Tim Robey

Nyad’s theme of women pulling together just about lands – thanks chiefly to Foster. But following the recipe of human interest this slavishly is a fast track to not being very interesting at all.

The film is heroically unabashed about the power of love, expressed through extraordinary photography (by Jamie D Ramsay, who lifted Living), and a quartet of stars bouncing off each other to hit stratospheric acting highs. It shimmers, and it aches.

Director David Gordon Green fails to whip up even a fraction of the original 1973 chiller's menace in this sloppy, CGI-heavy farrago.

In trying to pretend a blip was a seismic revolution, the film winds up distinctly strained, and more depressing than it quite knows.

As a scratchy string quartet for the four actors, it continues to work surprisingly well – you might hand it back with a B+ in that department. But as a storytelling assignment, it droops little by little into the C zone.

Kenneth Branagh returns as Poirot, but, rather than jazz things up, the film's many Danny-Boyle-esque stylings are a constant distraction.

Nothing at the cinema this year has a hope of beating Past Lives for romantic delicacy, the cosmic yearning it puts into the three words, “I missed you.”

It’s Mamma Mia!, minus ABBA. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Notching up his third entry in what I suppose we’re meant to call the CCU, Michael Chaves looks alive, as often, with the set pieces.

Washington – Man on Simmer – keeps himself awake with a few fun, staccato line deliveries. But the flurries of pointlessly sadistic violence are jaggedly dispensed, botching the build-up.

The film is mature, relatable and risks being terminally uncool – full of evident chagrin from Holofcener that she can’t be a new voice these days, but also comfortably embracing the old one.

It might have been a classic stoner comedy if far-out outweighed the gross-out.

In practical terms, this just means he’s Iron Man with a spray-paint job. The film’s draggy middle act has to confine Jaime in Victoria’s secret lab, or there would be nothing for the non-superpowered rest of his family to do: at long last, he’s pitted against the grievance-harbouring Indestructible Man (Raoul Trujillo) in one of those climactic clashes we know all too well, which is just a slam-bam VFX-off.

Some of the action sequences are OK, the cast decent – but this convoluted action-adventure's poor attention to detail is its undoing.

The thrill of the games is matched fleetingly here at best, because it feels like a simulator being put through a simulator, and not all the effects are up to snuff. Script-wise, we don’t just get Formula One, but formulae two through infinity.

Shallowly entertaining but the opposite of insightful, this film repeatedly hails the clever USP that Beanie Babies were understuffed on purpose, so they could be “posed” better. As a piece of malleable, threadbare, plasticky content with a plum destiny as digital landfill, their biopic is certainly in a position to know.

The film grabs your attention with verve, but also has a vision: it’s not mortal danger it finds freaky, but what’s waiting on the other side.

If there’s one reason to see Prisoner’s Daughter, it’s Kate Beckinsale.

The sum total is superior in every way to what he dished out last time. With a third one openly teased at the end, the fog has lifted: Hemsworth has landed on his Bourne, and this is his Supremacy.

Enjoyment of The Flash hinges on two things: how much Ezra Miller sprinting about you can realistically withstand in one film, and whether multiverses seem cool any more, a year after we just flogged them to death. I wish you the best of luck.

The dancing and photography are striking, and the acting’s perfectly fine. But the sum of it all is a moony inertia, lacking any awakening spark of life.

As a platter for meat-and-potatoes, bump-in-the-night thrills, it’s a little on the shaky side, but they’re still delivered to the table.

The animation is state-of-the-art – but isn't it high time superheroes stuck a pin in one reality and ripped up their passports?

It’s not enough for Loach and Laverty to have their hearts so reliably in the right place. The Old Oak is sluggishly predictable in plot, but also sharply unsatisfying at the end.

The further down the film descends, the more transfixing its images tend to get, as if Rohrwacher and Louvart have teamed up on an archaeological dig for their own treasures of texture and light.

Aatami is like some figure out of folk myth let loose on his persecutors, shaking off a ridiculous assortment of injuries between one set piece and the next.

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.

Law is horribly good.