Tim Robey

It’s about acting, denial, wrongdoing and the age of consent, but also about growing up, and the different ways we tread through that process, or fail to.

To call Fast X one of the most ludicrous action films ever made would be a borderline tautology for any instalment in the Fast and Furious franchise. But this one takes the cake.

So glibly controlled is the entire cruise, you wonder if it’s without a boatman, gliding on tracks underwater.

Bessa’s contained fury goes haywire in this stretch, and brilliantly so: it’s a tour de force of social-realist acting to be notched up with the likes of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.

Harold’s trek has its moments to savour, but Wilton seizes the day by sculpting her own mini Mike Leigh film on the side – armed with only a vacuum cleaner and a face like thunder.

The film thinks fame alone is a substitute for wit or charm, and might just as well have outsourced every last role to a hologram.

Suzume is perhaps Shinkai’s most spookily beautiful work to date, while remaining treasurably odd.

The whole thing remains ridiculous, partly since Avery can’t persuade us we’ve been watching a possessed boy so much as an overtaxed child actor he’s putting through boot camp. This was William Friedkin’s – and Blair’s – quite particular achievement. Think of Avery’s go as a goofy cover version you can indulge just the once.

It’s daft, disposable fun while it lasts.

Even at practically Kubrickian length, though, the lockstep slaughter barely gives you pause for breath. It’s a barrage, and a blast.

This film pretends to be cleaning house chez Mr Strangler, when it’s just pushing dust around.

The showdown (in the usual abandoned auditorium) is perhaps the campiest yet to be unveiled, proving that a generally-clapped-out franchise is capable of some fairly fun death throes.

The version we get feels like it’s been eagerly pitched, passably storyboarded, then handed over with a defeated shrug to somebody’s second unit.

When [Penn] steps aside, or simply lets Zelensky talk, the film hits home as a crudely earnest plea for more principled military aid, and you can’t really fault its message. The delivery, though, leaves a lot to be desired.

This is Sachs’s eighth film and one of his best.

Cinematically, Golda doesn’t altogether avoid a TV-movie stodginess – it looks a bit drab, with some duff effects and uneven staging. But it has a businesslike running time, and doesn’t waste it.

Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realised piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge.

I snorted with genuine laughter, hard, at this film’s closing notion of what being a comedy even is.

The film mounts its thesis while hardly needing to verbalise what’s going on: it mesmerises by reaching inside them to listen, even while others talk.

It's so rare in British cinema to see the "L" in "LGBTQ+" up there in such bold type, which makes Blue Jean not only a biting look at this historical moment but a riveting act of redress.

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.

From a premise of purest hokum, the Sixth Sense director wrings out an impressive amount of sweat – it's a real return to form.

In a sickly-sweet genre, it’s almost bracingly sour.

Whatever one’s familiarity with this searing chronicler of lives on the margins, the film is riveting and essential.

The undersung director, Emily Atef, does well to make the business of dying, which can be the hoariest of cinematic subjects, feel like a fresh quandary here for two people making up the rules as they go along.

Marketed cannily towards Gen Z – for her meme value is beyond compare – M3GAN is essentially the anti-heroine of a catnip horror film which tips far more towards the “campy fun” end of the spectrum than the raw terror end. No one will be quailing under their seats during her campaign of slaughter, but that was never the point.

If you’ve seen Eastwood’s Gran Torino or Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man, you’ll know the sort of cranky redemption arc we’re eventually in for here, but this is the flat-packed, self-assembly-kit version – more likely to exacerbate a mild depression than warm the cockles.

Piggy presumably aims to test our sympathies, but just forfeits them entirely, in the service of a facile plot and a heroine even the film itself can’t seem to stand.