Tim Robey

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

[Lhakpa's] resilience and sunny disposition light the film up, but it certainly shows a tough life, riven by conflicts, taking its toll.

The film has zero finesse even by Ritchie’s standards, but if star ratings were calculated on body count alone, give it hundreds.

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.

Only about once every two or three years does a horror-thriller as good as Longlegs lope into view. It crackles with eerie dread. Nested away is perhaps the most terrifying performance of Nicolas Cage’s career – among the funniest, too.

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.

Poignantly lyrical as a city symphony, it branches out for a sequel, when the characters abscond to the coast to figure out what to do: at once a respite and a reckoning, ghostly and mysterious.

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.

Audiard’s trick is to make the overblown mélange into something amazingly confident – it’s clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful and absolutely bonkers. It’s hard to believe he pulls it off, but he does.

It’s the casting of Moore, though, and her willingness to denude herself at 61 – emotionally, as well as physically – that gives The Substance a startling connection with its themes. Not for 30 years has she owned a film with anything like this certitude. Watching her confront the Demi Moore in the mirror, and do it so mercilessly, is extraordinary.

Cage commits, again, to his latest malcontent on the verge, without troubling himself with an Aussie accent in any way, which is classic Cage. It’s a performance that belongs quite high up in the canon.

Schrader is a million miles from the potent anguish of First Reformed, the 2017 film that won him an Oscar; rather, this nearly rivals his 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan, for bewildering tedium.

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.

This is like picking holes in a mesh crop-top. The script’s so creaky it often sounds AI-generated.

Seinfeld’s affable mugging is no compensation for putting us through a glorified pitch session anyone sane would have nipped in the bud.

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.

It knows its audience and doesn’t waste time. It also heightens the fun with elaborate practical effects, rather than blitzing us with eye-tiring CGI any more than it must.

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.

This is a film of piercingly perceptive moments, even if, as some say of Haneke's own work, it is cold to the core. [28 Dec 2001]

Rather than being any particular person’s bright idea for a girlboss fantasy revenge caper, this lousy romp was obviously hatched by an algorithm, and might just as well have been directed by AI.

Franco is more skilled at getting us to think: not only about memory loss, but everything we choose to forget and can’t, and how these distinctions make us who we are.

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.

Baker’s tingling delicacy of touch makes it a subtly distinctive experience: it’s a film I already looked forward to revisiting while tiptoeing through it the first time.

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.

Keegan chose a man of few words to make his stand, and Murphy, very much the man of the moment, steps up to play him with a heroic understatement that could move mountains.

“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.

Given that this family-friendly confection looks, sounds and tastes a treat, you’d have to be fussy to quibble.

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.

Society of the Snow is wrenching, deeply harrowing, but crucially dispenses with sappy takeaways about the triumph of the human spirit.

Even when the duo commandeer a luggage cart and trundle around these shiny corridors getting sozzled, we remain prisoners in their departure lounge of the damned.

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

You couldn’t accuse the film of outstaying its welcome for even one of these 81 pristine minutes.

The Voice’s vengeful motives are ridiculous, and the audience is captive to the special dullness only a suspenseless potboiler can provide.

The film’s strength is its plainness and melancholy, as it sketches the history of a marriage – ardent, in times gone by, and still movingly dedicated.

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.

Other directors might have escalated this into the zone of outright horror, with gory payback awaiting. Not Green, who has the level intent of keeping it chillingly real.

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.

With her actors, Belo captures moments of staggering grief that are moving in their restraint: we deal, usually, with the stricken aftermath.

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.

Camping out at the film’s doleful core is a very skilled Baruchel, so crestfallen and cowed as Lazaridis that to watch him is to feel the years ebbing away in virtual real time. Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

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.

The film is heroically unabashed about the power of love, expressed through extraordinary photography (by Jamie D Ramsay, who lifted Living), and a quartet of stars bouncing off each other to hit stratospheric acting highs. It shimmers, and it aches.

Director David Gordon Green fails to whip up even a fraction of the original 1973 chiller's menace in this sloppy, CGI-heavy farrago.

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.

Kenneth Branagh returns as Poirot, but, rather than jazz things up, the film's many Danny-Boyle-esque stylings are a constant distraction.

Nothing at the cinema this year has a hope of beating Past Lives for romantic delicacy, the cosmic yearning it puts into the three words, “I missed you.”

It’s Mamma Mia!, minus ABBA. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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.

Washington – Man on Simmer – keeps himself awake with a few fun, staccato line deliveries. But the flurries of pointlessly sadistic violence are jaggedly dispensed, botching the build-up.

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.

It might have been a classic stoner comedy if far-out outweighed the gross-out.

In practical terms, this just means he’s Iron Man with a spray-paint job. The film’s draggy middle act has to confine Jaime in Victoria’s secret lab, or there would be nothing for the non-superpowered rest of his family to do: at long last, he’s pitted against the grievance-harbouring Indestructible Man (Raoul Trujillo) in one of those climactic clashes we know all too well, which is just a slam-bam VFX-off.

Some of the action sequences are OK, the cast decent – but this convoluted action-adventure's poor attention to detail is its undoing.

The thrill of the games is matched fleetingly here at best, because it feels like a simulator being put through a simulator, and not all the effects are up to snuff. Script-wise, we don’t just get Formula One, but formulae two through infinity.

Shallowly entertaining but the opposite of insightful, this film repeatedly hails the clever USP that Beanie Babies were understuffed on purpose, so they could be “posed” better. As a piece of malleable, threadbare, plasticky content with a plum destiny as digital landfill, their biopic is certainly in a position to know.

The film grabs your attention with verve, but also has a vision: it’s not mortal danger it finds freaky, but what’s waiting on the other side.

If there’s one reason to see Prisoner’s Daughter, it’s Kate Beckinsale.

The sum total is superior in every way to what he dished out last time. With a third one openly teased at the end, the fog has lifted: Hemsworth has landed on his Bourne, and this is his Supremacy.

Enjoyment of The Flash hinges on two things: how much Ezra Miller sprinting about you can realistically withstand in one film, and whether multiverses seem cool any more, a year after we just flogged them to death. I wish you the best of luck.

The dancing and photography are striking, and the acting’s perfectly fine. But the sum of it all is a moony inertia, lacking any awakening spark of life.

As a platter for meat-and-potatoes, bump-in-the-night thrills, it’s a little on the shaky side, but they’re still delivered to the table.

The animation is state-of-the-art – but isn't it high time superheroes stuck a pin in one reality and ripped up their passports?

It’s not enough for Loach and Laverty to have their hearts so reliably in the right place. The Old Oak is sluggishly predictable in plot, but also sharply unsatisfying at the end.

The further down the film descends, the more transfixing its images tend to get, as if Rohrwacher and Louvart have teamed up on an archaeological dig for their own treasures of texture and light.

Aatami is like some figure out of folk myth let loose on his persecutors, shaking off a ridiculous assortment of injuries between one set piece and the next.

This tale of epiphanies and religious schooling at a tiny monastery in the 1940s has a woozy, episodic lyricism all Thornton’s own. It’s also fuzzy and unfulfilled, groping for its images without ever precisely knowing what it needs them to say.

Law is horribly good.

This whole film has a wizardry to it which you’ll be thinking about for days.

Certainly not free of clichés, Black Flies actually gains an added soul-sickness from being stuck with them as everyday realities.

It’s about acting, denial, wrongdoing and the age of consent, but also about growing up, and the different ways we tread through that process, or fail to.

To call Fast X one of the most ludicrous action films ever made would be a borderline tautology for any instalment in the Fast and Furious franchise. But this one takes the cake.

So glibly controlled is the entire cruise, you wonder if it’s without a boatman, gliding on tracks underwater.