With its really smart deep dives into cultural criticism, this is a seasonal stocking overflowing with spooky fun.

What emerges is Ailey’s lifelong seriousness and his vocational purpose in dance.

Not even an impending apocalypse adds much in the way of urgency. Still, Boyega is very credible and at 29 he’s beginning to look like a leading man with real gravitational pull. Likely he’ll file this on his CV under misfire.

It is an endearing sports film with just enough awareness of where it stands, now that Britain’s imperial legacy is being questioned more than ever, on a larger field.

Home Alone meets The Lost Boys in this trashy half-way entertaining Christmas vampire movie from director Sean Nichols Lynch; it’s a black comedy with some silly splattery gore.

There is a certain Cartesian buzz to be had from Sensation if you abandon all hope of following the plot, and let it wash over you. But that won’t help when it tries to land a final twist that is supposed to bend minds, but is more likely to exhaust patience.

This is a heavy-footed reboot which doesn’t offer a compelling reason for its existence other than to gouge a fourth income stream from Matrix fans, submissively hooked up for new content, and it doesn’t have anything approaching the breathtaking “bullet time” action sequences that made the original film famous.

Dolph Lundgren and Scott Adkins make a fine odd couple in this meatily satisfying action film – once it gets moving.

George Clooney has long been a force for good in movies and public life – but what a bafflingly bland, indulgent, gritless oyster of a film he’s directed here.

Mahershala Ali gives a heartfelt performance in this elegant and rather melancholy sci-fi mystery with which Irish film-maker Benjamin Cleary makes his impressive feature debut.

Although arguably a smidge too ponderous and self-serious for its own good, Nine Days still represents a reasonably promising debut for its writer-director Edson Oda.

What is great about Colman’s performance is that it is always teetering on the brink of some new revelation about Leda: her face is subtly trembling with … what? Tears? Laughter? A scowl of scorn?

Like a great big playful un-neutered pitbull, Matthew Vaughn’s new Kingsman movie comes crashing into our cinematic lives this Christmas, overturning the furniture and frantically humping everyone’s leg before rolling over on the carpet for you to tickle its tummy or anything else that comes to hand.

It’s flawed for sure but still moves with more deftness than most (arriving after Eternals is a blessing for any Marvel film) and there’s an ending that suggests an awareness of its roots (post-credits scene aside), hinting at a promising way forward rather than back. Consider the curse of sorts sort of broken.

There is something, for me, unrevealing about the drama, and almost sentimental about the final moments. But Hovig and Skarsgård are both very good.

It all playfully flirts with horror film conventions, offering up a winking orgy of patently fake gore and irony that’s for the most part pretty fun. At least the cast seem well in on the joke and are clearly having a blast, although the package could have been improved with a fewer sharper one-liners and tauter comic timing.

The issues involved here might have been discussed a little more extensively and the provenance and context of the TV interview archive material could have been labelled more clearly. But this is a decent film.

It’s watchable and even occasionally amusing.

This film could have done something more convincing with that mode of reverse-vertigo hinted at in its title: that fear and willed blindness about what looms over us. But if the movie helps to do something about climate change, such critical objections are unimportant.

An oddity, in which all the characters seem to be avatars for the loquacious Sorkin himself.

A judicious mix of new-minted interviews, home video footage and charming animation by Shanahan makes for a delightful, well-tempered package.

The film pinballs cheerfully about the place, from crisis to crisis, from losing the tickets to getting back the tickets, with no great narrative purpose other than fun.

This is confident, distinctive work.

It’s a film of desperately upsetting details.

It’s a shame that after that killer start, this wimps out of saying anything interesting about death or the adventure on the other side.

The competence of the action sequences compensates somewhat for the underlying lack of wit or humour throughout, unless you count the smile-inducing call backs to ancient 90s technology.

It’s pure mass market Christmas cookie cutter stuff that’s only made vaguely interesting in very short bursts because of its queerness.

Ameen has perfectly plausibly brought off a high-gloss mainstream picture with a big heart and a very nice supporting cast, including Stephen Dillane as Shirley’s new boyfriend. For Ameen, it’s another step on the way to Hollywood stardom.

West Side Story is contrived, certainly, a hothouse flower of musical theatre, and Spielberg quite rightly doesn’t try hiding any of those stage origins. His mastery of technique is thrilling; I gave my heart to this poignant American fairytale of doomed love.

The aesthetic of the animation is, like the script, rather nondescript, with boilerplate-looking gloss and shine – like any number of less memorable DreamWorks or Pixar productions

[A] televisual but still touching documentary tribute.

Subtlety and nuance are not exactly this film’s strong points.

Silent Night is not exactly a satire of well-off and well-connected people as such – everyone is supposed to be basically pretty adorable. But there is something undoubtedly startling and bizarre about seeing the end of the world generically grafted on to this jolly Britcom mode.

It would be really obtuse not to marvel at the exuberance, energy and vivid moment-by-moment immediacy of this movie: Sorrentino is a film-maker who is always on the move, on the attack.

This is a tremendously well-made film with a burning vitality: without question one of the most important Australian documentaries of the 21st century so far.

It is an extraordinary portrait of a man who is convinced he cannot be wrong, who will always position himself – at least in his own mind – as the persecuted victim struggling to do right.

Did the whole nation and its governing class go into denial after the Kennedy assassination as a way of managing their shock and grief? Perhaps. But this documentary, for all its factual material, is frustrating.

The plot’s twists and turns, which were manageable in a three-part TV drama, look contrived and unlikely in a feature film and Bullock has little to do but look self-consciously solemn and martyred for the entirety of it.

This remarkable film feels like it could become a time capsule, showing future generations what it felt like in 2020 for those on the frontline.

It feels kid-gloves at times: big-hearted and entertaining, but possibly lacking a little fun or oomph. A lovely warming film, though.

In the end, this is Lady Gaga’s film: her watchability suffuses the picture, an arrabbiata sauce of wit, scorn and style.

It’s moderately diverting Halloween filler – earning points for reviving Taco’s electropop cover of Puttin’ on the Ritz – but still way too static to become actually entertaining.

It feels worthwhile – funny and true about growing up and getting a life.

The film catches the excitement of this moment for Clarice, and Dynevor’s performance is wonderful.

It’s an entertaining, uncontroversial film directed by the actor Sadie Frost, who pulls in her celeb mates to do talking-head duties: Vogue editor Edward Enninful, Kinks guitarist Dave Davies, and even interview-shy Kate Moss gives a quote or two.

Berry brings commitment and focus to the drama. She wins on points.

The keynote is vanilla blandness.

The Power of the Dog is a made with artistry and command: it is one of Jane Campion’s best.

It’s such a delectable film: I’ll be cutting myself another slice very soon.

There are some nice moments and sweet showtunes, but Encanto feels like it is aspiring to exactly that sort of bland frictionless perfection that the film itselfis solemnly preaching against, with a contrived storyline which wants to have its metaphorical cake and eat it.

There’s an admirable sense of pluck to the film, as if those involved know very well they’re making something that doesn’t need to exist but they’re making the most of it anyway.

Lin-Manuel Miranda gives us an unashamed sugar rush of showbiz rapture and showbiz solemnity in this heartfelt tribute to Broadway talent Jonathan Larson, played here by Andrew Garfield.

Becoming Cousteau is no hagiography, but greater distance might have also allowed Garbus to reflect more on the man’s environmental legacy.

[A] cheap and cheerless sci-fi action film.

There’s a creak of old leather (and other things) in this outrageously dated and hokey sentimental western, made from a script that’s been knocking around the industry for decades; it’s a Swiss cheese of bizarre plot-holes set in 1979, clearly because that is when it was conceived.

This is a world of brutality and fear from which the movie averts its gaze at key moments, but the chill is unmistakable. The title appears to refer to a light which is inexorably fading.

The film finds rousing energy in the tension between Milla’s journey into adulthood, and the potential dead-end of her illness.

It’s Purcell’s powerhouse performance that lends the film its punchier, gritty edge.

The film is a parable about the dangers of blind faith in religion and authority, but it’s also warmly compassionate and accepting of human nature.

The film still feels a tad long for the simple narrative it offers, but moments of visual ingenuity and a deep understanding of psychological suspense show that Kempff is one to watch.

Often music documentaries feel padded out with filler but honestly I could have spent another hour in Copeland’s company.

It is a fierce and impassioned denunciation of evil.

A third-act plot twist is audacious enough to regain our attention, but Reuten and Wolf don’t quite have the charisma to fully carry it off.

An inoffensive time-filler that’s hard to love but easy to like.

Director David Verbeek’s script doesn’t quite wield the scalpel with enough sadistic glee. Instead, this film feels ever-so-slightly sluggish and dour in places.

It is mainly a rather silly high-concept dramedy intercut with maudlin moments, and the sentimental keynote inevitably dominates by the end.

This an enjoyably strange spectacle, perhaps best appreciated by taking it less seriously than its creators intended.

It’s not exactly boring – there’s always something new to behold – but nor it is particularly exciting, and it lacks the breezy wit of Marvel’s best movies. One of the strengths of the MCU to date is how it has taken time to define each character individually and lay out the grand narratives over successive movies, building a sense of momentum. Here, it’s all thrown at us at once.

There’s something so soulless and ineffectual about the aggressively unnecessary Red Notice that it almost plays like a pastiche of a Hollywood blockbuster, like a bot consumed the last 20 years of studio fare and spat out a facsimile as an experiment.

An adorable trio pootle around a post-apocalyptic world in this sentimental sci-fi that curiously lacks any sense of danger.

Schrader has carpentered a strong and vehement film, hypnotically watchable and squalid with nightmarish flashbacks and a typically apocalyptic ending that grows plausibly enough out of what has gone before. There’s a horrible, queasy urgency to this high-stakes game.

Without the franchise pull behind it, Next of Kin is a rather anonymous horror of demonic possession, competently made and with decent acting but indistinguishable from the pack, where predictability wins over personality.

It’s a movie bristling with ideas and ingenuity.

There’s zero, nay negative, fun to be had here, a potentially interesting, if not exactly original, sub-Manchurian Candidate idea (pre-programmed victims/accomplices are activated by a phone call) taken nowhere of interest.

There’s nothing markedly necessary about universe expander Army of Thieves, niche fan service that gives backstory to a character who we know dies later on, but Schweighöfer, also acting as director, keeps his frothy caper afloat with a light knockabout tone, never insisting the film as anything that it isn’t.

Moll has given us this audacious, witty and absorbing mystery thriller, a tale of adultery and amour fou with a gamey touch of the macabre.

There is such sensitivity and intelligence in the performances from Thompson and Negga and the cinematography from Eduard Grau and production design by Nora Mendis are both ravishing. It’s a very stylish piece of work from Hall.

The contemporary half of the film is for me less interesting, particularly in the overextended third act.

It’s all very silly, with a few enjoyable moments.

Maybe the Indian influence on the Beatles’ music didn’t last, but India’s own prestige, its soft power in the west, was immeasurably enhanced.

Amid the current explosion of affirmative diversity-driven film-making, there is a kind of strength in such a self-excoriating and uncompromising point of view. Corbine Jr is one to watch.

The production values are a bit too pedestrian to elevate this much above the ordinary.

Too hip for its own good, the film ends up going nowhere. Only of interest, perhaps, to hardcore St Vincent and Brownstein fans.

There’s probably a semi-decent creature feature here and maybe, with a hefty amount of redrafting, a semi-decent human drama but as it stands it fails at both, a satisfying, coherent film buried underneath copious amounts of animal guts.

It all works up to an only mildly surprising “shock” ending, which is bad news for all concerned, a twist that would be more tragic if it were possible to feel sorry for any of them.

Rylance is good casting as Maurice: his delicate sing-song voice and sometimes faintly unfocused gaze fit nicely with our hero’s lovably awkward determination, as well as Flitcroft’s sense as a natural comedian that there is something more than a little absurd in the game of golf.

The acting is daytime-soap standard and the tasteful, softcore sex is shot in such a way as to not look like actual sex. It’s unerotic, unsweaty and performed with expressionless faces. It feels like the film-makers know they have to do the sex bits, but don’t really want to actually do them.

While a certain disarming naivety infuses the work, it nevertheless packs an evocative punch, with a moral message about intolerance and the need to protect more vulnerable species. It’s also one of the few films that could potentially induce a psychedelic trip with its visuals alone.

In the end, this film suffocates you with ersatz compassion and personal growth.

Night Teeth isn’t quite as dreadful as its truly dreadful title but it’s just as forgettable.

Given the calibre of the voice cast, perhaps the biggest disappointment is how humourless the movie is.

Labyrinth of Cinema is indeed labyrinthine, a maze of jokes, film references, quirky back projections, bargain-basement effects and melodramatic confrontations. But at its centre is something deeply serious: a belief that, as the sole country to have experienced a nuclear strike, Japan has a terrifying exceptionalism. This awful truth is marked by a tonal cymbal-clash, both acidly comic and desperately sad.