up roughly an eighth of the Earth’s total surface – that the queues of honking traffic and rooftop helicopter rescues we’re supposed to invest in can’t help but feel like microscopic trifles.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Finding Dory
    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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Elle
    Elle forces you to critically confront every myth it indulges, every cliché it embraces and subverts.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    After the Storm
    No director working today observes family life with such delicacy and care, or is so unstintingly generous with what they find.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Risk
    Risk doesn’t burnish the Assange myth – it injects you into the bloodstream of the Assange story.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Red Turtle
    Though there isn’t a single word of dialogue in the film’s 80-minute running time, the big questions it asks, about ambition, acceptance and the beauty of companionship, ring loud in every heart-melting frame.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Robbie Collin
    I, Daniel Blake
    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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Aquarius
    Braga has been presented with an uncommonly dense and multi-faceted role here, and she plunges into it with a kind of glossy-maned, leonine majesty, investing the character with a hard-won dignity that often has you stifling a cheer, but also exploring her flaws in gripping fashion.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Personal Shopper
    The film depends on a performance from Stewart in which she’s virtually never off-screen or less than riveting.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    Loving
    Loving is short on grandstanding and hindsight, long on tenderness and honour, and sticks carefully to the historical record. It also features two central performances of serious delicacy and depth.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The Neon Demon
    When the film reaches its logical end point, Refn just keeps pushing, and eventually lands on a sequence so jaw-dropping...that all you can do is howl or cheer.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Toni Erdmann
    The film’s sweetness and bitterness are held so perfectly in balance, and realised with such sinew-stiffening intensity, that watching it feels like a three-hour sports massage for your heart and soul.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Robbie Collin
    The Nice Guys
    Think of The Nice Guys as candy noir: all the key ingredients from mysteries such as Chinatown and The Long Goodbye poured into a tall glass, then topped up with sugar syrup, a spritz of club soda, a sprig of mint and an ironic paper parasol.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    The BFG
    It’s a weighty technical accomplishment – the extraordinary detailed motion-capture technology alone, which stretches Rylance’s human performance to giant-sized proportions, is river-straddling bounds beyond anything you’ve seen before.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Robbie Collin
    Everybody Wants Some!!
    The characters often come across as immature dolts, but the film’s humane enough to recognise that’s all part of being 18.
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