Tim Robey

The film lays out all these facts quite vividly, but the insights it’s peddling into art and beauty never get below the surface. It’s a deeper dimension – truth – that eludes it.

Other Carney films have been funnier or sweeter; but this has a seen-it-all take on the music biz that’s refreshingly acerbic. It knows how fame and fairness are practically banned from sharing a bed.

As bizarre as it is terrifying, Backrooms may not be a revolution in horror, but it’s a beyond-freaky remapping of the genre.

Rarer still is comedy direction so inspired from someone making their feature debut. Alicia MacDonald is the real deal. There are dozens of characters here all nailing laughs by being 100 per cent themselves: that takes not only inspired casting and acting, but a person in charge who knows how to wring the juice out of every syllable.

This might be familiar dramatic terrain, but it’s handled with blazing empathy by all involved.

Deploying AI to resurrect John Lennon himself, even for a moment, is the one temptation he resists, thank God. But this cloying, nothing-to-see-here experiment is the next worst thing.

The overall tone, though, is just abominable. It’s hard to believe the source novel, adapted personally by its author, Virginia Feito, could have been quite this abrasively pointless.

It makes for easy-breezy viewing, the daft tone landing halfway between Buñuel and the Farrelly Brothers.

It’s an achingly elegant piece of work which I’m already looking forward to revisiting.

The performances across the board are keenly felt yet commendably unshowy: Branagh gets his character’s crumped forbearance spot on, while Abbass’s portrayal of Christian fortitude in the direst of circumstances becomes the wellspring of the film’s deep, multi-axial compassion.

You want The Unknown to go on the attack, or go wild, rather than dwindle into anticlimax. None of it needs an explanation – but it could have done with a point.

You could abandon Hope for an entire hour in the middle without missing much. There’s no denying the kicks we get either side, but there is a sharper, more satisfying 100-minute film fighting to get out here.

The film’s addictive needle-drops and sassy ensemble – including a sparingly used Cara Delevingne as Peter’s cutting business partner, and The Night Manager’s Diego Calva as an extremely obliging social worker – make it nothing if not easy to like.

There’s enjoyment to be had watching McKellen, 86, gamely pecking away at the role, snacking on morsels in every scene. If only he’d been given a fuller feast.

Puig’s story is trivialised by slickness, and the tragic ending barely registers.

Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) likes his black comedies of discomfort to make us squirm, as does producer Ari Aster. But this film is skimpier on insight than the best work either has done, and Daniel Pemberton’s poignant flute score deserves to be in a more mature film.

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

The film has bite without a lot of nuance.

The film gropes around for novel gimmicks – is the killer’s identity being deepfaked this time? – and tries to placate its fanbase with a few moments of gratuitously icky, mean-spirited gore. And goodness, it plods.

This comedy-drama with a surrealist edge is more than strong enough to be worthy of praise beyond Byrne, who is legitimately fantastic.

The Moment is an alienating, glitchy mockumentary imagining something that never happened.

The film mechanically ticks by, while showing no evidence of a soul.

The film has been put together like a machine to rattle you. It does that. I didn’t care for anyone on screen at all, and can’t say I’ll ever be tempted to watch it again, but here it is, for the delectation of a niche market.

Send Help is a strained disappointment from Raimi, who proved in Drag Me to Hell that he could sock an original concept to us and go sensationally OTT. Motivation was always on the money in that one; here it goes berserk, and not in a fun way.

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

The History of Sound has fashioned a deliberate non-epic from wispy material, keeping such a tight lid on sentiment, it’s like an obstinate clamshell with its secrets. Expectations need recalibrating beforehand so as not to feel lightly underwhelmed.

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

It’s very much the point of Athale’s screenplay that life was too short for such a grudge after the epic association these men had. By saying so, Giant hoists itself out of sports-biopic ordinariness and becomes really quite moving.

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.

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.

We are never distracted for long from the gaping sadness of the man and Hawke is brilliant at portraying that despair.

It has a perky winsomeness: there are jokes, not all of them morbid, about being dead. There are tear-jerking scenes that require a viewer to surrender. I struggled to do so. Funnily enough, Eternity drags.

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

Many good actors here are weirdly bad.

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

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

It’s far less endearing than we’re presumably meant to think.

Imagine Arabian Nights, filtered through a Sofia-Coppola-esque feminist sensibility, but spiced up with camp. That gets you some of the way into 100 Nights of Hero, a British indie romp based on a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg. It has saucy wit –especially up to the hour mark.

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.

The bizarre achievement of this new film is to make us feel trapped and punished through every phase of the story.

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.

Fast becoming one of the most reliable character actors we’ve got, Strong gives a quietly heroic rendition of Landau which bolsters White’s performance beautifully.

The scenario is so familiar it could have been the same old story, but the texture of all this street life gives it rather a special shine.

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

The film scores highly as a Highsmithian three-hander, and particularly excels at illuminating all the ways this trio have failed to grow up. It shimmers, convinces and thoroughly absorbs.

The all-round exertion is immense, but the experience is a bizarre ordeal.

Chaves has become a skilful enough craftsman that he deserves parole to pastures new. Meanwhile, Wilson and especially Farmiga, who have lent gravitas to so much that’s profoundly trumped up and silly, can take a long-deserved bow.

It’s a film that feels emotionally half-fulfilled, never quite grabbing or devastating in the way you’d hope.

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

None hold a candle to the main event: pulverising verbal jousts between two stars who can toggle between serious and silly like few others. Watching them cajole, manipulate and savage each other is effervescent bloodsport: you want neither to win, or the fun will stop.

Weapons manages to keep its powder dry – a feat of crafty editing by Joe Murphy – for a knockout finale that’s twisted, hilarious and savage, all at once.

These complications want to spin off into fluffy absurdity. Instead they thicken into treacle. It’s a mistake to have Lohan and Curtis mainly interact as new characters, because the emotional core between their old pair gets dislodged – though it certainly helps that Butters is such a splendid, grounding co-star both before and after the switcheroo.

It’s the opposite of a gateway horror for the trepidatious. It beckons in the brave.

Anyone interested in animation needs to pay attention to what these films are doing. The writing formula may be crude, but the whiz-bang aesthetic is sensational.

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

Just when it’s threatening to pay off, it ends, with an experimental cliffhanger, not Levy’s idea. It reminds us – by simply not working – that abrupt, unresolved endings are the hardest kind to earn.

Whatever kinship Depp may feel with this tortured, misunderstood, and regularly blotto artist is expressed, unfortunately, as a string of gruelling clichés.

If production problems didn’t thwart Maclean and crew from making a proper fist of all this, the editing took its eye off the ball.

Ana de Armas stars as a new, lethally dull trainee assassin, Keanu Reeves makes an emergency cameo, and the film is an absolute stinker.

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

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.

We’re stuck with Key, a stand-up virtuoso who is thankfully amazing playing a windbag who can’t read the room – a ludicrous ruiner of sunsets, or any other vaguely peaceful moment.

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.

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.

Bono may be his own worst enemy in the one-man show Stories of Surrender, but only just. His second worst is Blonde director Andrew Dominik, who has turned it into a more excruciating film than you might even have surmised.

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

There’s a kernel of philosophical intrigue in The Assessment, encased in a sleek shell of dystopian science fiction, and unfortunately flung a million miles away from audience engagement.

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]

Coogan, like Tom, weathers this relatively unscathed. But Federico Jusid’s tango-inflected score just won’t stop plucking our heart-strings, as if keen to reassure us that we’ll make it through one of the darkest periods in South America’s history without the mood souring.

Companionable as he always is, the way this flaunts Statham’s star power leaves a lot to be desired. He’s a totem of meathead carnage, barely sustains a scratch, and doesn’t get nearly enough moments of the deadpan bemusement he excels at best.

Novocaine may not be based on any pre-existing IP – no comic book or game, say. But that’s not much to crow about, because few flights of the imagination have lately felt lower in altitude.

[Burton] never thought acting was a manly profession, and seemed to be involved in a tug-of-war against himself, tangled up by his roots. To have half explored these themes, as Evans’ film does, means we’re left wanting more, but there’s a pleasing ache to the experience as a platonic love story.

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.

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.

There’s little here to keep us up at night – or from forgetting all about it by tomorrow.

The Alto Knights certainly has the off-screen pedigree you’d hope for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino) wrote the script, named after an infamous Manhattan social club. But the circuitous shaping feels off, a problem Barry Levinson’s direction is too flaccid to fix.

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

One swaggering brawl plays out to a certain synth version of Beethoven’s 9th, suggesting that Love’s fanboy devotion to A Clockwork Orange might override having fully understood it. But who knows?

To everyone’s complaints that Longlegs’ plot turned daft, I can only shrug: it was easily assured enough to sustain a deadly undertow, while dancing about with a diabolical sense of mischief. I also point them to The Monkey as Exhibit A for what misfiring daftness looks like.

What The Gorge does supply is a novel science-fiction premise and some captivating bursts of suspense.

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.

It’s all lightly reminiscent of Bride Wars, the cat-fighty 2009 farce with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson doing very unfeminist things to ringfence their perfect day. You’re Cordially Invited has a little more heart than that: it hits an average yet amiable stride.

Abbott, almost invariably good (we’ll forgive Kraven the Hunter), is perfect here: he gives us a guy striving too hard to be a great dad, unlike Blake’s own father, and neglecting the husband side of the equation.

Zemeckis can’t let go of his ghastly conviction that everything has to be heart-tugging schmaltz. Alan Silvestri’s ruinously sickly score is his main accomplice.

The film is torn between the conflicting instincts of sassy playing to the gallery and sanctified mush.

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

Last orders can’t come soon enough for the whole parade of supervillains, superheroes, or however they’re now choosing to identify. This is rock bottom.

This may be the single worst film I’ve seen all year; it’s certainly the most confused.

While Bill Skarsgård only fitfully impresses as Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’s chilling remake, Lily-Rose Depp proves she’s one to watch.

The songs put Wicked to shame in every way. They cluster neatly around entwined themes: spreading your wings versus the tug of homesickness; finding your path but daring also to lose it. With a running time that brings us briskly ashore, the film is a grand voyage in miniature – a taster epic. Further feasts, if you stay seated for the end credits, are thrillingly promised.

This whole story pimps out Yuletide as a strictly mercantile fixture, with a sham veneer of goodwill merely sweetening the transaction.

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

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.

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.

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.

This makes a better case that she was the first model everyone found relatable.