Tim Robey

Spirited never gets you to a place of soaraway joy, exactly, but it’s busy, silly and not a bad time.

Visually, it’s one great shrug, but to get by with a throwaway murder plot this routine, the zingers at least must zing. They rarely do. There’s something turgid and defeated about it.

Of all the gonzo flights of fancy, though, perhaps Al’s romance with Madonna (a bubble-gum-popping, uncannily inspired Evan Rachel Wood) is the most helpful at getting this uneven spoof into its groove. The idea of her courting him just to secure the so-called “Yankovic bump” in her record sales is pure Madge, and as such, delightfully persuasive.

Unashamedly rousing and immaculately crafted, The Swimmers is up there with Creed as a sports drama with more at stake than individual glory – a global-humanist purview to which it ascends without getting the slightest bit preachy.

Deadwyler does magnificent work in it, making bold, risky choices to communicate a near-operatic range of emotion.

Grandage’s feature debut, the literary biopic Genius, was an all-star dud; this is colourless, miscast, adrift. He hasn’t yet found cinematic lift-off: the camera gazes endlessly into the soupy sea off Peacehaven, as if it were a Magic Eye picture hiding the drama of a Turner painting inside. Amid the drab ruin of these lives in the 1990s, and their equally cheerless salad days, rare sparks of life succumb to a great deal of mopey regret.

Lindholm’s stealthy restraint fits the material like a glove, and both get under your skin.

The middle stretch is genuinely scary, though, thanks to the film’s clammy aptitude for trapping us alone in the dark. Somewhere in here, there’s a thesis brewing about how predators ply their trade and cover their tracks while purporting to be the good guys. The product of their actions is ghastly, and it’s lumbering at us fast.

It’s the “rom” that’s the killing shortfall. But I must admit, Bros put me in such a sour mood that its “com” got sabotaged into the bargain. It’s distinctly smug about pitching itself as a landmark, while being really more of a setback, and a pretty low bar for the next one to surmount.

Much of the film’s success comes down to Plaza, who has left that deadpan sphinxlike mode of hers some way back in the rear-view mirror. Grit replaces irony, and it’s fascinating to watch her think her way through every predicament here, deftly and in detail, weighing the percentages.

The film has whizz, and bang, and you’ll forget it by tomorrow.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s epic drama springs off the success of Black Panther and roars into action: it’s every bit as propulsive, as detailed, as richly imagined. It’s fast, and it’s loose, and it totally works.

It’s a thoroughly pleasant if flimsy film – a sleeper hit already in America’s sleepy arthouses – with a distinct perfume of nostalgia wafted towards us, say by the sight of Gitanes lit up on cross-channel flights.

When it’s in-flight entertainment this winter, no one will necessarily moan, but it plays like a soothing feature-length trailer for your first cocktail on the beach.

Causeway is an excellent, moving, determinedly low-key slice of US indie cinema.

The film has a sheepish, hair-shirt quality, as if it wants credit for intersectional largesse. What it does do quite well is challenge the temptations of unquestioning nostalgia.

Mark Chappell’s script has a refreshingly high laugh-rate as these things go, with a seam of pure English silliness that sets it well apart from Knives Out, without gunning for anything like that league of plot ingenuity. It’s closer, really, to doing for Christie what Scream did for the slasher flick – goosing the formula with winks and tickles.

The Forgiven concentrates on awful people doing awful things they’ll pay for unless they can avoid it, but as morality play it’s stuck in a rut, with an ending that just seems to have stumped McDonagh – it dissipates.

It’s in the wit department that this trifle wobbles most, dodging irony and cosying up with convention.

Smart comedy is already a rarity; smart comedy that looks this good is a once-in-a-blue-moon event.

Director/co-writer Babak Anvari made a startling debut with Under the Shadow (2015), but like his follow-up, Wounds (2019), this is a shakier pot-boiler – diverting, provocative in spots, a little head-scratchy in plot terms. The secret weapon is Ascott, an actor you itch to see cast in more films

Shot entirely in Welsh, this pristine debut from Lee Haven Jones has a methodical chill to it, laying steady groundwork for a buffet of grotesqueries. It’s horror-satire, with its eye on environmental plundering, and a demonic revenge to exact.

[Folman's] new film, Where is Anne Frank, doesn’t need to make sense of Anne Frank’s diaries – they speak for themselves – but instead builds a bridge to the present day, where Folman finds a troubling deafness to the very lessons, and alarm bells, that her legacy ought to have guaranteed.

Taken as a speculative romance, and in the right matinee spirit, it’s lushly engaging, with a star pairing that – appropriately – rivets.

With its meathead sensibility, Day Shift is always most comfortable hacking and slashing. These set-tos can be reasonably tasty, but everything else? Way more seasoning, please.

The script makes a heavy meal of Naru’s personal growth, where a concentration on pure survivalist reflex would have made it leaner and meaner. But when the film knuckles down in sequences of wordless action, it slays.

The oddity, and pretty much sole selling point here, is Phillips, a delightful stalwart of British telly for years, fronting a coy Australian sex comedy of almost dogged, determined mediocrity. Writer-director Renée Webster is at least to be credited with grasping her star’s flummoxed appeal in a rare leading role.

It’s the film that’s hell – and a very dull, desperate hell at that, as if these dungeon masters have realised we aren’t sufficiently scared by the main event, and try throwing the kitchen sink at us, almost literally.