Tim Robey

With her actors, Belo captures moments of staggering grief that are moving in their restraint: we deal, usually, with the stricken aftermath.

This slice of class-baiting British ordeal horror from writer-director James Watkins is potently made. It's also exploitative trash, serving up silly levels of alarmist editorialising about kids today.

It’s in the wit department that this trifle wobbles most, dodging irony and cosying up with convention.

The film is much too anxious – desperately so – for us to feel that Barry is a fundamentally decent guy.

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.

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.

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

A cram-it-all-in adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s 2010 history book of the same name, which knuckles down to its task with sleeves rolled, upper lips stiffened, and vast sheaves of exposition to whip through.

Maguire tries hard, and has a good stab at Fischer’s twitchy rage, but can’t bring much freshness or specificity to anything else.

Peter Baynham, best-known for Borat and Alan Partridge, co-wrote this script, which offers just the right of blend of madcap farce and piercingly precise gags about social media.

It’s the music that makes it particularly special, and appreciating that is entirely the point of the live-action remake.

Not a hugely comfortable fit for the silent treatment, Noël Coward's play might have transferred better in the stagey confines of the early sound era. [14 Jul 2012]

Ballard’s concept is meticulously, lovingly recreated, like a museum exhibit of itself. But the tone is always more playful than it is disturbing, a walled-off black joke which opts out of saying anything new.

Schrader is a million miles from the potent anguish of First Reformed, the 2017 film that won him an Oscar; rather, this nearly rivals his 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan, for bewildering tedium.

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.

Lindholm’s stealthy restraint fits the material like a glove, and both get under your skin.

It’s the film that’s hell – and a very dull, desperate hell at that, as if these dungeon masters have realised we aren’t sufficiently scared by the main event, and try throwing the kitchen sink at us, almost literally.

The film’s magic is how it slips the skin of sappy and mendacious formula, stepping away from cliché scene by scene, and in quietly revelatory ways.

The endgame could be… sharper. There’s an elaborate hoax that’s too easy to suss out – even for us, and we’re not the seasoned con artists on the receiving end. At this point, the film’s own confidence seems to falter just a fraction. Then again, the chinks in these crooks’ cynical armour are what give it texture, a mottling of human desperation. Instead of smug gotchas, it traffics in mistakes.

Stevenson has configured her tale as female body-horror fit for a dissertation, without giving it much of a spine: while slick, the set pieces are few, far between, and over too fast.

It’s only in the final stages of assembly that you start to realise some bits are missing.

Monster Hunter is silly, it’s loud, and it has a synth score by Paul Haslinger that pipes away addictively, manoeuvring the film’s tone into an optimal space for this sort of junk. It achieves a kind of jokey bombast.

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.

Michôd’s film consciously plays like an outback western, peppered with jagged and unpredictable outbursts of hard brutality. But it could do with losing control a little more often – and with establishing the dangers of its dog-eat-dog world more precisely.

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

Visually, it’s one great shrug, but to get by with a throwaway murder plot this routine, the zingers at least must zing. They rarely do. There’s something turgid and defeated about it.

This tale of epiphanies and religious schooling at a tiny monastery in the 1940s has a woozy, episodic lyricism all Thornton’s own. It’s also fuzzy and unfulfilled, groping for its images without ever precisely knowing what it needs them to say.

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.