Tim Robey

Eighty minutes ought to be a tight frame for this sort of hokum, which takes no effort to watch, but the only thing that escalates is how silly it is.

It’s not enough for Loach and Laverty to have their hearts so reliably in the right place. The Old Oak is sluggishly predictable in plot, but also sharply unsatisfying at the end.

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

Perhaps the unexpected ascendancy of Trump is simply no laughing matter – there are precious few zingers hitting home on this occasion. Or maybe what’s demanded by Moore’s one-man leviathan hunting is a less rusty set of harpoons.

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.

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

In fairness to Beyond, it makes very few promises it can't keep, but also goes halfway out on every limb it can find, risking next to nothing.

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.

There’s enough in Mr Jones to make you want a good deal more.

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

This is the trouble with nihilism as a foundation for horror: it can’t quicken the pulse, drum up scares, or elicit any fruitful response from the viewer at all. Being impressed with a whole lot of nothing doesn’t mean we are.

Something went wrong here – it feels like the final cut of the film is either the victim of duff scripting choices, or made equally duff attempts to fix them. It’s a pity, because it wastes Affleck’s solid efforts, and thwarts the picture Lyne got halfway on screen: a portrait of an affluent marriage as a toxic sham, with all the solidity of a Love Island merger.

The film is thoughtful, tender and generally quite beguiling.

It’s a film that exploration boffins will cherish most, but there’s plenty of grizzled male hardship here to engage fans of The Terror or The North Water. Unlike in those, you’re assured of at least one happy ending, too.

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.

By managing to keep faith with this fast-unravelling person, even in her most bozo moments of losing the plot, Wilson turns in her best and bravest work in films to date.

It’s really the style and performances, more than the pseudo-experimental structure Layton has chosen, that keep the film grabby.

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.

Organisationally, the movie has a struggle on its hands not to seem like the contents of a toy chest simply chucked down the stairs, with all the chaos of limbs and accessories that implies.

The film is way too much like a never-give-up Saga commercial for its own good.

John Wick has such stylistic assurance that even when it falters – the music’s a bit moronic, and the subtitles for Russian dialogue get a naff, pseudo-pulpy typeface – it mainly tends to remind you how much you’re enjoying everything else.

Scriptwise, it's as stilted as any other 1950s studio horror flick, but De Toth does a great job at making the melting waxworks look genuinely creepy, and, yes, that really is Charles Bronson (credited with his original surnme, "Buchinsky") loping about the museum as Price's deaf-mute assistant Igor. [28 May 2005]

Laika may not be conquering the world with this outing. But if every studio’s three-star films were as bounteous with the eye candy, we’d be in clover.

Sagging at times, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind feels as though it might have played better as a mid-length short film, with subplots pruned back.

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

It's a bureaucratic noir nightmare that may put you more readily in mind of Kafka, albeit with a tone of tongue-in-cheek bleakness that's bracing and funny – at least at first.

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.

Only when it reaches for all-out camp does this script truly tickle the pleasure receptors.

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.

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

With the filmmakers almost palpably high-fiving between these takes, it’s no surprise they wind up with a star performance that has to count as one of this star’s most strenuous. Treated as this zoo exhibit, he isn’t unleashed to express himself creatively. He’s caged.

The film is heroically unabashed about the power of love, expressed through extraordinary photography (by Jamie D Ramsay, who lifted Living), and a quartet of stars bouncing off each other to hit stratospheric acting highs. It shimmers, and it aches.

The film’s ambitions might be on the limited side: it’s a clipped survival tale with little of the anguished spiritual dimension that end-of-the-world stories have summoned in the past. But Affleck has certainly surrounded himself with the right people.

Call it a landlocked variant on Robinson Crusoe, but it’s a hypnotic one, with a sense of mystery and interior life that are all its own.

You wouldn’t call it profoundly scary – the one thing a wiped-clean slate can’t do is instantly defamiliarise us with every iteration of the monster that’s come since Carpenter. But it’s robustly suspenseful and shot with loving care.

The Family Fang, based on a book of the same name by Kevin Wilson, looks on paper like your typical, middleweight, dysfunctional-family angst-fest. But it’s rather better, and considerably more eccentric, than you might expect.

The film gets too caught up in its svelte, talky stylings to stay properly watertight as a suspense piece, and when it goes for broke in the last reel, it has too many characters – major and minor – behaving like buffoons. It definitely could have ended better.

The movie sorely needs a tighter edit, and direction from Apatow that isn't so slapdash and sitcommy.

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]

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.

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 unlikely to change anyone’s life, exactly, but it’s genial, funny, and invigorating.

The hesitancy of the storytelling, with its comforting lulls and odd delays, is a funny sort of boon.

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.

On his broadest canvas yet, Trapero mounts a saga about the role of conscience, which might seem old-fashioned if it weren’t so urgently imagined. An added fillip is Michael Nyman’s stirring score, his best in years.

Very little is out of place in Branagh’s do-over, but that’s almost a problem: there’s a feeling, throughout, of going perfectly through the motions. The film is all smoothly-operated crane shots, excellent hair, gleaming teeth. Originality is the glass slipper it never even tries on.

This is Holmes intentionally slowed down to a hobbling, reflective, end-of-life pace: dare we call it refreshing? It’s a film to rummage around in, picking up old clues, considering their meaning, and turning them in your palm.

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 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.

Novello again, in an underrated road-to-ruin melodrama, plays a public-school rugby champ disgraced when he takes the fall for getting a waitress pregnant. Visual experiments abound and there's a justly famous scene with the curtains of a Paris nightspot being pulled back, exposing its superannuated regulars to the unsparing sunlight. [14 Jul 2012, p.4]

It wants to become a cat-and-mouse game between the leads, but the leaky script dampens any real hope of suspense.

This prodding, acidic, bumpy-but-worthwhile movie is about even the world’s consenting creatures winding up with nothing they really wanted, while a dog submits to human will just to make us feel like we’re the ones in charge.

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.

Sasquatch Sunset barely gets started – though it does have remarkable prosthetics and some lovely sunsets.

It’s flat-out hilarious – find me a funnier screen stab at Austen, and I’m tempted to offer your money back personally. Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it’s also Stillman on the form of his life.

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

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

It’s Deneuve who musses up the formula and makes the film worth seeing, by generously bringing out her inner vulgarian.

That the film winds up cramped, underwhelming and strangely thwarted is hard to square with all the effort up on screen – or perhaps it just feels too much like effort.

It’s an elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class.

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.

Sketchy it may be, but the film finds dreamy consolation in the final curtain.

Blanchett makes us feel the creeping horror of professional disgrace, the fear and stigma, however unfair Mapes argues her treatment may have been. We watch a polished professional come apart at the seams, caught up in self-incrimination and spiralling neurosis.

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.

Slack Bay is half as long as Quinquin, but still feels too long. Major ensemble scenes (a family banquet, a service on the beach) dawdle indulgently, as if waiting for the joke to start.

Roofman has heart, energy and personality fit to burst. If the cinema gods decided that it was finally time for Channing Tatum to have a chance at an Oscar nomination, they could hardly have equipped him better than with this role.

The film frustrates because it’s frictionless, almost completely devoid of credible conflict, and generally keen to sail through as a testament to everlasting love at its most altruistic.

In trying to pretend a blip was a seismic revolution, the film winds up distinctly strained, and more depressing than it quite knows.

The film fares best when the chief negotiator, a fellow Marine vet played by the late, great Michael Kenneth Williams, steps into the fray. It’s one of his final performances, and a wary, angry one that elevates the material.

Sheer novelty powers this confrontational curio, up to a point. But the nastiness cuts both ways.

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.

The headline draw remains the headline draw – and sometimes it’s enough for two lead actors to animate, complicate and enrich a project by lending it all the mysterious gravity you could ask for.

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.

As a feat of adaptation by Max Porter, from his 2023 novella Shy, it’s quite fascinating.

So what’s to dislike here? Hardly anything – it’s finding things actively to like that poses more of a problem.

It’s not a peak for the doughty franchise so much as a reverential goodbye. Jollity is also served, when it’s not straining for misplaced importance.

It’s all impeccably pleasant, just a tiny bit bland.

Staying Vertical is a script by a hot talent never quite getting round to being fully written, and instead disappearing down a series of suggestive dead ends.

With her actors, Belo captures moments of staggering grief that are moving in their restraint: we deal, usually, with the stricken aftermath.

This slice of class-baiting British ordeal horror from writer-director James Watkins is potently made. It's also exploitative trash, serving up silly levels of alarmist editorialising about kids today.

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

The film is much too anxious – desperately so – for us to feel that Barry is a fundamentally decent guy.

There’s very little marring this as a pleasant experience all round, even if little, outside the performances, ramps it up into the realm of the truly memorable.

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.

It’s callous and conscience-free, the work of an auteur in the mood to flex his style chops while saying literally nothing.

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.

Maguire tries hard, and has a good stab at Fischer’s twitchy rage, but can’t bring much freshness or specificity to anything else.

Peter Baynham, best-known for Borat and Alan Partridge, co-wrote this script, which offers just the right of blend of madcap farce and piercingly precise gags about social media.

It’s the music that makes it particularly special, and appreciating that is entirely the point of the live-action remake.

Not a hugely comfortable fit for the silent treatment, Noël Coward's play might have transferred better in the stagey confines of the early sound era. [14 Jul 2012]

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.

Schrader is a million miles from the potent anguish of First Reformed, the 2017 film that won him an Oscar; rather, this nearly rivals his 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan, for bewildering tedium.

Drop is ludicrous. OK, so are all films in which a taunting psychopath calls the shots, but this one takes the biscuit because of the so-not-cutting-edge tech element.

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

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.

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.

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.

Stevenson has configured her tale as female body-horror fit for a dissertation, without giving it much of a spine: while slick, the set pieces are few, far between, and over too fast.