Tim Robey

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.

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

There's hardly a shot in Polanski's debut that isn't laced with purpose. [12 Jan 2013, p.10]

The best thing about Destin Daniel Cretton’s blockbuster is how confidently it goes its own way: these call-backs to surrounding Marvel lore are sly without being smug, at least until the obligatory end-credits gesture ushering Shang-Chi into the fold.

The Nest is good on a first viewing and special on a second, when its cramped horizons and avoidance of full-bore tragedy are strategies for which you’re prepared. Durkin’s use of Kubrickian dissolves makes the passage of time feel like no one’s friend.

With its thickly-accented voiceovers, re-recorded into English by Mathieu Amalric, the film is a pleasingly eccentric watch, and one full of rare insights.

There are no shattering revelations here – if Gibney’s canny gathering of various narratives, shimmering score and cool graphics give his film the goose-pimply intrigue of a spy thriller, it just happens to be one you’ve already seen. It’s also one in which the subplot, if anything, takes over from the main plot.

Blade is arguably too much of a good thing. But hey, that’s immortality for you.

The film’s comedy is loose and generous, and its esprit de corps sneaks up on you with a soft tread.

What with all this material, and the focus on Cengiz and Abdulaziz as key players in the ongoing story, The Dissident has a lot to juggle. We can forgive Fogel if his portrait of Khashoggi himself seems a touch incomplete: with its restless style of activism, the film arguably builds on his legacy better than it would have done as a work of retrospective biography.

While Kayla Day is very much a teenager of her precise time and place, her gruelling anxiety – and Fisher’s wonderful yearning in the role – make her universally relatable anyway.

The movie rattles with provocations.

It’s hard to remember the last time an actress aged as convincingly on screen as Zhao Tao does in the melancholic, gently epic Ash Is Purest White.

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.

What The Gorge does supply is a novel science-fiction premise and some captivating bursts of suspense.

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.

There’s a Spielbergian showmanship to Bayona’s films, wedded to an unabashed emotionalism, and this one reaches for you down in the gut.

The Informer is one of the year’s more pleasant genre surprises: a clenched fist of a crime thriller in the mode of The Departed or The Town, in which every element is just a notch smarter than you’d expect. Generic though the film may look, it holds together absorbingly, thanks to a sturdy script which ups stakes and adds characters with cunning and intelligence.

Hansen-Løve and Huppert cup a single life in their hands and ponder the mixed blessing of freedom from a philosophical position: the trade-off between self-sufficiency and aloneness that Nathalie finds herself negotiating.

The film is thoughtful, tender and generally quite beguiling.

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.

It manages the all-important jump scares with the finesse of a skilled stage illusionist, but it’s the surprisingly sincere emotional core that makes it the pick of the series.

There’s no breakneck pace, no urge to pulverise the audience with action. Bart Layton’s film is methodical and moody – that mood being one of bone-weary fatigue. These are stuck lives, the products of bad luck and unfortunate choices

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.

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.

A War does something brave and challenging in making its most sympathetic character responsible for the worst thing that happens in it.

The energy, gruesome thrills and craziness of this flick are hard not to admire.

It’s Dano’s handling of the actors, unsurprisingly, which shows the most confidence.

Admirers of Baker’s earlier work will have a journey to go on here, first in missing the rowdy companionship of protagonists who weren’t wholly out for themselves. As spectacle, this study of a dirtbag running out of extra lives falls into the category of crowd-baiting, not crowd-pleasing. Mikey, repeatedly, is just the worst.

It has the desperate vitality of something barely made-up.

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.

Quemada-Díez thinks in images, and his film is too offhandedly credible in its details to feel like a thesis he’s trying to prove: it’s poetry, not prose.

It seethes with frustration on its subjects’ behalf – that for all the impact their stand has had, they still face a many-headed hydra on the road to real democracy.

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.

The backdrop to this very English marriage – soot and grit and survival, and that basenote of touching bafflement – means all the tears are earned.

Lonergan is so precise with his actors, the sense of place, and the level control of tone that you feel him methodically striving here to avoid false notes.

Love and Monsters is mercifully zombie-free, while serving up a refreshingly different vibe from the word go. It’s not mock-heroic in a winking way; it doesn’t seem so pleased with its own punchlines. It’s rueful and shrugging.

A dizzying collage of all the changes in London’s social and architectural fabric since light was first trained through celluloid.

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.

Skilful photography boosts a standard-issue love triangle into one of Hitch's own favourite films from the period. [14 Jul 2012]

The film scores highly as a Highsmithian three-hander, and particularly excels at illuminating all the ways this trio have failed to grow up. It shimmers, convinces and thoroughly absorbs.

The script never lunges for cheap drama by forcing Saroo into a binary choice between mothers, and the most complex beats are about tip-toeing around, often counter-productively, to avoid hurt or betrayal.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Doctor Strange, within the lockstep rubric of these things, is how non-Marvelly it manages to feel.

Berg’s favourite subject...is heroism at the brink, but the rescue efforts here aren’t pushed to the outsize or sentimental extremes they might have been.

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

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.

All the best parts of the movie are transitions and montages, jazzing up the video-game-ish plot with mock-heroic exuberance. The summer ahead is looking madly stuffed with talking animals, but Po has jammed his bulging frame through first, and done it with style.

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.

None hold a candle to the main event: pulverising verbal jousts between two stars who can toggle between serious and silly like few others. Watching them cajole, manipulate and savage each other is effervescent bloodsport: you want neither to win, or the fun will stop.

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

Bremner, perfectly cast and moving as well as funny, makes McGee an unrepentant showman who’s also an addict high on his own success. It’s refreshing, after the arduous self-pity of Rocketman, to watch a British music biopic which doesn’t wallow in finger-wagging regrets all day.

The songs put Wicked to shame in every way. They cluster neatly around entwined themes: spreading your wings versus the tug of homesickness; finding your path but daring also to lose it. With a running time that brings us briskly ashore, the film is a grand voyage in miniature – a taster epic. Further feasts, if you stay seated for the end credits, are thrillingly promised.

The vignettes of rule-breaking and social exclusion have a funny and stinging force.

Ramsay’s main tour de force is with the Andrew-Wyeth-esque weirdness of the countryside: counting the insects buzzing on the soundtrack could make the viewer go insane. We’d be right there alongside Grace, whose rebellious freak-outs should be alienating – she hates the world – and yet thanks to Lawrence feel majestically raw from beginning to end.

At just under two hours, it's a little long, but the blend of biting character study and campaigning pharmaceutical docudrama is zesty and memorable.

For all its promised rebellion, Colette’s story really segues into a more nuanced tale of outgrowing: not just a childish and bullying spouse, but an age of acquiescence.

It’s all splendid fruit for a documentary, especially given two things: the remarkable filmed record of the expedition at the time, and the fact that seven of its members are still alive.

What a step up for Moretz this is. Her wobbly credentials as a leading lady – oddly, and maybe ill-advisedly, there’s a Carrie reference in the script – suddenly feel like a thing of the past. There’s eye-rolling resignation in her performance, then bottomless despair, then tentative hope.

It's Hardy's performance, above everything else, that sneaks up on you.

Nymphomaniac, which mainly plays out in the banal home-and-office settings you might expect from a 1970s porn shoot, is less drop-dead gorgeous than Antichrist but significantly more human.

The point is that you could watch these films for four hours, then spend 14 arguing about them – about whether sex, for vor Trier, is an eternal human mystery, or a cosmic joke at our expense.

The film ends exactly one scene too late, lessening the brutal statement its ending might have made. But these really aren’t deal-breakers in a crisp bullseye of a debut feature which has guts and brains to spare.

Anyone who’s ever wondered who and what made Tony the way he was will be richly rewarded by Alan Taylor’s trip back in time.

The Dubai section in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, in which Cruise spiders his way up the face of the Burj Khalifa, then sprints down it as if trying to break the vertical 800m record, proves everything Cruise wanted it to, above all that he’s picked the right director to make these set pieces fly. It’s better still in Imax.

Flux Gourmet plays like a gonzo skit, and is hilariously unabashed on that level, but there’s clearly a level of commentary here regarding the crazy whims of artistry, the trouble with getting funded by people whose opinions you despise, and the shrivelled incompetence of anyone paid to write about your work and consume it when it’s served.

If this is Mitchell trying to go full-bore David Lynch – as a zine author and oddball collector, he pointedly casts Patrick Fischler, aka the diner-nightmare guy from Mulholland Drive and a sinister bureaucrat in Twin Peaks – he’s certainly not holding back.

It’s a bleak but compassionate, glancingly comic and often satirically incendiary work about the pyramid structure of Russian corruption, with the little guy crushed helplessly beneath, and God, or at least the orthodox Church, perched at the top.

A tough, vital, electrifying film.

It’s a real tea-drinker’s piece, wanting you to sit down and let its hushed insights, like some earthy infusion, linger on the palate. The incentive is strong to see it again – not immediately, perhaps, but just when it’s just starting to fade on you. The second time, the flavours here can only deepen and unfurl.

Though Rudd and Lilly spark off each other just as appealingly as before, the more urgent point is for Lilly to earn The Wasp her equal billing, which she very much does.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t – Alexander Skarsgård's Prince Amleth rampages through a mythological epic of savage beauty.

Sciamma’s splendid, multi-layered conceit manages to carry equal weight as a love story and a manifesto of sorts for feminine art.

It holds up as terrifically fresh and constantly enjoyable, thanks to the collision of two social milieus that American cinema rarely puts side by side.

Perturbing truths about old age nestle inside an outwardly sentimental shell — it’s a less cosy or placid prospect than it seems.

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.

As a rattling ghost-train ride through sewers and derelict houses even David Lynch would think twice before exploring, the film toot-toots its way around at often deafening volume, but settles for doing only partial justice to King’s epic ambitions. Perhaps Muschietti has more of these stored up for the sequel, once an audience has gained faith that the scary stuff – petrifying, when it peaks – is well and truly in hand.

Quietly disturbing but also darkly amusing to the end.