The King of Staten Island is not structurally perfect. There is a rather contrived crisis the purpose of which is to bring Claire, Scott and Ray together at last, but there is charm and gentleness in this new stepfamily. Powley’s performance and the final shots of the Staten Island ferry brought back happy memories of Joan Cusack in Mike Nichols’s 80s classic, Working Girl. There are a lot of laughs here.

It's often entertainingly creepy in a twilit world of its own.

This is the second highest-grossing movie of the year in Japan, but unless you’re a teenager, an anime junkie or really, really care about volleyball, you’re unlikely to get much out of it.

This is muscular stuff, with a firm grip on your attention.

To watch Tesla the film is to admire its ambition while regretting its follies. Much like Tesla the man, perhaps?

Anyone who says voting is a waste of time needs to watch this film.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a perfect fit for its target audience – the Harry Potter kids who are following Emma Watson through her baby steps towards the stronger stuff.

In the Aisles is a poignant and richly sympathetic film.

This is a fascinating and neatly realised horror riff on the 2020s’ most popular genre.

Love and sex, two things taken so casually for granted in so many different kinds of story, here become totemic articles of faith. Lady Chatterley still has the power to move.

The psychological thriller form has imposed on Dolan some discipline, and brought out his talent and energy.

Sissy is a deranged pleasure to watch, though a strong stomach and an appreciation of genre protocols is highly recommended.

It's an amiable film with some great musical moments and the classic "growing success" montage showing them on the road in south-east Asia. On music, identity and race, the film has a big beating heart in the right place.

Schirman's film (produced by the team behind Man on Wire and Searching For Sugarman) is as gripping as any high-concept Hollywood thriller and as psychologically knotty as Greek tragedy.

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.

Levine succeeds in giving some genre tropes renewed sheen. Even a rote-seeming, Rogen-initiated drug trip pays off with the cherishable sight of Theron conducting state business with glitter in her hair.

Crystal Fairy is an acid trip where the frequent bonhomie is doused by sobering introspection.

It’s just a rare joy to see a film-maker scrambling together overused tropes and making something so vibrant and vital as a result, an exciting and unexpected studio movie with a brain, some guts and a heart.

The soul of the movie isn’t particularly in the human/creature relationship at its center, but in the stunning craftsmanship that surrounds (and in the creature’s case, creates) them.

This assured debut tells us teenage girls can – and will – save themselves.

There’s something about the franchise’s earnest investment in its characters that’s quite unique. Its longevity is because it functions as much as a soap as an action flick.

Whannell’s finite reserves of creativity have been meted out in an imbalance, going all in on world-building while giving the fight choreography and the cinematography listlessly documenting it the short shrift.

Ahadu pulls the curtain back on a government that was willing to imprison and torture its electorate.

Despite beings shaky in terms of tone – as well with its occasionally obtrusive handheld camera movements – Lola impresses with its refreshing blend of analogue and digital flourishes.

Patti Cake$ is by no means a hopelessly bad movie, it’s just hampered by its desperate need to be a crowd-pleaser.

The absence of a real point of view, and of any depth of characterisation, prevents the otherwise pleasing entertainment drawing blood.

It’s fun, though GOTG2 doesn’t have the same sense of weird urgency and point that the first film had. They’re still guarding, although the galaxy never seems in much danger.

Try as writer-director Mike Flanagan might, there’s something coldly unmoving about it all, a disjointed and dry-eyed tearjerker that never rises above Instagram caption philosophy.

It's certainly atmospheric and cool in a new-New Wave way, but really, what's the point?

Tran adroitly layers the fight sequences, filmed with fluidity and at least substantially performed by the main actors themselves, between frothy layers of blokey banter.

There are plenty of great moments, but they jump out amid a jumble of strangely flat scenes. This doesn’t feel like the work of a great master; it’s a discordant brew that just doesn’t blend right.

It is a good idea and there are good moments in the film, especially at the very beginning when Anna and Aleks have a bizarre encounter with the old woman herself, Rita Concannon, strikingly played by Olwen Fouéré. But then things begin to slide. There are however some resonant ideas here.

If it's possible for a picture to be at once ideal and imperfect, then Damsels fits the bill.

It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I.

It’s powerfully and pugnaciously acted, and horses are brought in – as animals often are in social-realist movies – as symbols of redemptive nobility. But I felt that in narrative terms it turned into a cul-de-sac of macho violence.

Talley strikes you as a man of sincerity and depth behind all the air-kissing and lamé.

As with the last film, there are bold extravagant gestures of spectacle, while Wright, Coel, Bassett, Gurira and Thorne all supply fierce performances; each of them ups the onscreen voltage simply by appearing.

While Harrison’s performance may never fully reveal the nature of the man beneath these sumptuous layers of organza, silk and self-confidence, it’s enchanté Chevalier, all the same.

This really is a very strange film, and perhaps doesn’t quite cohere the way a more rigorously refined and redrafted screenplay might, but each of its exotic elements suggests a mounting delirium – exactly the kind of unacknowledged, displaced group frustration that grows and metastasises in a police state.

The rock’n’roll bad boy of tennis is watchably if uncritically celebrated in this documentary portrait by Barney Douglas; it is a film that leaves unsolved the riddle, if it is a riddle, of John McEnroe’s confrontational on-court personality.

The whole package is an easily digested guilty pleasure.

In the new film, by literally creating a bust of the bird – as if a clump of stone or plaster could compare with the natural majesty of wings and feathers – the meaning has been accidentally inverted: a story about how something can never die becomes about how it will never live again.

This film is a distinct, articulate pleasure.

It’s a charismatic performance from Adewunmi, and Amoo’s camera often comes in close to his face and his gaze, suggesting that Femi is on the verge of some kind of epiphany or vision – and it’s nothing to do with the drugs.

There are substantial talents involved in this film, but it doesn’t come together.

It uses its supernatural premise to explore some very human behaviour.

Both actors contribute knife-sharp timing and the kind of intensity needed to make this essentially two-man setup work.

It’s a vehement movie, with a driving narrative force and a robust sense of time and place.

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

Silver Haze is a sombre, thoughtful film about depression and what is (and isn’t) likely to promote emotional healing, performed with openness and honesty.

There are some laughs and it’s always likable.

Conti manages the feat of being funny, emotionally astute and kinda sexy throughout.

An interesting and worthwhile drama.

It really is very very long; watching it like going to an all-night movie show where the only film is Fight Club. Yet it’s tremendously directed and performed with brio.

Love Life is an inexpressibly tragic and painful human drama about complicated lives, a movie that interleaves the utter desolation with a dry understated comedy and a sense of emotional tangle and chaos, a film that moreover blindsides its leading female character – and us, the audience – with an entirely unexpected coda section.

As stylishly made as these films might be, there’s still not enough of a distinctive identity away from its inspirations and not enough away from the (very loud) sound and fury to give us hope that this is a story worth retelling time and time again.

Lost Girls is sorely lacking and, ironically, one wonders what a Garbus docuseries could have found instead.

In some ways, this works better without the metaphorical reading – as just a far-fetched, but quite ingenious entertainment, with some bold climactic touches.

The film-makers’ enthusiasm for his clarity of purpose is all well and good, but it does leave the film prone to hyperbole, and perhaps a more measured, sideways look at the weird dropout culture around climbing would have been more interesting.

Barbershop: The Next Cut is hardly subtle, but it is more nuanced than you might expect.

For the most part it manages an adept balance between satire, sincerity and sheer silliness that’s ultimately winning.

It is genuinely mind-boggling, and yet this unsatisfying, naive and fundamentally uncritical documentary, despite careful modern-day interviews with the participants, doesn’t get to grips either with the story’s implications or with the story itself.

For all the competence and strength of Trapero's direction, the film is not as powerful as it might have been.

Though there are moments of real joy and liberation during the games, everything outside of the matches is cloaked in a mood of lost dreams and stunted futures.

A good-natured love story, doomed to flower and fade in the space of a single holiday, leaving behind the traditional coming-of-age realisation that friends and family are what’s important right now.

The performances are exhaustingly unsubtle and undirected and the film’s failure to hit the comic note early on has the added disadvantage of undermining the avowedly serious moments of solidarity and body-positivity at the end.

Branagh and Weitz stick lovingly to the legend throughout; and while it might have been nice to see the new-model Cinderella follow Frozen’s progressive, quasi-feminist lead, the film’s naff, preserved-in-amber romanticism is its very charm.

It is an elegant if slight piece of work, touching and intriguing by turns, but hampered structurally in that it relies on two separate flashback sections.

It’s all so human and messy and it’s refreshing to see a director that doesn’t shy away from such complexity with Colangelo crafting a film that’s every bit as nuanced as the subject at hand.

Although many of the stories told here are deeply harrowing and the film sometimes seems to be trying to bite off too much, at least there’s a happy ending of sorts.

Altogether, it’s a richer devil’s brew than you would expect, crisply edited and moodily shot – even if the last act doesn’t quite hit the spot.

Kazan brings to the role a sweet and dignified vulnerability, keeping rigorously to plausible human behaviour.

It's all a bit absurd, but Legrand handles the absurdity with some style, and there is something clever in making an apparently minor character responsible for a major narrative flourish. An enjoyable spectacle.

None of these characters quite flares passionately into life but all are persuasively portrayed, and it’s a vehement reminder of what doesn’t get taught in British schools.

Kendrick and Lively have never been funnier, snapping one-liners at each other like elastic bands; the script is hyper-alert to the undercurrent of competitiveness between stay-at-home and working mums.

Howe’s film is drenched in empathy, where violent actions aren’t exactly excused, but at least framed with understanding.

It’s about misogyny and abuse and memory and materialism and gender performance and many other things that would be a spoiler to mention. It’s therefore less of a plate and more of a buffet, and while it might be beautifully served, it’s a film about excess that suffers from it too, a case of too much leaving us with too little.

This is a visually sumptuous kids’ film that will also charm adults.

Sono retains his go-for-the-throat approach, but the violence here somehow connects with the brutal economic conditions, and he fosters very tender, affecting performances from Shôta Sometani and Fumi Nikaidô as his crushed young lovers.

McAvoy is the most compelling reason to see this one. The original may be darker, but it didn’t have McAvoy.

It is a film with all the depth of a fridge magnet.

The result is an unpredictable film, a difficult approximation of a biopic. But it delivers a Jimi Hendrix experience somehow the richer for sidelining the man and subverting his music.

Perhaps we are near to cliche here. Yet the film never really tips over into bathos and predictability. Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy are the students, each giving the sort of performance that heralds considerable talent. The film will undoubtedly speak to those at whom it is aimed, and I hope others too. It isn't that wonderful. But it's much, much better than usual.[16 June 1985, p.20]

LA 92’s reliance on news and eyewitness footage leaves it vulnerable to the same limitations as that footage – namely the prioritising of sensationalism over insight.

The ending chorus of conclusions wraps up a bit too neatly, though that doesn’t invalidate the enjoyably deranged ride before.

There's the frustrating sense of ideas bubbling too low beneath the surface, of mordant jokes serving as an end rather than a means.