Magic Farm may not be a blanket crowd pleaser, but Ulman’s smart writing lands in a deeply optimistic place about the pure magic of human connection.

The satire isn’t quite as sharp as you would hope though.

Director Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst weave the darkest satire. In essence their scenario pushes at the same boundaries between what is acceptable and unacceptable as Anna’s campaign, even as Femke’s vendetta shifts the argument from merely discursive, theoretical terms to the realm of the viscerally physical.

A luxe, rather ridiculous look at the uber-rich.

While Sorkin, Kidman and Bardem breathe life into these sitcom icons, their lives ultimately prove too big and too messy to fit within this film’s constraints.

This is simply a generic and brutally efficient tearjerker – like its title, it aspires to archetypal grandeur and lands somewhere blander.

Selma Blair is sympathetically naturalistic as a woman who gave up her career to be a mother and now wonders what her options are. This is offset at every turn by Cage, whose line reading is unpredictable and whose movement is flamboyantly deranged.

The resulting film is an uneven one – occasional flashes of intrigue are hampered by Fuze​’s strange structure and uncertainty about how funny it wants to be. Although the 90 minute runtime is welcome during an age of ill-advised action film bloat, there’s not much good in a film being short if it’s also largely unremarkable.

Despite its noble intentions, The Silent Twins is a broad-brush depiction of the Gibbons sisters’ lives, one that fails to represent the institutional racism and discrimination which had a profoundly damaging effect on them and quite possibly led to Jennifer’s death.

Romantic comedies are meant to be cringe-y and based on morally questionable conundrums, but James and Latif’s individual charms and dynamic is undone by the way their characters’ choices make them feel lost in a way that is completely unrelatable.

Perhaps the demand for super low-stakes, “turn your brain off” studio comedies where the only point is cathartic laughter will one day return. It brings this writer no joy to report that No Hard Feelings isn’t the film to usher in that era.

This finely-crafted, often affecting film points not necessarily to another sequel, but to a future where the Overlook and its eerie occupants have been frozen in time and locked away, forever and ever and ever…

Where the film suffers is in its lack of a coherent dramatic arc, as it instead chronicles a chunk of time that marks a confluence of small epiphanies and aching fallbacks.

The Drama wants you to believe it’s outrageous, but this unnecessary posturing gets in the way of a black comedy that is otherwise well-observed and amusing about the prickly nature of relationships, both sexual and platonic.

Considering McDonagh’s previous writing form, you’re left expecting some subversion or commentary on this overused device – but it never comes.

A film this unwilling to make any sort of profound statement needs to at least be dumb and fun, and it actually manages to be neither.

Paxton is masterful at creating an atmosphere of dread, using precise framing and powerful chiaroscuro lighting to toy with symbolism from Japanese folklore, Greek mythology and modern art.

Halle Bailey is fantastic as Ariel, and Daveed Diggs delightful as Sebastian the crab, but it’s still a late-stage capitalism slog.

This low-on-dialogue, low-on-action, high-on-atmosphere feat is deeply cinematic, yet begs the questions: is there anything new to be said about World War Two, and is Nagy’s effort enough to stand out in this terribly overcrowded genre? The answer, alas, is no.

Millepied’s foray into directing does well to shine the spotlight on Barrera and Mescal’s chemistry, as well as demonstrating how you can tell a story through movement alone.

A horror film about the brazen folly of attempting to domesticate a chimpanzee, or even about the terrifying reality of rabies (which is almost always fatal once a patient is symptomatic) should work. Unfortunately Primate has little interest in its own subject matter – technical plot holes and interchangeable characters aside, there’s no consideration given to Ben’s role within the Pinborough family, let alone the macabre history of domestic chimp attacks in America.

If the film doesn’t radically deepen the conversation around the gender politics or financial intricacies of marriage, it does find new textures in the way ambition corrodes intimacy.

There’s nothing subtle about these films, from their Eat The Rich messaging to the just-go-with-it in-world lore, but in all of their schlock they strike a welcome tone between winking self-awareness and retro absurdity.

Beyond the creative stunt choreography, Novocaine doesn’t leave much of an impression full stop, and its saccharine ending relegates it to a category of films with intriguing premises that end up ultimately forgettable.

Ultimately the mash-up of genres doesn’t quite come together in a satisfactory manner, clashing to the point of whiplash.

Sono has flow to spare, but samples heavily from icky fanboy culture.

Hidden in Martello-White’s bold, assured calling card is a provocative allegory of black experience in white Britain, as characters get caught in an evolving conflict between estrangement and assimilation, individualism and inauthenticity, pride and self-loathing.

For the most part, though, Frears and co poke fun at the monarchy and do a decent job at presenting the complex relationship between India and England.

Menkes is in such a rush to get through the history of cinema to point a finger of blame at everyone except herself, ending with her own films as examples of a negation of the gaze. Nobody’s perfect.

While the film extends a certain empathy towards its subject’s mighty fall from grace, it does not let him off the hook, and it ends as a multi-dimensional study of a man who has lived a life of such extreme entitlement that sincere contrition simply does not compute with him.

The Mule is a beautiful, troubling film. It is a pearl formed around a grit of unease in the oyster of our nostalgia.

As a piece of compelling and coherent narrative filmmaking, Hounds is unfortunately a fun beginning, a silly ending and with a mid-section that’s missing in action.

In River, the waters soon turn murky as context is largely omitted in favour of exquisite yet repetitive aerial imagery depicting astonishing natural landscapes, tidal currents, and elemental forces.

Lowery’s got the courage of his convictions, and while it’s hard to not hunger for more of the artistry which is so evident (choreographer Dani Vitale also deserves a nod) Mother Mary represents the sort of individual, original storytelling that feels all too rare in an industry pushed more and more towards adaptations, reboots and sequels.

Although occasionally let down by weak writing and erratic pacing, the film’s visuals are glorious. Unsurprisingly given its creators’ backgrounds, The Deer King is meticulously crafted.

As an awards-bait biopic, Christy is basically solid; as another chapter in the star text of a soon-to-be-28-year-old woman basically no one on the internet can ever be normal about, it’s interesting – and also, given the entrepreneurial Sweeney’s social-media savvy, quite a canny bit of positioning.

What’s sad about the film is that the feather-light comic tone seems to preclude any deeper insight into what are, on paper, a set of potentially fascinating and psychologically deep characters.

Moana 2 is one of those few exceptions where it doesn’t quite soar to the heights achieved by the first story but still stands tall in its own right.

The result is a teen movie with an identity crisis.

Hope Gap doesn’t go as deep into questions of love and loss as Nicholson’s 1993 screenplay for the CS Lewis biopic Shadowlands, but it benefits from the focus on an adult son, for whom the end of his parents’ marriage is shown to be just as hard to accept as it would be for a young child.

There’s something inherently unsatisfying about the film’s ambling structure, as the first hour flies by and nothing of great import has really happened.

Razooli clearly has ambition and imagination, and this simple but sweet fairytale is an exuberant adventure with charm to spare.

[Chon's] execution is heavy-handed, with the ending steering into a mawkish spectacle which undercuts the seriousness of the topic at hand.

Told in a literal and linear fashion, the style of animation and narrative pacing unfortunately means that the film – with exception of the final scenes – sometimes loses poignancy in its attempts to express the unfathomable tragedy of Charlotte’s life.

Unfortunately, much of said action is old hat (pun intended), with the bulk of this strangely peril-free offering playing like a refried compendium of golden moments from Spielberg’s original trilogy.

With no substance and no style to be found, all that is left in Wicked: For Good is two actresses, doing more than just belting their hearts out by giving genuinely compelling performances.

While Pixar films have included romance before, there has never been an explicit rom-com made by the studio, and Sohn’s ambition is admirable here, as he attempts to bring new ideas to Pixar amid the glut of sequels and prequels the studio has favoured lately.

Scenes flicker between joyful hit and bemusing miss and it feels as if the film has been thrown together in a manner that feels experimental. The script, meanwhile, is too rudimentary to match the full satirical potential of the premise.

No-one has a clue what they’re doing or what the purpose of this slip-shod, opportunist enterprise is. The film pays such heavy and pummelingly-consistent homage to the unimpeachable 1984 original, This is Spinal Tap, that the whole thing starts to look unseemly and self-satisfied.

It’s in the writing where this one shines. Less in the moment-by-moment dialogue between characters, which is functional to a tee, and more in the way in which the clever plot is constructed and vital details are gradually teased out.

Antlers is a slippery, troubling film whose ambiguities, despite one heavy-handed piece of exposition, remain intact even as the film’s identity keeps metamorphosing and body-swapping. Here, the beast within has always been there, lurking and latent as part of America’s constitution, and just waiting to bite back.

Road House’s limp, jokeless dialogue leaves the viewer plenty of time to consider how lazy the whole affair feels.

It’s a deeply unpleasant and reactionary film that even compelling central performances can’t save.

Whether Archenemy is a tale of genuine urban renewal, or merely of power shifting without any real underlying change, remains tantalisingly ambiguous.

Where Thor: Ragnarok was unpredictable and unruly in the most thrilling way, Love and Thunder by contrast feels safe and formulaic. Waititi is too preoccupied with trying to land the same jokes, and he burdens the film with a wishy-washy love story which even by the MCU’s low standards feels shallow and perfunctory.

It’s laudable that Maclean wants to breathe new life into unabashed “B” material, but unfortunately the idiosyncratic touches have usurped rather than bolstered what should be robust, time-honoured noir framework, and we’re left with a film which leaves only a superficial impression and little sense of purpose.

Despite the best efforts of DoP Elisha Christian to create a striking visual identity, the film ultimately brings little to well-trodden cinematic ground, even in its hell-for-leather finale.

It’s a strange, mythically menacing journey through grief and the self-torments of guilt.

It was an exciting prospect to see what someone like Jenkins would do while up against the Hollywood machine, but it unfortunately feels like the machine won this bout, if not by knockout, then definitely on points.

It’s by no means horrendous or offensive, but it’s just a chronic bore, another film that will likely join the Billion Dollar Box Office club, but not a single person will be able to tell you how and why it managed to get through the front doors.

On paper, it’s Hosada’s usual tunes blown up on a grander scale. In practice, the results are an overstuffed yet simplistic mess.

Alpha is as thorny as her previous two features, but there’s something lonely and longing here too.

Migration is not an ambitious film, and doesn’t seem to have anything important to say about why one might migrate and the lessons we can learn from this rather arduous but necessary endeavour.

The most compelling throughline of a-ha: The Movie is its level of detail and frankness. While the group’s stayed together for 40 years, through hiatuses and solo ventures, there’s an impression they’re not especially close.

Heller skillfully portrays the repeated routines of motherhood – breakfast, lunch, dinner, bath time, bedtime – as both meaningful and exhausting.

Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is a mixed (ball) bag indeed, definitely not unendurable, and even boasting a couple of nuggets of misty-eyed nostalgia that aren’t instantly undercut by playground irony, but for the most part it does boast the hit-and-miss qualities of polytechnic sketch comedy.

Drive-Away Dolls revels in ridiculousness, allowing nothing serious get in the way of a good joke.

Surprisingly, Fast X emerges as not only Leterrier’s best film but one of the most enjoyable entries in the entire series. A great deal of this can be attributed to the fact that this film, to an extent heretofore unseen, acknowledges and embraces just how absurd this franchise is.

The Pale Blue Eye is all at once a melancholic romance, a revenger’s tragedy, and an intriguing mystery. Its one problem, though, is that it comes with a glacial pace to match its wintry setting.

The brash message of the film may amount to little more than ​“smash the system”, but it’s a message that Wright has ignored in a film that sorely lacks for imagination and edge.

Renck’s film floats along with a unique grace, reckoning with the weight of paternal legacy and human folly with sincerity, achieving something quite profound in the process.

A kinetic, truly thrilling and delightfully operatic espionage tale.

There is nothing that resonates below the surface here; this is a half-remembered story dressed in a beautiful gown that seems destined for TikTok fan edits and Pinterest mood boards rather than soul-stirring emotional catharsis. We are guided by the hand, instructed on how to feel at every moment, and trusted with nothing.

Ambulance is just delightfully unhinged in its experiment to see how much carnage can be caused by just one car chase.

The Boogeyman is deftly done, its child-focused stakes are never less than alarming, and its ending, ambiguous and closeted, rings true.

There was room to do something ridiculous here – it bears repeating: this is a film about a killer whistle. Why is it taking itself so seriously?

It looks good, it sounds good, the actors are giving it their all, and yet… it never properly gels.

It’s a rare bird indeed in that it’s a work of art that actively practices what it preaches, a celebration of unfettered creativity and farsightedness that offers a volcanic fusion of hand-crafted neo-classicism while running through a script of toe-tapping word-jazz that merrily dances between the raindrops of logic and coherence.

The heavy reliance on CGI is noticeable, particularly because the work is quite ugly (the area from which Barry is able to access the past is a jagged kaleidoscopic eyesore) and while the film benefits from not having a sludgy abundance of fight scenes, the ones it does feature are still largely indistinguishable from any other film.

While it would be unfair to suggest Hausner is condoning Novak’s actions, there is a sort of nihilistic glibness about the film which leaves a sour taste.

The story is not particularly forthright in articulating its themes and ideas, and while that may work in the slow-burn pages of a novel, it just feels contrived and manipulative up there on the screen.

No matter what we might think of her, it’s clear that Tammy Faye was one of a kind. Chastain’s mannered plague of tics does right by her in that respect, but she’s been inserted into a template now worn from overuse.

It is an exercise in self-punishment disguised as self-aggrandisement, by a director powered by confident resignation and – for those unlucky enough to have experienced the gaping hole of yearning for home – it is entirely worth the self-indulgence.

The Bride! doesn’t have a single original thought worth pursuing. The fact that this film appears so shrilly convinced of its radical praxis speaks to a bizarre disconnection from reality.

To add insult to injury, just when things are finally about to get nasty, a character effectively sits us down for a tedious exposition dump that explains the whats, whys and hows of it all. It’s this very lack of trust in its viewers that comes as the film’s most upsetting development.

Beast doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to animal survival films, but it’s free enough of fat and frills to warrant a watch in the theatrical dog days of summer.

It’s predictably rousing, and Tolkien heads will probably enjoy many of the callbacks to the original trilogy, but as a film in its own right, it’s all a little overblown and unnecessary.

he 93-minute runtime is mostly padded out by a plethora of jokes about dicks and bodily fluids which might amuse a group of nine-year-old boys, but is unlikely to impress anyone whose prefrontal cortex has fully formed.

Despite occa­sion­al­ly indulging its worse instincts, there’s still a sur­pris­ing amount of fun to be had with M3GAN 2.0 – a big­ger and fun­nier sequel which could stand to pull back on both of those elements.

There’s just nothing here to cement The Boys in the Boat as anything other than a sort of interesting story made in a competent but uncomplicated manner.

Each time Fuhrman is obviously switched out or Julia Stiles is clearly stood on a box the B-movie hokeyness is utterly hilarious. That fun is only enhanced by the complete seriousness with which each actor is performing their part, particularly the cat-and-mouse duologues that Stiles and Fuhrman practically spit at each other.

Beyond occasionally marvelling at the lively work of the puppeteers, there’s not a lot to hold on to in The Mandalorian & Grogu, not even the supposed father and son connection between its marquee characters.

Cocaine Bear transcends terms such as ‘good’ and instantly enters the realm of ‘beloved trash’. It will be viewed at teen sleepovers, as a romantic icebreaker, and when no one can decide what to watch for decades to come – the sort of uncomplicated, silly, surreal viewing experience that might not change your life, but will certainly enrich it.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes outstays its welcome big time – a serviceable B-movie which replays the series’ inherently-quite-exciting fight-to-the-death storyline, but then inelegantly bolts on an extra hour of vapid soul searching and lore expansion that made this viewer want to bludgeon himself with his own keep cup.

As a feature, it all feels very rushed and dramatically inert, with the outcome of Abe’s predicament visible from many, many miles off.

As a whole, the film doesn’t really work, as Mendes is far more successful in dealing with psychological issues than he is with political ones.

Director Christian Schwochow’s staging is unostentatious to the point of coming across as pedestrian, but the film is ultimately engaging thanks to the dilemmas wrestled with by the script.