Tim Robey

Benedict Cumberbatch is inspiredly cast, serving up a technically ingenious performance which may be his juiciest ever.

This defiantly blank canvas may strike you as a puzzling, even a dubious, heroine, but Ryder’s terrific. And at least she has the last laugh: no one can get their graffiti to stick.

Midway will never be mistaken for a classic, and even box office success for the $100 independent production looks dicey. Stretches of the film work beautifully, though, and the sinking feeling for Japan’s forces is painted with sympathy, not schadenfreude.

For all the film’s fumbled shortcuts, air of semi-intentional Nineties-ness, and the completely mad bit with a stray flight of doves, it jollies along with some amiability.

Boy Erased could have been more sharply etched, all told – there’s something naggingly indistinct about it. But the lessons of Conley’s experience fight manfully, all the same, to punch through and be counted.

It uses some hoary devices to twist your arm, but resistance, eventually, is futile.

It has a whistle-stop quality, and you sometimes wish it would slow down to savour more personal details, rather than dishing out brisk bullet points from this amazing life.

There’s only so much in this desperately involved historical saga that Chadha and her screenwriters are able to grapple with.

There’s enough in Mr Jones to make you want a good deal more.

It has heft, it looks amazing, and it's businesslike to a fault.

It’s unlikely to change anyone’s life, exactly, but it’s genial, funny, and invigorating.

An artistic spin on tragedy that’s deft, witty, very well-acted, and more diverting than it is profound.

This meat-and-potatoes B-thriller stays modest and grounded: compared with the noisy excesses of higher-budgeted action flicks, it has a kind of crude integrity.

For a comedy about a tribe of manic homunculi with nylon faux-hawks, it’s really got to be counted a pleasant surprise.

From top to bottom, it’s Brydon’s film, and his performance matches the modesty of the surroundings: rarely pushing too hard, he finds just the right groove as a browbeaten Everyman lacking spring in his step (or dash in his breaststroke).

Many things in this film have an off-kilter absurdity, for good and bad.

Come the final act, the best political thrillers don't play nice, after all – they twist the knife. This one’s so concerned with making the world a better place, it retracts the blade and wipes it clean

Cinematically, Golda doesn’t altogether avoid a TV-movie stodginess – it looks a bit drab, with some duff effects and uneven staging. But it has a businesslike running time, and doesn’t waste it.

The film brings us down, as well as letting itself down somewhat – a late scuffle in a peat bog is poorly motivated, the ending too vague. But the jangling escalations of the first half still mark Andrews out as a name to watch.

At the end, it’s hard to avoid the sense you’ve watched a grab-bag of horror conceits, a kind of pot-pourri-potboiler with organising principles cooked up to provide a veneer of cohesion.

It's halfway-strong, just under-dramatised; goodness, though, if it doesn't show what O'Connell is capable of.

None of this quite counts as stop-the-presses stuff in the present day, but it’s enough to make this a sharp debut, with a shivery undertow.

Sincerity isn’t the film’s problem; it’s more a question of mileage.

Director Justin Lin has become the man to give this franchise legs: the start and finish here, defying every imaginable law of physics, are series highs.

The film is not only unchallenging, it seems actively scared of challenging us. You emerge feeling pacified and only semi-entertained.

Stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski honours the choreography first and foremost – there’s none of the choppy editing that can often cover for this-will-do blockbuster combat, but bravura long takes which push the stuntmen and Reeves (with a lot of digital assistance) to the limits of their presumed endurance.

The production design and effects for this apocalyptic terrain are way above par for this sort of thing, and evidence of a much higher budget than Ball had first time around.

Arrogance may be the Achilles’ heel of all Grant’s baddies, including this one, but a tip-toeing aversion to risk makes Heretic end with a whimper.

Notching up his third entry in what I suppose we’re meant to call the CCU, Michael Chaves looks alive, as often, with the set pieces.

There’s not much fault to find with Sicario on the level of craft or performances, just its rather sputtering momentum, and the lack of a higher purpose.

By concentrating on the relationship, the road they’ve taken here is too narrow, but I’m sympathetic to the problem: sharpening your focus always gives biopics more lift-off than vaguely trying to cram everything in.

It ought to be a triumph. Somehow, though, it lacks the flooding emotional force Donoghue gave it on the page.

It’s Theron, underrated in comedy, who brings something fresh to the party, looking alive in the kind of uptight, self-mocking role that Sandra Bullock frequently corners.

Raymond Cruz’s solemn performance as a skilled Mexican exorcist does the job, but the film misses a trick in not casting a more heavyweight veteran – Edward James Olmos? – to lend a little of that Max von Sydow ballast.

We’re all aboard, and there’s certainly some enjoyment to be had. It’s just a pity that the ride is a bit of a con, at times. It’s a template without spark, a formula which seldom takes the risk of experimenting with anything fresh. It needed some of that old Spielbergian magic.

It’s as if the book has been given a full-body massage en route to the screen, teasing away some of the spinal kinks that actually made it interesting.

For fans of Barratt, Boosh and mock-heroic Britcoms, it’ll mostly hit the spot.

Wingard has the technique to pull this homage off, and the sense to build unease from somewhere in the core of America’s psyche.

The Imitation Game is a film about a human calculator which feels... a little too calculated.

It’s a film about micromanaging, fixing things on the fly, and a lot of Ridley’s gruff, technocrat personality shines through.

It’s certainly Redmayne’s film, and his performance is everything you could ask for: completely convincing in its physicality, credible in its pain, and warmly but not crassly optimistic in its nearly constant good temper.

The film has bite without a lot of nuance.

Thank heavens, then, for the time-loop gimmick, which sustains a full hour of screen time with enough variations on its gambit to hook you in.

Despite a wobbly handle on all this, it’s an intriguing film to wrestle with, it’s powerfully acted by Melander and Milonoff, and it sticks out for its undeniable outlandishness. After all, when was the last time a bearded troll baby posted from Finland was the closest thing to salvation?

Denial certainly isn’t great cinema – it gets stuffy and repetitive, and Lipstadt’s frustration at not being allowed to testify herself isn’t the burning issue it ought to be. Still, it’s textbook advocacy, and a teaching tool of genuine value.

With its single, ultimately blood-soaked day to cover, this wants to be a pressure-cooker thriller, but something’s a little off with the settings.

While it’s fair to say that Transit isn’t aiming for a torn-from-the-headlines specificity about the issues of today, it could be accused of dodging some racial questions, and some of its Petzoldian gambits – including a love triangle that remixes Casablanca with sepulchral dabs of Vertigo – dampen its dramatic charge.

Pohlad’s film is good at probing the line between radical creativity and mental disarray; arguably less good at getting Wilson back on the safe side of it. But it leaves you in no doubt that the man’s a genius.

Even while making a heartfelt statement that will put Khan deservedly on the map, the film cries out for a different shape, so that these three could grieve, bond and come to an understanding without the plot’s cloak-and-dagger machinations.

Gibney’s problem here, in a way, is his main point: the very lack of transparency about these missions, which operate in ill-defined spheres of international law, obstructs informed public discussion.

This is Sachs in Éric-Rohmer-abroad mode, and some way off top form. Frankie suggests a gloriously civilised shoot more than it coheres into much of a film.

Lame Ferrell, through some weird freak of his talent, tends to be the best Ferrell, and despite the film’s general mediocrity in most departments – let us swish briskly over everything about the way it looks – his floundering star turn delivers the goods.

As a scratchy string quartet for the four actors, it continues to work surprisingly well – you might hand it back with a B+ in that department. But as a storytelling assignment, it droops little by little into the C zone.

It makes genuinely important points about homelessness, and the middle-class horror of ever crossing that line. But the script, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, She Said) is a surprising letdown.

What’s impressionistic on the page has to be re-sculpted and honed to a point on screen, but the result is that the novel’s tenderly hidden secrets become rather blatant twists.

The film is mature, relatable and risks being terminally uncool – full of evident chagrin from Holofcener that she can’t be a new voice these days, but also comfortably embracing the old one.

You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, and there’s a lot of smooth here. Jim Broadbent has the balance of jollity and melancholy just right as Santa.

As a gently exploratory portrait of adolescence, Spring Blossom is tender, amiable and sweetly played, but it doesn’t risk (or say) all that much.

If the film had been tightened to two hours of Crowe and Shannon ruthlessly going at it, we might have been mesmerised.

The secret weapon, though, is dimpled star Ben Wang, the 25-year-old lead in the Disney+ series American Born Chinese.

These relationships are poised to be explored in more depth than they are.

And there’s a hidden triumph in the supporting cast from the always-reliable character actor Bill Camp (Black Mass, Midnight Special), whose spectacular, hideously convincing wipe-out as a guy called Harlan Eustice, in the course of a single night, sets much of the plot in motion.

There’s nothing soft and romcom-cuddly here, but a brutal dissection of competitive friendship dynamics, eating disorders and selfish misery.

Part Heat, part Miami Vice, this sinewy thriller keeps motives hidden as a police unit weighs duty against dirty money.

Bombshell is a bright, watchable film on a subject that ought to make us squirm.

There are clever and sensitive touches right through, and a moving ending. But Fanning seems wholly uncomfortable, and not always intentionally.

It takes a love of Springsteen’s widescreen balladry, perhaps – all hail the mighty Thunder Road – to get on the film’s wavelength, but it’s an invitation right there for the taking.

This Emma is pleasant enough in passing, and nothing if not scenically lush. I just couldn’t get on with its Emma at all.

The final hurrah for Mercury’s genius, this huge, hubristic spectacle lets you grant his troubled film a pass: at least it keeps on fighting to the end.

The Vanishing makes an unmistakable effort, but also feels like one, and fades almost fittingly from the imagination within hours of seeing it.

The film’s narrative obliqueness heightens its gallery-piece surrealism. What payoffs we get are affecting, though.

The set-up is grabby and effectively alarming, even if it lends itself to more nail-biting stress than actual suspense.

It’s jocular, never feels like a screed, and it’s refreshingly outward-looking.

It’s the character dynamics here, more than the dark and stormy set-pieces, that get things off the ground.

Hoffman's performance has a sadness, an unexplained loneliness, which gives this slightly diffident piece a centre of sorts, and there's a pleasing air of melancholy all round.

There’s only so much lovable bad behaviour you really want to indulge them in now.

The story’s insistent ambiguities ought to make it seductively complex, but it never quite shakes off a stuck-in-the-mud vibe.

In the grizzled spectacle Gibson willingly makes of himself, it has a B-movie equivalent of that A-plus Mickey Rourke comeback, delivered with just enough clout to count as a step in the right direction.

Cedar might have built up a broader satirical thesis from all this wheeling and dealing, but he’s happy to let the film rest gently on Gere’s shoulders – these days, a pretty safe foundation.

On this present occasion, Farhadi may hardly be reinventing himself, but his old tools serve him just fine.

It’s well-acted, especially by Healy (The Innkeepers), who makes you feel the pain of every wound, the ratcheting torture of every dilemma. But the film’s also a gimmicky exercise whose hollowness and credibility are constant problems.

Does it add up to much? Not really. Not finally. But it’s a suggestive puzzle-box of a picture, worth turning over in your palm.

The tone oscillates between earnestness and mischief, a little uneasily. There’s a trippy, funhouse aspect to it which yields a couple of splattery punchlines, but it could have gone further in this direction

Watching it is like settling into a reupholstered armchair which still creaks in the same old places.

Take one high-concept format, two big stars and lots of songs... this romcom isn’t perfect, but you can’t help rooting for the main couple.

It’s a casual breakthrough, normalising what was once a taboo.

What lifts it to a major degree is Rahim’s performance. We know little of Salahi’s life outside Guantánamo, dealing with him as a virtual blank slate, but he fills this in with a remarkably charismatic personality, riven with contradictions, and clinging to bursts of mischievous humour as a survival strategy.

It doesn’t have easy access to human emotion, instead deploying a series of techniques to fake it.

For all its occasional fumbling, Mogul Mowgli fully justifies its existence in every bristling detail of Ahmed’s performance, which never plays as self-pitying so much as impatient and hotly aggrieved.

Struggling with tone and urgency during its recruiting phase, the film clomps along to a pedestrian drum-roll, summoning a stark, brooding edge without quite enough lift-off.

The film’s forgettable fluff, but perfectly genial, and it’s hard to imagine many hardcore objections to curling up with it.

The film’s a little wobbly on actual charm; stronger on smarm, in-jokes and Bond-riffing action pastiche. Yet whatever their niggles, families can flock to it, relieved to be getting brand new entertainment that entertains.

The film is like a cheeky seaside postcard with swastikas and cryptography on the reverse.

Through all the film’s bumps and scrapes, Firth does invest a lot of commendable energy in helping us grasp Crowhurst’s besieged state of mind. It’s a good performance in shaky circumstances, but at least he honours the man’s contradictions, on top of his terror of public failure, and even greater one of exposure as a fraud.

It’s a candy-coated underworld romp, and pleasingly weird at times – when we’re invited inside Harley’s cutely tattered parlour, no explanation’s given for why she has a stuffed beaver in a pink tutu on her kitchen table. It’s just… the kind of thing she would have. Yan’s film converts her from livid to likeable, and doesn’t give a hoot if you mind.

Who knows what it’ll look like down the line as a record of its own premiere – the live-streaming may well have been its oxygen. But we did watch the boundaries crumble outright between live performance and real, on-the-hoof film-making, to amply entertaining effect.

There’s something ever-so-chic, a touch too manicured about the film’s despondency, and only rare moments land to touch us, especially. But it’s a gentle, genial watch.

Perhaps the play’s overfamiliarity is the one thing holding this back in the end: you’re expecting it to cross the barrier from solid to gut-wrenching, and that never quite happens.