Robbie Collin

It’s an absorbing but disappointingly tasteful watch.

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

Mickey 17, about a hapless clone’s misadventures on a colonising mission, is a throwback to blockbusters as the late 20th century made ’em: a $100m boisterous sci-fi satire that neither belongs to a franchise nor cares to start one, but instead jams as many eggs as it can into one increasingly precarious basket.

A thrill-free thriller.

It’s the comedy of British middle-class embarrassment, executed here as deftly as anything in peak Richard Curtis. Like me, you may be surprised by how much you’ve missed it.

The premise sounds morbid but the execution couldn’t be sunnier: think Snoopy does RoboCop.

So much of the film’s (notably slight) running time is squandered on filler – a subplot involving bickering henchmen consumes around a third of the film – that it’s never able to hit its grindhouse stride.

“We should be home in about 90 minutes or so,” Wahlberg chirpily informs his passengers just before take-off. That’s the film’s pledge to its audience too: some ups, some downs, then safely into land.

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

Ken Loach-style didactic social realism is all well and good, but Loan Ranger looks as if it was shot on a block of processed cheese and written with a bucket and mop.

Not all of it clicks, but given how bizarre much of it is – Williams’s 2003 Knebworth gig is interrupted by a platoon of heavily armed monkeys, for instance – the hit rate is impressive.

This expensive-looking follow-up, which tells the story of Simba’s father’s own coming-to-power, sheepishly papers over all of the now-unfashionable concepts on which its forerunner was built.

The rocker is too mercurial a figure for a biopic to ever fully capture him – but this gorgeous film comes as close as you could hope.

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

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

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

There’s a haiku-like purity to it: Look Back is as neat and yet also as overflowing as the four-panel strips in which its leads once diligently honed their craft. And if something so beautiful also feels too brief – well, that may be the idea.

Beneath the charming sparkly wrap, there’s just more of the same underneath: an endless round of pass-the-parcel that never actually coughs up a gift.

While Paul Mescal impresses in Ridley Scott’s riveting sequel, a stellar Denzel Washington rather eclipses the rest of the cast.

Piece by Piece is a razor-sharp pronouncement on the nature of stardom in 2024. That you leave the cinema wanting to buy toys and records isn’t simply the idea of the story: it’s the moral.

It’s an intimate film with a roomy embrace.

The result is an empty film about emptiness, and therefore doubly depressing.

The amatory mechanisms here are so basic they make 1970’s Love Story look like Wuthering Heights, but at least Love Story had the courage to wring every last drop of pathos from its tragic-romance premise.

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.

Flow might be a digital confection, but it’s also open, alive, elemental. In every sense, it’s a breath of fresh air.

As last dances go, it’s the Macarena in film form.

Adams is already a six-time Oscar nominee: it’s very possible that for this, she could finally nab one outright. From out of its sitcom-neat package, Nightbitch unleashes something primeval and wild – thought it might seem cuddly, hot spit flecks its jaws.

It’s hard to recall a time when the state-of-the-art felt this much like art.