Wendy Ide

While the interviews are largely quite banal, thanks to Song’s expressive performance, they are intriguing. But the picture loses what steam it had once we get to the final two chapters, where the actress is required to transcribe what she remembers of the conversations, memorise them and then perform them for her acting coach.

This is an underdog tale straining so hard to be endearing that it’s more likely to pull a muscle than tug a heartstring.

7 Keys is a nervy but uneven thriller that is rather let down by the fact that, while the two central performances are independently strong, there’s little discernible chemistry between them.

Ultimately, the picture is entertaining enough, in a somewhat tawdry way. Just do not expect it to hold up to forensic scrutiny.

While the film is largely content to tread a safe path, it does at least feel full-hearted in its appreciation of the way music can connect lost souls and enrich lives.

It evokes a specific time and a place so vividly that you can almost taste the stale cigarette smoke and cheap beer. But while the picture affectionately skewers the youthful pretensions of the aspiring artists, it also allows the students an overly generous space in which to pontificate and navel-gaze.

Like the characters it follows, this first feature from director Jaydon Martin is unpolished, honest and a little rough around the edges at times.

While Wicked: For Good repeats much of the same formula as the first picture, there is a crucial ingredient missing: humour. Without it, the spark is extinguished; the astringency that cut through the sentimentality of the first picture is gone.

The lack of a satisfying human connection between key characters is a stumbling block, but Wyatt does deliver plenty elsewhere.

Hot Milk lacks some of the lush, heady symbolism of the book, and opts for a less teasingly ambiguous approach to the storytelling. Mackey, however, impresses, as a woman driven to distraction by the neediness and manipulation of those around her.

A testy father-daughter relationship adds weight to the story, all of which Armanet, in her first lead role, tackles with a convincingly frayed and frustrated performance.

While vivid in its depiction of Paris’s vibrant lesbian culture, seems curiously slight and modest in its emotional impact given the seismic internal battle the central character wrestles with.

Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) directs, just about striking a balance between the fluffy sentimentality of the story and its hard-edged political backdrop.

Sunny, soulful, if a little montage-heavy at times, this is a more conventional film. Hekmat’s magnetic star quality, though, is unmistakable: she’s a free and fascinating presence.

James Hawes, who directed the entire first season of Slow Horses, clearly knows his way around the spy genre. Which is why this disjointed thriller about a brilliant CIA code cracker turned elite operative (Rami Malek) delivers at least some pacy thrills and globe-hopping intrigue, despite numerous issues with the screenplay, structure and casting.

As anyone who saw The Woman King will know, Davis has a formidable screen presence and serious action chops; for all its silliness, there’s plenty of fun to be had watching her slaughter the bad guys amid a diplomatic hail of bullets and canapés.

It’s a pity, then, that this sluggishly paced film, which leans heavily on a fussy, twinkling piano score, is so meandering and listless.

Rather than a slick, high-concept fantasy action picture in the vein of Everything Everywhere All at Once, here is a B-movie throwback with its roots in the pulpy creature features of the 1950s. Viewed from this perspective, the shonky special effects are just part of the fun.

If you’re a paunchy, middle-aged geezer with a wholesale cocaine habit, an aversion to “woke”, and hobbies that include beer and punching people, well, have I got a movie for you!

Reema Kagti’s fiction feature gets a little bogged down in the tension between the friends, resulting in a marked dip in energy in the second hour. But the (literally) uplifting final act raises the roof and, through rudimentary green-screen technology, some of the cast.

What elevates this raucous romp by music video director Lawrence Lamont is the crackling energy between Palmer (Nope) and singer SZA, making her acting debut here.

It’s all fairly predictable. Anyone who has seen more than a couple of serial killer movies will have no problem assembling a list of possible masked murderers. But Josh Ruben’s film goes above and beyond when it comes to squelchy, visceral gore.

It’s a humourless drag of a picture, overreliant on clunky exposition and naive geopolitical posturing. Plus it’s ugly, with a greasy murkiness that looks as though the lens was smeared with lard.

The Fire Inside, which was scripted by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and directed by cinematographer turned first-time feature film-maker Rachel Morrison, understands that, with storytelling as with fighting, sometimes all you need to do is stand firm and land the punches.

For all the talk of gamechanging comedy genius, Saturday Night ultimately plays it rather safe: it’s closer to a Noises Off-style romp transposed to a TV studio than the blast off of a cultural revolution.

Great turns don’t always amount to a great picture, and the unfortunate consequence of this no-frills directing approach is that the film-making can feel rather flat and functional – a display cabinet for the acting rather than a vital piece of storytelling.

It isn’t breaking new ground, but the feature debut from TV director Drew Hancock is pulpy, bloody fun.

By the Stream is a wry comedy of manners that muses, in its unassuming way, on the creative act.

The wildly uneven wedding clash comedy You’re Cordially Invited is certainly in the vicinity of terrible on numerous occasions.

The combat sequences and SUV shootouts are grimly efficient, but the picture is baggily paced.

The element that makes this intriguing – the ghost POV shooting technique – is also a problem, undermining the suspense and distancing the audience from the vulnerable girl whose fate is in the balance.

Very silly, but pulpy fun.

The film soon runs out of bite, with a plot that repeatedly chews over the same thumps, bumps and rattled doors, and the same shadowy menace in underlit basements.

It’s an alienatingly ugly technique and a mawkish tear-jerker choked up with synthetic sentimentality. You start to envy the dinosaurs their extinction event.

The famous apple incident is a taut centrepiece for Nick Hamm’s picture, and the action sequences are propulsive. The casting, however, is questionable.

It’s all very sweet and well-meaning, yet this story of redemption is a naïve and very pastel coloured portrait of a Yakuza veteran.

It’s a tricky balance, and one that the film doesn’t always quite pull off, between sounding a warning and screaming with existential terror; between galvanising the audience into action and plunging them into despair.

We Live in Time is let down by the jarring product placement (take a bow, Weetabix and Jaffa Cakes) and by the aggressively anodyne score, which sounds like the kind of reassuring, hand-holding mulch that might be played in a dentist’s waiting room.

While I had more time than many of my fellow critics for the two previous movie spin-offs from the Sega video game series, it turns out that you can, in fact, have too much of a good thing.

It’s a droll, perceptive and shamelessly sentimental look at generational tensions.

Unfortunately, Perry drenches the tale with his trademark syrupy ineptitude, creating a gloopy, turgid plodder.

The yagé trip sequence is overlong, baggy and indulgent. The characters lose all sense of their bodies; the film simply loses its point.

Nightbitch would have worked better if it had been pushed further in either direction – as an intimate interrogation, or as a full-bore bestial freakout. This uneasy middle ground feels like a missed opportunity.

An impenetrable plot doesn’t entirely hold together, but the film is worth a look for fans of wigged-out sci-fi, gorgeous framing and lush, orchestral, Bernard Herrmann-inspired soundtracks.

There’s a little too much crammed into this overstuffed stocking of a movie, but the gorgeous, lovingly detailed animation style – it’s the second feature from British studio Locksmith Animation (Ron’s Gone Wrong) – and the zippy action sequences should prove a winning combination for family audiences.

Caroline Lindy’s feature debut is a droll, if uneven blend of comedy, romance, fantasy and horror that relies heavily on the off-the-charts chemistry between Barrera and Dewey, who manages to convince as a charismatic romantic lead, despite looking like a rejected prosthetics test for the 80s TV series Manimal.

Given the emotive subject matter, the film chooses to keep the potential mothers at arm’s length as characters, losing tear-jerking opportunities as a consequence.

This sequel is so derivative of its predecessor, it’s practically a remake.

The prosaic anti-escapism of this sprawling American indie thoroughly subverts the expectations of the festive family movie.

It’s a handsome production, and an impressive debut from first-time director Malcolm Washington, Denzel’s son. But like the previous two pictures, it’s stagey and mannered – a film that never quite sheds its theatrical roots.

It’s a fun watch, and the technique allows film-maker Morgan Neville to visually represent Williams’s form of synaesthesia, which turns music into colours, and to explore his musical process in a suitably playful and creative manner.

A charmless, CGI-heavy spectacle, Red One falls into an ill-considered audience no man’s land: it’s too intense for little kids (we get to visit Krampus in what appears to be a yuletide S&M dungeon) and too bland to attract teens and genre fans.

While it’s an enjoyable family romp that should charm younger audiences, the action onslaught can’t conceal that this sequel lacks the inventive agility, wit, comic timing and, most crucially, the magic of its predecessors.

See The Room Next Door for its stunning mid-century architecture, chic interior design, and for Swinton’s enviable euthanasia wardrobe. But don’t expect to feel much of anything, unless you have an unhealthy passion for colour-blocked chunky knitwear.

Hardy is a highlight, playing Eddie as a man who has had more than enough of the party that’s raging in his head, but Kelly Marcel’s film is a sloppy, incoherent let-down.

Radwanski uses restless, handheld cameras and improvisation to capture micro-moments in which not a lot happens but the implications are huge.

It’s a fun premise, but Lowe’s follow-up to her deliciously nasty 2016 debut, Prevenge, is disappointingly underpowered and slapdash.

As an account of a notable moment in French legal history, it’s undeniably compelling stuff.

The teasing, tricky structure adds intrigue to a fairly rudimentary horror premise and the cinematography – actor Giovanni Ribisi steps behind the camera as the DOP – is suitably strident, with reds and yellows screaming from the screen.

The vampire genre is, like its toothy protagonists, notoriously difficult to kill outright, but this flat and uninspired film could be a nail in its coffin.

Leaning heavily on a wealth of breathtaking slow-motion surf footage, Stephanie Johnes’s crowd-pleasing documentary tracks Gabeira’s triumph over industry sexism and a catastrophic wipeout that nearly cost her career and her life. Stirring stuff.

There are a lot of ideas churning around in this intriguing but scattershot picture, which veers into the surreal and macabre in its quest to explore themes of identity, authenticity and the nature of beauty. Not all of it lands successfully, particularly in the increasingly agitated and fragmented second half.

While the title seems to promise a dual focus and fresh blood in the form of Gaga’s Lee Quinzel, in practice, she is very much a secondary character who earns next to no screen time on her own and suffers from thin writing and cursory characterisation. It’s a testament to Gaga’s weapons-grade charisma and star quality that despite all this, Lee’s scenes are electrifying and she lands every last line like a punch.

For all its big-hitting visual ambition, philosophical window dressing and pick-and-mix literary references, this is a work of screaming emptiness.

The cushioning effect of Ferrell’s celebrity and, judging by the closing credit list, an extensive and well-funded production team, mean that while this is a likable-enough film, it is an insulated and artificial construction.

A film that erases itself so thoroughly from your memory, it’s almost as if Pitt and Clooney had performed one of their bespoke clean-up services on your brain.

This kind of horror storytelling is only as successful as its final act. And, unfortunately, Never Let Go drops the ball, along with the bloodstained machete, just when it should be ramping up the tension.

It’s affecting enough, with both Harris and Stevenson capturing the wrenching, protracted grief of not knowing, but I found myself wishing that the film had maintained a sense of mystery rather than dumping a chunk of inelegant exposition at the end.

Flashbacks to Mariam’s technicolour youth in 1969 Karachi are gorgeously realised, and the design department (in particular wardrobe) gets to revel in an eye-popping kaleidoscope of primary hues.

Despite reported reshoots and a fresh edit after the film’s coolly received premiere last year, its sour spirit and a cluttered, clumsy third act remain a problem.

Realistically, it was never going to match the instant cult appeal of the original, but it has a lot of fun trying.

Some pleasingly icky special effects add to the general sense of mouldering menace. Where the picture stumbles, however, is in its almost total lack of effective scares.

The film runs out of momentum, finding itself ensnared in a needlessly complicated web of intrigue and administrative shenanigans.

Law is phenomenal – a petulant, powerful and vengeful man who has the court balanced on the knife-edge of his mercurial favour. Vikander is magnetic as Katherine, but, as with the depiction of Josephine (played by Vanessa Kirby) in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, the screenplay creates a strong woman of today rather than a credible figure from history.

And Their Children After Them is a big, sweeping melodrama which, although undeniably cinematic, struggles to sustain audience engagement throughout its overly generous running time.

Not everything works in Mika Gustafson’s feature debut, but the performances, in particular that of the magnetic Delbravo, have an unpredictable, wayward energy. And the restless, hungry gaze of the camera captures the savage love and joyous freedom that unites the girls.

It’s clearly a passion project for Page, so why then does his performance feel so lifeless and inert?

A film of two halves, Cloud’s excessive, bullet-strafed second section is more effective than the restrained and sluggish first part. The themes it explores are uncomfortably of the moment.

This is a film that is precision-engineered to hit the commercial sweet spot between extreme-sports mountain-climbing adventure docs such as Free Solo, The Alpinist and Touching the Void and feelgood tales of overcoming adversity. And as such, it works.

For a film that dips its Manolo-clad toe into the murky waters of domestic abuse, it’s unexpectedly aspirational, almost frothy in tone. But perhaps that’s the point the film is labouring: spousal violence in a relationship is rarely broadcast to the wider world.

It should be pulpy fun powered by car chases and zippy repartee, but The Instigators is a dispiriting and predictable drag of a movie.

Offbeat flashes of humour punctuate this stylishly enigmatic, Jean-Pierre Melville-inspired crime picture, but the momentum flags a little in a convoluted final act.

Enthusiastic mugging and gurning from the cast can’t hide a feeble, flailing screenplay that clings to its single idea like a lifebelt.

A film can be obnoxious and simultaneously very funny, and Deadpool & Wolverine is frequently hilarious. But it’s also slapdash, repetitive and shoddy looking, with an overreliance on meme-derived gags and achingly meta comic fan in-jokes.

Part of the problem is that while Johansson is deliciously minxy and manipulative as Kelly, the usually likable Tatum has all the charisma of a carpet tile in this clenched-jawed, buttoned-up role.

There’s little that’s new in this enjoyable but familiar brush with villainy.

Frauke Finsterwalder’s take on the Empress is a lavish production favouring an accessibly middlebrow, at times almost soapy, approach.

Now in his 60s – not quite old enough to be a US presidential candidate but not far off – the actor lacks some of the hunger and aggression that ignited his career in the 80s, but he remains a uniquely magnetic performer. And somehow he manages to bring a degree of freshness to material that was stale several decades ago.

Weighty themes are handled with a refreshing lightness of touch.

Swinton is massively overblown and Torres too wispy and diffident to balance things out.

Gore addicts will be sated – the prosthetics and makeup are robustly grisly – but the story feels rather too glib and predictable to be fully satisfying.

It’s impossible to endure all this – the film is sporadically funny but it’s also emotionally arid, mannered, and overlong – without making a link between the power plays on screen and Lanthimos’s approach as a film-maker.

It’s not uninvolving. The picture takes its own sweet time getting going, but a satisfying momentum builds through the multiple, interlinked storylines.

Like its subject, the film is not particularly revolutionary or groundbreaking in its approach. But again, like its subject, it is a work of unmistakable quality and class.

Something in the Water is competently filmed, with lots of propulsive underwater shark’s eye shots of the flailing legs of the bridesmaids. But there’s rather too much time spent watching the girls bobbing and bickering in the middle of the ocean as they wait for the next assault from the circling fish.

Despite Crowe’s commitment to going balls-out nutso in the role, the film unravels, a casualty of slap-dash plotting, lazy directing and a reliance on tired Catholic horror tropes.

Ultimately, it’s a bit of a mess, but it has luridly entertaining moments nonetheless.

Catching Fire is more concerned with the mercurial essence of its subject than it is with the nuts and bolts of her life. We learn little, for example, about her family background.