Steve Rose

The result comes across like a cross between a buddy movie and a horror movie – a war movie without the war. Ultimately, it all comes down to the core relationships, so it’s just as well that Hoffman and Jonsson are both terrific; their stars are certain to rise further off the back of this.

Much of that war is waged with a combination of fists, feet, blades and assorted ironmongery; people are routinely hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, and the athleticism and fight choreography is impressive, even if the action is edited so frenetically that it’s almost impossible to follow.

You could almost call [Eno] a meta-artist. And this is his meta-documentary; it is not, ultimately, as radical as it purports to be, or as revealing as it could have been perhaps (some external viewpoints would have been welcome), but stimulating and cerebral all the same.

It’s an effective little thriller that knows the conventions and doesn’t stray too far from them.

This is the second highest-grossing movie of the year in Japan, but unless you’re a teenager, an anime junkie or really, really care about volleyball, you’re unlikely to get much out of it.

Admittedly some of these moments get a little gushy. Beyoncé has much to be thankful for and she spends a little too long doing the thanking, from her parents to her dancers to guests like Diana Ross. But there’s always another slab of concert action round the corner to jolt the whole show back to life.

It’s not exactly boring – there’s always something new to behold – but nor it is particularly exciting, and it lacks the breezy wit of Marvel’s best movies. One of the strengths of the MCU to date is how it has taken time to define each character individually and lay out the grand narratives over successive movies, building a sense of momentum. Here, it’s all thrown at us at once.

What really redeems the film are the brilliantly observed characters: these are archetypes of modern Britain that nobody really nailed before. Created by the principal actors themselves, they are generally portrayed with affection rather than condescension, and performed so convincingly that a newcomer might well believe they were real people.

There are action thrills, to be sure, but they are folded into what becomes a sort of group therapy session on the psychology of grief, guilt, vengeance, chance and coincidence. Even more blessedly, it’s often hilarious.

The freshness of the approach, combined with the substance of the stories, works the same strange magic on the viewer as on the inmates. It is easy to be swept along.

There’s now a well-trodden route for such musical travelogues, laid down by the likes of Buena Vista Social Club and Searching for Sugar Man, and while this lacks the polish or drama of either of those, it’s an engaging and uplifting journey.

The dialogue is earnestly on-the-nose, and there is little in the way of visual excitement in what’s essentially a static board meeting (the story was adapted from a stage play).

Lawrance does a convincing job nonetheless, portraying Charlotte as a reasonable woman in unreasonable circumstances – but it’s Shaw who steals the show, conveying her character as both a heartless monster and a woman haunted by her own past, with that kind of breathy, distracted haughtiness she does so well.

Director Théo Court does a fine job of capturing the barren beauty of this landscape and using it to suggest the broader moral vacuum.

Where some might praise an Eric Rohmer-style lightness of touch, others might see a certain slightness. And at barely 70 minutes, this is a fleeting affair in every sense. Perhaps that’s the point.

The trance-like pacing and mystical meditation might frustrate viewers looking for an easy watch, but local film-maker Lois Patiño is clearly operating at the fine-art end of the cinema scale. He applies his distinctive mode to a story that’s both ravishing and unsettling.

Beneath the bro-friendly, fantasy-art trappings, Onward finds a little bit of that old Pixar magic.

Like its fast-moving, attention-deficient hero, this just feels like a rush job.

If you’re going to do a send-off this huge, there are a lot of goodbyes to say, and a lot of loose ends to tie up. The fact that The Rise of Skywalker manages most of them and within a vaguely coherent story is something of an achievement in itself.

This is very much a sympathetic fly-on-the-wall with Team Chelsea, but, considering the high drama of Manning’s life, the resultant film is muted and disjointed, and given to impressionistic images – such as landscapes out of car windows – when really the time could have been spent telling us more.

It is lively, colourful and genuinely funny, and doesn’t break what didn’t need fixing about the original.

Without Reynolds this would be pretty run-of-the-mill; with him it’s a perfectly acceptable family movie. Given the history, that’s a giant leap for Pokémon-kind.

Bohemian Rhapsody honours Mercury the showman but never really gets to Mercury the person.

The movie’s other major weakness is its continued foregrounding of the white guys at the expense of the consciously inclusive cast around them.

This kids’ animation is altogether lively and funny with just enough soul, even if it comes at the expense of Potter’s sensitivity and delicacy.

Director Brad Bird deserves praise for packing such big ideas into such an accessible, rip-roaring, retro-futurist adventure.

Vintage screen Dickens with a cutting edge: the French terror is vividly, hauntingly realised, all chaos and guillotine ghouls. [16 Aug 2000, p.23]

You could say this is all good gory fun, and The Evil Dead remains a triumph of brains over budget. But in retrospect, you can’t help wondering if Raimi and co didn’t have some women issues to work through?

The story almost comes off the rails, but Beetlejuice’s charm lies more in the execution. The movie is crammed with visual invention and snappy comedy. The afterlife is richly imagined as a macabre bureaucracy. The living world is no less outlandish, especially with those eye-popping interiors and costumes.

It remains a nightmare experience that’s not easily brushed off. And despite its ramshackle scrappiness in production terms, and some dated gender politics, the storytelling is first class, pitching us straight into the action, but only revealing its full hand gradually.

The political and the supernatural come together beautifully (and violently), and the unsentimental portrayal of childhood is refreshing, with terrific performances from the boy actors. It’s altogether a supremely satisfying tale.

This animated Japanese masterpiece is a war story as wrenching as any live-action movie.

It is not a simple film to summarise or describe as a comedy, satire or drama. Renoir was too generous to deal with such absolutes, and that's one of the reasons the film endures: nobody is good or bad, they just make good or bad decisions – hence the title.

This sunny 1989 fantasy by master animator Hayao Miyazaki broaches the issue of female sexuality more boldly than any Western children’s movie would dare.

Hayao Miyazaki's family fantasy is full of benign spirituality, prelapsarian innocence, but little icky sentiment.