A sombre, well-acted film about sacrifice and regret.

There are fewer jokes, moment by moment, but just as much sprightliness, spectacle and fun.

An incoherent, inconsequential picture which sometimes looks worryingly as if it is being made up as it goes along.

This is an unfinished doodle of a film, a madly self-indulgent jeu d’esprit without substance: a sketch, or jumble of sketches, a ragbag of half-cooked ideas for other movie projects, I suspect, that the director has attempt to salvage and jam together. [Cannes Version]

It is romantic and hallucinogenic, with an edge of softcore erotic sleaze.

This film touches on her keynote themes of sexuality and colonialism, in its 21st-century manifestation, though maybe the romantic passion and duplicity don’t come across as strongly as they might have done with leads who had a stronger chemistry.

It’s still no scarier than any branded content, and perhaps only the most lukewarm slumber party would truly need it. Yet if you were to ask whether Origin of Evil offers a better quality of timewasting than its predecessor, my finger would hover inexorably over YES.

A great film about the American civil rights movement is way overdue. The Butler, overwhelmed by flash and good intentions, doesn't even come close.

There’s just about enough care and sensitivity in The End We Start From to offset its issues, providing us with an unusual, female-powered alternative within a field of films that are usually heavier on action than words.

It’s still a very entertaining and spectacular movie, with a rush of nostalgia to go alongside the exhilaration of fun.

Seriously bloody horrible in every particular, and uncompromisingly bleak to the very end, this looks to me like the best British horror film in years: nasty, scary and tight as a drum.

It may wind up as the year's most significant horror film; it's certainly among the most original.

Without stridency but with a clear sense of purpose, director Tonje Hessen Schei compiles a mix of original interviews and footage and archive material and simulations to explore the history of drones.

This Swallows and Amazons is decent enough: but probably best savoured on the small screen after tea on a rainy Sunday.

It’s a film to remind you of the almost miraculously collaborative nature of cinema, but also the radiant personalities of individuals.

Writer-director Attila Till’s plucky comedy-drama isn’t quite the radical representation of disability it seems to think it is, but has its heart in the right place.

A film that displays most of the faults of his kind of on-the-hoof film-making - and all the virtues.

In the end this is a fundamentally genre-subservient film, staying within the safe lines that absolves it from getting close to the true horrors it hints at.

At least Sweeney has good enough comic timing to make the thinly written dialogue sound vaguely amusing; he’s also adept at making his many reaction shots exaggerated just enough to tickle without descending into outright mugging.

In many ways it’s a shrewd sketch of the ways that real life, in all its embarrassment and banality, does not respectfully stop for bad news.

Joan Collins is the only person in this film who seems to be enjoying the fact it's a big camp mess.

The mystery remains: did the North Koreans get it? Did they not get it? Or did they choose a foggy condition of semi-incomprehension as the only state in which they could reconcile ideological piety with reaching out the hated west?

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about Father of the Bride 2022 (was there ever really going to be?) but it’s a far better, and smoother, film than one would expect from the outset, a streaming premiere made with such confidence that it surely deserved a big-screen run.

Mr Malcolm’s List has no great ambitions other than to amuse. But that is always harder than it looks.

Too much chaos ultimately prevails, but the rehearsal sequences at least forsake vapid luvvie-isms for close, instructive study of how to pull the best out of actors and text alike.

Levinson has always been acutely interested in the minutiae of human behaviour, and it's this concern that makes The Bay the triumph that it is.

Despite the panache with which the dance sequences are presented, it is frustratingly inert dramatically.

Perhaps it’s more for insiders and specialists, but this film is a taste of Italian life.

Pinocchio is a thoroughly bizarre story; Garrone makes of it a weirdly satisfying spectacle.

Yates paces the fast-moving thrills with precision. [25 Apr 2009, p.53]

It’s amiably amusing, and Bill and Ted’s Peter Pannish inability to accept the ageing process is enjoyably surreal, with a weird tinge of not-entirely-intentional tragedy.

The beamingly ingenuous Cruise, whose character is not burdened with any doubts or an inner life, somehow sells it to you.

You’ll spend the next 90 minutes finding out, and for the most part that’s a brisk and painless journey that romps merrily along, powered by its own cliches and memories of better movies, in a way that’s more comfortingly familiar than wearisome.

You might need a sweet tooth for this gentle, Hornbyesque drama from writer-director Brett Haley. But it’s a likable heartwarmer and very decently acted.

Believable performances, along with a deep understanding of place, lend Drunk Bus a cheeriness that is entertaining and heartwarming.

It’s a beguiling story and Bell and Bening are tremendous as the star-crossed lovers.

What a bland and sugary texture there is to this very conservative, undemanding oldster roadtrip.

It’s too skimpy and self-conscious, more a series of gestures than an organic whole. But Ortega frames his action with a delicious high style, interspersing tense standoffs with formal dance sequences. He gives the impression that all his characters are locked in a bizarre hothouse romance, even when they are chasing or attempting to kill one another.

His fly on the wall approach never feels exploitative – in instances, it yields surprising empathy. In spite of his characters’ actions, Minervini miraculously captures traces of profound humanity.

This Faust is part bad dream, part music-less opera: sometimes muted and numb, though with hallucinatory flashes of fear.

An accomplished debut.

It’s not exactly hard-hitting stuff, and isn’t meant to be, but it spins an entertaining yarn.

The film conforms to the coming-of-age template in that romance is followed or superseded by friendship and maturing personal growth. Urzendowsky keeps it all together.

Usually anything this many generations into its evolution is pretty exhausted – but this is pretty good, or at least in parts.

When a writer-director of some undeniable talent throws so much at the wall, it’s inevitable that elements will stick and in Vengeance, there’s just about enough to make us curious to see what happens when Novak learns to tighten his focus. Vengeance is less the film we need right now and more the one he thinks we do but hopefully next time, he’ll figure out how to make something we want instead.

We get some tastily over-the-top acting and some huge rewind POV shifts to explain what has really been going on – and, of course, the heady whiff of gaslight as Millie can’t quite be sure she really understands anything that’s happening. Silly it may be, but Feig and his cast deliver it with terrific gusto; this is an innocent holiday treat.

There’s really not much going on with Roar storywise. But then you take a step back and think about what it is that you’re watching. My viewing of Roar was set to a soundtrack of “Oh my God!” and “Holy crap!”, all of my own making.

Like Werner Herzog, Kier’s German accent lends a deadpan drollery to everything he says, but there is a gooey soft-centre to his film, and Kier carries that off reasonably well, his face becoming almost boyish. Another intriguing persona in the Udo Kier gallery.

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.

Thomas and Pilcher are determined to avoid making a flashy war epic, and stress the sacrifices of everyone involved; the downside of this is that A Call to Spy has a stolid pacing that makes you feel every minute of its two-hours-plus running time. But it’s still an interesting story that’s yet to fully come into the light.

Caught Stealing is a very enjoyable spectacle.

Operation Mincemeat is watchable enough, but perhaps can’t find a fictional way into the stranger-than-fiction outrageousness of the scheme itself.

It is a bit stagey, but heartfelt and well acted.

Mulligan knows how to lead us up and down the garden paths of his bucolic world, and as with Psycho you need a second viewing to appreciate the various skills that have gone into this movie.

Maguire flails around obligingly, happy to trade amiability for a decent fist at capturing the difficult, prickly Fischer. But he can’t quite carry it off, and the way the script dances around the edge of his illness, exploring the surface symptoms without trying for deeper psychology, leaves the actor exposed.

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 entertaining, though composed with algorithmic precision, and it winds up suspiciously neutral about whether kids really should abandon digital enslavement in favour of real-life human friends.

Lambert is too skittish to keep us in her character’s lives for longer than brief, often maddeningly flat moments.

Though it begins as a murder-mystery, Kill Your Darlings may be best described as an intellectual moral maze, a story perfectly of its time and yet one that still resonates today.

Super Hero gamely tries to explain the backstory a bit at the beginning, but trying to keep up as we are plunged into a world of bad guys with outrageous quiffs, super-skilled preschoolers and green-skinned martial arts masters with droopy forehead antennae is quite futile. If, however, you can relax and just let it wash over you, Super Hero’s eye candy animation is mesmeric.

This tense dystopian horror-thriller feels geographically non-specific, almost as if it were taking place in some kind of dream world. That touch of hazy vagueness is just right for SA director and co-writer Kelsey Egan’s cracking feature debut (co-written with Emma Lungiswa De Wet).

The pace, which had been so tightly controlled in the first two films, is a curious mess, starting off painfully slowly, then rushing when it really matters.

The sisters themselves reveal a little, mostly because of Serena's unguarded imperiousness; but as a study of sports supercelebrity it's a tad subdued.

The final serving of this three-part confection rarely strays from enjoyable, even if it doesn’t match the seductive sweetness of the first bite.

Saving Mr Banks is an indulgent, overlong picture which is always on the verge of becoming a mess. Thankfully, reliable old Tom Hanks snaps his fingers and – spit, spot – everything more or less gets cleared away.

The whole movie is lit in that fascinatingly artificial honeyglow light, and it runs smoothly on rails – the kind of rails that bring in and out the stage sets for the lucrative Broadway touring version.

This is a sympathetic, serviceable but respectfully unintrusive documentary about the Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin.

What’s key is that even though this is a movie about a scoundrel, it’s all very optimistic. Forbes and Wolodarsky keep the frame bright and the filmmaking calls attention to itself only when necessary.

The forthright, punchy screenplay shows Kinoy’s TV background, but there is a galloping energy to the whole drama.

A dopey splatterfest that features one-dimensional characters and a draggy first act that’s eventually won over by creatively immature gross-outs and absurd violence.

The film is very capably made, with forceful, potent performances from Waterston and Fassbender. That franchise title is, however, looking increasingly wrong. It is a bit familiar.

It’s a very mysterious and even bizarre film in many ways, shot in what is becoming Nemes’ signature style: long takes, a persistent closeup on the lead character’s face, and a shallow focus that allows the surrounding reality to intrude only intermittently.

It's a resourceful, distinctive film that builds to a satisfying crescendo.

A fun, disposable watch.

In the end, Gully Boy runs on very traditional lines, and maybe comes too close to cliche, but is always engagingly dead set on entertainment.

The plot is nicked from Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, full of guttering candles, bumps in the night, and the kind of little shocks you hate yourself for jumping at. [08 Nov 2008, p.53]

Deadpool is neurotic and needy – and very entertaining. An innocent pleasure.

There’s a whiff of familiarity haunting almost every scene and while it would have been rewarding to see Cooke and O’Conner take a few chances or add some more emotional depth, it’s a satisfying enough watch, best viewed with little investment and low expectations.

It is an unsubtle and schematic but very well-acted Brit folk-horror pastiche from the writer-director Alex Garland; it feels like a reverse-engineered version of The League of Gentlemen, with the overt comic intention concealed or denied.

The second Lego Movie is even better than the original: a sophisticated new adventure that gives us a new look at how the universality of the Lego universe was more gendered than we thought.

If anyone other than Hawkins were in this film, it would be very hard to recommend. With her in virtually every scene, it is a lovely, tiny character study.

This film has an audience, certainly, but it feels very derivative.

The raffish charisma and sinister, saturnine handsomeness of Javier Bardem is what raises this movie above the standard of soap-opera … mostly.

Wheatley has made High Rise his story, instead of Ballard’s. That’s fine – but, unfortunately, it’s a less interesting take.

A fascinating film.