His to-the-point revenge thriller Silent Night isn’t good enough for us to erupt into the applause Woo has so often deserved, but it’s also not bad enough for us to mourn the film-maker that he once was, a mostly competent exercise that serves less as a victory lap and more as a warm-up.

Admittedly some of these moments get a little gushy. Beyoncé has much to be thankful for and she spends a little too long doing the thanking, from her parents to her dancers to guests like Diana Ross. But there’s always another slab of concert action round the corner to jolt the whole show back to life.

The bizarro plot might help Candy Cane Lane stand out from the bland, busy crowd of new seasonal movies but it’s just as limp and lacking in spirit as the rest of them. Murphy and Ross deserve better, and so do we, and so does Christmas.

The yuletide drama takes a more-the-merrier approach to the trading-places trope, offering a smorgasbord of stock characters for couch-bound viewers to relate to.

Mercy Road is an original, darkly idiosyncratic thriller; I’ve never seen another quite like it.

The back half is all over the place and doesn’t seem to know what to say – but Connelly never ceases to be anything less than mesmerising as the kind of older woman full of spit, vinegar and shrapnel who could go off at any second.

The performances from Hathaway and McKenzie are vehement and watchable, but the film itself is an unsatisfying and anticlimactic oddity.

[A] somewhat bemused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time.

It’s a Wonderful Knife is diverting enough to start with, as the plot clicks efficiently into motion with the requisite stabbings and impalings. Unfortunately, there’s not enough fuel in the engine – the characters don’t have quite enough to do, we can’t care quite enough about them, and the world-building is nearly-but-not-quite convincing.

It’s a silly horror that’s not as good, or as bad, as you’d hoped: neither funny enough nor ever properly scary. That said, there are some cheerfully gory bits and a smattering of decent culture clash gags.

This one has all the Norwegian drama of Yuletide in one tidy package, yes sir.

As the catastrophe escalates, the movie’s mood music of imminent horror gets gradually and continuously louder, without ever quite reaching a climax of fear – or meaning.

Nicol Paone’s flat direction and Jonathan Jacobson’s listless screenplay leave the cast painting by numbers.

Batiste is a cheerful and inspiring presence but there’s a guardedness to him that keeps us at a respectful distance. His relentless optimism, so integral when he’s trying to keep everyone’s spirits up, can also function as a shield.

This is a powerful and important documentary, though I have one tiny qualification.

It’s as if everyone involved is terrified of actually making people laugh in case that gives offence somehow, or disrupts the algorithmic calculation that theoretically makes this a palatable piece of content. The whole thing is as bland as cellophane.

Escalante’s storytelling vigour and his way with an unsettling image keep this film’s voltage high.

Brightly animated and with moments of surprising insight, there’s a warm likability to Leo that radiates, for those still in the classroom and those who left it long ago.

Perhaps the most remarkable moment comes at the end when the elderly Aurora reflects that she doesn’t want revenge, she just wants those connected to the genocide to be made accountable for it: “sat in the chair” of justice.

Watching all the tried-and-tested elements fail to coalesce just makes us nostalgic for the classics instead. Let us all wish Disney can find that magic again.

Perhaps Control will gain cult status – or inspire a remake. But Spacey’s eerily detached, jaded presence does not do much for his putative comeback.

In film-making as in gift-giving, it’s the thought that counts, and there’s not much to go around in here.

As comedy writers and movie actors, the members of Please Don’t Destroy – Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall – are out of their depth. That’s not a knock on their brand of comedy, which works in small doses.

The sleek, stark images of this film are hypnotic; the faces are compelling and the hallucinatory finale is rather inspired. An arresting piece of work.

It is a vivid snapshot of a troubled private life at the apex of the US music scene.

At less than 80 minutes, it’s barely even a movie, more one long montage of bits that never run on long enough to be defined as scenes.

The film is a surprisingly gentle, touching story about acceptance, though it is less than sizzling as a romance.

Roth thinks in hooks and punchlines, which keeps the copious slayings inventive and gratifying while also enlivening the connective tissue between them.

If you feel the need to watch a faith film, you could do far, far worse than this one, a decently staged musical treatment of the nativity that feels like a Christian version of a live action Disney movie.

Not even the fierce wattage of Toni Collette’s talent can light up this hokey crime comedy.

Phoenix is the key to it all: a performance as robust as the glass of burgundy he knocks back: preening, brooding, seething and triumphing.

In the end, the film looks like something that’s been salvaged in the edit, as it muses boringly on life’s great imponderables.

The film’s particular innovation is to privilege Black women’s perspectives on the history of American racism, and with the exception of Kendi himself, every expert commentator here is a Black woman.

Both of the leads keep it low-key, with 95-year-old Renaud’s unfussy reminiscences dotted with defiant irony, and the initially unforthcoming Boon opening up under her cajoling as naturally as a flower.

It’s a disorientating, unrelaxing two-hour experience, but rewarding.

The direction by Nadine Crocker has all the authenticity of a daytime soap opera. But all the same, there’s no denying that Hedlund and, to a lesser extent, Fitzgerald are pretty good, offering better performances than the film surrounding them deserves.

In the end this feels a bit too much like a knockoff of a superior product, like something one of these guys would sell out of the boot of their car.

Though effective in filling in the gaps of Chau’s story, the impressionistic animation dramatising his final moments commits a similar sin as the swashbuckling tales of yore, and makes a spectacle out of a tragedy that is ultimately not all that mysterious or abstract – but in fact grounded in material sociopolitical contexts.

Well, Caine and Jackson and their ineffable class give this film some real grit: it’s a wonderful last hurrah for Jackson and there is something moving and even awe-inspiring in seeing these two British icons together.

The fly-on-the-wall camera has had privileged, intimate access, there’s no doubt about it. But it still always looks like a film which is happy to go so far and no further. Perhaps some more detailed, critical analysis of the music itself would also have been welcome.

The dogs give the film a touch of class, but as a whole this is forgettable.

Directed with verve and enthusiasm by 37-year-old former bank employee Lokesh Kanagaraj, who moved into directing after winning a short film competition, the influence of the likes of Quentin Tarantino on all of this is very much evident.

The Tower is a hellish vision of isolation that must surely have been dreamed up during the pandemic lockdown; it made me want to switch on The Road for a bit of light entertainment. Not easy to recommend, this.

Too well-schooled in the social physics of the internet to come off as a scold against it, writer-director Kristoffer Borgli dexterously skewers a callous culture that cultivates, digests, and disposes of its novelty acts with the blazing-fast speed of a good WiFi connection.

This movie finally ties itself into various knots to prefigure the later world of Katniss, but the time to end the Games came long ago.

Sometimes God is just too on the nose when he makes his creations suffer; but at least Alberdi’s humane, profoundly empathic film-making offers some balm.

Larson, Harris and Vellani are an entertaining intergalactic ensemble.

It makes for some fun moments and a funny showdown with the baddies. In the old days this would probably have gone straight to tape, so straight-to-download feels like the right place.

There’s nothing sentimental about this documentary, which looks at people with the clear, unflinching gaze of a portraitist.

The evasive, guarded acting from the main players can only do so much to elevate the paltry material Nikou gives them to work with. A long, fitfully amusing walk down a short road.

The 99-minute film is long on yelling and guffaws, short on punchlines.

The hoary sub-genre that is “attractive American tourists find something nefarious on their travels” is given a vigorous polish in thoughtful thriller The Royal Hotel, a film light on exploitation and heavy on interrogation.

Bottoms is actually a bizarrely violent film, and its plot is always teetering on the brink of pure incoherence, but it’s always funny, thanks to the goofy and winning comic presences of Sennott and Edebiri.

Laurent, to her credit as director, is less interested in how a shootout can work as an aphrodisiac, and more invested in how it would affect a female friendship.

The question of who gets to tell stories is discussed (spoiler: mostly white men, until recently), and for a 97-minute film, Subject squeezes in a lot of ethical biggies.

Grisly sights are paraded before the camera (including a castrated hunter and untold bison gore) but Polsky lacks the visual flair to make the shocks visceral or the suffering anything more than superficial.

Zimny could have mined some more intimate profundity from Stallone’s determined political fence-sitting, the reluctance of a born entertainer to alienate any faction of his fandom with vocal partisanship.

The folk singer and counterculture veteran Joan Baez is the subject of this intimate and painful documentary, which brings us to the brink of a terribly traumatic revelation that it can’t quite bear to spell out.

It is a record of the past, but an almost unbearable warning of agony yet to come.

It’s an outstanding documentary.

It looks like an interesting experiment, but there is something fundamentally inert here.

Some guilty pleasure thrills are what’s on offer but they are frankly annulled by Liam Neeson’s autopilot dullness, a driverless car of a performance from an actor we know to be capable of much more.

With natural sympathy and warmth, film-maker Carol Morley has created this likable, generous, imaginative response to the work of the neglected English artist Audrey Amiss.

A competently made yet maddeningly dull attempt to bring the hit video game to the big screen makes for an instantly forgettable night at the movies.

Despite a very game lead performance from Heather Graham, and some amusing 90s-style erotic thriller mannerisms – voile curtains blowing on a hot summer night while a sex scene happens to a wafting sax accompaniment – this left me not knowing quite where to look.

While a dedicated Bening gives her all in a tough, physically demanding role, deserving of at least another nomination if not necessarily a win, it’s Foster who steals the film with a fine reminder of her easy charisma.

When not being used to grind dull culture-war axes, sputtering impotent anger is a comedy staple. It just needs to be funnier than this.

There’s a certain amount of nasty fun to be had watching the assorted couples get drunk and tear strips off each other, in a metaphoric sense at least, before the violence kicks off – as if Greene were aiming to make a cross between Scream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Night of the Hunted may fall a bit short of moral substance, but it certainly holds us in its grip.

Any stabs at thematic seriousness have an incongruous feel. It’s admirable that Deacon, who has been vocal about his own mental health issues, has made his character bipolar, but the subject isn’t explored so much as mentioned repeatedly.

Some of the time, this new Chicken Run has the same flaw as the newer Pixar movies: a sense that the film could almost have been algorithmically fabricated through AI, especially here in the opening act. Well, the gags puncture that and a lively voice cast including Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, David Bradley, Jane Horrocks and Imelda Staunton provide energy and fun.

A worthwhile, engaged film.

This is a genial and good-natured production with much spectacle and entertainment to offer, and, like all of Branagh's classical revivals on celluloid, it manages to be high-minded and yet accessible.

At its best, the Eras Tour film manages to capture the why of that bond, the shock of her vast stardom against the startling emotional clarity of her songwriting. The Eras tour, she says, has been the most special experience of her life; in this deft rendering, it’s easy to feel the intoxication of being in her temple.

It’s sentimental, though the way Kirsty is helped by women boiling with fury at the injustice does feel modern.

Stanfield is a performer whom you can’t help warming to, although here, as sometimes in the past, I found myself wanting him to bring something extra in the third act, some new level of energy or anger. But maybe it would be wrong here.

There must be some limit to how much content you can generate from the franchise’s core formula, which always finds the titular pack of talking puppy heroes saving their perpetually endangered home town, Adventure City, from an assortment of perils.

It’s competently acted and made – her direction easily trumps her writing – and while there’s nothing close to suspense, there are some effectively visceral moments of gore.

This is a watchable enough film

This searing film bears a terrible witness to this great crime.

Saltburn is an English mystery drama of the high-cheekboned upper classes, watchable but sometimes weirdly overheated and grandiose, with some secondhand posh-effect stylings, a movie derived from Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith, with a bit of Pasolini.

The bulky physical presence of Del Toro himself gives the film its momentum and force.

Cage dials it down nicely, keeping his freaky at a gentle 6 out 10. The film cruises along on his charm; it’s otherwise a totally disposable but mostly entertaining action comedy drama with a really stupid plot and a few good laughs.

Like with his Halloween reinvention, the film is trapped between the serious and the silly, a thinly etched tale of a father dealing with grief and faith jarring next to scenes of a demonic child screaming the C-word while spitting slime. It’s better when it leans into the latter, a schlocky night out at the movies made with more competence than most recent horrors but one that is unlikely to make a believer out of die-hard fans.

There are echoes of Happy Death Day, Back to the Future and The Final Girls in Amazon’s perky Halloween offering Totally Killer, echoes often loud enough to drown out the film entirely. Its time-travel slasher plot cribs elements from all and relies on enthusiasm over invention to keep us entertained, a gamble that only works in brief bursts.

Unsurprisingly, it all builds to a bleak conclusion, and the film as a whole is a powerful statement that lingers in the mind long after the final credits roll.

The two leads do their best here, but even they cannot scrounge enough feeling out of this desolate sci-fi.

It’s not The Exorcist, Sorcerer or The French Connection. But it makes for a worthy late addition to the great director’s armada.

When the traps begin, they’re as gnarly as ever, if not gnarlier, and with very little suspense about the outcome given how they tend to end, we’re reminded of what a Saw film is: a juvenile endurance test.

Thank goodness for Kerslake, who drives the action, literally and figuratively. Her portrayal of the damaged but resilient Eileen is prickly, unsentimental and true.

My Sailor, My Love is worth watching for Walker’s excellent portrayal of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown and the damage accruing from being the perpetual caretaker of the family.

Anderson’s short, sweet, neatly managed production follows the original tale pretty much to the letter.

It’s an intriguing, stimulating, exhilarating movie, which really does address – with both head and heart – the great issue of our age, AI.

Indeed, it is not clear how interested director Rudy Valdez is in Santana, or whether he is just doing this gig as a means to an end.

A fiery Dever gives it more than the film ends up deserving, though, rising to a difficult challenge with both the virtual lack of dialogue and a string of sequences that force her to energetically react to a range of digital effects, a performance that almost saves the movie.

More than two decades since the original, Rodriguez maintains his ability to invoke a child’s sense of adventure and absurdity.

Jason Statham is the only bit of genuine oomph in a tired tale whose digital effects could have been shot on an iPhone.

As always, I find myself considering that in a world where everyone’s a cynic and an ironist, Cousins’s unaffected rapture is unique and refreshing. And there is an odd-couple comedy here, with Cousins as the unstoppably garrulous super-fan and Thomas as the reticent English gentleman, almost like a charismatic Cambridge don on the long vacation, who has picked up a voluble hitchhiker.