Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them.

It is efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will probably make older viewers want to unplug and retreat into an 18th-century novel.

There are a couple of decent plot twists and reveals, but not enough to stop you from checking out until the next bit with the whale comes up.

It’s entertaining and bizarre chaos, anchored by Odenkirk’s hangdog air of gloomy resignation to the violent mess which he has to clean up.

The film’s absurdity and antique dramatic style never quite come to life.

This docu-portrait verges on corporate promo at times, though there are a couple of telling vignettes in the second half.

Still fully in possession of every marble at the ripe old age of 100, Sichel reflects to camera on his middle-of-the-action view of events during the cold war, and a little tea gets spilled along the way, but not so much that he’s likely to get in any trouble for revealing state secrets. Still, he’s unabashedly critical of some CIA operations, such as the plots to destabilise leftist regimes including that of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.

Instead of letting the visuals do the talking, the voiceover steps in to verbalise the characters’ feelings, and the need to provide multiple backstories through flashback veers into over-exposition. Still, Departures remains a highly thoughtful exploration of love and identity, and an excellent showcase for northern talents on film.

It can be a bit soppy, sometimes resembling Sunday-night TV comfort food, but this big-hearted picture wins you over, and there are certainly some marvellous panoramic shots of the Highlands.

Where it’s lacking in psychological bite, Wardriver’s demi-monde is convincingly venal in general terms. Thomas lends it enough fast-driving attack and romanticised ferment that it might just pass in the darkness for a Michael Mann film.

Held together by Molina’s typically commanding voiceover, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a simple, heart-first drama of broken people trying to put themselves back together.

The cherry on top of this admittedly weird cocktail is a strong streak of genuine sensuality – if it’s your first encounter with tentacle sex on screen, you might be surprised how appealing Heimann and his cast have managed to make it seem.

This hectic fantasia struggles to plumb deeper depths.

It is an amusing and gruesome premise, which writer-director Damian McCarthy stretches out into a convoluted, bizarre extended narrative.

The film sags during the subtler moments of the setlist, which is a problem when half of it is composed of ballads performed at a mic stand or while lying on the floor. I will freely admit to not being particularly fond of Cameron’s recent work, but I couldn’t help wishing for a Na’vi to swoop from the rafters on a tetrapod to liven things up.

The coming-of-age parts of the film centred on Frances work a little better, but for all that, and despite Lithgow and Colman’s commitment, this is very uncertain.

It’s cheerful and watchable, if a relentlessly on-brand fan promo, corporately policed and controlled, using vintage archive photos and video rather than closeup talking-head footage of the band now.

It all has the distinctly cheap whiff of something that should have gone direct to the small screen – hammy acting, stilted dialogue, chintzy effects, tinny score, Halloween costumes – but without the raucous fun that should come with it.

For all its cack-handedness, there’s some effort here to grapple with issues around institutional and personal guilt and the wrongs done to young people that might turn them into smirking, giggling serial killers … or mass murderers, depending on how you define the term.

The off-brand, bought down the market quality of Skydance animation is initially less of a problem here without the poorly realised humans of Luck and Spellbound to distract but there’s still no immersion or sweep to the world being created, just bright colours which might be enough for some toddlers.

This is good-natured, buoyant entertainment. It’s wearing well.

Opera director Damiano Michieletto makes his underpowered cinema debut here, and the whole film, with its lifeless staging, uninteresting performances and laughably naive ending can only be described as the school of Salieri.

Amid this farrago, the political critique comes over more like accidental backspatter than meaningful statement.

The film scoots smartly past the death and brings us briskly on to the entertaining business of sheep-oriented crime detection. It’s all very silly, although, as with Babe, I have to confess to agnosticism about digital talking animals, even if the technology here is next-level. It’s an entertaining tale of ovine law enforcement.

The whole affair feels slick but soulless, with no personality or – despite the lush settings – any real sense of place.

Antoine Fuqua’s demi-biopic of Michael Jackson gives you the chimp, the llama, the giraffe … but not the elephant in the living room. It’s like a 127-minute trailer montage assembling every music-movie cliche you can think of: the producers’ astonishment in the recording studio, the tour bus, the billboard chart ascent, the meeting with the uncool corporate execs in their offices.

Roommates might not rival the fizzy, formative teen films it both references (Clueless) and often directly cribs from (Mean Girls) but it still belongs in a different league to what we’re mostly served right now. Could someone possibly tell that to Netflix?

As this film’s producer-star, Angelina Jolie shows honesty and courage in tackling a story that so closely mirrors her own experience of having a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer. But sadly, the film itself feels specious and shallow, insisting with bland and weirdly humourless confidence on the glamorous importance of the fashion world in which it is set.

For all that this film is about the revolutionary and disruptive business of art, it takes a pretty un-subversive view of art and artists, compatible with the museum gift shop. But I have to admit, it’s executed with brio and comic gusto – the “past” sections, anyway – and Lindon’s performance has charm.

Balls Up is juvenile entertainment, handled by professionals.

Blades of the Guardians offers a duly impressive spectacle, chock-full of epic set-pieces that lean more on physical effects than CGI, and of course lashings of exquisitely choreographed fight scenes mostly using – as the title suggests – swords.

It is another highly sympathetic performance from O’Connor, who converts the British reticence of his earlier roles into Dusty’s strength and quiet vulnerability.

The Blue Trail is a generic mashup: it partly has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant old people, and partly it has something far more subversive and disquieting. The mix of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.

Cronin, an Irish film-maker who has made just two films to date (The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise), is an undeniable visual talent but his Mummy is also absurdly, watch-checkingly overlong (134 minutes is an unacceptable length for a genre film as thin as this), tonally unsure and, fatally, not all that scary. It’s also, for something so clearly attributed to just one person, a film so deeply influenced by the work of many, many others. It might not feel like a Mummy movie you’ve seen before but it’ll feel like a great deal else.

It’s hard to outline what makes this work interesting without spoiling it, but let’s just say that as a satire it has helicopter parenting, sinister medical innovation to extend lifespan, and our obsession with youth and beauty in its sights. It’s a shame the final chapters don’t quite coalesce these fertile themes in more satisfactory fashion, and the film just ties everything up with some cursory violence.

Lowery’s film can dazzle. But to quote one of the director’s clear references, many will spot his inspirations all too well.

It might perhaps have been more ruthless. The movie ends on a bit of a flat note too, with personal growth where you might have hoped for a murder, or at the very least a public humiliation. Still the performances are unfailingly entertaining.

You, Me & Tuscany is a perfectly wholesome and harmless meet-cute that starts by asking: “What if the Little Mermaid had a Lady and the Tramp-style hookup with the season one heart-throb from Bridgerton, spaghetti and all?”

It sometimes seems as if each Jude film is almost to be viewed once only; if you press play again, or go to the cinema to see it a second time, there will be only a blank screen, as if Jude and his ragged company have folded their tents and vanished.

It all adds up to a serviceable horror that at times feels like a B-movie without the fun, containing scenes that could almost work as a spoof.

While there’s something engaging in how the film takes us to a place so, literally, far from where we started, how we get there is not as entertaining or propulsive as it should be with anonymously staged action, easy-to-spot twists and a crucial lack of suspense.

Sonomura was the action director for three Baby Assassins features, which might explain that this, his third gig as a main director, feels more weighted towards scenes that showcase fisticuffs and fancy fight choreography rather than character development and emotional nuance.

There are one or two interesting moments: including an intriguing discussion of the idea that Tinder is anti-love and in fact just promotes addiction to the app, which is inimical to actually finding a long-term partner. But really this is a very tiring and mediocre film.

The script steadily goes about its mission of freeing its characters from all forms of oppression – but it’s generous and unpatronising too.

This is a serious and worthwhile film, though one that tells you what you know already, and yet somehow perhaps doesn’t tell you enough.

Tonally pitched between a bloodbath and bath time, a boyish strain of immaturity is the dominant creative force for Sokolov, at times amusingly but more often in commonplace, enervating ways.

Nothing here is to be taken very seriously at all but it is mostly devoid of the suffocating, and often nihilistic, smugness one has come to expect from modern action films.

The cast nurdle matters along to the climactic real ale awards, which becomes the scene of current cinema’s least surprising surprise result.

It’s all too clumsily calculated to deliver the raucous two-drinks-in blast it so desperately wants us to have and in a year that’s already given us better, bolder B-movie examples than usual (Sam Raimi’s Send Help and monkey-gone-mad horror Primate), it creaks that much louder. It is film-making far too in love with itself to care if you love it too.

It is perhaps too much the acquired taste (and smell) to appeal to everyone, but it’s distinctive, never dull and – much like its most noxious niffs – difficult to shake.

For a film about the inevitable eradication of most life on Earth, Arco isn’t as depressing as you might expect, as it finds a tiny thread of optimism to hold on to.

Ben Wheatley’s Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is a hothouse flower of misery, sprouting dozens of resentment-buds under artificially controlled conditions.

We know he is an intelligent man who lives in this world – the silent supposed bafflement and dependence on giving people enough rope to hang themselves, which are such a large part of his arsenal, look like increasingly feeble weapons when the matters are of such increasing importance in all of our lives.

There’s also no real satire here either (moneyed folk are apparently bad, did you realise?) and at this stage of the rich-eating cycle, I just want it to be over. Forget a killing, Ford has made a real mess instead.

Reminders of Him does, in fact, remind of that earlier time, when It Ends With Us over-delivered on sweeping sentimentality, a brief glow before everything curdled. We cannot go back there, but I’ve heard far less pleasurable echoes.

There is an undeniable energy and spookiness to this low-budget chiller, which makes intelligently modest use of digital FX in a way that some bigger-budget projections would do well to emulate.

This is a Hail Mary pass that Gosling just about manages to catch.

Visually ravishing though it is, Scarlet is a hefty disappointment from director Mamoru Hosoda, a leading light from whom we expect more than an incoherent and overbearing fantasy.

Like the film around him, [Ritchson] does what he needs to do, everything here just about serviceable for the moment yet never memorable enough for the moment after.

It is a resoundingly confident drama.

The biggest problem with Outgunned though is that it seems to have fallen prey to one of the stupidest of modern issues in cinema: a luxuriously padded run time.

The layering of one creepy thing on to another creates a sense of silliness rather than terror, leaving you with the sense that Coco Chanel’s maxim about the perils of over-accessorising – “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off” – also applies to writing and editing horror movies.

It’s a bit of a snooze, but Therese is very good at channelling terror and distress.

There’s just about enough here to show signs of life...but Williamson often feels like he’s treading water when he should be drawing blood.

Written by Colby Day, In the Blink of an Eye attempts no less than the sweep of life from big bang to unknown verdant planets, with the emotional depth of a tide pool and the complexity of a cave painting.

It’s not a deep work, but it’s relentlessly fun if you’re not squeamish, or indeed sentimental about animals getting killed in the opening minutes.

Chopra Jonas gamely commits to the pulpiness of The Bluff, even as it doesn’t ask much of her beyond its impressive action sequences and a few tart one-liners. But there’s cinematic swoop to the movie that you might not expect in a straight-to-streaming swashbuckler, and you feel the grisliness as she drags herself along the ground in blood-splattered clothes like so many final girls of gory slashers before her.

There might be just about enough competence to Polone’s film-making to ensure this won’t be the worst horror film of the year, but it’ll probably be the least necessary.

It might work if Rita was a more appealing protagonist, capable of wringing out gallows humour or personal tragedy from her predicament.

Where it initially threatens to be a new The Thing, it finally serves up sloppy zomcom; just about enough for a Friday night but not much else.

If it’s not quite devious enough overall, Redux Redux still opens up a punchy murder-revenge side alley for the genre.

Even if much of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in need of a rethink, it’s hard not to enjoy the scrappy, animated brainstorm taking place in front of us. The mess of it all is at least a very human one.

It never provokes full-on out loud laughs, but there are wry chuckles to be had and the ferocity of the execution is pretty fun.

For good to prosper, it seems, all it takes is enough good people to take action. It’s an uplifting message in a watchable movie.

British director Hardy has far more fun here than he did with 2018’s mechanical franchise entry The Nun.

It’s quasi-erotic, pseudo-romantic and then ersatz-sad, a club night of mock emotion.

Goat lacks heart and soul, and a sense of genuine emotions.

This final chapter, like its immediate predecessors, falls somewhere between footnote and outright detritus, like a plastic bag being blown through the multiplex by a stiff breeze.

Perhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu.

This horror bonanza, the eighth instalment in the V/H/S anthology series, is a mixed bag, with some very high highs and regrettably poor lows.

Relationship Goals is no less parochial a take on marriage, presented yet again as a woman’s only path to true and lasting peace in life. If you can turn a blind eye to that message and focus on the familiar funny faces instead, the tractor-beam ride to the credits is heavenly enough.

Honestly, there isn’t a single step in Shelter’s plot that isn’t entirely predictable, but to the film’s credit the fight choreography is solid (Waugh was a stuntman himself once) and young Breathnach proves, after her turn as Susanna Shakespeare in Hamnet, that she is a find with a future.

Many of us have long sensed culture is making a decisive break with the analogue in favour of the (perhaps terminally) online and Fischbach’s film makes that paradigm shift not just visible but visceral; it feels not unlike spending 12 hours on Twitch with all the curtains closed.

Frank & Louis is a solidly made drama, but Ben-Adir and Morgan are something special.

[Colman] knows how to oscillate between broad comedy and heart-wrenching drama but the film around her isn’t as adept. Like the dream husband at its centre, Wicker looks the part but there’s nothing underneath.

It’s carried through by an all-in Hawke who is really put through the wringer, arguably his most physically gruelling role to date (the upside of a low budget is that his hardships are made to look that much harder), a muscular and entirely persuasive performance that continues his winning streak.

For a film so sincerely intent on bringing us into the process of sibling grief, I still left a stranger.

There’s a swirl of creepy noises in A24’s new hyped-up horror Undertone – screaming, gargling, singing, banging – but nothing is quite loud enough to drown out the swirl of films it’s cribbing from.

I’d like to see a film about a comedian who, like Bishop, really does flower into being funny.

Chasing Summer at least outruns the charge of being boring, though at what cost.

It’s an earnest tribute to a lot of things – a city, a time, a genre, a mentality, an actor in Turturro – and while we’ve definitely been here before, it’s nice to come back.

What should be wickedly cutting in-the-know dialogue is soft and uninventive, what should be a seat-edge string of escalating circumstances becomes increasingly tiring and hard-to-buy and while the cast is game, they mostly struggle to find the right level for Yan’s admittedly difficult-to-match zany energy.

It succeeds in fits and starts – I laughed more than I have at many a comedy in the past year – but its wild, scattershot humour is so hit and miss, too many jokes going nowhere, that it’s not quite the rousing win I wanted it to be.

Rabbit Trap loses focus, but not before it has shown us a scary performance from Croot.

The novelty of a malevolent presence in the wholesome, brightly lit world of a kids TV show can’t quite sustain an engaging 95-minute feature, Kelly not knowing where to take his admittedly attention-securing setup.

The movie is about how people ruin everything with their destructiveness, but also about the beauty of the human heart. It’s so inventive and imaginative that I wanted to love it more, but in the end found it a little bit psychologically uninvolving, perhaps because of its nonstop swirl of ideas and stories.

At times, it feels hopeless. But eventually the victories come, sometimes from unlikely quarters.

Doeren clearly has a feel for the bear necessities, but the human interest hardly gets its boots on.