Tim Robey

With the filmmakers almost palpably high-fiving between these takes, it’s no surprise they wind up with a star performance that has to count as one of this star’s most strenuous. Treated as this zoo exhibit, he isn’t unleashed to express himself creatively. He’s caged.

Daniel Roher’s shrewd portrait makes the point that Navalny is half-politician, half-journalist; blending the two with his affable charisma on camera, which even extends to goofing off on TikTok, he has exactly the man-of-the-people touch that would be most likely to qualify him as a political threat.

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.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t – Alexander Skarsgård's Prince Amleth rampages through a mythological epic of savage beauty.

With the best will in the world, Metz drags us through a labyrinth of intrigue but messes up the crumb trail. We’re left disorientated, and underwhelmed.

This is hardly the sound of artistic burnout. No mean videographer either, Hoon departed with a great deal left to say.

It’s the rapport between the actors – or the anti-rapport, to start with – that makes this such a winning diversion.

By managing to keep faith with this fast-unravelling person, even in her most bozo moments of losing the plot, Wilson turns in her best and bravest work in films to date.

It’s warm, cosy and very Linklater: it definitely exudes more chill than urgency.

Something went wrong here – it feels like the final cut of the film is either the victim of duff scripting choices, or made equally duff attempts to fix them. It’s a pity, because it wastes Affleck’s solid efforts, and thwarts the picture Lyne got halfway on screen: a portrait of an affluent marriage as a toxic sham, with all the solidity of a Love Island merger.

There’s almost nothing the film does well, but that doesn’t stop it donning a winner’s smirk while it copies every 1980s science fiction smash you’ve ever seen.

The performances command respect, even when the script is caught feeding characters stock laugh lines you don’t quite believe, or seeming to fumble (or compress?) whole subplots to duck away from the melodrama it might otherwise have become.

As a critic-turned-partisan who also narrates, Krichevskaya is the right kind of observer here on paper. But there’s too little airing of her own views at the time of walking out, when she didn’t have faith in Dozhd’s true independence.

That the film winds up cramped, underwhelming and strangely thwarted is hard to square with all the effort up on screen – or perhaps it just feels too much like effort.

With better pacing and jokes, the film could have been a goof-off exercise to satisfy the midnight-madness crowd.

Against the Ice is very square, very straight, and just naggingly average in all departments.

I was surprised to find how emptying out a man in this fashion triggered genuine emotion by the end.

It manages a light, improvisatory mastery, an immaculate hold on tone, and a grave yet sunlit tableau of an ending, with each one of these faces turned in collective mourning, that I’ll never forget.

Where Fassbinder crafted extraordinary tableaux of self-parodic misery, such as the drunken, prostrate Petra diving for the phone on her white shag carpet, Ozon breezes through this exercise instead with his usual snappy relish. He has plenty to say about the original’s magnificence, but perhaps not an awful lot to add.

Dark Glasses is mainly just flat, but it could definitely have done without this all-round disgrace of a dog performance – quite enough to have Uggy from The Artist shielding his peepers with a front paw.

The film has an impetuous, let’s-try-it-on quality that makes it a modest pleasure.

Flux Gourmet plays like a gonzo skit, and is hilariously unabashed on that level, but there’s clearly a level of commentary here regarding the crazy whims of artistry, the trouble with getting funded by people whose opinions you despise, and the shrivelled incompetence of anyone paid to write about your work and consume it when it’s served.

Take one high-concept format, two big stars and lots of songs... this romcom isn’t perfect, but you can’t help rooting for the main couple.

Branagh exploits a star-packed cast to distract us in all directions. The trouble is, it sometimes feels like a dozen actors signed on, then drew lots to see who was playing whom.

The film sounds actively embarrassed by what it’s trying to pitch, and reverse-engineers its sci-fi elements to fit the default disaster template Emmerich could apply in his sleep. We’re promised the Moon, but sold a lemon.

Laugh for laugh, it may well be a series peak. I bow down to the perfection of one immaculately organised prank in a furniture shop, especially when innocent bystanders weigh in with their “He went all up in the ceiling!” comments.

This chamber-horror oddity from the English actress-turned-auteur is too weird, too wonky; intermittently gross, and often gruelling.

Breaking down taboos around our attitudes to sex on screen is a laudable project, and one that the British two-hander Good Luck to You, Leo Grande gets at least half right.

Without giving in to bromides, the cha-cha, surprisingly feel-good rhythms of Nagy’s direction make this heroine's sudden sense of purpose rather exhilarating.

The film fares best when the chief negotiator, a fellow Marine vet played by the late, great Michael Kenneth Williams, steps into the fray. It’s one of his final performances, and a wary, angry one that elevates the material.

The film gets too caught up in its svelte, talky stylings to stay properly watertight as a suspense piece, and when it goes for broke in the last reel, it has too many characters – major and minor – behaving like buffoons. It definitely could have ended better.

Not one of the quartet misses the opportunity to do some of their very best work here.

As a giant window on all this toil, the film is full of news, insights and revelations without pushing a dogmatic thesis: it’s as open-ended and humanly interested as documentaries get.

The killings themselves are run-of-the-mill, jump-scare assaults staged with minimal invention or flair, which only makes the film’s box of tricks look emptier: there are even quips about how we’ve seen it all before, at which I found myself duly nodding. It gets almost too meta to function.

While it’s fully grounded as a family portrait, overlaid on it still is that type of cosmic optimism which makes Mills’s work so lovely. I’m not even sure we fully deserve it, but it would be sheer masochism to turn it down.

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 gives you a family hanging on by a thread, and makes the careful tending of that thread feel so desperate it’s more than a little terrifying.

The distinctive charms of Wain’s aesthetic certainly come over, especially daubed across the lovely end credits, by which time this jumpy curio, with almost palpable relief, has laid itself to rest.

It shows so much blood being spilled in the name of democracy, and so many tears shed, that it’s next-to-impossible not to be fired up.

There are snatches of fun to be had early on, before the teasing gimmickry about reality and fakery expires. But the second half is just a slavish rehash of all the series’ best-known tropes. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, crossing through this looking glass, we may simply wind up less and less curious.

The film frustrates because it’s frictionless, almost completely devoid of credible conflict, and generally keen to sail through as a testament to everlasting love at its most altruistic.

We’d give the lazy set-up a pass if sufficiently fun things started happening off the back of it.

As a debut, it’s grungy, overscaled and rarely far from cliché. But it also has guts, and there’s a vigour to the acting that pulls it through.

It’s never outright bad – not unforgivably so – but comes off muted, diffuse and generally half-baked.

Stone packs a ton of information in, then lurches to a halt; while he milks Kennedy’s mistrust of the three-letter agencies, his grasp of “what really happened” is still fundamentally guesswork. Still, he does persuade us of smoking guns out there that weren’t Oswald’s, or anywhere near the book depository.

Encounter is bugged-out science fiction paranoia, stylish and sinewy, with an opening sequence that may have you bolting for the door, or at least the remote control.

Don’t Look Up’s driving thesis – roughly, “look at all these morons!” – is so basic it’s only really possible to respond to it as a hit-and-miss actors’ showcase.

True to its title, this film is about a nest, every twig that was used to build it, and what flying out of it might mean and cost, to parents and child alike. The detail is in those twigs, and if Gerwig is capable of all this in her first solo feature, who knows what feats of woodwork she'll craft for us next.

This Tex-Mex drama about a retired rodeo star on a mercy mission has an intermittent dawdling charm. It’s also slack and featherbrained – and set in the late 1970s, but you can barely tell.

The film satisfies all the same, because they’ve figured out what a great stand-up routine Venom can do this time, and Hardy has settled well into being straight man to his own not-at-all-straight alien weirdo.

The sheer depth of Sassoon's personal misery feels like a brutally unfashionable thing for a contemporary film to confront, but Davies, who’s never given a fig about fashion, confronts it head on.

On all fronts, you wish that Dear Evan Hansen had nothing to do with Evan Hansen.

As an undemanding pas de deux, it’s sweet enough.

It has a certain clomping, smart-alecky entertainment value, wedded to the meta appeal of watching three A-listers juggle all the twists with ease, before walking off into the sunset with silly money. Did Netflix never twig that the real heist was on them?

The film’s addictive patterning draws us into its cycles of obsession as hungry observers: each part dispenses only as much new information as Moll wants to give away.

When Clooney gets this cast riffing off each other in boozy hangout mode, the movie skips along surprisingly well for all its so-what-ishness.

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.

Shallowness permeates all the characterisations, giving it a bland, marshmallowy centre.

While Gyllenhaal thrusts himself into the role with energy, you can sense his awareness that his acting has to carry the whole shebang, like a chef in the kitchen doing every last job. He’s entertaining, but guilty, like The Guilty, of throwing nuance in the bin.

Anyone who’s ever wondered who and what made Tony the way he was will be richly rewarded by Alan Taylor’s trip back in time.

There’s nothing at all wrong with Respect, which is colourful and pretty well played, other than an overall air of caution – and the thing about Aretha Franklin’s voice is that it really swung for the rafters.

Copshop has a certain sub-Tarantino appeal, which is very much the way director Joe Carnahan (Narc, Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team, The Grey) wants to play it.

The Nest is good on a first viewing and special on a second, when its cramped horizons and avoidance of full-bore tragedy are strategies for which you’re prepared. Durkin’s use of Kubrickian dissolves makes the passage of time feel like no one’s friend.

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.

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

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.

CODA is way too busy playing things cute.

The engagement with JM Barrie’s themes here is palpably sincere, and I found myself pulled along, not only by Zeitlin’s tugging showmanship, but the ache he manages to create around childhood as an enchanted space.

The film needs no excess melodrama even at its bleakest, because the visual language Sharrock has constructed is inhospitable enough. It’s his concentration on these faces, in the 4:3 ratio of Nick Cooke’s gravely beautiful cinematography, that gives it all a redemptive glow.

It’s consistently absorbing as well as evocative to the harsh finish, with mordant plot surprises Connolly keeps smartly tucked away.

If there’s a chink in your emotional armour, there’s simply no resisting what this film has to offer.

We’re all aboard, and there’s certainly some enjoyment to be had. It’s just a pity that the ride is a bit of a con, at times. It’s a template without spark, a formula which seldom takes the risk of experimenting with anything fresh. It needed some of that old Spielbergian magic.

This supernatural thriller has a wild conceit about a time-bending beach, and every creaky device to hand gets thrown in to keep it going.

The acting quartet of Jones, LaPaglia and double Davis is just immense.

Admirers of Baker’s earlier work will have a journey to go on here, first in missing the rowdy companionship of protagonists who weren’t wholly out for themselves. As spectacle, this study of a dirtbag running out of extra lives falls into the category of crowd-baiting, not crowd-pleasing. Mikey, repeatedly, is just the worst.

The film could have been an indulgent memoir, a scrapbook of a major (if stunted) leading-man career. But seeing so much of it through Kilmer’s own viewfinder gives it both focus and poignancy.

There’s so much distinction here, and maybe just a slight vagueness about theme as Husson nears the finish line: it’s a tough ask to end a film well which is so given over to memory, and this becomes a bit of a waft in the general direction of closure.

It’s the silent allegiances of sisterhood, a near-underground network operating to safeguard women’s rights, which exercise Haroun’s imagination throughout this excellent piece.

It’s a real tea-drinker’s piece, wanting you to sit down and let its hushed insights, like some earthy infusion, linger on the palate. The incentive is strong to see it again – not immediately, perhaps, but just when it’s just starting to fade on you. The second time, the flavours here can only deepen and unfurl.

As a statement, Benedetta won’t win any awards for coherence, but there’s just Too Much Verhoeven going on here for sensation hunters ever to feel short-changed.

Where Part I had a shimmering poignancy as a tragic love story, this is busy and dazzling: Hogg has never made a funnier piece of work or come to us with such fresh provocations.

Even if it springs few genuine revelations, this loping sine wave of a film still lands as an honest take on the high highs and low lows of a sodden Scandinavian lifestyle.

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.

For all the emptiness of Nobody, it’s sleekly watchable.

This is Sachs in Éric-Rohmer-abroad mode, and some way off top form. Frankie suggests a gloriously civilised shoot more than it coheres into much of a film.

Even while making a heartfelt statement that will put Khan deservedly on the map, the film cries out for a different shape, so that these three could grieve, bond and come to an understanding without the plot’s cloak-and-dagger machinations.

The believability of this fractured family is clinched by Machoian’s casting.

Michael Chaves, proves himself again to be a shrewd replacement, somehow inviting the viewer to buy into a frankly wacky screenplay by dint of decent acting and committed style.

If the original films owed a blatant debt to David Fincher’s Se7en, this one remortgages from the same lender.

There’s bad fun to be had in the final stretch – if you go in fully aware that the production flew off the rails.

The film’s a little wobbly on actual charm; stronger on smarm, in-jokes and Bond-riffing action pastiche. Yet whatever their niggles, families can flock to it, relieved to be getting brand new entertainment that entertains.

As a gently exploratory portrait of adolescence, Spring Blossom is tender, amiable and sweetly played, but it doesn’t risk (or say) all that much.

Billed as a “survival thriller” and starring a weirdly underutilised Angelina Jolie, this is a musty amalgam of fire-fighting action flick, John-Grisham-esque conspiracy hokum and outdoorsy bonding adventure. All it lacks is a web search using Ask Jeeves.

While occasionally too muted for its own good, Apples does benefit from not pushing its quirk factor too hard – that would only have set up a barrier between us and Servetalis’s hollow detachment. It’s a braver choice for Nikou to invite our empathy.

Director and co-writer Nick Stagliano tries to wax serious about the business of killing, but the trouble is, he hasn’t written any characters who scan as real people.

Childlike vulnerability hasn’t been something Hopkins has opened up to show us in a long, long while, but he seems ready for this role, hungry to do it, and you may not be prepared for how deep he goes. Zeller’s writing, and his shockingly naked acting, peak at the bitter end.

Love and Monsters is mercifully zombie-free, while serving up a refreshingly different vibe from the word go. It’s not mock-heroic in a winking way; it doesn’t seem so pleased with its own punchlines. It’s rueful and shrugging.

Despite a spirited score and a few other redeeming features, The Reckoning is too clumsy, overlong and generally miscalculated to add up to an intelligent commentary on misogyny, or a satisfying riposte to it

Nothing about the sound in Sound of Metal is ordinary.

The film is like a cheeky seaside postcard with swastikas and cryptography on the reverse.

It needed a director to grapple with all this, deadhead the redundancies and deliver a coherent vision; it’s especially disappointing to watch Christopher Smith struggle to pull it off.

Antebellum doesn’t so much concertina the past and the present as do a leering jig back and forth, then blow you a callous raspberry instead.

What lifts it to a major degree is Rahim’s performance. We know little of Salahi’s life outside Guantánamo, dealing with him as a virtual blank slate, but he fills this in with a remarkably charismatic personality, riven with contradictions, and clinging to bursts of mischievous humour as a survival strategy.

What with all this material, and the focus on Cengiz and Abdulaziz as key players in the ongoing story, The Dissident has a lot to juggle. We can forgive Fogel if his portrait of Khashoggi himself seems a touch incomplete: with its restless style of activism, the film arguably builds on his legacy better than it would have done as a work of retrospective biography.

This film’s two hours feel like four.

The main disappointment, other than female characters who only exist to be disposed of, comes from recognising the kernel of something unusual buried in the film’s marrow.

This long-overdue sequel to the 1980s hit romcom is no masterpiece, but it’s full of slick cameos, zany set-pieces and eye-popping style.

Bremner, perfectly cast and moving as well as funny, makes McGee an unrepentant showman who’s also an addict high on his own success. It’s refreshing, after the arduous self-pity of Rocketman, to watch a British music biopic which doesn’t wallow in finger-wagging regrets all day.

As a straight-up redemptive sob story with no other purpose, it cooks the books.

The United States vs Billie Holiday might be all over the shop – a tatty red carpet for its much-ballyhooed star turn. But this other Lady Day still seizes her moment.

An assortment of myths are exploded in Zappa, the baggily engaging docu-portrait directed by Bill & Ted star Alex Winter.

Dropping its leash on a star who needs one, the film mistakes decrepitude for drama, and the closest it gets to mid-scene narrative suspense is wondering whether Al Capone has just let himself go with a number one or two.

Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed) doesn’t make images pop like the Coens, but he knows how to get a plot simmering, and he can milk a sit-down to perfection.

The trouble begins with a seasick lurching between fantasy and reality, it’s redoubled by subject matter that can’t support that, and it hits a whole arpeggio of duff notes with the casting.

While unlikely to steer future comedy in any direction you could identify – it’s barely in control of its own running time, frankly – the film is genuinely silly, at a time when silliness is quite welcome.

The film’s about a chapter we prefer to get out of the way in adolescence; revisited as this kind of helpless mid-life crisis, it’s exquisite torture.

Strip away the wiring, and Cahill’s film connects most tangibly as a fable about drug addiction – hardly a shock, with all the crystal-obsessed scurrying to make one grey reality bearable, or switch to another outright. He’s had more ingenious ideas, but the whole thing’s strangely charming.

Alive to pulse-quickening details of body language and the conversational codes by which a dangerous friendship lives or dies, the film is a study in contrasts far beyond the monochromatic.

Land will give you a craving to be in the great outdoors, maybe before it’s even over.

The tone oscillates between earnestness and mischief, a little uneasily. There’s a trippy, funhouse aspect to it which yields a couple of splattery punchlines, but it could have gone further in this direction

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.

The only realistic way to fix Cats would be to spay it, or simply pretend it never happened. Because it's an all-time - a rare and star-spangled calamity.

Bombshell is a bright, watchable film on a subject that ought to make us squirm.

If it weren’t for the stifling earnestness about patriarchal dogma, you could mistake it for M. Night Shyalaman’s The Village given some kind of vague off-Broadway workshopping, and regurgitated minus the twist.

It would be near-impossible to love Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women more than Greta Gerwig does.

Watchable though the One Good Cop formula has oft proven, it’s shot through here with unearned self-regard – and turns acrid fast.

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.

Midway will never be mistaken for a classic, and even box office success for the $100 independent production looks dicey. Stretches of the film work beautifully, though, and the sinking feeling for Japan’s forces is painted with sympathy, not schadenfreude.

The film’s twists, alas, fall into one of two categories – the obvious and the tasteless – and the side-orders of gruesome violence feel like they’ve been delivered to quite the wrong table.

Even those familiar with King’s 2013 follow-up of the same name, more of an absorbing dark fantasy than a horror novel, won’t be prepared for the alchemy of elements cooked up here.

The cop thriller Black and Blue is just the ticket for Naomie Harris, if she wants to prove she can shoulder a suspenseful action flick by looking sharp, acting credibly nervy, and keeping us squarely on her side.

Though it coasts on some wildly uneven star charisma, there’s nothing particularly objectionable about Double Tap, finally. It’s fine? It’s just a time-killer we didn’t much need, a decade after we hardly needed the first one.

It gives you plenty to look at, even if you could say it’s been Avatarred and feathered to within an inch of its life. It’s the big, echoing hole in the middle – insert story, any story – that no one has figured out how to plug.

Beyond its waspish wit, a dastardly roll-call of suspects and Daniel Craig’s dapper efforts as our presiding sleuth, the film gives nothing away until the bitter end, thanks to a head-spinning tricksiness of plotting that even Agatha Christie might have conceded was rather ingenious.

The hesitancy of the storytelling, with its comforting lulls and odd delays, is a funny sort of boon.

It’s staged, scored and cut together with an aggressively deadening quality, numbing your senses to the very impact it intends.

While it wouldn’t be entirely fair to accuse the film of having “bonus DVD content” written all over it, little here is, shall we say, incompatible with the hard sell.

Watching it is like settling into a reupholstered armchair which still creaks in the same old places.

Only when it reaches for all-out camp does this script truly tickle the pleasure receptors.

Scary Stories hits with the scares as much as it misses with the storytelling, levelling out to a glass half full.

The Mustang could have held more surprises, but as a landscape study – “Prison, with horses” – it’s ruggedly stunning.

The film’s sincere core is threatened a little by its flashier directorial effects.

The Informer is one of the year’s more pleasant genre surprises: a clenched fist of a crime thriller in the mode of The Departed or The Town, in which every element is just a notch smarter than you’d expect. Generic though the film may look, it holds together absorbingly, thanks to a sturdy script which ups stakes and adds characters with cunning and intelligence.

As a two-hander it has some tension and promise.

Sketchy it may be, but the film finds dreamy consolation in the final curtain.

The film is way too much like a never-give-up Saga commercial for its own good.

Angel Has Fallen is almost worth seeing.

While it’s fair to say that Transit isn’t aiming for a torn-from-the-headlines specificity about the issues of today, it could be accused of dodging some racial questions, and some of its Petzoldian gambits – including a love triangle that remixes Casablanca with sepulchral dabs of Vertigo – dampen its dramatic charge.

Weakly acted mainly because it’s weakly conceived, Good Boys doesn’t have a sincere bone in its body – or even enough funny boner jokes to compensate.

It takes a love of Springsteen’s widescreen balladry, perhaps – all hail the mighty Thunder Road – to get on the film’s wavelength, but it’s an invitation right there for the taking.

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.

It goes all-in on the foolproof chemistry, at the expense of everything else. We know from Thor: Ragnarok and the subsequent Avengers pow-wows how well Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson can spar, but their partnership only takes a film so far when the script’s in freefall and nothing else seems to have a stake.

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.

A midnight-movie, exploitation-savvy version of this film, with Spencer chewing up the scenery like nobody’s business, might feasibly have been a camp classic. But this is Tate Taylor’s version: too nervous to thrill, too daft to upset anyone, and constantly policing how much fun it lets Spencer have.

Incoming director Michael Dougherty (Krampus) is the one in this unenviable hot-seat, but he can’t competently handle a budget this huge when it’s being poured over an assignment this vague.

With its thickly-accented voiceovers, re-recorded into English by Mathieu Amalric, the film is a pleasingly eccentric watch, and one full of rare insights.

It's decent but not deep fare, connecting most with the theme of alcoholism as a different kind of tempting but terrible abyss.

Luckily, Wilde has brought together a pair of stars whose joy in each other’s company is impossible not to relish, and their chemistry just goofing around reaches Tina-Fey-and-Amy-Poehler levels of inspired fizz.

It’s the kind of filmmaking with rich confidence in its own professionalism, like a hired assassin purring with his own satisfaction after a devious, trace-free job.

Sciamma’s splendid, multi-layered conceit manages to carry equal weight as a love story and a manifesto of sorts for feminine art.

A sombre spiritual war epic which surges up to claim its place among the director’s most deeply felt, sturdily hewn achievements.

The film often rings hollow.

The film itself never exudes much heat: it’s a chilly, impeccable diagram.

The combination of satire and savagery is pretty fierce and intriguingly unique.

The school isn’t specific enough and the horror isn’t weird enough: on both fronts, it’s so broad it could practically be a Norfolk waterway.

It has a slippery elegance, an ambitious way of nudging its nose into magic realism, and some unforgettable images.

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.

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

If Amazing Grace can’t fathom the inner depths of Aretha in any definitive way, it grants her a great deal more than a little respect.

Raymond Cruz’s solemn performance as a skilled Mexican exorcist does the job, but the film misses a trick in not casting a more heavyweight veteran – Edward James Olmos? – to lend a little of that Max von Sydow ballast.

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.

From top to bottom, it’s Brydon’s film, and his performance matches the modesty of the surroundings: rarely pushing too hard, he finds just the right groove as a browbeaten Everyman lacking spring in his step (or dash in his breaststroke).

Mortal Engines has been thoroughly storyboarded, make no mistake. But here lies the rub – lift-off, personality, and plainly put, direction, aren’t there. All the pieces of the movie slide mechanically into place and wait – and wait – for some spark of soul to turn up and animate them.

Summoning ghastly spectres of the real past, with the tragic ballast this one lends, always carries the risk that they’ll frighten mere fictions off the screen.

Through all the film’s bumps and scrapes, Firth does invest a lot of commendable energy in helping us grasp Crowhurst’s besieged state of mind. It’s a good performance in shaky circumstances, but at least he honours the man’s contradictions, on top of his terror of public failure, and even greater one of exposure as a fraud.

While it's possible to fantasise a truly explosive, riskily disturbing version of The Workshop, that simply wouldn’t be what its own makers intended.

This film, with its endless copying of Assassin’s Creed camera angles and state-of-the-art bullseyes, is an ugly machine, tiring to the eye, monotonously scored, and also weirdly regressive on quite a few levels.

There’s a doomy superficial finesse to the picture, with all its wintry confrontations, skull-trained sniper fire and quick thinking, and it doesn’t take itself as seriously as Fincher’s did. But then, it couldn’t: there’s nothing going on beneath.

The film suggests Inglourious Basterds dumbed down, pumped up, and ditching all pretension. If only it played like a spirited B-horror hybrid we could all get behind, instead of a ghoulish effects trip for the Resident Evil crowd.

It has the feel of a clockwork musical toy that’s been tinkered with and shaken to life over and over – it cranks out a tune, all right, but the feeling of labour behind it dampens the magic.

You wouldn’t call it profoundly scary – the one thing a wiped-clean slate can’t do is instantly defamiliarise us with every iteration of the monster that’s come since Carpenter. But it’s robustly suspenseful and shot with loving care.

Perhaps the unexpected ascendancy of Trump is simply no laughing matter – there are precious few zingers hitting home on this occasion. Or maybe what’s demanded by Moore’s one-man leviathan hunting is a less rusty set of harpoons.

The final hurrah for Mercury’s genius, this huge, hubristic spectacle lets you grant his troubled film a pass: at least it keeps on fighting to the end.

If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.

It’s Dano’s handling of the actors, unsurprisingly, which shows the most confidence.

Dramatic fragments, blasted our way, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a puzzle in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, it gets by on no more than electric confidence, high-fiving technical virtuosity, and a cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

Your hope, gradually dashed, is for The Seagull to convey more of a sense of human loss than this faintly so-whattish drama about a dead bird.

So what’s to dislike here? Hardly anything – it’s finding things actively to like that poses more of a problem.

What a step up for Moretz this is. Her wobbly credentials as a leading lady – oddly, and maybe ill-advisedly, there’s a Carrie reference in the script – suddenly feel like a thing of the past. There’s eye-rolling resignation in her performance, then bottomless despair, then tentative hope.

It’s really the style and performances, more than the pseudo-experimental structure Layton has chosen, that keep the film grabby.

It’s sludgy, and kind of random, and if you already know you’ll enjoy it anyway, you undoubtedly will.

At base, these are meat-and-potatoes genre thrills, but the meat’s decently seasoned, and, even if there’s too much token foliage crowding the plate, it’s cute that they mind about presentation.

Nighy and Mortimer have just a couple of scenes together, but they’re easily the film’s best: both actors sink gratifyingly into the nuances of this incipient friendship, bond over books you actually believe they’ve read, and give the film its best hope of doing Fitzgerald justice.

Though Rudd and Lilly spark off each other just as appealingly as before, the more urgent point is for Lilly to earn The Wasp her equal billing, which she very much does.

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.

For all The Escape’s weaknesses, it’s held together with real sinew by Arterton, who lives and breathes the stifling air of Tara’s habitat without needing to act up a storm at any point.

It’s impressive how many layered twists Dark Web inflicts after its simple start, suggesting the tendrils of a conspiracy proliferating so quickly and steathily there’s no undoing them.

For all its baroque pomp, though, McQueen intuits the one unspoken terror – loneliness – which nudged this fascinating artist into the void.

OK, McQuarrie may not have De Palma’s sweat-drop precision, John Woo’s craziness or the impish wit of Brad Bird, but his mastery of logistics here is easily sufficient to make it the blockbuster of the summer.

This is Lee’s closest ever film to a thriller, but it defies expectations, offering multiple, murky solutions to a set of mysteries at once.

Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its time jumps and nomadic shifts in location, its very destiny.

On Chesil Beach is a non-disaster, essentially, until it falls off a cliff.

The film is oddly unmoving as a memorial, but as with Amy Winehouse, it inspires a collective mea culpa for the feeding frenzy of public judgement that only turned to sympathy when it was far too late.

Compellingly stumped by its own heroine, the film simply can’t make its mind up about Tonya Harding. If it did, it wouldn’t get away with being such a blast.

It isn’t Allen escaping into the past so much as defensively dredging it up, script-wise. And though he’s hired another world-class cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, to give this the gaudy hypercoloured glow of a pastichey Douglas Sirk melodrama, the film’s look is pushy and unattractive, as if it’s wearing too much lipstick.

Portman’s high-tension acting, her inability to relax, suits the material down to the ground. It’s one of her best performances, moving through credible grief and bewilderment, but facing up bullishly to her fears by the end, and finding some kind of exhausted resolve to interrogate them.

Leslie Mann’s warmth and air of charming confusion have helped many a film before. But she gets some definitive moments for the clipreel here.

A pound-store Tarantino with the sadism dialled up and the wit switched off, Roth has the very basics of a stomach-clenching suspense sequence down pat. It’s just that the film never provides any rationale for why you’d want to submit to it.

Everything builds with implacable skill up to, but not quite including, the finale, which is played for a table-turning punchline that feels more crowd-pleasing than strictly satisfying.

It doesn’t have easy access to human emotion, instead deploying a series of techniques to fake it.

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

Grisebach has an observational grasp of the male psyche – especially its pathological obsession with pride – that fairly takes the breath away.

As a demonstration of slighted masculinity being given an inch, taking a mile, and chewing it up with breakneck fury, the film could hardly be more timely or disconcerting. But it understands the ignition point of rage – not just its ugly momentum.