Simran Hans

This story of motherhood and moral conundrums, of privilege and philanthropy and “worthy causes” is one whose dramatic twists and soapy reveals feel at odds with the cultivated tone of serious, muted elegance.

There’s a note of truth in Bell’s finely tuned performance as a character whose insecurities have calcified over the years, hardening her to genuine goodwill, which she frequently misreads as pity.

The director treats the film as an empathy exercise, hoping to complicate and humanise a terrorist. Yet this is undermined by the obvious red flags that she plants in each section. Saeed’s flight path becomes a foregone conclusion.

Alexis Louder holds her own as the heroine of (and sole woman in) Joe Carnahan’s lean, mean, 70s-inspired action thriller.

It is gleefully dorky, hopelessly earnest, sincere, quite possibly to a fault. It unfolds as a series of Springsteen-soundtracked set pieces, each shamelessly engineered to maximise catharsis, cheering and possibly weeping from the audience.

The film shies away from any kind of political commentary, and as a result feels oddly sapped of fire or urgency.

The spectacle is more involving than the plot, especially the dazzling image of Kong floating skyward, serene and surrounded by purple glowing rocks.

It’s not unfunny watching McConaughey smoke a joint from between Isla Fisher’s toes, but some viewers may find themselves less enamoured of Moondog than the film is.

There’s perhaps an over-reliance on voiceover by way of letters and emails, though the film’s unvarnished formal directness is a good thing, given the sensitive material.

There’s comedy in its depiction of the Swedish prime minister as a caricature of even-temperedness, but from its gaudy 70s costuming to its goofy, wobbling tone, everything about this film feels uncomfortably broad.

In its attempts to provide an antidote to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s catalogue of liberal fantasies, the film swings too far in the other direction.

The feelgood tone feels a little flaccid.

The ratcheting tension is sadly punctured by unintentionally hilarious scenes of ambitious “research” by journalist Amy (Valene Kane), mostly involving frantic Googling and YouTube tutorials on “how to look younger”.

Marsden is charming enough, summoning surprising chemistry with Schwartz, and so it’s not total torture spending an hour and a half with the pair. Yet for better or worse, it doesn’t linger.

Based on the true story of a group of Swedish men who competed in the synchronised swimming world championship, Swimming With Men is reminiscent of The Full Monty, its feelgood climax landing with a welcome, if gentle, splash.

There is about as much jeopardy as you’d expect from an action thriller about an obscure land dispute; a tense encounter with an angry polar bear and a phantom hot air balloon are highlights during the endless plodding across the frozen wilderness.

This harrowing retelling of Norwegian rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 terrorist attack on the island of Utøya is less exploitative than Paul Greengrass’s brutal, Netflix-bound, English-language version, but the question remains: does a tragedy have to be turned into cinema for people to engage with it?

Butler is convincingly sturdy as Banning, but the film’s politics are shaky.

Wright is sympathetic and believable, but we never truly get a sense of Edee or her desires outside the bounds of her loss.

The scenes of family bonding are tiresome but the action is mostly tense and cheerfully bloody.

At a slow two hours plus, the film feels stretched.

It’d be easy to map Gilliam on to Grisoni, a film-maker dogged by his artistic misfires and the mess left in their wake. Really, though, he’s Quixote, stuck in a noble past and wilfully disconnected from a present that jostles uncomfortably close.

Most irritating is the murder scene itself, which sees both women stripping nude, seemingly in order for the camera to leer more effectively at their bodies rather than to spare them getting their petticoats bloodied.

Frat boy humour is dressed up in an expensive, arthouse jacket.

There is something queasy about mining such fresh real-life trauma for popcorn entertainment.

Footage of recent concerts and meet and greets is included to showcase both her imperious glamour and how far she’s come, yet we never really get a sense of where she’s been, let alone My Life’s musical and cultural context.

I’m a huge fan of Cornish’s 2011 debut Attack the Block, but this film isn’t nearly as energetic or enjoyably wacky as its predecessor. In fairness, it’s pitched at a considerably younger audience, but at two hours it drags; less patient children may struggle.

Probably, the intention was to make explicit the connections between Theo’s past and present, but there’s not enough detail or characterisation for this structural intervention to work. Without those connecting narrative bones, the result is all flab and no flavour.

As a genre exercise, the film starts promisingly enough, contrasting claustrophobic, dimly lit interiors with atmospheric wides of the landscape composed like moody paintings. Worthington-Cox is compelling, by turns twitchy, tentative, stoic and bold. Still, something isn’t clicking.

Unfortunately, the second half is over-reliant on flashy disaster set pieces, blazing towards a predictable, melodramatic conclusion.

Debicki (The Tale, Widows) is wonderful as Woolf, a wry and solemn observer, but the rest of the film is all too literal.

The film works better as a comedy than a horror, skewering its ignorant US tourists, and better still as a spiteful relationship drama.

Characters and storylines appear to have been chosen at random by a Woody Allen meme generator.

The film is called Misbehaviour, but a timid script belies mischief of any sort.

The performances create anthropological distance, not human empathy.

The film feels thin, drab and ultimately unable to harness the collective power of its otherwise talented cast.

The tone veers haphazardly from tense, high-stakes cat-and-mouse chase to ill-judged satire.

From his cheesy narration (“Nothing is more addictive than the past,” Nick solemnly opines) to the movie’s double-crossing femme fatale and nocturnal, neon-lit setting, the director has great fun playing with genre tropes, but it’s unclear whether she’s going for heightened camp.

The decision to turn the film into a procedural with a redemptive ending feels like an attempt to grasp at justice, but it’s harrowing to watch all the same, yet offering little context and few fresh insights.

Clearly, it’s intended as a vehicle for Wilson, who is credited as co-producer, but it’s Hathaway who steals the show.

This unwillingness to divulge anything truly intimate, combined with the film’s jumbled chronology, gives the whole thing a thin, Wikipedia-ish feel. Jett says she wants to offer her fans “a primal release”. A pity, then, that this film about her is so repressed.

Guy Ritchie’s latest gangster comedy presents itself as a harmless romp, but behind its wink-wink-nudge-nudge humour is a bitter and dated worldview.

It’s not unfunny, but one joke can’t sustain the entire movie.

The film can’t resist revelling in a conservative conclusion outside Buckingham Palace, with a victory banner fluttering against a smattering of St George’s flags.

The smug asides plastered on screen, and the hyperactive inserts of nature documentary footage do nothing to raise the film’s real-life stakes.

The tone flits between revenge thriller and against-the-elements survival movie, but commits to neither.

The film can’t square the fact that its protagonists are the victims of sexism and yet perpetuate it by sheer virtue of working for a rightwing news channel.

The relatively scant highlights include the film’s sunset pastels, shoals of fish in penguin waiter uniforms, a homage to Atlantis (the Las Vegas one) and a plot point involving the power of the Macarena.

In an improvement on the film’s predecessor, director Andy Serkis dispenses with detailed explanations and instead amps up the humour, leaning into the goofy, flirtatious dynamic between Venom and Brock.

With its drab, overpowering score, this tedious drama is nearly as gruelling as the trek up Scotland’s Suilven.

The attempts at authentic stoner dialogue soon become tedious, with too little plot or character development grounding the inanity (Hill’s self-written script also features an eyebrow-raising overuse of the N-word).

Kenneth Branagh’s unabashedly feelgood memoir of growing up in Belfast as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s suffers from a problem of perspective.

The film fetishises female strength, but only in its ability to prop up men; its women remain prettified empty shells.

The performances, especially the brittle Louis-Dreyfus, are admirably grounded, but the script’s comedy wastes time with lazy barbs about European brusqueness and American exceptionalism abroad.

It’s not subtle, or particularly clever, though Glow’s Betty Gilpin is fun to watch as an ultra-violent ex-military veteran with a southern drawl.

Adams is a vivacious screen presence with a twinkle in her eye, and Jordan can’t quite match her, unable to draw out any real inner turmoil in a character who is respectable to a fault.

There are a few rascally moments, such as Jim Broadbent settingoff roman candles in his back garden, but mostly it’s a staid affair, laden with dragged-outscenes of the gang doing thejob.

The journey is a nice excuse to paint Tom into a cheerily cosmopolitan portrait of the UK.

Merlant’s performance is committed, and the film takes her romantic and sexual fixation with the ride seriously, immersing the viewer in her dazzling, neon-lit world.

Mena Massoud’s boyband haircut brings a certain charm, but like the rest of the film, he’s blandly competent.

Shanley has an Oscar and a Pulitzer (he wrote the sublime Moonstruck, and the stage and screen versions of Doubt). Here, that’s easy to forget, given the cartoon accents and overblown metaphors about horses destined to jump the fence.

At least the CGI is clever, the consistency of Venom’s viscous, hostless form moving between molten metal and melted chewing gum.

Fans of the band might enjoy watching the movie cycle through their hits (and there are many), but those, like me, hoping for a more robust appraisal of the late Freddie Mercury may find themselves disappointed.

The film doesn’t understand what mode it wants to operate in; serious thriller with emotional stakes or contrived, cynical satire (a set piece around a Twitter hashtag seems to suggest the latter).

You could make the argument that this film is effective enough as a series of stunt gags in 70s costume, and an alcoholic bear certainly made me crack a smile. But the subplot involving DC’s attempts to bring up his 14-year-old daughter is a saccharine afterthought, and feels oddly out of step with the vacuous nature of the rest of the film’s throwaway laughs.

An over-explanatory voiceover seems to indicate a lack of confidence in the script’s jumbled plotting and laggy pacing. The performances aren’t bad (Ameen’s charisma eclipses the expositional dialogue), but the stakes feel low and the characters gangster-movie generic.