Tim Robey

Booth is simply outstanding, weighing up with deep shading the oppressive circumstances that have made Evelyn both torturer and captive, nemesis and potential lifeline.

Stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski honours the choreography first and foremost – there’s none of the choppy editing that can often cover for this-will-do blockbuster combat, but bravura long takes which push the stuntmen and Reeves (with a lot of digital assistance) to the limits of their presumed endurance.

Admittedly modest, but the epitome of jolly, this is like the companionable second volume of an autobiography in film form – you'll whip through it in no time, and come out wanting more.

There are gorgeous things about it, there’s one really good performance, and reminders of Davies’ transcendent style ripple through the film. But it also feels broken and cumbersome, weighed down by a number of decisions that simply don’t work.

Even when the duo commandeer a luggage cart and trundle around these shiny corridors getting sozzled, we remain prisoners in their departure lounge of the damned.

It’s all splendid fruit for a documentary, especially given two things: the remarkable filmed record of the expedition at the time, and the fact that seven of its members are still alive.

Denis has made a spellbindingly mysterious object – as nonsensical as existence, maybe, until you give it a quarter-turn, and look again.

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.

Boiling Point grips remorselessly while it’s spinning all these plates, and somehow ladles onto them a smorgasbord of great, frazzled acting from all concerned.

It’s one of his least crazy films in narrative terms, but you couldn’t call it subdued, because the colours and textures he’s coaxed from a new director of photography, Jean-Claude Larrieu, are even more intoxicating than ever – it’s like an unexpectedly dry martini in a dazzling Z-stem glass.

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.

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.

The Dubai section in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, in which Cruise spiders his way up the face of the Burj Khalifa, then sprints down it as if trying to break the vertical 800m record, proves everything Cruise wanted it to, above all that he’s picked the right director to make these set pieces fly. It’s better still in Imax.

[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.

Everything’s told in shards, and Amalric does very well to create a sense of emotional continuum amid all the procedural detail. His own performance is fantastic, jittery and dishevelled.

CODA is way too busy playing things cute.

It’s the “rom” that’s the killing shortfall. But I must admit, Bros put me in such a sour mood that its “com” got sabotaged into the bargain. It’s distinctly smug about pitching itself as a landmark, while being really more of a setback, and a pretty low bar for the next one to surmount.

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.

It’s the casting of Moore, though, and her willingness to denude herself at 61 – emotionally, as well as physically – that gives The Substance a startling connection with its themes. Not for 30 years has she owned a film with anything like this certitude. Watching her confront the Demi Moore in the mirror, and do it so mercilessly, is extraordinary.

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

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

Marketed cannily towards Gen Z – for her meme value is beyond compare – M3GAN is essentially the anti-heroine of a catnip horror film which tips far more towards the “campy fun” end of the spectrum than the raw terror end. No one will be quailing under their seats during her campaign of slaughter, but that was never the point.

The director’s game is level, and typically mischievous, but lacks something - and it’s not just the vicious sting at the end of, say, Hidden.

Piggy presumably aims to test our sympathies, but just forfeits them entirely, in the service of a facile plot and a heroine even the film itself can’t seem to stand.

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

The film’s nothing if not an argument-starter, with plenty of hot provocations – especially about the bargains underpinning black excellence – to toss out. They’re like firecrackers, though. You come out rattled, but half-certain you’ve been toyed with.

Hail, Caesar! keeps stumbling over its own best ideas as we stop to appreciate them – ditching momentum, preferring gaps for applause.