Tim Robey

Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) likes his black comedies of discomfort to make us squirm, as does producer Ari Aster. But this film is skimpier on insight than the best work either has done, and Daniel Pemberton’s poignant flute score deserves to be in a more mature film.

The film has bite without a lot of nuance.

The film gropes around for novel gimmicks – is the killer’s identity being deepfaked this time? – and tries to placate its fanbase with a few moments of gratuitously icky, mean-spirited gore. And goodness, it plods.

The Moment is an alienating, glitchy mockumentary imagining something that never happened.

The film mechanically ticks by, while showing no evidence of a soul.

The film has been put together like a machine to rattle you. It does that. I didn’t care for anyone on screen at all, and can’t say I’ll ever be tempted to watch it again, but here it is, for the delectation of a niche market.

Send Help is a strained disappointment from Raimi, who proved in Drag Me to Hell that he could sock an original concept to us and go sensationally OTT. Motivation was always on the money in that one; here it goes berserk, and not in a fun way.

The History of Sound has fashioned a deliberate non-epic from wispy material, keeping such a tight lid on sentiment, it’s like an obstinate clamshell with its secrets. Expectations need recalibrating beforehand so as not to feel lightly underwhelmed.

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

We are never distracted for long from the gaping sadness of the man and Hawke is brilliant at portraying that despair.

It has a perky winsomeness: there are jokes, not all of them morbid, about being dead. There are tear-jerking scenes that require a viewer to surrender. I struggled to do so. Funnily enough, Eternity drags.

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

It’s far less endearing than we’re presumably meant to think.

Imagine Arabian Nights, filtered through a Sofia-Coppola-esque feminist sensibility, but spiced up with camp. That gets you some of the way into 100 Nights of Hero, a British indie romp based on a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg. It has saucy wit –especially up to the hour mark.

The all-round exertion is immense, but the experience is a bizarre ordeal.

It’s a film that feels emotionally half-fulfilled, never quite grabbing or devastating in the way you’d hope.

It’s not a peak for the doughty franchise so much as a reverential goodbye. Jollity is also served, when it’s not straining for misplaced importance.

It’s callous and conscience-free, the work of an auteur in the mood to flex his style chops while saying literally nothing.

These complications want to spin off into fluffy absurdity. Instead they thicken into treacle. It’s a mistake to have Lohan and Curtis mainly interact as new characters, because the emotional core between their old pair gets dislodged – though it certainly helps that Butters is such a splendid, grounding co-star both before and after the switcheroo.

The recommendation might be stronger if the mortifying moments for Craig didn’t make me, personally, want to cower rather than laugh.

Just when it’s threatening to pay off, it ends, with an experimental cliffhanger, not Levy’s idea. It reminds us – by simply not working – that abrupt, unresolved endings are the hardest kind to earn.

Whatever kinship Depp may feel with this tortured, misunderstood, and regularly blotto artist is expressed, unfortunately, as a string of gruelling clichés.

If production problems didn’t thwart Maclean and crew from making a proper fist of all this, the editing took its eye off the ball.

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

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.

After the novelistic strengths of First Cow and Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt turns in something here that’s more like a short story – unhurried, pleasurable, and low key.

Eighty minutes ought to be a tight frame for this sort of hokum, which takes no effort to watch, but the only thing that escalates is how silly it is.

There’s a kernel of philosophical intrigue in The Assessment, encased in a sleek shell of dystopian science fiction, and unfortunately flung a million miles away from audience engagement.

Coogan, like Tom, weathers this relatively unscathed. But Federico Jusid’s tango-inflected score just won’t stop plucking our heart-strings, as if keen to reassure us that we’ll make it through one of the darkest periods in South America’s history without the mood souring.

Companionable as he always is, the way this flaunts Statham’s star power leaves a lot to be desired. He’s a totem of meathead carnage, barely sustains a scratch, and doesn’t get nearly enough moments of the deadpan bemusement he excels at best.

Novocaine may not be based on any pre-existing IP – no comic book or game, say. But that’s not much to crow about, because few flights of the imagination have lately felt lower in altitude.

[Burton] never thought acting was a manly profession, and seemed to be involved in a tug-of-war against himself, tangled up by his roots. To have half explored these themes, as Evans’ film does, means we’re left wanting more, but there’s a pleasing ache to the experience as a platonic love story.

The headline draw remains the headline draw – and sometimes it’s enough for two lead actors to animate, complicate and enrich a project by lending it all the mysterious gravity you could ask for.

Drop is ludicrous. OK, so are all films in which a taunting psychopath calls the shots, but this one takes the biscuit because of the so-not-cutting-edge tech element.

There’s little here to keep us up at night – or from forgetting all about it by tomorrow.

The Alto Knights certainly has the off-screen pedigree you’d hope for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) wrote the script, named after an infamous Manhattan social club. But the circuitous shaping feels off, a problem Barry Levinson’s direction is too flaccid to fix.

It wants to become a cat-and-mouse game between the leads, but the leaky script dampens any real hope of suspense.

One swaggering brawl plays out to a certain synth version of Beethoven’s 9th, suggesting that Love’s fanboy devotion to A Clockwork Orange might override having fully understood it. But who knows?

To everyone’s complaints that Longlegs’ plot turned daft, I can only shrug: it was easily assured enough to sustain a deadly undertow, while dancing about with a diabolical sense of mischief. I also point them to The Monkey as Exhibit A for what misfiring daftness looks like.

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.

It’s all lightly reminiscent of Bride Wars, the cat-fighty 2009 farce with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson doing very unfeminist things to ringfence their perfect day. You’re Cordially Invited has a little more heart than that: it hits an average yet amiable stride.

The film is torn between the conflicting instincts of sassy playing to the gallery and sanctified mush.

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

While Bill Skarsgård only fitfully impresses as Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’s chilling remake, Lily-Rose Depp proves she’s one to watch.

This whole story pimps out Yuletide as a strictly mercantile fixture, with a sham veneer of goodwill merely sweetening the transaction.

It’s all impeccably pleasant, just a tiny bit bland.

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.

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.

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.

Joy adopts the most basic possible template for its fluffy history lesson, but still has an impressive habit of joining all the wrong dots.

Conclave is briskly enjoyable, but once you’ve wafted the white smoke away, it leaves you with frustratingly little to chew on.

Respectful if not revelatory, Bouzereau’s film gives her legacy a massage, gently probing, but also leaving her in peace.

The fact that Trap is 100 per cent ridiculous – like, off-the-chain barking mad, from the moment the plot kicks in – doesn’t stop it being a funfair ride that’s worth a spin.

There are snatches of crude enjoyment to be had, if you venture in with basement-level expectations, and manage to ignore some dire third act CGI. Roth’s fetish for gloating nastiness in his other work makes it hard to decry the mutilation of whatever his original vision might have been. For once, he’s at the receiving end of a rusty blade, instead of wielding it

Based on the Colleen Hoover bestseller, this vacuous film splices abuse and glossy courtship in the big city – to deeply dubious effect.

The Instigators is little more than a stacked cast list on an Apple budget, waiting for a good script to materialise.

This is the trouble with nihilism as a foundation for horror: it can’t quicken the pulse, drum up scares, or elicit any fruitful response from the viewer at all. Being impressed with a whole lot of nothing doesn’t mean we are.

Match-making two stars with the natural zing of Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum ought to be a breeze. It’s funny, then, that this 1960s space-race caper specifically fails at being a romcom, because the “rom” keeps dragging us back to Earth.

First-time director Brewer was the visual effects supervisor on Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s this department that’s his forte, rather than marshalling actors, or stitching scenes together with functional continuity.

The star’s comeback isn’t quite as entertaining as his 2022 Oscars punch-up – but it comes close.

Square, lacquered, and livelier than you’re expecting, Joachim Rønning’s film obviously adheres to all the formulae a doughty sports drama needs, starting crucially with the backdrop of adversity.

It’s just a product that behaves like one – which is a pity, since studio animation is now bolder and more dynamic than it has been for years. Not hellish – but pretty purr-gatorial.

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

We’ve had two-hours-plus to leaf through this empty life, but Sorrentino makes it amount to almost nothing, except his usual love letter to Napoli, and an added ode to side-boob.

The Shrouds has potential to be morbidly hilarious, deeply twisted and strange, or rather moving: the fact that it only feints in those directions, while prioritising several less fruitful ones, makes it the steepest disappointment of Cronenberg’s late career.

Personally, I couldn’t follow Arnold over the dotted line into violent magical realism, however situated it might be in a young girl’s sense of fantasy. It’s a miscalculation, like playing your weakest suit mistaking it for a trump.

The film’s more nothingy than noxious: Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) directs with vanishingly little of the snap he had back in the day.

Being funny with Dark Age clichés shouldn’t be a challenge, even if you have to trudge off-script and simply cover yourself in mud. The cast of Seize Them!, a plucky shoestring Britcom about a peasant revolution, unfortunately face an uphill battle.

Stanfield’s dropout charisma can cushion a role fine, but can’t make this one very interesting.

While the leads get it together somewhat in the final stretch, it can’t be the hardest job to access these teary-bonding emotions opposite an actual loved one.

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.

Stevenson has configured her tale as female body-horror fit for a dissertation, without giving it much of a spine: while slick, the set pieces are few, far between, and over too fast.

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

It’s a thriller’s engine purring away, while it stubbornly sits in neutral, getting us nowhere.

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

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.

It’s an egghead exercise, both scrambled and undercooked.

We’re missing any real sense of awe – but for all its faults, this lands somewhere between noble failure and endearing oddity.

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

Sasquatch Sunset barely gets started – though it does have remarkable prosthetics and some lovely sunsets.

Exuding more uncertainty than discipline, this wackadoo horror-thriller from German writer-director Tilman Singer can’t decide if wearing a smirk will see it through a sloppily developed plot, which keeps promising more than it delivers.

“We’ll tell it, but with one fewer death” is an odd way to go about this tale – which ends up as a solid flexing exercise for its cast, but puts us through a family’s annihilation for no other reason it can ultimately decide upon.

Kaufman has rummaged about in Pixar’s Inside Out grab-bag and mussed up the elemental simplicity of Yarlett’s idea. It’s nicely personal as his spin on a Pixar film, but the downside is that he can’t help imitating too many of them at once – which makes it equal parts sweet and hectic, and not a little overambitious.

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.

The Boys in the Boat is autopilot Clooney – a pleasant, coddling watch almost ruthlessly shorn of depth or subtext.

It’s a nostalgic exercise in burnishing the Stallone brand, with the star on screen half the time in new interviews, between a slew of clips and outtakes.

Borgli’s scenario might falter as it goes along, but Cage is a dream.

The script shuffles romantic complications around in a sub-Clueless manner, but it badly lacks a killer idea, unless bored teenage lesbians repeatedly punching each other (and then the opposing boys’ football team) is everything you could possibly want from a lowbrow comedy.

Had Roupenian stretched out Margot’s ordeal into the turgid novella it hereby becomes, we’d never have heard of Cat Person in the first place.

There’s nowhere near enough horror, threat or intrigue to last the course.

It’s hard to extend much credit for the subject matter when it’s exploited for a “wild ride” that isn’t even wild, hawking a true story that isn’t even true.

The longer we spend inside Freddy’s, the duller it gets.

The groundwork is laid here for something potentially high-octane – think La Haine meets Ready Player One – but 20 minutes in, the film enters a holding pattern it never really escapes.

While you couldn’t hold up Sumotherhood to any legitimate standards as good cinema, it’s an entertaining shambles – and far less toxic than anything Clarke made.

The film is all feints for an hour – elegant feints, but far from kick-starting the dramatic motor, they have a habit of stalling it.

Nyad’s theme of women pulling together just about lands – thanks chiefly to Foster. But following the recipe of human interest this slavishly is a fast track to not being very interesting at all.

In trying to pretend a blip was a seismic revolution, the film winds up distinctly strained, and more depressing than it quite knows.

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.