Tim Robey

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.

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.

It’s quite cheeky that Cooper should swipe the biggest laughs himself in what he intends as a love letter to the New York comedy scene. Equally, though, the fact that he can’t resist being part of this sparring, riffing ensemble is an endearing indication of how much he adores it.

Elliot is a talent eccentric enough to make Nick Park look like an office drone, and the serious sadness underpinning his vision only makes the humour work better.

As a film, Testament of Youth glimmers with sadness, but also the apprehension of sadness: we know not all of these boys are coming back.

Ballard’s concept is meticulously, lovingly recreated, like a museum exhibit of itself. But the tone is always more playful than it is disturbing, a walled-off black joke which opts out of saying anything new.

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 is carnage for connoisseurs. Nothing in the series so far can quite prepare you for the intricate sadism of these set pieces.

The film’s about a chapter we prefer to get out of the way in adolescence; revisited as this kind of helpless mid-life crisis, it’s exquisite torture.

What kept me smiling right through this overturned odyssey is that the men in it aren’t brave pioneers or scary outlaws or any such thing – they’re incorrigible nerds, a century before the word was coined.

Paddington was uncommonly charming and Paddington 2 is very nearly as good.

The most haunting part of this riskily earnest film isn’t the unmentionable effects coup of its grand finale, but the quieter beats, all in close-up, that comprise its coda: atomised, spent, and sad.

While occasionally too muted for its own good, Apples does benefit from not pushing its quirk factor too hard – that would only have set up a barrier between us and Servetalis’s hollow detachment. It’s a braver choice for Nikou to invite our empathy.

The star of Brooklyn is Fiona Weir – not a person who appears on screen at any stage, but the woman who cast it.

The film’s magic is how it slips the skin of sappy and mendacious formula, stepping away from cliché scene by scene, and in quietly revelatory ways.

Haynes’s vision of two New Yorks, a half-century apart, is a marvel of nested detail, never overbearing, and interested in things rusted and forgotten rather than shiny and new.

It shows so much blood being spilled in the name of democracy, and so many tears shed, that it’s next-to-impossible not to be fired up.

It’s the silent allegiances of sisterhood, a near-underground network operating to safeguard women’s rights, which exercise Haroun’s imagination throughout this excellent piece.

It’s the kind of filmmaking with rich confidence in its own professionalism, like a hired assassin purring with his own satisfaction after a devious, trace-free job.

The sheer depth of Sassoon's personal misery feels like a brutally unfashionable thing for a contemporary film to confront, but Davies, who’s never given a fig about fashion, confronts it head on.

It’s a compact and obliquely moving film, deftly constructed to let the dying of the light arrive, not as sunset, but a kind of dawn.

If Amazing Grace can’t fathom the inner depths of Aretha in any definitive way, it grants her a great deal more than a little respect.

There’s so much distinction here, and maybe just a slight vagueness about theme as Husson nears the finish line: it’s a tough ask to end a film well which is so given over to memory, and this becomes a bit of a waft in the general direction of closure.

Denis has made a spellbindingly mysterious object – as nonsensical as existence, maybe, until you give it a quarter-turn, and look again.

It earns respect and a cumulative awe in its intently amused vision of reality: it’s a commanding and intellectually gratifying piece of work.

The Art Life shows us a lot about Lynch’s process, just in a different medium from the one that made him famous. His paintings are terrifying. One day, he just had the sudden urge to watch them move.

Childlike vulnerability hasn’t been something Hopkins has opened up to show us in a long, long while, but he seems ready for this role, hungry to do it, and you may not be prepared for how deep he goes. Zeller’s writing, and his shockingly naked acting, peak at the bitter end.

Tornatore may have hit a sticky wicket with his subsequent work, but he knew what he was doing here: warning us about the irrational lure of the filmed past, which is to say cinema itself, then ushering us grandly to our seats.

Without giving in to bromides, the cha-cha, surprisingly feel-good rhythms of Nagy’s direction make this heroine's sudden sense of purpose rather exhilarating.

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

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

The film has clout, vitriol and an impressive payload of blackly comic despair.

Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, if we mean respite, but in plunging its hero into a revenge-displacement grudge mission, it has the compensation of a rock-solid dramatic idea, and the intelligence to run and run with it.

It’s one of his least crazy films in narrative terms, but you couldn’t call it subdued, because the colours and textures he’s coaxed from a new director of photography, Jean-Claude Larrieu, are even more intoxicating than ever – it’s like an unexpectedly dry martini in a dazzling Z-stem glass.

Without a doubt, it gives us the oddest couple of the year in Alexander Skarsgård’s Ray and Harry Melling’s Colin. For that, and many other reasons, this fresh, funny and poignant pairing is one to be cherished.

The whole climax is a delight

It’s addictive fantasy, satisfyingly snappy even in its absurdity, and something no Chastain fan can afford to miss.

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.

Allen’s ambitions with this taut, tart character study might not be stratospheric, but they’re at least moderate-to-high, and his degree of success is exciting.

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.

The film could have been an indulgent memoir, a scrapbook of a major (if stunted) leading-man career. But seeing so much of it through Kilmer’s own viewfinder gives it both focus and poignancy.

The film is inescapably hilarious too, though – such is the weird power of swearing when the swearer can’t keep a lid on it.

Encounter is bugged-out science fiction paranoia, stylish and sinewy, with an opening sequence that may have you bolting for the door, or at least the remote control.

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.

Both actors, unfazed by the sheer oddity of their task, rise energetically to the occasion.

An acutely compassionate account of unshakeable guilt.

Seyfried reads the tone of this hokum better than anyone, and knows restraint is hardly called for, using every excuse in the book to go completely bananas.

Writer-director Jeremy Lovering, in his feature debut, keeps a skilful handle on technique — his film is a calling card that could give you paper cuts.

It would be near-impossible to love Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women more than Greta Gerwig does.

Hawaiian waves crash over a high-calibre Hollywood prestige drama, sharp and sobering, with top-drawer work from Lancaster, Clift and Sinatra.

For all its baroque pomp, though, McQueen intuits the one unspoken terror – loneliness – which nudged this fascinating artist into the void.

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.

If Diao’s intent on confounding us, he has the courtesy to do it with frequently astonishing style and verve.

This film leaves you itching to read a meaty biography, even as it solidly maps out Hepburn’s emotional life, and explains the relationship with trauma which cut her out so well to be a UNICEF ambassador, raising millions for Bosnian war orphans and Somalian famine relief.

From its unshowy script on down, Mississippi Grind is content to rumble along as a character piece, keeping its storytelling loose and unpredictable, like a repeat flick of the dice.

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

Cleaving hard to its road-trip formula, it works out less of an honest-to-goodness plot than Magic Mike, but goes even beyond that wonderfully loose, dexterous movie in feeling sexually liberated. It’s more glammed-up, rising above any element of tawdry exploitation, and is more of an outright comedy.

Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has followed up one big, awardsy film from last year (Dallas Buyers Club) with another at lightning speed. That was a braver film, but it's the spaciousness of this one that distinguishes it from being just another mechanically pre-ordained adversity narrative.

This Ireland-set fantasy adventure, starring Albert Sharpe and Janet Munro as a father and daughter vying with a local clan of leprechauns is benign and deeply genial stuff. [25 Mar 2020]

Plays entertainingly like an Asian version of a Michael Mann film, albeit with the plot of Mean Streets. It's not quite essential, but the deeply felt ending looks like a jumping-off point for all that Wong has made since. [22 Jan 2005]

Taken on its entertainingly trashy terms, Espinosa’s film does most of the things you want from it quite well, at least until a gotcha ending which doesn’t getcha.

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.