Tim Robey

Booth is simply outstanding, weighing up with deep shading the oppressive circumstances that have made Evelyn both torturer and captive, nemesis and potential lifeline.

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.

Admittedly modest, but the epitome of jolly, this is like the companionable second volume of an autobiography in film form – you'll whip through it in no time, and come out wanting more.

There are gorgeous things about it, there’s one really good performance, and reminders of Davies’ transcendent style ripple through the film. But it also feels broken and cumbersome, weighed down by a number of decisions that simply don’t work.

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.

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.

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

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.

Boiling Point grips remorselessly while it’s spinning all these plates, and somehow ladles onto them a smorgasbord of great, frazzled acting from all concerned.

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.

Perhaps the play’s overfamiliarity is the one thing holding this back in the end: you’re expecting it to cross the barrier from solid to gut-wrenching, and that never quite happens.

The film has an impetuous, let’s-try-it-on quality that makes it a modest pleasure.

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 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.

[Zlotowski] creates a situation, casts it perfectly, and backs out of a fully achieved story. As drama, it’s coitus interruptus, with a Geiger counter doing the interrupting.

Everything’s told in shards, and Amalric does very well to create a sense of emotional continuum amid all the procedural detail. His own performance is fantastic, jittery and dishevelled.

CODA is way too busy playing things cute.

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.

The moral maze of the premise is tautly negotiated. Shrewd casting helps, as does Eastwood’s trump suit: a forensic seriousness of purpose. Grappling with the mechanisms of justice and the workings of a lone conscience, he puts both in the scales, and no one’s off the hook.

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.

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

It’s a casual breakthrough, normalising what was once a taboo.

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.

The director’s game is level, and typically mischievous, but lacks something - and it’s not just the vicious sting at the end of, say, Hidden.

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.

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

The film’s nothing if not an argument-starter, with plenty of hot provocations – especially about the bargains underpinning black excellence – to toss out. They’re like firecrackers, though. You come out rattled, but half-certain you’ve been toyed with.

Hail, Caesar! keeps stumbling over its own best ideas as we stop to appreciate them – ditching momentum, preferring gaps for applause.

The film’s wobbles begin at this stage and spread unstoppably through the last hour. It’s one of those steep-tumbling disappointments where almost every scene feels like an additional step in the wrong direction.

You needn’t have the faintest idea who Ilana Glazer or Michelle Buteau are. It’s enough that this pair of US comics spark and connect, hilariously, as two lifelong friends who complete each other’s sentences.

Christine, which asks a top-notch Rebecca Hall to play out the last days of Chubbuck’s life, dares us to hope that it’s somehow about a different Christine Chubbuck – one who made it out the other side of her own tragedy.

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.

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

More skilful docs get away with more ingenious cheats than this, which doggedly insists that Aisholpan is proving herself to everyone, and dangles proofs it doesn’t even need.

This follow-up to the acclaimed 1992 horror film of the same name has far more substance than your average popcorn chiller.

If there was one thing last year’s occult shocker "Hereditary" taught us about its deviously gifted writer-director, Ari Aster, it’s not to trust him in the slightest. Think Midsommar, his much-hyped follow-up, looks like Aster’s answer to The Wicker Man? Well, it is, kind of – but that’s not to say you’ll come anywhere near predicting its singular, warped response.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s extremely moving in the gentlest, most linear way, and the other performances are sterling, too.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

For all its occasional fumbling, Mogul Mowgli fully justifies its existence in every bristling detail of Ahmed’s performance, which never plays as self-pitying so much as impatient and hotly aggrieved.

The Imitation Game is a film about a human calculator which feels... a little too calculated.

An artistic spin on tragedy that’s deft, witty, very well-acted, and more diverting than it is profound.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Thank heavens, then, for the time-loop gimmick, which sustains a full hour of screen time with enough variations on its gambit to hook you in.

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's bad enough that the film has such minimal interest in his victim – after two scenes doing the film's best acting, Afesi is out of the picture. But as portraiture, Welcome to New York flops too, despite Dépardieu's considerable efforts. [Unrated Version]

This excellent film is a sequel and knows it, and wants us to know that it knows it.

There’s only so much lovable bad behaviour you really want to indulge them in now.

Onward may be middle-of-the-pack Pixar but it’s still a real pleasure.

The United States vs Billie Holiday might be all over the shop – a tatty red carpet for its much-ballyhooed star turn. But this other Lady Day still seizes her moment.

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.

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

This Emma is pleasant enough in passing, and nothing if not scenically lush. I just couldn’t get on with its Emma at all.

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.

And there’s a hidden triumph in the supporting cast from the always-reliable character actor Bill Camp (Black Mass, Midnight Special), whose spectacular, hideously convincing wipe-out as a guy called Harlan Eustice, in the course of a single night, sets much of the plot in motion.

It takes a love of Springsteen’s widescreen balladry, perhaps – all hail the mighty Thunder Road – to get on the film’s wavelength, but it’s an invitation right there for the taking.

If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.

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 certainly Redmayne’s film, and his performance is everything you could ask for: completely convincing in its physicality, credible in its pain, and warmly but not crassly optimistic in its nearly constant good temper.

André De Toth's film noir benefits from lovely LA location work and a strong supporting cast, including a scenery-chewing cameo from Timothy Carey. [10 Dec 2011, p.38]

Flexing some of that Jean Valjean resolve, but with a payload of untrammelled, Wolverine-like rage behind it, Jackman comes closest to shouldering the movie, without ever seriously threatening to make it work.

Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed) doesn’t make images pop like the Coens, but he knows how to get a plot simmering, and he can milk a sit-down to perfection.

Everything Joan and Tom go through is handled believably, but with blinkers on. Their surrounding lives feel grey and pencilled in, as if by all-round agreement to deny them any colour.

A tough, vital, electrifying film.

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.

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.

Beneath the mounting contrivances, Dunne’s sturdy performance supplies an earnest core which Lloyd should have trusted more completely.

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.

Quietly disturbing but also darkly amusing to the end.

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.

Cinematogapher Dean Semler gets amazing colours as the sun sets, and there’s a bravely avant-garde debut score from Kiwi composer Graeme Revell, pumping up the pulse with sinister breathing sounds. The plot even thrives on a tacit cultural tension between the Australian stars and the arrogant interloper.

For fans of Barratt, Boosh and mock-heroic Britcoms, it’ll mostly hit the spot.

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

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

Summoning ghastly spectres of the real past, with the tragic ballast this one lends, always carries the risk that they’ll frighten mere fictions off the screen.

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

The film’s addictive patterning draws us into its cycles of obsession as hungry observers: each part dispenses only as much new information as Moll wants to give away.

The tone oscillates between earnestness and mischief, a little uneasily. There’s a trippy, funhouse aspect to it which yields a couple of splattery punchlines, but it could have gone further in this direction

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.

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.

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.

It’s consistently absorbing as well as evocative to the harsh finish, with mordant plot surprises Connolly keeps smartly tucked away.

Leslie Mann’s warmth and air of charming confusion have helped many a film before. But she gets some definitive moments for the clipreel here.

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.