Tara Brady

The grand casting gambit of pitching De Niro against De Niro proves an unnecessary distraction. Curiously bloodless in every respect.

The Spielberg film casts a long shadow over the stage musical, which too often feels like a retread of that film interrupted by songs. The musical number as narrative speed bump is a flaw that carries over to the big screen.

Based on the novel by Elena Ferrante, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s opening gambit as a writer-director is a brave charge at source material defined by flashbacks and far too many subplots.

Seydoux and Poupand bring plenty of emotional clout to their roles, even if the script straddles uncomfortably between verité and melodrama.

The film never attains the Shakespearean-sized tragedy of the Korean director’s Decision to Leave or the bludgeoning impact of OldBoy.

It’s certainly something to see – especially Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes and Jade Healy’s production design – and plenty to mull over but both the viewer and the film-maker should have guessed from the offset that there can only be one Barry Lyndon.

A perennially sun-dappled kitchen. Cast-iron pans. Belle-époque bustles. Gastroporn doesn’t come more XXX-rated than this insanely pretty, airily vacant livre de recettes.

There’s plenty of razzle dazzle here but little that passes for oomph.

Watching anonymous child after anonymous child arrive for treatment makes for grim and frustrating viewing. We want to know who these kids are, but the film does not. It’s the very antithesis of how hospital drama – narrational or otherwise – are supposed to function.

Heartfelt performances from such terrific actors as Keri Russell and Scott Haze fail to turn this hotchpotch of competing themes into cohesive drama.

Wells Tower’s screenplay creates a compelling, compromised hero in Eliza, one matched by Blunt’s charm and commitment. But the film is ultimately torn between raucous satire and social conscience.

Kielty, an accomplished comedian, firmly sits on his jazz hands and performs some of the worst stand-up routines in the history of comedy. Kerslake brings an edge and unpredictability that animates a carefully shaded story. The specifics of place have their own texture; seldom has a script encompassed such a variety of uses for the great Ulster standard: ballbag.

The Croods: New Age remains a sequel that no one was crying out for. It’s busy. It’s well-staffed. It passes the time.

A quiet character study pivoting around mum sex and elder care, it’s not the director’s best work but it’s streets ahead of this recent misfire.

The Eternal Daughter remains a dazzling double-header for Swinton, who, against all odds, disappears into both roles.

Straddling the current revival of the picaresque in US indie cinema (The Sweet East, Riddle of Fire) and cinéma vérité, this is a pleasing meander, skilfully directed, shot, and edited by the upcoming auteur siblings.

The camera dutifully records esteemed actors – including one Corrie veteran, as it happens – talking in beautifully appointed rooms, but it seldom finds the cinematic spark that might elevate the drama beyond a polished theatrical exercise.

A winning cast, mostly drawn from the ranks of Gen Z, ensures that Rosaline’s spurned, sulky plans to steal Romeo back from Juliet can be fun.

Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon features a luminous ensemble and arguably a career-high performance from Ethan Hawke, yet it’s hobbled by an aesthetic gamble so distracting, so patently absurd, that it nearly sinks the enterprise.

With looming grace and the fluffy heart of a Golden Labrador, Elordi, standing in for a departing Andrew Garfield, turns out to be the most swooning Goth heart-throb since Edward Scissorhands emerged from Vincent Price’s laboratory.

The sustained twitchy energy of the script amplifies the jangling nerves of Hanna’s fight-or-flight dilemma. But Liv’s weak-mindedness can feel implausible and the grandstanding denouement feels jarring and unearned.

We’re never properly spooked. The presence, ironically, lacks presence. An excellent cast and flashy film-making ensure we are entertained, nonetheless.

Mendes’s script, though it contains some memorable scenes, tries to do too much, as it takes on racial and sexual inequality, mental-health issues and, incongruously, the romance of cinema.

Not atypically for a portmanteau picture, this surprise winner from last year’s Venice film festival is intermittently arresting and wildly uneven.

Anderson’s 11th movie is simultaneously furiously busy and curiously uneventful.

The Fire Inside has enough quality to please genre and sports enthusiasts even if it feels like an undercard fixture. For all the talent on both sides of the camera, the nuts-and-bolts script lacks innovation and the pacing neither bobs nor weaves.

There are qualities to admire here even if it always feels like a movie manufactured by a committee.

In common with Edgar Wright’s recent portrait of Sparks, Tornatore’s film largely eschews such niceties as documentary structure in favour of enthusiastic chronology. And then Ennio worked with Pasolini; and then he worked with Dario Argento. And so on. It’s an interesting biography, nonetheless.

The emotional pyrotechnics that scaffold most cancer dramas, give way to something that is as honest as it is understated.

To add to the viewer’s distress, the picture is as deafeningly loud as it is tiresomely provocative.

This already improbable dream boasts an interesting supporting cast.

Astaire’s dancing and Audrey’s charm sweeten a bitter pill. But unearthing this vicious artefact is not unlike exhibiting a medieval chastity belt.

It’s good fun. The critters are cute. The landscapes are burnt orange dystopian or pretty and pink. The action sequences – some utilising the Philippines’ national martial art, arnis – are staged with aplomb. The central conceit, however, feels unwieldy.

Has Denis Villeneuve succeeded where others – most notably Alejandro Jodorowsky – have floundered? Given the extensive runtime, it’s impossible not to think of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s alleged assessment of the French revolution: “Too early to say.”

Sadly, the film falls short of being A-ha’s Some Kind of Monster (Metallica’s cringy group therapy epic).

It’s a fascinating news story, but the film’s additional, if entertaining speculations remain just that.

The tricky father-daughter pairing at the centre of Charlotte Regan’s surefooted debut feature marks Scrapper as the poppier, knockabout cousin of last year’s Aftersun. In common with Charlotte Wells’s award-winning film, this drama pitches a knowing pre-adolescent against an uncertain parent. But the tone, colours and flights of fancy make Scrapper lighter and sparkier viewing.

Nobody (surely) was expecting The Godfather from the director of Atomic Blonde and the writer of Hotel Artemis. Nobody (equally) could have anticipated such a dreary mess.

Arriving as part of the recent vogue for historical lesbian romances, The World to Come is better than Ammonite and rather more carnal than the chilly Carol, if not nearly as swooning as Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, nor as fascinating as Fastvold’s own writing.

Baumbach’s characteristically barbed wit too often makes way for self-indulgence and sentimentality. Ruminations on fame as a hollow, unfulfilling enterprise have all the depth of a disposable contact lens.

Among the undercooked female parts, Cruz converts a nothing wife role into fabulous distress. Even she can’t save Ferrari. Who knew a film about fast cars could be such a slog?

It doesn’t quite work. Actors as talented as Negga and Patel can’t enliven the “zany” auxiliary friend roles. Levy’s script, more damningly, can’t quite reconcile grief with the film’s romcom ambitions. A promising first film, nonetheless.

Save for some Skittle-coloured CG and cartoon violence, the original West End director Matthew Warchus puts a filmed version of the stage show onscreen. Theatre fans will be delighted; movie fans will wonder where the wide-angle chorus lines went to.

Unrequited love is seldom so much fun.

Elio is a half-formed thing. The basic story beats suggest that subplots and jokes have gone missing. Even the buddy comedy between Elio and Glordon is curiously marginalised. The candy-coloured character designs will please younger viewers, but the all-ages pleasures of peak Pixar are in short supply.

The misused music and hollow visuals set the tone for a vacuous film that frequently feels like an overstyled catalogue shoot.

It’s a fascinating delve or “kaleidoscope” as the film-makers have it. The film is as complete a portrait as we may ever get.

Die My Love is uncompromising, hypnotic, brave and often indelible looking, even when the theatricality and fractured structure erode any emotional weight. The result is an impressively punishing, intermittently brilliant bad trip that may be the worst date movie ever made.

Access and subplots are occasionally inconsistent against the political turmoil. Still, what it lacks in context and shape it makes up for with a sense of urgency and indignation.

Onward falls well short of magical.

Pugh’s emblematic, muddy-hemmed blue dress — designed by Odile Dicks-Mireaux — marks her out against the windswept exteriors. Not for the first time this year, she’s the standout in a film that, given the remarkable personnel involved, really ought to pack a greater punch.

It takes a while for Winocour’s gentle drama to consolidate into a satisfying detective story as Mia pieces together the events of that fateful evening. The denouement is dramatically convenient but undeniably moving.

Bjerg’s central performance is a lumbering delight and Youssef’s comparatively straight-man routine makes one pine for a spin-off sitcom.

Blitz lacks the emotional heft of Hunger or the director’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, but it’s an absorbing, reliable depiction of a much-mythologised historical moment.

From Wim Wenders’s Hammett to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth, the English-language debut is a rock on which many directors have run aground. So it proves with Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, a picture stuffed with good performances, pretty things and weighty dialogue that nonetheless fails to coalesce into the shape of an Almodóvar film.

The final act descends into chaotic silliness, but watching Dinklage and Pike attempting to out-villain one another is never dull. Deborah Newhall’s costumes would look intimidatingly power-hungry on a clothes hanger, let alone Ms Pike. And there’s a terrifying subject lurking under the dark humour.

Production designer Tamara Deverell and costume designer Luis Sequeira make for an arresting spectacle, one that is, ultimately, too luxurious for the sleazy travelling show and 1940s hoboism at the heart of the movie.

Under the satire, there’s an authentic sense of emotional uncertainty.

The machinations find a charming focus in the thawing between Del Toro and Threapleton. Both actors bring a jouissance to the slightly jaded milieu.

Trashy stories need plots and character development, too.

The film attempts both an in-depth portrait of the late author and a scattershot meditation on the persistence of his ideas.

For all Joachim Philippe and Virginie Surdue’s handsome cinematography, this lyrical documentary lacks focus and, more disappointingly, historical context. A missed opportunity.

As a Liverpool fan, this critic is hardly the target audience. But if this consistently engaging film has a flaw – here are words I did not expect to write – it’s the truncation of the Man United years. It’s the only shock in a fond, fast-moving tribute.

Like the village it depicts, the film is meticulously crafted yet oddly two-dimensional: a map, not a place.

This is a fond requiem from a Bowie fan, made with reverence for his art and respect for his privacy.

It falls to the charming cast to outshine the flimsy material. Gladstone and Tran are as warm and well-worn as a much-loved bed sweater. Bowen Yang thrums with millennial angst. Joan Chen steals scenes as Angela’s loudly gay-positive mother.

The animation remains enchanting and is punctuated by exciting swords-and-sandals action, even if the finished film is not quite the classic we might have anticipated from the talents attached.

The pretty pictures and silhouetted, sanitised sex will do well enough for Bridgerton fans, but the material has strayed so far from the source, one wonders why they kept the title.

An engaging chronicle, nonetheless.

The appearance of Malik Zidi rounds off a fine cast and introduces intriguing echoes of the amnesiac romance of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That and decent tech specs, including some nifty shots from veteran horror cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, offset the slightly cobbled-together feel of the material.

The central father-son plotline feels a little too modest to accommodate Wyatt Garfield’s impressively shot action set pieces, Nathan Parker’s ambitious production design and scathing social commentary, but this remains an impressive and visually innovative directorial debut for the film-makers.

Husbands longueurs and wobbly shots of improvised tangents never congeal into anything as satisfying as Cassavetes s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Gloria or A Woman Under the Influence. But, in contrast with director s mean-spirited inheritors, the film does own that husbands even rubbish ones are people too. [28 Sep 2012, p.13]

Affleck has made no secret of his struggles with alcohol and has talked about the catharsis he experienced shooting Finding the Way Back. It’s a career-best performance, one that marries hulking physicality and internalised demons, as Jack battles grief and addiction.

Anne Robbins’s costumes are dazzling. The production designer Donal Woods makes a dull country-fair storyline look magical. But for all the nostalgic gibberish about passing the baton, this latest instalment stalls and curdles.

By focusing on human-sized and domestic drama, The End We Start From can’t match the escalating jeopardy and horrific narrative punch of such similarly themed, bigger-budgeted fare as The Road or I Am Legend.

Mr Malcolm’s List plays like Jane Austen fan-fiction, which isn’t the worst subgenre in the world, even if nobody could ever confuse the plot with that of Lady Susan, let alone Pride and Prejudice.

A trinity of exceptional performances from Booth, Mellor and Starshenbaum work to convey a moral knot as exceptional circumstances and extremism become normalised.

Screamboat is no classic, but it knows its audience.

It lacks the wild provocations of Schrader’s scalding recent trilogy, but Oh, Canada pokes and probes in quieter, sneakier ways.

Full of sound and fury, signifying something. If only we knew what that was.

It’s not for everyone. Please Baby Please often forgets that it’s a musical, and the action is increasingly chaotic.

Goth remains fiercely committed to the bit. West, a talented, ideas-driven film-maker, makes merry with contemporaneous tropes, yet falls well short of the substance or sleaze that defined Cruising, Hardcore, or the other films referenced throughout.

Taking cues from the lively cast, Nabil Ayouch’s third feature to make it to Cannes is scrappy, occasionally messy, prone to distractions, and never less than diverting.

It is often argued that The Strokes are the last rock stars and that their Manhattan peers are the last great bohemians. It’s an Americentric view, but it’s gospel truth for this appealing if impressionistic time capsule.

The urgency of the project ironically detracts from the drama. The story is simply too recent and too fresh to yield any surprises on the big screen. The characters appear mostly fleetingly and without time and space for development. This is precisely why the genre demands recognisable faces with baggage.

The film – like its subject – lets the pomp and circumstance do the talking.

The Apprentice lacks the gravitas or impact of [Abbasi's] earlier films, but it’s a pleasing enough doodle thanks to Stan, Strong, and a lot of period wigs.

The wafer-thin characterisation and over-reliance on musical recitals make it hard to buy into the film’s premise of enduring love.

The problem here is not insight but narrative stagnation. Too often H Is for Hawk confuses slowness with contemplation, repeating emotional beats and trumpeting parallels between Helen and Mabel.

There are things to admire, but Bring Them Down is a hard film to like.

Ziegler’s performance is the best thing about Music. For friends and family members of those on the spectrum, it’s a revelation and an acknowledgment that people with autism can be remarkable without having remarkable abilities like those found in Rain Man or Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

This is a rather conventional artist’s biopic for an unconventional person and it’s a film that ends as suddenly (and frustratingly) as it begins.

It’s fortunate that Dylan O’Brien has just enough goofy charm to hold all the plundered Build-a-Bear bits together.

For a film that depicts the discovery of the Holocaust, Lee is curiously flat and uninvolving. Miller and the images she captured deserve better.

It remains a fascinating, stylish, uncompromising thriller for all its repugnant prejudices: punk rock movie-making for the ruling elite.

The dialogue is yellow-pack, the set-up is so silly you wonder why they didn’t parachute in a dinosaur or set off a volcanic explosion for good measure, and the sparsely populated commercial flight screams budgetary constraints. Still, it ticks along, makes merry, and everyone works hard and sweatily to put the “AAAAAAH” back into action.

Barrera is a reliable and veteran Final Girl, but even she can’t save the film from collapsing under the weight of its own silliness. Fun for a while.

Nicholas and Tryhorn’s new film for Netflix, though plenty laudatory, presents a contemplative Pelé that appears human after all.