Robbie Collin

The Sheep Detectives is a profoundly odd viewing experience – entirely pleasant, lightly funny and easily absorbed, yet every so often you find yourself thinking hang on a minute, I am watching a flock of sheep investigate a murder, and feel like you are having a stroke.

Is Mother Mary a comment on modern stardom? Or the study of an intense, broken relationship? Or is it just an excuse for two hours of sculptural close-ups and artfully creepy tableaux? As you watch, you find yourself continually grabbing at meaning but, like a ghost, your fingers slip straight through.

The result is spooky, upsetting and revolting. Although it ends up crossing the line from unsettling to punishing, you still have to take your hat off to it, if only because a makeshift sick bag may be required.

It’s smart and watchable in a miniseries sort of way, and sets the current war in Ukraine in an instructive wider context – while Dano is ideally cast as the unreadable vizier serenely pulling strings behind the scenes. But it’s also overlong.

It has a weird, half-finished vibe, with a lumpy, repetitive structure, a bizarre colour palette that resembles an exploding Tango Ice Blast machine, and too many scenes that wear on well beyond their natural usefulness.

The performances are great, the rise-to-fame story gripping, and the music and choreography are making my skin tingle. I can’t wait to see how they’re going to deal with the trickier stuff.” But then you do wait. And wait. And then the credits roll, and you’re left waiting still.

It’s testament to just how bad the original Super Mario Bros Movie was that this sequel can be a noticeable improvement in every respect – animation, storytelling, humour, vocal performances, you name it – while still comfortably qualifying as absolute rubbish.

It isn’t especially funny, and I’m not even sure that it’s meant to be.

Does it have many original ideas of its own? Perhaps not. But its greatest hits mixtape of other people’s has been compiled with such flair – as well as a sound comprehension of why they worked so well the first time – that it’s hard not to be swept up regardless.

In short, the film actually looks funny. Remember when animations always did.

A wildly arresting performance from Buckley is not enough to save this generic and uninspired adaptation.

Its title refers to the mythical Islamic bridge across hell, on which one false step leads to certain damnation. The path trodden by the film itself is no less risky, but it styles out the crossing astonishingly.

It is grippingly unpredictable – a film with a glint in its eye and smoke curling from its nostrils and underpants. But you dismiss it, or miss it, at your peril.

Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right. Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency.

Like carnival itself, The Secret Agent sucks you in and buffets you along, with every swing and sway making it harder not to submit.

It’s a watchable national identity crisis in microcosm.

A prestige drama it may be, but it’s at its best when it’s a little messy and wild, and content to let the feathers fly.

A supremely sweet and touching comic drama.

The film’s aim, to my eyes, is not to revel in, score points with or otherwise sensationalise the killing of a five-year-old girl. Rather, it confronts us with the dilemma the taped call itself poses: what are we, as humans, meant to do with it? More to the point, what can we?

As a low-stress package tour of will-they-won’t-they romance highlights, it does the trick.

In staging the Jimmies’ various acts of violence (to which they refer, horribly, as “charity”), DaCosta may have taken a cue from Kubrick’s own parable of British decay: even toughened horror fans should find it disturbing, if not downright hard to watch.

Blue might be the warmest colour elsewhere, but here it’s just a bit tepid.

Some of us saw a while ago that turning Avatar into a franchise would prove to be a creative cul-de-sac. Having reached the top of the street three years ago, Cameron spends all of Fire and Ash trying to turn his enormous articulated lorry around. The back-up beeper is beeping, the spinning yellow lights are spinning, and he’s just knocked over his third wheelie bin. I do hope he eventually gets out.

There is a complex yet recognisable psychological dynamic at work here, and Squibb navigates the muddle of it nimbly.

Usually, a spoof franchise would only feel this exhausted by the second or third sequel, so I suppose Fackham Hall deserves points for efficiency at least.

Goodbye June is a keenly observed, nicely played drama about a family whose members are still working out how to muddle along with one another, despite three of its four adult siblings having long flown the coop.

For its entire two and a half hours – which whips past in what feels like mere minutes – Safdie’s film had me vibrating like a tuning fork. It’s a joyous salute to life’s beautiful cacophony.

Disney, when minded, can still do this stuff as well as anyone – and in the pleasurable spring and snap of its animation, its at-times-unsettlingly comely character design, and set-pieces that swarm with humour and panache, Zootropolis 2 is proof.

A second instalment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda.

Pike’s preposterous accent is as close as the film ever comes to acknowledging its own premise’s inherent corniness.

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.

It has all the charm and personality of a dented traffic cone and features perhaps the single most tin-eared screenplay – in which Papa Smurf is kidnapped by the villainous wizard Gargamel, and Smurfette leads a globe-trotting mission to free him – that I have ever encountered in my two decades as a critic.

Indeed, in a genre infamous for feints and teases, Gunn’s kitchen-sink approach feels refreshingly generous, and his excitement for the character shines through.

The craft is exemplary – it’s easily the best-looking, best-sounding film since the first. But it takes a deep, personal love of the medium for a director to deliver such crunchy impact, thrills, spills and euphoric highs while treading anew in footsteps as craterous (and muddy) as they come. If it’s not the blockbuster of the summer, I’ll be amazed.

Its loopy verve is reassuringly human.

This follow-up doesn’t re-take the temperature of British society one generation on so much as vivisect its twitching remains.

It’s a film which understands the pleasure of seeing familiar roads driven with consummate expertise. The F does stand for formula, after all.

Will it enrapture its target audience regardless? It should certainly keep them occupied for a couple of hours, though perhaps more with nodding recognition rather than delight.

Inglesby wittily repurposes such modern plot-wreckers as mobile phone tracking and instant messaging into real dramatic assets, while as a director, Pearce is a savvy stylist who knows exactly when to rein things in: imagine Jacques Audiard with a cricket conscience perched on his shoulder whose only job is to say “steady on”.

Nouvelle Vague stylishly captures and celebrates a certain approach to making cinema – reactive, incautious, free-range – but leaves you wishing there was a little more of it in the film you just saw.

In place of classic thriller techniques and mechanisms are a beige aesthetic, limp dialogue and glib let’s-just-vibe-with-it attitude that only grow more maddening as things progress.

This tremendous follow-up to Trier’s 2021 international breakthrough hit The Worst Person in the World flows with a ravishing freeness through the many complex strictures it builds for itself: layered family psychologies; behaviours and secrets that recur and reform across generations; the therapeutic value of art to its makers.

Cannes has had its share of opening-night turkeys over the past decade or so (2014’s Grace of Monaco was a memorable one), but for sheer unabating feebleness this must take the biscuit.

Lilo & Stitch has been tamed into one of those naughty-pet family comedies that used to roll off studio production lines with thud-thudding regularity, until the form fell out of fashion somewhere around 1994.

His tender, witty, wondrous The Phoenician Scheme is the most Andersonian Anderson film to date – but then again, they all are, and that’s the fun of them.

Even by the series’ own now well-established standards, this widely presumed last entry in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise is an awe-inspiringly bananas piece of work.

This cracking campaigning documentary makes a galvanising case for action – and without lobbing its audience overboard with an anchor weight of hopelessness yoked to their heels.

The latest Marvel title is just dollop upon dollop of dourness, leaving its stars no space to show us what they might bring to the franchise.

The plotting meanders its way to the very brink of incoherence, but as the scenes tick past, the vague sense of a many-tendrilled mystery being solved does gradually descend.

The film carries itself like a bright and mischievous character study in the style of Nicole Holofcener, but is ultimately just a dog weepie with airs.

A stickler might argue – not wrongly – that Havoc is ultimately a handful of astonishing set-pieces, linked by interludes of Hardy growling and ambling around. But as Howard Hawks once pointed out, all a good movie needs is three great scenes and no bad ones.

These poor players have all hand-picked their roles, and are resolved to strut and fret as convincingly as they can, right up until the curtain plummets.

Director Cave stages some nicely gripping scenes of suspense, toggling between camp and grit as nimbly as the swoony soundtrack, which occasionally cuts out for comic effect.

Nothing about the plot or craft astounds, but the qualities above are all far rarer in studio movies these days than they should be, which makes The Amateur remarkable – in its own stonily workmanlike way.

The result is in every sense a partial portrait, but doesn’t remotely suffer from being so – in fact, its exhortation to viewers to fill in the gaps where possible is one of its central pleasures.

In lieu of monologues and soul-baring, Coogler crams the film with proper movie-star performances at every level: by turns glowingly charismatic, sparklingly funny and silkily seductive.

The placid, open-ended charm of its video game source material is nowhere to be found in this grindingly generic brand extension.

Part of the genius of Warfare’s ending is that it admits that war rarely – if ever – contains endings at all.

Think of it as a slightly self-nobbling version of Enchanted, the wondrous (and original) Disney blockbuster that both sent up and celebrated the Disney princess musical tradition in 2007.

As filmmaking, it’s as mindless as Hollywood’s worst.

It positions spycraft as a hybrid of occult ritual and parlour game – and perhaps also a grand-scale working-through of deep-seated national jitters. Happily, it’s also enormous fun with it, and has your mind whirring to keep up with David Koepp’s devious screenplay, which gives itself a head start and waits until the very end before willingly surrendering the lead.

What fun it is to watch a film this expensive and not be able to quite work out where it’s going – or even if it might just stay put for a bit, and soak up the dustily poetic death-of-the-American century vibe.

The long-term consequences are depressing, but also low on dramatic tension and life.

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.

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.

Jolie is given ample space to dazzle, but less to surprise. Dazzle she does though, with a fine understanding of just how camp she can go without proceedings becoming too operatic for their own good.

The baseline for these things should be a little higher than ‘doesn’t retroactively sour you on its predecessor’. Even today – never mind in another 36 years – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the option of watching the source plumping for thi

It’s a funny, insightful, sensationally acted account of art’s capacity to dissolve walls, and heighten, broaden and deepen the reach of our lives.

Romulus might inject an appalling new life into the Alien franchise, but it won’t do much good for the national birth rate.

This bright children’s adventure, loosely adapted from a picture book about a young boy whose drawings become real, feels like the sort of thing Jim Carrey might have made in his first flush of success. It’s silly, relentlessly amiable, and embraces the low-stakes playfulness of its conceit.

The film is so myopically gripped by the idea of Marvel as endlessly fascinating corporate soap opera that in five years time, you wonder if it will make any sense at all.

The visual effects tower and terrify, but crucially, never as effects. The prevailing sense during every chase, escape and scramble for cover, is one of watching real people battle nerve-wilting odds.

At a time when digital animation is breaking radical new ground, it can be tempting to view the hand-drawn sort as its old-fashioned forebear, with no more scope to evolve. But Momose’s film elegantly proves otherwise: it has the artistry, but also the visionary spark.

“This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls,” ran the mischievous campaign for last winter’s musical remake of that millennial hit. But this absolutely is your father’s (and grandfather’s) Beverly Hills Cop, and for all its brazen route-one idiocy I ended up wanting to give it a hug.

As before, the act of watching with an audience is part of the fun, with each pin-drop-silent sequence playing as a challenge to viewers to maintain their collective hush at all costs. This is the pleasant surprise of the summer so far. See it. Don’t bring crisps.

This is pure filmmaking-by-paycheque: you can virtually hear the clock card machine crunching at the start of every scene, as cast and crew punch in dutifully for another shift.

Hopkins’ performance isn’t good, exactly, but it’s certainly interesting to watch, as the actor seems to swipe his lines of dialogue from the shelf in passing, as if playing a script version of Supermarket Sweep. Goode is restrained by comparison, but then the film does a lot of restraining on his behalf.

Crucially, Kelsey Mann’s film, co-written by returning screenwriter Meg LeFauve, gets Pixar back to doing what they always did best: juggling big concepts in fun and ingenious but also surprisingly wise and moving ways.

The film itself is a mesmerisingly gripping and controlled parable-thriller in which the paranoia, misogyny and rage of the Iranian state are mapped seamlessly onto an ordinary family unit.

It’s a black-and-white period piece invested with a supremely eerie folkloric edge – a bleak historical chapter made timeless, and all the more troubling for it.

Every character in Anora might be an utter nightmare, but they’re also a joy to spend time with, and the cast understand them down to their smallest behavioural tells.

The premise sounds as though it must invite a satirical reading, and there are many well-aimed ironic jabs at aspects of the leaders’ national character and the box-ticking rigmarole of modern politics. But directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – three beloved cult Canadian experimentalists – also poke fun at the notion that their intentions could be so clean-cut.

The main problem with Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice is that the film is a character study with very little character to study. ... Still, what the film lacks in revelatory insight into the Trump psyche, it makes up for in enticing context.

The film is earnest yet hopeful, with crisply drawn characters - but perhaps its full grandeur won’t be fully realised until part two.

Getting along with Hoard requires playing along with it too. But it’s easier to warm to than you might imagine, thanks to how well it captures the half-dazed tone and flow of early 1990s teenage life.

As for kindness itself, I can’t say much jumped out on a first viewing, unless it was of the you-have-to-be-cruel-to-be sort. But it’s exactly the sort of film that makes you want to look again.

Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in this full-body sensory bath movie which follows a struggle for power among the elites of New Rome.

The film may handle differently to its predecessor, but it’s clearly been tuned by the same engineers. After the pared-down drag racer, here comes the juggernaut.

It’s all thumpingly corny, but in the way good family films often are.

Dupieux elevates it by seeding entire swaying crops of confusion: we can never be entirely sure where scenes end and the mess of making them begins.

Sincerity and conviction are now rare qualities in the blockbuster field, but this is a film that puts its monkey where its mouth is.

Would the film have ideally been a bit smarter? Perhaps. But it gets all of the dumb stuff just right.

But nothing here or in the previous instalment will make you give the slightest fig who wins. Yes, the world of Rebel Moon is richly imagined, even if its origins as an aborted Star Wars project still remain far too obvious. In place of storytelling, though, it’s built on unwieldy lore dumps: we’re given hundreds of details about this galaxy far far away, but no reasons to care about any of them.

Beneath the mousy indie stylings of Rachel Lambert’s new film, adapted from a 2013 play by Kevin Armento, beats a proudly mushy romantic-comedy heart.

Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far.

Romance and cinema are ideal bedfellows for all sorts of obvious reasons, but on screen, the beauty of friendship can be harder to pin down. This wise and wondrous (and wordless) animation does it better than any other film in recent memory – and in ways a six-year-old could effortlessly grasp.

This is otherwise rough-hewn, hard-bitten entertainment – with an irresistible puppyish grin on its face.

Civil War moves in ways you’d forgotten films of this scale could – with compassion for its lead characters and a dark, prowling intellect, and yet a simultaneous total commitment to thrilling the audience at every single moment.

Kung Fu Panda’s knee joints these days are creaking like a haunted flight of stairs.

There’s some commendable trippiness towards the end, but for the most part Godzilla Smooch Kong is all too ready to fall back on delivering the bare minimum promised by its title. It’s giant monsters fighting, the thing constantly shrugs: what else do you want? Ideally a bit more than this.

There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else.

It’s not entirely without redeeming features. Margaret Qualley’s game lead turn would fit into the joint Coen canon on its own merits, and the final line (yes, I’m reaching, already) does land with a certain Billy Wilder-esque comic grace.

Çatak’s film turns out to be less intrigued by where the missing money actually goes than how the school reacts to its disappearance: as a sort of loose organism purging itself of impurities as its collective survival instinct kicks in. It’s a sound lesson in politics – or is it biology? – but more importantly, it’s a chalk-snappingly tense watch.

Garrone knows exactly where he’s leaving both his heroes and his audience: on the agonising cusp of a happily-ever-after his film makes you want to will into existence.

There’s a leaden-footedness to the direction, too. Where Burton’s camera lurched and crashed, Williams’s has a habit of hanging back sheepishly, fluffing visual gags and sapping scenes of the unhinged energy they need.

When the culprit is revealed to the audience after an hour or so, and the film attempts to dig into the psychology behind their reign of terror, it quickly finds itself out of its depth.

Wenders’ obvious affection for Tokyo itself, his keen feel for texture and neat avoidance of cliché all suggest Perfect Days is likely to age well as a portrait of a great city’s everyday side.

Denis Villeneuve's sequel to his 2021 sci-fi epic is a bold and visually astonishing piece of filmmaking.

All in all, it’s a new low in a mini-franchise comprised almost entirely of new lows: Venom, Morbius, and now this.

If Lopez’s screen career has often tended towards the unsurprising, well, here is the antidote: perhaps the least predictable film ever made. What’s most exciting about it, though, is that behind the lunacy, so much of it works.

It’s a gorgeous performance overall – [Ben-Adir's] Marley is so alive to the potential of music as both an art form and cause, it’s as if you can see the creative energy flowing up from the earth through his legs to the tips of his fingers and dreadlocks.

The quietly ingenious ending is the opposite of having your cake and eating it, and leaves your stomach rumbling for a resolution this film is too smart to provide.

The action is slapstick-driven, yet the set-pieces are all so transparently bogus – with fourth-rate CGI and actors’ digital doubles flopping about the place like haunted marionettes – that they play as insulting rather than outrageous.

Love Lies Bleeding’s total lack of filter is its greatest strength. It’s the sort of film you instinctively want to tuck under a mattress: hot, nasty and mouth-wateringly disreputable, this is cinema with nothing to lose.

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.

First-time writer-director Chloe Domont beats a sly, perceptive path across this tricky psychological turf.

In every shot, the mix of gritty local colour and artful digital augmentations is riveting: you’re always vaguely aware that what you’re looking at can’t all be real, but the line which splits reality from fantasy is impossible to spot.

How can it be possible that nine years have passed since the previous instalment, yet every facet of this one feels so woefully first-draft? Expend4bles: wh4t a lo4d of cr4p.

El Conde is a visual feast as much as a visceral one, but its artful poise belies its bloodlust. Larraín is making his points here not with fang-like precision, but a gleeful crocodilian chomp.

On a first viewing, I wasn’t quite convinced by some of the glitchy japes Bonello deploys here and there . . . But perhaps he wants us to think of the film itself like its torn heroine: a strange machine whose ghost refuses to give up.

Hit Man trips along on great writing, Linklater’s witty, light-touch direction and a rich sense of place, but what makes it especially pleasurable is Powell and Arjona’s naturally steamy rapport.

There was barely a scene in Dogman that didn’t have me yelping in disbelief.

Given his otherwise grim recent form, Allen himself may have simply got lucky with this one, but the charm and sparkle here are real.

The vibe is documentary plus poetry – a little Andrea Arnold, a little Chloé Zhao – with symbolic touches that might have felt a bit much (see: recurring visions of bison) had they not been so carefully leavened with down-to-earth warmth and wit.

The film’s signature move is poking around the strange psychological grey space between being kept and being caught.

Much of the pleasure of the film is in procedure: watching someone work diligently and knowledgeably towards a goal that just happens to be murder. But a darkly fun tension emerges between its anti-hero’s internalised principles and how he actually behaves when pressed.

Not everything in it lands cleanly, but even its misses excite, and its direct hits are knockouts.

This triumphant adaptation, which premiered last night at Venice, strip-mines Gray’s book for all its funniest, fizziest and sexiest ideas, and leaves the chewier, more literary stuff on paper, where it belongs. I’d say purists might bridle, but speaking as one of them, I wasn’t just relieved, but overjoyed.

This being a Wes Anderson film, it almost goes without saying the details are delectable.

The crash scenes have a horrible heart-in-mouth quality: it’s as if you can feel the tumble of gravity working on your own insides. And the same goes for the racing itself, which like the vehicles is somehow sleek and crunchy all at once – inches from disaster at any given moment, and all the more beautiful for it.

It offers a selection of sweaty, string-vesty, bulgy-bare-armsy scenes from the life of the real-life submarine commander Salvatore Todaro, played here by Pierfranceso Favino. It isn’t dreadful.

Theater Camp’s comedy springs entirely from personality: the jokes aren’t really quotable because they depend on you knowing who’s making them to work.

Scrapper rummages around with style. It puts bubbles in the kitchen sink.

The film’s tendency to go broad wherever possible renders it fairly un-scary, while in place of Get Out’s deep and needling cultural allegory we instead get pointed jabs at American film and television trends. It’s all good fun as far as it goes, but Story and his cast could have afforded to sharpen their own blades a bit.

The problem isn’t that this unusual combination of genres doesn’t click. It’s that the jokes are so stale, the performances so broad, and the plot so greased up with improbable short cuts, that Audrey’s journey feels less like a voyage of self-discovery than a coach tour of the form’s dustiest landmarks.

Meg 2, by design, is a completely anonymous bag of lukewarm McDonalds – it’s hard to be mad at it, but only because nothing in it stands out enough to get mad at.

It’s summer-holiday eye candy with a sherbetty experimental fizz.

This spooky theme-park spin-off has its moments, but the plot is creakier than the floorboards, and why is it over two hours long?

Far too much of it still feels scaled to the stage. Comic material that in a theatre might have simply played as broad comes across as forehead-smashingly crass, while the dramatic shorthand in the grown-up scenes turns that whole section of the story into a conveyor belt of clichés.

Christopher Nolan's portrait of the father of the nuclear bomb is a triumph, like witnessing history itself being split open.

Greta Gerwig takes on feminism and the patriarchy in this hilarious, deeply bizarre film.

The Bird Box beasts may be back in business, and perhaps in films to come we might even get a proper look at one. But it’s hard not to feel the apocalypse has moved on without them.

It’s all so giddily bizarre, the film deserves a health warning of its own: will induce (entirely pleasurable) lightheadedness and shortness of breath.

Director Chris Smith builds the film around Ridgeley’s mother’s scrapbooks of photographs and memorabilia – and perhaps partly because of that, it ends up feeling like little more than a leaf through the milestones. It’s been made for the fans, but they’ll know every last detail already: it’s pop history as singalong.

Disguises, time bombs, runaway trains: Cruise, his director Christopher McQuarrie and their collaborators are very consciously working in a century-old tradition here, perhaps to show the business and art of stunning audiences can – if we choose – be much the same now as it ever was.

It’s not simply that its various comedic scenarios aren’t funny (though they aren’t); or that all of its would-be snappy one-liners drop on the floor like wet socks (though they do), or that the timing is so off that it feels like the film was edited with a spork. It’s that nobody on screen, Lawrence included, seems remotely invested in the exercise in the first place.

Every shot is sluiced in flat grey light – the action scenes look like gravel in a food processor – while the dialogue is all botched quips and clichés (“Did somebody order backup?” one Transformer smarms while cocking a rocket launcher), and the human characters timidly written nobodies.

It’s the Pixar film that has to remind its audience what a Pixar film is.

While the film never shocks it almost always compels, and Breillat crafts some images that keep tingling in the mind long after they’ve faded from sight.

Tran, a practised sensualist, is superb at depicting food as a vehicle for pleasure.

Teenage idealism curdling into cult-like insanity is a punchy, timely subject. But it’s hard to discern what Hauser and her regular co-writer Géraldine Bajard actually want to do with it, or how much sympathy their film has for Miss Novak’s follower-victims.

It’s juicily ambitious stuff: imagine the familial tensions of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited mapped onto an entire nation, but also playing out in multiple close-up vignettes.

Manning Walker’s wily command of tone and glistening sweat and DayGlo visuals do make you pine to be young again for the first half hour or so of this.

For the most part, sound and image are irreconcilable, so you find yourself either listening in horror or watching with pleasure, only for the spell to be broken by some eye or ear-catching detail in the other temporal strand.

On paper, this looks like a flatly impossible task for DiCaprio: the film’s central character is neither hero nor charismatic outlaw, but a grasping, biddable, determinedly unreflective stooge, whose actions inspire revulsion and outrage.But he meets the challenge with one of the finest, most complex performances he’s ever given.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, Theodor Adorno famously wrote. Glazer’s film gives us the prosaic instead, refashioning it into the darkest, most vital sort of art it might be possible for us as a species to produce.

It ultimately feels like a counterfeit of priceless treasure: the shape and the gleam of it might be superficially convincing for a bit, but the shabbier craftsmanship gets all the more glaring the longer you look.

It’s mostly handsomely shot, with painterly vistas of the French countryside and lots of dazzling Versailles interiors. But the central relationship never convinces – it all just feels like a performance, put on for the benefit of the courtiers and by extension, us.

An entirely uproarious 90 minutes at the cinema which asks nothing more of its audience than that they keep their incredulity suspended for just a few seconds longer and keep enjoying the ride.

Where the film moves from compelling to revelatory is in its use of archive footage of Fox – from his films and shows, but also televised personal appearances – to reveal a join-the-dots picture of what was actually going on behind the hot-young-star facade.

The staging and tone are determinedly old-fashioned, and the atmosphere of romance and danger only amplified by the glorious French settings: lots of muddy byways, echoing courtyards and fine, candlelit interiors, and not a green screen in sight.

Yes, Evil Dead Rise indulges in the odd bit of homage, from its chainsaw-based final showdown to an amusing opening gag about Raimi’s trademark demon’s-eye-view tracking shots. But it mostly just wants to scare you witless – and (for this critic, anyway), resoundingly succeeds.

For all its decorative twists and curls, this is a sophisticated, searching work.

Writer-director James Gunn finds moments of inspiration in this sequel, but the plot is a mess, the film irritable and frazzled.

It might end up being the most beautiful, moving and all-around-loveliest children’s film of the year.

The issue here isn’t the moment-to-moment loopiness. It’s that the film’s cumulative unmanageableness soon starts to look like a put-on – Aster seems much more interested in pushing the limits of his audience, rather than his own.

It’s absorbing and well-acted enough that at times you could almost forget you were being asked to emotionally invest in which company gets to slide its wares onto a rich young sportsman’s feet.

Somehow, this new animated adaptation of the video game is even worse than the abominable 1993 live-action. Even the CGI is second-rate.