Tim Robey

It’s Theron, underrated in comedy, who brings something fresh to the party, looking alive in the kind of uptight, self-mocking role that Sandra Bullock frequently corners.

It’s hard to remember the last time an actress aged as convincingly on screen as Zhao Tao does in the melancholic, gently epic Ash Is Purest White.

While Kayla Day is very much a teenager of her precise time and place, her gruelling anxiety – and Fisher’s wonderful yearning in the role – make her universally relatable anyway.

Even Moore seems quite stranded, given little chance to animate her character except as an unenviable technical exercise. Love is meant to be soaring across parapets, melding destinies with the fluttering elegance of a high B flat, but in Bel Canto, flat is the operative word.

It’s a bungled business, making obvious errors of staging.

This film isn’t a nadir at all – it’s divertingly loony – but Jordan has rarely had less urgent things to say to us.

Landing the perfect ending is a challenge for any such story; A Star is Born, for all its guts and pathos, peaked early. Wild Rose holds its horses, and lets Rose-Lynn soar only when she’s worked out who she is.

Little is colourful enough, with some inventively weird costumes to distract you from the arbitrary plot. But it has a dog of a script, co-written by the director, Tina Gordon, and Girls Trip’s Tracy Oliver, both scrabbling around fruitlessly for inspiration before and after the central conceit drops.

As parable, the film’s slippery quality catches you off guard in the best way. And it summons profound love for a character – a village idiot it would never let you describe that way – without congealing even slightly into sentimentality. It clings on to Lazzaro like the only hope in a benighted world.

Bizarre quantities of action simply don’t connect to anything at all.

Laika may not be conquering the world with this outing. But if every studio’s three-star films were as bounteous with the eye candy, we’d be in clover.

The point with van Gogh is that he produced mind-boggling art while stricken with doubt that he’d failed all his life. This film is his spiritual antithesis – so recklessly confident that it paints right over him.

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

If this is Mitchell trying to go full-bore David Lynch – as a zine author and oddball collector, he pointedly casts Patrick Fischler, aka the diner-nightmare guy from Mulholland Drive and a sinister bureaucrat in Twin Peaks – he’s certainly not holding back.

Despite a wobbly handle on all this, it’s an intriguing film to wrestle with, it’s powerfully acted by Melander and Milonoff, and it sticks out for its undeniable outlandishness. After all, when was the last time a bearded troll baby posted from Finland was the closest thing to salvation?

As trash pleasures go, Serenity’s too ploddingly stretched and lacking in plot curlicues to reach nirvana, but it’s capable of making a whole audience giggle at its wonderfully pretentious gracenotes.

Somewhere in the specifics of Cronin’s is-he-or-isn’t-he scenario – played with gripping detail by Kerslake and Markey – there’s a decent little midnight chiller.

Sagging at times, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind feels as though it might have played better as a mid-length short film, with subplots pruned back.

The film’s ambitions might be on the limited side: it’s a clipped survival tale with little of the anguished spiritual dimension that end-of-the-world stories have summoned in the past. But Affleck has certainly surrounded himself with the right people.

There’s a bicep-flexing quality to Landes’s direction, with its bursts of colour and chaos, its conjuration of a surreal experience out of tactile reality. You tumble out of it bruised, bewildered, mesmerised.

All is True is a tongue-in-cheek title all the same, for a script which fills in factual gaps with its own blatant leaps of imagination: they’re just far more respectful and illuminating leaps.

Boy Erased could have been more sharply etched, all told – there’s something naggingly indistinct about it. But the lessons of Conley’s experience fight manfully, all the same, to punch through and be counted.

As you’d expect from Rodriguez, it has a decent number of pow-wow fight scenes, and sure loves to watch machinery being ripped to shreds. But it's all uncomfortably close to the gruesome Flesh Fair from Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, revamped as an ain’t-it-cool demolition derby with a charm-and-conscience bypass.

In its best moments, which tend to involve Gambon lurking at the back with a seedy grimace, or Broadbent looming almost motheringly over a rival’s shoulder, the film’s writing and acting have the grubby energy of good Pinter. In its worst though, it’s business-like and, for all the vivid performances, oddly bland.

For all the film’s fumbled shortcuts, air of semi-intentional Nineties-ness, and the completely mad bit with a stray flight of doves, it jollies along with some amiability.

he film's indulgences are so heart-on-sleeve that it's hard to differentiate watching it from hearing someone pitch their very bad screenplay ideas with no attempt to read the room.

For all its promised rebellion, Colette’s story really segues into a more nuanced tale of outgrowing: not just a childish and bullying spouse, but an age of acquiescence.

Intermittently entertaining but also a rum mix of goofy and pretentious, Glass sets far more problems than it successfully solves: tying various loose threads together, Shyamalan can’t restrain himself from adding more. The result’s a lumpy tangle, and the trilogy’s weakest instalment.