Tim Robey

The film thinks fame alone is a substitute for wit or charm, and might just as well have outsourced every last role to a hologram.

Suzume is perhaps Shinkai’s most spookily beautiful work to date, while remaining treasurably odd.

The whole thing remains ridiculous, partly since Avery can’t persuade us we’ve been watching a possessed boy so much as an overtaxed child actor he’s putting through boot camp. This was William Friedkin’s – and Blair’s – quite particular achievement. Think of Avery’s go as a goofy cover version you can indulge just the once.

It’s daft, disposable fun while it lasts.

Even at practically Kubrickian length, though, the lockstep slaughter barely gives you pause for breath. It’s a barrage, and a blast.

This film pretends to be cleaning house chez Mr Strangler, when it’s just pushing dust around.

The showdown (in the usual abandoned auditorium) is perhaps the campiest yet to be unveiled, proving that a generally-clapped-out franchise is capable of some fairly fun death throes.

The version we get feels like it’s been eagerly pitched, passably storyboarded, then handed over with a defeated shrug to somebody’s second unit.

When [Penn] steps aside, or simply lets Zelensky talk, the film hits home as a crudely earnest plea for more principled military aid, and you can’t really fault its message. The delivery, though, leaves a lot to be desired.

This is Sachs’s eighth film and one of his best.

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.

Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realised piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge.

I snorted with genuine laughter, hard, at this film’s closing notion of what being a comedy even is.

The film mounts its thesis while hardly needing to verbalise what’s going on: it mesmerises by reaching inside them to listen, even while others talk.

It's so rare in British cinema to see the "L" in "LGBTQ+" up there in such bold type, which makes Blue Jean not only a biting look at this historical moment but a riveting act of redress.

The endgame could be… sharper. There’s an elaborate hoax that’s too easy to suss out – even for us, and we’re not the seasoned con artists on the receiving end. At this point, the film’s own confidence seems to falter just a fraction. Then again, the chinks in these crooks’ cynical armour are what give it texture, a mottling of human desperation. Instead of smug gotchas, it traffics in mistakes.

From a premise of purest hokum, the Sixth Sense director wrings out an impressive amount of sweat – it's a real return to form.

In a sickly-sweet genre, it’s almost bracingly sour.

Whatever one’s familiarity with this searing chronicler of lives on the margins, the film is riveting and essential.

The undersung director, Emily Atef, does well to make the business of dying, which can be the hoariest of cinematic subjects, feel like a fresh quandary here for two people making up the rules as they go along.

Marketed cannily towards Gen Z – for her meme value is beyond compare – M3GAN is essentially the anti-heroine of a catnip horror film which tips far more towards the “campy fun” end of the spectrum than the raw terror end. No one will be quailing under their seats during her campaign of slaughter, but that was never the point.

If you’ve seen Eastwood’s Gran Torino or Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man, you’ll know the sort of cranky redemption arc we’re eventually in for here, but this is the flat-packed, self-assembly-kit version – more likely to exacerbate a mild depression than warm the cockles.

Piggy presumably aims to test our sympathies, but just forfeits them entirely, in the service of a facile plot and a heroine even the film itself can’t seem to stand.

How deep can an authorised portrait of Whitney Houston delve? The answer: not very. I Wanna Dance with Somebody aims, instead, to climb high – to cheer and celebrate as a glitzy biopic, where documentaries have tended to dwell morbidly on Houston’s downfall.

One of Howard Shore’s routinely excellent moody scores helps our wend through the wilderness. But the irony, for a would-be-macabre mystery about hearts being ripped out, is a flatlined pulse and a puzzling absence of red meat.

Spirited never gets you to a place of soaraway joy, exactly, but it’s busy, silly and not a bad time.

Visually, it’s one great shrug, but to get by with a throwaway murder plot this routine, the zingers at least must zing. They rarely do. There’s something turgid and defeated about it.

Of all the gonzo flights of fancy, though, perhaps Al’s romance with Madonna (a bubble-gum-popping, uncannily inspired Evan Rachel Wood) is the most helpful at getting this uneven spoof into its groove. The idea of her courting him just to secure the so-called “Yankovic bump” in her record sales is pure Madge, and as such, delightfully persuasive.

Unashamedly rousing and immaculately crafted, The Swimmers is up there with Creed as a sports drama with more at stake than individual glory – a global-humanist purview to which it ascends without getting the slightest bit preachy.

Deadwyler does magnificent work in it, making bold, risky choices to communicate a near-operatic range of emotion.

Grandage’s feature debut, the literary biopic Genius, was an all-star dud; this is colourless, miscast, adrift. He hasn’t yet found cinematic lift-off: the camera gazes endlessly into the soupy sea off Peacehaven, as if it were a Magic Eye picture hiding the drama of a Turner painting inside. Amid the drab ruin of these lives in the 1990s, and their equally cheerless salad days, rare sparks of life succumb to a great deal of mopey regret.

Lindholm’s stealthy restraint fits the material like a glove, and both get under your skin.

The middle stretch is genuinely scary, though, thanks to the film’s clammy aptitude for trapping us alone in the dark. Somewhere in here, there’s a thesis brewing about how predators ply their trade and cover their tracks while purporting to be the good guys. The product of their actions is ghastly, and it’s lumbering at us fast.

It’s the “rom” that’s the killing shortfall. But I must admit, Bros put me in such a sour mood that its “com” got sabotaged into the bargain. It’s distinctly smug about pitching itself as a landmark, while being really more of a setback, and a pretty low bar for the next one to surmount.

Much of the film’s success comes down to Plaza, who has left that deadpan sphinxlike mode of hers some way back in the rear-view mirror. Grit replaces irony, and it’s fascinating to watch her think her way through every predicament here, deftly and in detail, weighing the percentages.

The film has whizz, and bang, and you’ll forget it by tomorrow.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s epic drama springs off the success of Black Panther and roars into action: it’s every bit as propulsive, as detailed, as richly imagined. It’s fast, and it’s loose, and it totally works.

It’s a thoroughly pleasant if flimsy film – a sleeper hit already in America’s sleepy arthouses – with a distinct perfume of nostalgia wafted towards us, say by the sight of Gitanes lit up on cross-channel flights.

When it’s in-flight entertainment this winter, no one will necessarily moan, but it plays like a soothing feature-length trailer for your first cocktail on the beach.

Causeway is an excellent, moving, determinedly low-key slice of US indie cinema.

The film has a sheepish, hair-shirt quality, as if it wants credit for intersectional largesse. What it does do quite well is challenge the temptations of unquestioning nostalgia.

Mark Chappell’s script has a refreshingly high laugh-rate as these things go, with a seam of pure English silliness that sets it well apart from Knives Out, without gunning for anything like that league of plot ingenuity. It’s closer, really, to doing for Christie what Scream did for the slasher flick – goosing the formula with winks and tickles.

The Forgiven concentrates on awful people doing awful things they’ll pay for unless they can avoid it, but as morality play it’s stuck in a rut, with an ending that just seems to have stumped McDonagh – it dissipates.

It’s in the wit department that this trifle wobbles most, dodging irony and cosying up with convention.

Smart comedy is already a rarity; smart comedy that looks this good is a once-in-a-blue-moon event.

Director/co-writer Babak Anvari made a startling debut with Under the Shadow (2015), but like his follow-up, Wounds (2019), this is a shakier pot-boiler – diverting, provocative in spots, a little head-scratchy in plot terms. The secret weapon is Ascott, an actor you itch to see cast in more films

Shot entirely in Welsh, this pristine debut from Lee Haven Jones has a methodical chill to it, laying steady groundwork for a buffet of grotesqueries. It’s horror-satire, with its eye on environmental plundering, and a demonic revenge to exact.

[Folman's] new film, Where is Anne Frank, doesn’t need to make sense of Anne Frank’s diaries – they speak for themselves – but instead builds a bridge to the present day, where Folman finds a troubling deafness to the very lessons, and alarm bells, that her legacy ought to have guaranteed.

Taken as a speculative romance, and in the right matinee spirit, it’s lushly engaging, with a star pairing that – appropriately – rivets.

With its meathead sensibility, Day Shift is always most comfortable hacking and slashing. These set-tos can be reasonably tasty, but everything else? Way more seasoning, please.

The script makes a heavy meal of Naru’s personal growth, where a concentration on pure survivalist reflex would have made it leaner and meaner. But when the film knuckles down in sequences of wordless action, it slays.

The oddity, and pretty much sole selling point here, is Phillips, a delightful stalwart of British telly for years, fronting a coy Australian sex comedy of almost dogged, determined mediocrity. Writer-director Renée Webster is at least to be credited with grasping her star’s flummoxed appeal in a rare leading role.

It’s the film that’s hell – and a very dull, desperate hell at that, as if these dungeon masters have realised we aren’t sufficiently scared by the main event, and try throwing the kitchen sink at us, almost literally.

It would be hard to overpraise Burghardt, a debuting actress on the spectrum whose scenes are so tender, relaxed and generally sweet she deserves at least half the credit.

This is at the very least a beautifully designed failure, marrying crepuscular photography with faultless art direction, and blessed by a gorgeous, otherworldly score by Augustin Viard, a specialist in the ondes Martenot. It looks and sounds so darkly inviting – but sends you home unsated.

With its watch-through-your-fingers cringe factor, this is an excellent black comedy of amiss-ness all round. It’s about millennials, their fibs, and their failures.

What keeps it on its feet is the snappy direction of Jeremiah Zagar, a Philly native who shows off his home town with unmistakable pride, and has a lot of vivid strategies for what the camera’s doing (there are more time-hopping match cuts than I could count) or which song to put on top.

The moment-to-moment incoherence of Dashcam makes it maddeningly hard to figure out what’s happening – the “WTF?”s that appear in the chat-box might just as well be our own. There’s a certain delirious energy to it.

Achieving the gossamer profundity of one of Alice Munro’s short stories, her film is about the uninterrogated privileges success brings and the envy they can easily spawn.

All his usual strengths fail him in a different culture here, perhaps because the veneer of venal cynicism that ought to be the film’s top layer is so easy to scratch through. Digging for the pathos hardly takes us long, especially with one of the director’s most cloying scores handing over a shovel.

The film’s craft, with its shivery wooded landscapes and deep focus, is consistently strong, and the acting – especially from State, but also many of the bickering village ensemble – spices up what might have been a route-one polemic.

It’s profoundly compelling, expertly made, and quite intentionally horrifying.

The shot-making is sensational, and the film knows it; the camera does things you’ve never seen before, say with focus in an interrogation room mirror, and the whole saga’s edited as though Park can’t wait to show you what’s up his sleeve.

Moonage Daydream, a wildly creative tribute to everything Bowie achieved over four and a half decades, sets a sky-high bar as cinematic fan-service, and it leaves you buzzing.

The film has a beguiling looseness – it captures that familiar holiday feeling of good days and bad days, or moods turning for no particular reason, other than maybe spending a bit too long in each other’s company.

Seydoux has unfakeable chemistry here with a perfect-as-usual Poupaud, the leading man in French cinema who seems most incapable of putting a foot wrong.

Gray has taken a dicey risk here, by thinking through white guilt from such an unapologetically personal place. In this retrospective mea culpa, he’s trying to be honest about his own conscience and childhood regrets, but also examining the multiple failures of education that set these two kids on such divergent paths.

It’s as much a film about legal process as social injustice, and the nitty-gritty is eye-opening.

The movie isn’t awful, just sapping and strained.