It can be slow going, certainly, but it’s always rewarding. Pull up a chair, stay a while.

The deeper that Resurrection goes, the more that Gan’s vision delicately, meticulously, and, of course, slowly envelopes you, no matter your level of comprehension.

Ella McCay, the movie, feels like we’re being bear hugged by a lovable, slightly boozy old grand-uncle who genuinely hopes to find common ground with a new generation, but also can’t help being a little patronizing.

The Secret Agent is not only mining the director’s own personal cinematic education – it is rich in homages to everything from The Parallax View and McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Shivers and, of course, Jaws – but also excavating an entire nation’s past.

Burger and Tateisi don’t quite deliver a film as energetic and unpredictable as their subject.

In so many ways, The Whole Bloody Affair is the movie-est movie to ever be movie’d, with Tarantino generously trepanning his skull wide open in order to provide everyone a direct portal inside his cinema-addled brain.

The most disappointing part is that the film is peppered with so many brief moments of comic flair and clear-eyed truths that they are collectively almost enough to convince you that it doesn’t matter what Baumbach’s intentions might’ve been. Unfortunately, those sharper-edged bits and pieces eventually become subsumed by a drippy sentimentality that sticks to you like the crisp white suit that Clooney is often wrapped inside of.

[Buckley's] all-in performance is riveting, and well balanced by Paul Mescal’s quieter intensity as the Bard, making the film worth watching – but never rescuing it from the cheap biographical determinism of its third act.

Exceptionally overlong, crammed with miscast performers putting in half the effort they should, and so overly pleased with its various (and rather middling) twists that it leaps from “clever” to “pompous” in one fell swoop, Wake Up Dead Man represents a hard and rough fall from grace.

It preserves the believe-in-yourself mythos of its predecessor, but smoothly addresses the problems baked into Zootopia’s overly sunny portrayal of local government. It doesn’t regurgitate old jokes, but builds on them, and even makes them funnier.

Edgerton doesn’t allow pity or easy sympathy to seep in. Things are hard, things fall apart. And sometimes it all comes together. It’s a living.

The star’s eager-to-please persona and overgrown puppy-dog physicality keeps the film from falling into complete shtick. It is all the more remarkable a feat given that Phillip is a complete cipher of a character.

That plot gets lost in these desaturated Wicked movies. They look less like The Wizard of Oz and more like Fruit Loops that had been left sitting in a bowl of milk for too long – those bright solid colours bleeding out and leaving nothing but a soggy mess.

Presented with every opportunity to say or do something remotely new or compelling, Wright, typically a talented stylist, elects to shrug his shoulders, delivering a wafer-thin confection that is aggressively disinterested in both ideas and action.

It is tidy, it is easy and it is, by the end, far too flinty.

While the original Now You See Me had a winking audacity that leaned into the absurdity of its bag of tricks, the newest installment feels rote and lacks the thrill of genuine surprise.

There are multiple endings of various potency, secondary characters who bizarrely drop out of the proceedings, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the real-life tension that drove so much of the trial’s backroom machinations, with the most fascinating element of the central Goring-Kelley relationship reduced to a quick line of end-credit text.

This is Sweeney’s show, and when she’s not framed in its dead centre, the movie’s blood cannot help but drip down the drain. The star deserves whatever awards might be coming her way. Don’t make her put up a fight.

Audrey is the best kind of inscrutable hero, as precise in her obsession as she is enigmatic in every other aspect of her life. For moviegoers starving for something new who, like Audrey, have nearly given up the ghost, Measures for a Funeral is a symphony, full and rich.

In a more controlled and less punishing film, Lawrence’s deeply committed performance would be the discussion of the year. Yet she has tossed herself to the wolves here, the star provided no care or cover by her director. What is the point in going so raw, so feral, if the result is so scattered, so interminable, so irredeemably silly?

The lack of genuine slaughter in Badlands isn’t the film’s only problem. While it flips the franchise’s history by making the Yautja a hero instead of a villain . . . there is not nearly enough tension or world-building on display to become invested in this particular game of kill-or-be-killed.

The entire experiment feels limited, constrained by both unfettered admiration and nostalgia for a time that Linklater never experienced firsthand. It is a movie of limits, whereas Godard knew none.

As is the case with much of Reichardt’s work, The Mastermind is a genre movie that zeroes in on a formula only to meticulously scrawl over it in jet-black ink.

The film never catches fire, but White and Strong do their very best to give it a spark.

The script, which has a “story by” credit from Stuckmann’s wife and fellow genre enthusiast Samantha Elizabeth, jumps all over the place in tone, from wild to solemn, with no real resting place in between.

A House of Dynamite doesn’t so much self-destruct as fail to even ignite a spark.

A miracle of a movie that could only exist due to everything going so very wrong.

Whereas Jang’s original film was driven by a funky visual inventiveness that embraced wacky comedy over repellent and snide creepiness, Lanthimos’s version merely doubles down on the filmmakers’ most annoying tendencies: obvious observations about power dynamics, ostensibly outrageous acts of violence that underline a juvenile affinity for shock humour, and an overall contemptuous view of humanity that is played for easy, repetitive yuks.