Robbie Collin

In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.

The generational rewrite has been deftly done, with enough timeliness braided in to make it feel freshly relevant, but all the gags fans want to hear again left reverently intact.

Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon's suburban horror feels like an adaptation of a Stephen King story that he never got round to writing.

After a while, it’s as if Thomas’s self-loathing begins to rub off on the script, which keeps undercutting should-be-resonant moments with smirking references to other films.

The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so.

This is an all-singing, all-sobbing weepie with sequins, featuring comedy, uproarious choreography, and a suite of soul R&B and gospel numbers that will have you bopping along in your seat.

As yarns go, it is all comfortingly chunky and luxuriantly spun – winter comfort viewing that treats its audience as gallantly as its heroes treat their mission, while taking itself just seriously enough.

The monster mayhem scenes are obviously the main draw, and they’re terrifically staged, with clean visual effects that look anchored to the real world. And a careful balance is struck between spectacle and horror.

This first half of Snyder’s diptych (the second is due in the spring) is more of a loosely doodled mood board than a functioning film – a series of pulpy tableaux that mostly sound fun in isolation, but become numbingly dull when run side by side.

Like any good chocolatier, King has obsessively focused on texture and flavour. And it’s those qualities – tuned to mass-market tastes, yet held in connoisseurish balance – that give his film its irresistible velvety sweetness.

The film looks good and moves well. It earns its initially forbidding running time. It’s driven by human behaviour you might actually recognise.

Absurdly, the film ends up flouting its own self-imposed rules to reach a suitably syrupy conclusion – and thereby avoid the more bittersweet, thought-provoking landing you find yourself wondering if it has the courage to go for. Well, it doesn’t: Genie is a sugar-only zone. But then, it is Christmas. Or near enough.

Disney's centenary animation feels like an attempt, after a wobbly decade, to return the brand to first principles – but it doesn't come off.

Fennell has a sharp eye for outrage, and an even sharper one for hotness, crafting any number of scenarios and images here that may elicit sotto voce phwoars against your better judgement.

The director’s 28th feature is a magnificent slab of dad cinema, with Phoenix a startling emperor and Vanessa Kirby brilliant as his wife.

The Hunger Games prequel plunges us back into the futuristic empire of Panem – but fails to live up to the first films of the franchise.

The shortest of the films yet is also the most interminable, a knot of nightmares that groans with the series' now-trademark VFX sloppiness.

A lot gets packed in here, none of it good.

Nikou’s film is wonderfully astute on love’s unruliness: it wants you to both delight in and despair of it, and have fun doing both.

While the plot often has a trudgy, through-the-motions feel, the same can’t be said for the animation itself, especially in the musical interludes.

This uproarious sequel to the Bristol studio’s beloved debut feature, which premiered at the London Film Festival today, takes what mercifully no one has yet labelled the Chicken Run Cinematic Universe and moves it on precisely one cultural notch.

Nichols’ film delivers a grubbily glamorous blast of underworld machismo of the sort that Scorsese himself made a mid-career speciality: think wildly charismatic performances, elegant camerawork, regular jabs of barbarous violence, and a skin-fizzingly sharp jukebox soundtrack.

The folklore underpinning The Boy and the Heron is crazily sui generis: it rushes and sparkles and sploshes like a child’s imagination, making the sort of synaptic leaps in both image-making and storytelling that should be impossible for an adult brain to pull off.

This pensive science-fiction three-hander, adapted by the Lion and Mary Magdalene director and Iain Reid from the latter’s 2018 novel, quickly settles into its solemn, elliptical groove – and then sticks to it so doggedly, it becomes a tonal rut from which the film increasingly struggles to escape.

Giamatti isn’t playing a type, so much as a man who has taken refuge inside one in order to armour himself against the more exposing aspects of human existence. It’s a riotous but also slyly moving performance of a performance – and, along with Randolph’s, is rightly being talked about for awards.

The Miracle Club’s own manoeuvrings can, at times, feel a bit pat and convenient. But its final moment of reconciliation – Smith and Linney back home by the shore, having pruned back 40 years of emotional overgrowth – justifies the trip.

In a pivotal scene, the younger Nicholas explains to his colleagues that he has faith in ordinary people because, well, an ordinary person is all that he is. One Life’s wholehearted embrace of that sentiment is the root of its limitations – and its potency too.

Stripped back to basics, Saw’s appeal (if that’s the word) is certainly clearer than it’s been for a while; the series isn’t really horror at all, but a revenge thriller taken to deliberately appalling test-your-nerve extremes.