Tim Robey

The general ineptitude is more likely to make you cackle in disbelief.

As a bouncy childcare aid, it doesn’t exactly fail, but you might be better off asking an eight-year-old about that. It’s witless fare if you want the whole family entertained.

Beneath the mounting contrivances, Dunne’s sturdy performance supplies an earnest core which Lloyd should have trusted more completely.

This film leaves you itching to read a meaty biography, even as it solidly maps out Hepburn’s emotional life, and explains the relationship with trauma which cut her out so well to be a UNICEF ambassador, raising millions for Bosnian war orphans and Somalian famine relief.

The whole thing drips with garish insincerity and preaching to the choir. Irony of ironies, that a show about out-of-touch luvvies swanning down to wave their magic wands at red-state intolerance has become… the spitting image of that, as a home cinema offering from Murphy and team.

Converting dyed-in-the-wool Appalachian pessimism into honest, bootstrappy uplift is not a task you envy Howard or his cast, as the running time slips away and no concrete point materialises. Elegy is four years late and doomed.

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.

[Kaufman's] film leaves your head spinning.

As a psychothriller, it gives itself one simple assignment – to set your heart rate pounding through the roof. And on this level, with a lurid voltage that might require health warnings, it nastily delivers.

The movie sorely needs a tighter edit, and direction from Apatow that isn't so slapdash and sitcommy.

What’s striking about the film’s tone is its redemptive warmth. Though the details are chilling, it’s as if a cathartic space has been opened for these girls and their families to explain what they went through.

The film tries to scale a gargantuan mountain of a subject – the broken voting system – and just keeps slipping repeatedly down the sides

There’s enough in Mr Jones to make you want a good deal more.

Sometimes it just takes one actor to elevate a film from innocuous, take-it-or-leave it fare into something winningly tender – and if your first film’s needing that kind of lift-off, you could hardly do much better than Monica Dolan.

The existential crises of music industry hotshots in Los Angeles might struggle to mark it out, to say the least, as a film for our moment. At the same time, it’s a refuge – a balmy vision of cloudless blue skies, rooftop martinis on someone else’s tab, and a few soulful jamming sessions in a recording studio no one’s using. You could disappear into Nisha Ganatra’s film for a couple of hours and easily forget where the evening went.

Quietly disturbing but also darkly amusing to the end.

The film is close to parody – not of anything Potter’s ever done, but of male artists and their obsessive end-of-life regrets. If you’d told me it was a shelved adaptation of late Philip Roth done by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Birdman (or Biutiful) mode, I’d have believed it in a shot.

An unfashionably male art film of Nietzsche-quoting, Tarkovsky-adjacent bent that’s ghoulish, baffling and rather brave.

The film isn’t a write-off – well-handled, it could have had the sober dramatic voltage of Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters, which relates a now-familiar story of corporate malfeasance in a different place and time. The problems are of style, focus and intent.

Starting her film with an aphorism of William Blake’s – “The bird, a nest; the spider, a web; man, friendship” – she not only does justice to the human end of this equation, but looks out for a rare spectrum of the animal kingdom into the bargain.

Buoyed by an appealing duet of star turns from Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver.

Onward may be middle-of-the-pack Pixar but it’s still a real pleasure.

Ford doesn’t give a bad performance, but the dog does: the obvious fakery we can (maybe) overlook in a CG lion is far too glaring when it’s man’s best friend.

This Emma is pleasant enough in passing, and nothing if not scenically lush. I just couldn’t get on with its Emma at all.

Everything Joan and Tom go through is handled believably, but with blinkers on. Their surrounding lives feel grey and pencilled in, as if by all-round agreement to deny them any colour.

It’s a candy-coated underworld romp, and pleasingly weird at times – when we’re invited inside Harley’s cutely tattered parlour, no explanation’s given for why she has a stuffed beaver in a pink tutu on her kitchen table. It’s just… the kind of thing she would have. Yan’s film converts her from livid to likeable, and doesn’t give a hoot if you mind.

It has a serviceable but stalled quality.

While politically unimpeachable, Just Mercy is simply too lethargic to be the major awards race player Warner Bros. were evidently hoping for. It’s a pity for Jordan, who has steel and energy in his part, and an especial shame for Foxx, who gives a beautifully modulated, unflashy and quietly moving performance, easily his best in at least a decade.