Tim Robey

It’s a film about micromanaging, fixing things on the fly, and a lot of Ridley’s gruff, technocrat personality shines through.

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.

The film has bite without a lot of nuance.

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.

Despite a wobbly handle on all this, it’s an intriguing film to wrestle with, it’s powerfully acted by Melander and Milonoff, and it sticks out for its undeniable outlandishness. After all, when was the last time a bearded troll baby posted from Finland was the closest thing to salvation?

Denial certainly isn’t great cinema – it gets stuffy and repetitive, and Lipstadt’s frustration at not being allowed to testify herself isn’t the burning issue it ought to be. Still, it’s textbook advocacy, and a teaching tool of genuine value.

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.

While it’s fair to say that Transit isn’t aiming for a torn-from-the-headlines specificity about the issues of today, it could be accused of dodging some racial questions, and some of its Petzoldian gambits – including a love triangle that remixes Casablanca with sepulchral dabs of Vertigo – dampen its dramatic charge.

Pohlad’s film is good at probing the line between radical creativity and mental disarray; arguably less good at getting Wilson back on the safe side of it. But it leaves you in no doubt that the man’s a genius.

Even while making a heartfelt statement that will put Khan deservedly on the map, the film cries out for a different shape, so that these three could grieve, bond and come to an understanding without the plot’s cloak-and-dagger machinations.

Gibney’s problem here, in a way, is his main point: the very lack of transparency about these missions, which operate in ill-defined spheres of international law, obstructs informed public discussion.

This is Sachs in Éric-Rohmer-abroad mode, and some way off top form. Frankie suggests a gloriously civilised shoot more than it coheres into much of a film.

Lame Ferrell, through some weird freak of his talent, tends to be the best Ferrell, and despite the film’s general mediocrity in most departments – let us swish briskly over everything about the way it looks – his floundering star turn delivers the goods.

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.

It makes genuinely important points about homelessness, and the middle-class horror of ever crossing that line. But the script, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, She Said) is a surprising letdown.

What’s impressionistic on the page has to be re-sculpted and honed to a point on screen, but the result is that the novel’s tenderly hidden secrets become rather blatant twists.

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.

You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, and there’s a lot of smooth here. Jim Broadbent has the balance of jollity and melancholy just right as Santa.

As a gently exploratory portrait of adolescence, Spring Blossom is tender, amiable and sweetly played, but it doesn’t risk (or say) all that much.

If the film had been tightened to two hours of Crowe and Shannon ruthlessly going at it, we might have been mesmerised.

The secret weapon, though, is dimpled star Ben Wang, the 25-year-old lead in the Disney+ series American Born Chinese.

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

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.

There’s nothing soft and romcom-cuddly here, but a brutal dissection of competitive friendship dynamics, eating disorders and selfish misery.

Part Heat, part Miami Vice, this sinewy thriller keeps motives hidden as a police unit weighs duty against dirty money.

Bombshell is a bright, watchable film on a subject that ought to make us squirm.

There are clever and sensitive touches right through, and a moving ending. But Fanning seems wholly uncomfortable, and not always intentionally.

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.

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

The final hurrah for Mercury’s genius, this huge, hubristic spectacle lets you grant his troubled film a pass: at least it keeps on fighting to the end.

The Vanishing makes an unmistakable effort, but also feels like one, and fades almost fittingly from the imagination within hours of seeing it.

The film’s narrative obliqueness heightens its gallery-piece surrealism. What payoffs we get are affecting, though.

The set-up is grabby and effectively alarming, even if it lends itself to more nail-biting stress than actual suspense.

It’s jocular, never feels like a screed, and it’s refreshingly outward-looking.

It’s the character dynamics here, more than the dark and stormy set-pieces, that get things off the ground.

Hoffman's performance has a sadness, an unexplained loneliness, which gives this slightly diffident piece a centre of sorts, and there's a pleasing air of melancholy all round.

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

The story’s insistent ambiguities ought to make it seductively complex, but it never quite shakes off a stuck-in-the-mud vibe.

In the grizzled spectacle Gibson willingly makes of himself, it has a B-movie equivalent of that A-plus Mickey Rourke comeback, delivered with just enough clout to count as a step in the right direction.

Cedar might have built up a broader satirical thesis from all this wheeling and dealing, but he’s happy to let the film rest gently on Gere’s shoulders – these days, a pretty safe foundation.

On this present occasion, Farhadi may hardly be reinventing himself, but his old tools serve him just fine.

It’s well-acted, especially by Healy (The Innkeepers), who makes you feel the pain of every wound, the ratcheting torture of every dilemma. But the film’s also a gimmicky exercise whose hollowness and credibility are constant problems.

Does it add up to much? Not really. Not finally. But it’s a suggestive puzzle-box of a picture, worth turning over in your palm.

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

Watching it is like settling into a reupholstered armchair which still creaks in the same old places.

Take one high-concept format, two big stars and lots of songs... this romcom isn’t perfect, but you can’t help rooting for the main couple.

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

What lifts it to a major degree is Rahim’s performance. We know little of Salahi’s life outside Guantánamo, dealing with him as a virtual blank slate, but he fills this in with a remarkably charismatic personality, riven with contradictions, and clinging to bursts of mischievous humour as a survival strategy.

It doesn’t have easy access to human emotion, instead deploying a series of techniques to fake it.

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.

Struggling with tone and urgency during its recruiting phase, the film clomps along to a pedestrian drum-roll, summoning a stark, brooding edge without quite enough lift-off.

The film’s forgettable fluff, but perfectly genial, and it’s hard to imagine many hardcore objections to curling up with it.

The film’s a little wobbly on actual charm; stronger on smarm, in-jokes and Bond-riffing action pastiche. Yet whatever their niggles, families can flock to it, relieved to be getting brand new entertainment that entertains.

The film is like a cheeky seaside postcard with swastikas and cryptography on the reverse.

Through all the film’s bumps and scrapes, Firth does invest a lot of commendable energy in helping us grasp Crowhurst’s besieged state of mind. It’s a good performance in shaky circumstances, but at least he honours the man’s contradictions, on top of his terror of public failure, and even greater one of exposure as a fraud.

It’s a candy-coated underworld romp, and pleasingly weird at times – when we’re invited inside Harley’s cutely tattered parlour, no explanation’s given for why she has a stuffed beaver in a pink tutu on her kitchen table. It’s just… the kind of thing she would have. Yan’s film converts her from livid to likeable, and doesn’t give a hoot if you mind.

Who knows what it’ll look like down the line as a record of its own premiere – the live-streaming may well have been its oxygen. But we did watch the boundaries crumble outright between live performance and real, on-the-hoof film-making, to amply entertaining effect.

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.

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.

Harold’s trek has its moments to savour, but Wilton seizes the day by sculpting her own mini Mike Leigh film on the side – armed with only a vacuum cleaner and a face like thunder.

Genres don’t come much more formulaic than frat-house comedy, and nobody, in this fair-to-fine example, feels like rocking the boat.

As a critic-turned-partisan who also narrates, Krichevskaya is the right kind of observer here on paper. But there’s too little airing of her own views at the time of walking out, when she didn’t have faith in Dozhd’s true independence.

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 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.

A cram-it-all-in adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s 2010 history book of the same name, which knuckles down to its task with sleeves rolled, upper lips stiffened, and vast sheaves of exposition to whip through.

An unfashionably male art film of Nietzsche-quoting, Tarkovsky-adjacent bent that’s ghoulish, baffling and rather brave.

The film itself never exudes much heat: it’s a chilly, impeccable diagram.

The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family.

The film has limitations. But it has Binoche, and that’s almost enough.

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

It has a certain clomping, smart-alecky entertainment value, wedded to the meta appeal of watching three A-listers juggle all the twists with ease, before walking off into the sunset with silly money. Did Netflix never twig that the real heist was on them?

Breaking down taboos around our attitudes to sex on screen is a laudable project, and one that the British two-hander Good Luck to You, Leo Grande gets at least half right.

There’s a doomy superficial finesse to the picture, with all its wintry confrontations, skull-trained sniper fire and quick thinking, and it doesn’t take itself as seriously as Fincher’s did. But then, it couldn’t: there’s nothing going on beneath.

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.

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.

While politically unimpeachable, Just Mercy is simply too lethargic to be the major awards race player Warner Bros. were evidently hoping for. It’s a pity for Jordan, who has steel and energy in his part, and an especial shame for Foxx, who gives a beautifully modulated, unflashy and quietly moving performance, easily his best in at least a decade.

Buoyed by an appealing duet of star turns from Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver.

While it's possible to fantasise a truly explosive, riskily disturbing version of The Workshop, that simply wouldn’t be what its own makers intended.

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.

Give the film this much: it’s egalitarian in its imbecility.

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.

Sometimes it just takes one actor to elevate a film from innocuous, take-it-or-leave it fare into something winningly tender – and if your first film’s needing that kind of lift-off, you could hardly do much better than Monica Dolan.

After the novelistic strengths of First Cow and Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt turns in something here that’s more like a short story – unhurried, pleasurable, and low key.

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.

When Clooney gets this cast riffing off each other in boozy hangout mode, the movie skips along surprisingly well for all its so-what-ishness.

It’s a pleasing if minor piece of work, like a semi-precious stone that you’d still keep.

This film isn’t a nadir at all – it’s divertingly loony – but Jordan has rarely had less urgent things to say to us.

The distinctive charms of Wain’s aesthetic certainly come over, especially daubed across the lovely end credits, by which time this jumpy curio, with almost palpable relief, has laid itself to rest.

[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.

Overegged is the word – there was enough conviction in Radcliffe alone to pull the story through these straits.

Marc Webb, returning after the last instalment, again shows a better feel for the relationships than he does for juggling all the overlapping story elements.

A story stretched thinly between two many characters, without the dynamism or momentum to keep itself charging onwards.

Eye in the Sky is a tick-tock suspense exercise as well as a neat little ethical echo chamber, a plea for reason in a world exploding too vigorously to give it the time of day.

Director Christopher Landon, a veteran of the Paranormal Activity series, keeps the energy levels so peppy and the twists coming so unflaggingly, you barely have time to lodge any complaints.

You sense structural uncertainty about what the Armstrong saga connotes and how exactly it was begging to be told. But you can’t take your eyes off Foster.

Like the 69-year-old Stallone hoisting his frame gingerly into play, Creed takes a while to move. But by the end, it’s genuinely moving.

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.