Tim Robey

Christine, which asks a top-notch Rebecca Hall to play out the last days of Chubbuck’s life, dares us to hope that it’s somehow about a different Christine Chubbuck – one who made it out the other side of her own tragedy.

Kaufman has rummaged about in Pixar’s Inside Out grab-bag and mussed up the elemental simplicity of Yarlett’s idea. It’s nicely personal as his spin on a Pixar film, but the downside is that he can’t help imitating too many of them at once – which makes it equal parts sweet and hectic, and not a little overambitious.

Blade is arguably too much of a good thing. But hey, that’s immortality for you.

More skilful docs get away with more ingenious cheats than this, which doggedly insists that Aisholpan is proving herself to everyone, and dangles proofs it doesn’t even need.

This follow-up to the acclaimed 1992 horror film of the same name has far more substance than your average popcorn chiller.

If there was one thing last year’s occult shocker "Hereditary" taught us about its deviously gifted writer-director, Ari Aster, it’s not to trust him in the slightest. Think Midsommar, his much-hyped follow-up, looks like Aster’s answer to The Wicker Man? Well, it is, kind of – but that’s not to say you’ll come anywhere near predicting its singular, warped response.

Society of the Snow is wrenching, deeply harrowing, but crucially dispenses with sappy takeaways about the triumph of the human spirit.

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.

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.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Doctor Strange, within the lockstep rubric of these things, is how non-Marvelly it manages to feel.

Elliot is a talent eccentric enough to make Nick Park look like an office drone, and the serious sadness underpinning his vision only makes the humour work better.

It’s extremely moving in the gentlest, most linear way, and the other performances are sterling, too.

The backdrop to this very English marriage – soot and grit and survival, and that basenote of touching bafflement – means all the tears are earned.

It has a whistle-stop quality, and you sometimes wish it would slow down to savour more personal details, rather than dishing out brisk bullet points from this amazing life.

The film is all feints for an hour – elegant feints, but far from kick-starting the dramatic motor, they have a habit of stalling it.

[Lhakpa's] resilience and sunny disposition light the film up, but it certainly shows a tough life, riven by conflicts, taking its toll.

The Shrouds has potential to be morbidly hilarious, deeply twisted and strange, or rather moving: the fact that it only feints in those directions, while prioritising several less fruitful ones, makes it the steepest disappointment of Cronenberg’s late career.

For all its occasional fumbling, Mogul Mowgli fully justifies its existence in every bristling detail of Ahmed’s performance, which never plays as self-pitying so much as impatient and hotly aggrieved.

The Imitation Game is a film about a human calculator which feels... a little too calculated.

An artistic spin on tragedy that’s deft, witty, very well-acted, and more diverting than it is profound.

The best thing about Destin Daniel Cretton’s blockbuster is how confidently it goes its own way: these call-backs to surrounding Marvel lore are sly without being smug, at least until the obligatory end-credits gesture ushering Shang-Chi into the fold.

The script makes a heavy meal of Naru’s personal growth, where a concentration on pure survivalist reflex would have made it leaner and meaner. But when the film knuckles down in sequences of wordless action, it slays.

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.

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.

Skilful photography boosts a standard-issue love triangle into one of Hitch's own favourite films from the period. [14 Jul 2012]

Franco is more skilled at getting us to think: not only about memory loss, but everything we choose to forget and can’t, and how these distinctions make us who we are.

Thank heavens, then, for the time-loop gimmick, which sustains a full hour of screen time with enough variations on its gambit to hook you in.

Haynes’s vision of two New Yorks, a half-century apart, is a marvel of nested detail, never overbearing, and interested in things rusted and forgotten rather than shiny and new.