Tim Robey

Even Moore seems quite stranded, given little chance to animate her character except as an unenviable technical exercise. Love is meant to be soaring across parapets, melding destinies with the fluttering elegance of a high B flat, but in Bel Canto, flat is the operative word.

It’s a bungled business, making obvious errors of staging.

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

Landing the perfect ending is a challenge for any such story; A Star is Born, for all its guts and pathos, peaked early. Wild Rose holds its horses, and lets Rose-Lynn soar only when she’s worked out who she is.

Little is colourful enough, with some inventively weird costumes to distract you from the arbitrary plot. But it has a dog of a script, co-written by the director, Tina Gordon, and Girls Trip’s Tracy Oliver, both scrabbling around fruitlessly for inspiration before and after the central conceit drops.

As parable, the film’s slippery quality catches you off guard in the best way. And it summons profound love for a character – a village idiot it would never let you describe that way – without congealing even slightly into sentimentality. It clings on to Lazzaro like the only hope in a benighted world.

Bizarre quantities of action simply don’t connect to anything at all.

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.

The point with van Gogh is that he produced mind-boggling art while stricken with doubt that he’d failed all his life. This film is his spiritual antithesis – so recklessly confident that it paints right over him.

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

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.

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?

As trash pleasures go, Serenity’s too ploddingly stretched and lacking in plot curlicues to reach nirvana, but it’s capable of making a whole audience giggle at its wonderfully pretentious gracenotes.

Somewhere in the specifics of Cronin’s is-he-or-isn’t-he scenario – played with gripping detail by Kerslake and Markey – there’s a decent little midnight chiller.

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.

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.

There’s a bicep-flexing quality to Landes’s direction, with its bursts of colour and chaos, its conjuration of a surreal experience out of tactile reality. You tumble out of it bruised, bewildered, mesmerised.

All is True is a tongue-in-cheek title all the same, for a script which fills in factual gaps with its own blatant leaps of imagination: they’re just far more respectful and illuminating leaps.

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.

As you’d expect from Rodriguez, it has a decent number of pow-wow fight scenes, and sure loves to watch machinery being ripped to shreds. But it's all uncomfortably close to the gruesome Flesh Fair from Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, revamped as an ain’t-it-cool demolition derby with a charm-and-conscience bypass.

In its best moments, which tend to involve Gambon lurking at the back with a seedy grimace, or Broadbent looming almost motheringly over a rival’s shoulder, the film’s writing and acting have the grubby energy of good Pinter. In its worst though, it’s business-like and, for all the vivid performances, oddly bland.

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.

he film's indulgences are so heart-on-sleeve that it's hard to differentiate watching it from hearing someone pitch their very bad screenplay ideas with no attempt to read the room.

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.

Intermittently entertaining but also a rum mix of goofy and pretentious, Glass sets far more problems than it successfully solves: tying various loose threads together, Shyamalan can’t restrain himself from adding more. The result’s a lumpy tangle, and the trilogy’s weakest instalment.

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).

Mortal Engines has been thoroughly storyboarded, make no mistake. But here lies the rub – lift-off, personality, and plainly put, direction, aren’t there. All the pieces of the movie slide mechanically into place and wait – and wait – for some spark of soul to turn up and animate them.

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.

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.

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.

This film, with its endless copying of Assassin’s Creed camera angles and state-of-the-art bullseyes, is an ugly machine, tiring to the eye, monotonously scored, and also weirdly regressive on quite a few levels.

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.

The film suggests Inglourious Basterds dumbed down, pumped up, and ditching all pretension. If only it played like a spirited B-horror hybrid we could all get behind, instead of a ghoulish effects trip for the Resident Evil crowd.

It has the feel of a clockwork musical toy that’s been tinkered with and shaken to life over and over – it cranks out a tune, all right, but the feeling of labour behind it dampens the magic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Dramatic fragments, blasted our way, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a puzzle in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, it gets by on no more than electric confidence, high-fiving technical virtuosity, and a cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

Your hope, gradually dashed, is for The Seagull to convey more of a sense of human loss than this faintly so-whattish drama about a dead bird.

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

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

It’s sludgy, and kind of random, and if you already know you’ll enjoy it anyway, you undoubtedly will.

At base, these are meat-and-potatoes genre thrills, but the meat’s decently seasoned, and, even if there’s too much token foliage crowding the plate, it’s cute that they mind about presentation.

Nighy and Mortimer have just a couple of scenes together, but they’re easily the film’s best: both actors sink gratifyingly into the nuances of this incipient friendship, bond over books you actually believe they’ve read, and give the film its best hope of doing Fitzgerald justice.

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.

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.

For all The Escape’s weaknesses, it’s held together with real sinew by Arterton, who lives and breathes the stifling air of Tara’s habitat without needing to act up a storm at any point.

It’s impressive how many layered twists Dark Web inflicts after its simple start, suggesting the tendrils of a conspiracy proliferating so quickly and steathily there’s no undoing them.

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

OK, McQuarrie may not have De Palma’s sweat-drop precision, John Woo’s craziness or the impish wit of Brad Bird, but his mastery of logistics here is easily sufficient to make it the blockbuster of the summer.

This is Lee’s closest ever film to a thriller, but it defies expectations, offering multiple, murky solutions to a set of mysteries at once.

Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its time jumps and nomadic shifts in location, its very destiny.

On Chesil Beach is a non-disaster, essentially, until it falls off a cliff.

The film is oddly unmoving as a memorial, but as with Amy Winehouse, it inspires a collective mea culpa for the feeding frenzy of public judgement that only turned to sympathy when it was far too late.

Compellingly stumped by its own heroine, the film simply can’t make its mind up about Tonya Harding. If it did, it wouldn’t get away with being such a blast.

It isn’t Allen escaping into the past so much as defensively dredging it up, script-wise. And though he’s hired another world-class cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, to give this the gaudy hypercoloured glow of a pastichey Douglas Sirk melodrama, the film’s look is pushy and unattractive, as if it’s wearing too much lipstick.

Portman’s high-tension acting, her inability to relax, suits the material down to the ground. It’s one of her best performances, moving through credible grief and bewilderment, but facing up bullishly to her fears by the end, and finding some kind of exhausted resolve to interrogate them.

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.

A pound-store Tarantino with the sadism dialled up and the wit switched off, Roth has the very basics of a stomach-clenching suspense sequence down pat. It’s just that the film never provides any rationale for why you’d want to submit to it.

Everything builds with implacable skill up to, but not quite including, the finale, which is played for a table-turning punchline that feels more crowd-pleasing than strictly satisfying.

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

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

Grisebach has an observational grasp of the male psyche – especially its pathological obsession with pride – that fairly takes the breath away.

As a demonstration of slighted masculinity being given an inch, taking a mile, and chewing it up with breakneck fury, the film could hardly be more timely or disconcerting. But it understands the ignition point of rage – not just its ugly momentum.