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.