Robbie Collin

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.

Merlant’s film isn’t being unladylike: rather, it’s asserting that ladylike is what all of these things really are, and it’s high time cinema admitted it.

McQueen’s film is big-picture British cinema, of a scale and depth which hasn’t been seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Both London and the countryside are shot with a classical elegance that calls to mind David Lean, while the sequences portraying the bombings themselves flare with panic and horror.

A Different Man mulls how cinema – and art more broadly – deals with disfigurement, but has even more fun holding its audience’s toes to the coals.

While there’s still (arguably) some fun to be had with this independent comedy’s double-entendre-friendly title, the laughs – such as they are – don’t extend a great deal further than that.

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.

One of those films whose plot and texture are entirely inseparable.

Baby Invasion, which premiered at Venice tonight, may be the stupidest film I have ever seen. And I use the word “may” only because I’m not entirely sure this thing actually is a film in the first place.

As a repeat performance – even a cunningly subversive one – Folie à Deux can’t quite match its predecessor for dizzying impact. But it matches it for horrible tinderbox tension: it’s a film you feel might burst into flames at any given moment.

Queer doesn’t scrimp on provocation and pleasure, but it’s also a beautiful film about male loneliness, and the way a solitary life can so easily shade into a life sentence.

Almodóvar has always been the sole screenwriter of his films – but perhaps in this case, keeping an English assistant in a nearby antechamber might have been a wise move.

As a state-of-the-US historical epic, it boasts all the thematic heft of Once Upon a Time in America or There Will Be Blood. (How did the wave of postwar immigrants remake America in their image – and how did America remake them in return?) But it’s also acted with the colour and fizz of a classical Hollywood comic drama, and shot with the loose, rangy energy of a 90-minute indie cult hit. The tonal mix feels completely unique, but it works.

The Order also works as a gripping procedural in its own right – a long-form game of investigative join-the-dots, built around a series of lethally disciplined action scenes.

Electrifying.