Hauser is the star and he keeps the film on track: poignant, lonely and vulnerable – maintaining the tricky balance of laugh-at and laugh-with.

It’s a given that Hanks will nab at least a best supporting actor nomination but it would be all too easy to forget his co-star. The cynic-becomes-a-believer arc is age old but it unfolds here without cliche thanks to an emotionally intelligent script from Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, but mainly because of a marvelous, prickly turn from Rhys.

Queen and Slim doesn’t entirely work. The credibility factor isn’t too high sometimes and there are big set pieces that don’t gel. . . . Yet this is a punchy, watchable film.

Beanpole is moving, disturbing, overwhelming.

Chung’s nuanced portrait of a family figuring out their place in the world is both small and somehow rather grand.

The story is a real-life political chess game with the makings of a gripping race-against-the-clock thriller; but here it drags out into sluggish, dull and unconvincing melodrama.

The rapport between Law and Lively allows the movie both to relax and pick up the pace. Morano puts together good fight scenes, robust stunt work and tasty car chases. It’s destined to be viewed on a million long-haul flights, but it works perfectly well as a thriller.

The Last Thing He Wanted is a thing that no one wanted.

It’s elegantly constructed and precisely composed, with Durkin painstakingly recreating an era without falling into nostalgic overload. But it’s also a drama about a family that keeps us at a distance for the most part.

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.

It is a frustrating filmgoing experience, but still one worthy of your time for the acting alone.

Wendy is undoubtedly self-assured and in-your-face, and the gorgeous location photography certainly has an impact. But it’s wrecked by chapters so lengthy they become simply excruciating.

There’s a lived-in chemistry that’s missing from the pairing and the film’s great many awkward moments between them don’t feel quite as cutting or as uncomfortable as they should. It’s a dark comedy that feels too light.

There’s a lot here to digest, a bitter cocktail with many confounding flavours and its abrasiveness will prove tough-going for some, especially those in search of a more polite and familiarly structured literary biopic. But for those willing to sink into the depths with Shirley, it’s a delicious journey down.

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.

The Twitter-to-screen adaptation of Zola is as scrappy and imperfect as the original story but just as likable. There’s something unusually compelling about what Bravo does with the material that makes up for its missteps.

The result is as long and as lavish an advert as has ever been produced for the Chinese emergency services. It’s just you might reasonably want your films a little more stirring and challenging, and not quite so obviously rubber-stamped.

This film makes explicit the implied sexuality in the original, which isn’t necessarily a wrong thing to do at all, but everything is very ham-fisted and crass.

Forget about chilling to the bone, The Grudge barely drops below room temperature.

It’s brand management dressed up as insight and while it’s not not entertaining, it’s certainly far from particularly revealing, playing more like a PR exercise then a festival-worthy feature.

It’s amiable, but the real action thrills and the chemistry between the leads isn’t there.

There’s a puppyish charm here.

This is a film in touch with modernity, but I wonder if the livestreamers were quite as apolitical as this film makes them appear. And I was unsure about Zhu’s decision to correct all the images from colour to black-and-white, an arthouse-ification that the film didn’t need.

A powerful, personal piece of work.

So there are two films here: one is frightening and poignant and the other tender but slight. The first one will haunt me even if the second will fade.

Like Your Name, it’s thrillingly beautiful: Tokyo is animated in hyperreal intricacy, every dazzling detail dialled up to 11, but it’s less of a heartbreaker.

It’s ultimately a miracle that despite the tortured production process, Dolittle can most generously be described as passable for young, undiscerning viewers. It won’t charm or amuse you particularly but it’s not a catastrophe, the highest praise I can muster.

It’s comedy-drama that is not funny enough to count as a comedy and not plausible enough to count as a drama. You’re going to need a very sweet tooth for it – sweeter than the one I have.

Pamela B Green’s hectic, garrulous, fascinating documentary recovers the story of French film-maker Alice Guy-Blaché.

While Bad Boys for Life has a completely asinine story, generic action, predictable plot beats, moronic dialogue and truly reprehensible politics, I still had a good time.

Too many scenes of sub-vaudeville witchy cavorting suggest Kramer hasn’t completely mastered her own poetic register. But it is bracing to watch her reach for the stylised impact needed to carry her ideas about social identity; exactly the kind of the expressive messiness this wing of the post-#MeToo film industry should be engaging in if the old order isn’t going to reimpose itself.

Her photographs are like very bad dreams and simply looking for any period of time at dead bodies is a very strange experience.

Often moving but also disquieting and even intermittently funny, this drama unfurls a spiritual parable that is uniquely Polish but accessible to all.

Scalpello’s film is livelier pulp than the absence of advance fanfare would suggest.

[A] good-natured and well-intentioned film.

It tells us that Seberg was wronged and that she looked really great in a bra – and not necessarily in that order.

It’s a remarkable match-up between film-makers and actor and reaffirms the importance of that partnership, especially for a movie star stuck in a profitable rut. Sandler deserves more, and if he wants us to keep watching, then so do we.

Frustratingly, Lowenstein doesn’t let the musician’s talent speak for itself.

There are kernels of something interesting here: an interracial best friendship and business partnership in today’s America, or navigating best friendship on the cusp of middle age, or maintaining the ethics of your business and passion under the growth mandate of capitalism. It would take thought, and jokes constructed with a motivation other than how to include the word coochie. It would take an understanding that women want to see sex and their bodies talked about filthily on screen, but are smart enough to know that’s not always enough.

What frustrates me most about Underwater is just how very little it brings to the table. It’s a solid, competently directed regurgitation of an oft-told tale that never manages to justify its own existence

A little of the personality has been lost in adapting Shaun’s world for sci-fi (the Wallace and Gromit movie Curse of the Were-Rabbit pulled off horror with a little more finesse). It’s a minor quibble; Shaun is by no means past his prime.

The whole thing is shot and lit in that dull flat way that is mandatory for Hollywood family comedies, and the script is mainly dull, though I concede Key has some nice lines as he gets cross with Brynn’s sarcastic attitude.

There is such artistry and audacity in this new film by the 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hallucinatory experience whose sinuous camera movements take you on a long journey into memory and fear and a night full of dreams.

I can’t help thinking Gillan’s superpower as a writer and performer might actually be comedy. Still, always a compelling screen presence, she’s now a film-maker to watch.

It’s oddly safe, given the subject matter, and the humour is similarly sanitised. What Waititi thinks is shockingly audacious is in fact frustratingly timid, he opts for a gentle prod when maybe a punch would do.

If you’re going to do a send-off this huge, there are a lot of goodbyes to say, and a lot of loose ends to tie up. The fact that The Rise of Skywalker manages most of them and within a vaguely coherent story is something of an achievement in itself.

Oldman delivers his lines with a strange lethargy and tonelessness, as if – just before speaking – he has just realised that income tax will have to be deducted from his fee.

Ritchie has made an entertaining return to his mockney roots.

It’s warbling warbling warbling piffle.

Given that a fair amount of creative licence has been exercised here, it is strange that Bruce Lee has such a small part to play.

It’s a film that ostentatiously concerns itself with contemporary, zeitgeisty issues such as digital culture and the internet, and whether this is undermining the world of reading and books. But strip out the strained speechifying on that subject and it could have been made at any time in the last 40 years.

As with so many family animations right now, I felt that the script stays on the safe side, with fewer smart lines and ironic gags than I might have wished for, but this is a good-natured entertainment.

Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela is an absorbing and disturbing spectacle, a sensory film about the climate crisis, and it begins with what might be the soundtrack to the end of the world – a persistent tinkling, crackling, trickling.

For pure gonzo outrageousness and steroidal silliness, this action spectacular made for Netflix by Michael Bay has a certain amusement factor and thumpingly unsubtle oomph.

With Hewlett Jr often chronicling events in cool monochrome, shooting in close proximity if not exactly total intimacy, this snappy scrapbook tips the hat to the infectious creativity of Albarn’s travelling circus.

Lauren Greenfield’s film about the Philippines’ former first lady Imelda Marcos reveals a grotesquely self-pitying, wholly unrepentant and very rich woman.

It’s an unwieldy and messy thing, drearily directed and boringly written, taking its agenda seriously yet not providing a robust enough framework to surround it.

For LaBeouf, the script was quite literally a form of therapy for deep-rooted issues he still struggles with and as such, it’s an inventive and admirably introspective exercise. As a film though, it’s only half as successful, not quite as involving or as stirring for us as it surely is for him.

To say The Cave would break anyone’s heart feels flimsy. Like Ballour, it has a purpose: to focus the world’s attention on the suffering of Syrian people.

What gives Jumanji its likability is that it has the emphases and comedy beats of an animation, but also the performance technique of live action – and the occasional reshuffling of avatars and players lets the actors show off a little bit further. Jumanji’s next level is rather satisfying.

So Long, My Son is a piercingly, profoundly moving picture that peels and exposes the senses.

It is a strange film in some ways, speckled with powerful, insightful moments but also with some strained acting, pulled punches and fudged attitudes, unable to decide if its heroines are compromised through having been loyal Fox staffers.

Disappointingly, it is a borderline dopey, sentimental children’s adventure mostly without the wit and spark that converted grownups and kids to the Lego films.

The story has a moderate charm, but is less baroque and ambitious than many Japanese animations.

A contemporary whodunnit that both respects and revises the subgenre. ... It’s such a rare pleasure to see a director so in love with a genre without slipping into Tarantinoesque fanboy indulgence, remembering his audience is bigger than himself and also that his film requires both head and heart.

1917 is Mendes’s most purely ambitious and passionate picture since his misunderstood and under-appreciated Jarhead of 2005. It’s bold, thrilling film-making.

This is such a beguiling, generous film from Gerwig. There is a lot of love in it.

What keeps the film going is simply the factual chaotic bizarreness of what is happening: an improvised deal on Iran-Contra levels of crookedness. Sudeikis is authentically bland and slippery.

Despite the film’s obvious interest, it is a bit conceited and stately, a little like Wim Wenders’ movie about Pope Francis, though without the sycophancy.

Boseman carries off the drama with flair and style.

It’s a film with something to say but it’s not all that good at saying it.

This is a gift to cinephiles everywhere from deep in the cellar and we’re all lucky to get a sip.

Ma, with his natty suits and ruthless glare, brings heft and humour to the proceedings and easily upstages his pretty-boy co-stars.

The pure silliness of this idea is enjoyable. The children give guileless performances, and Nyong’o gamely plays the broad comedy for all its worth.

The Report is a cool, dry look at the facts.

Berman is guilty of one of the most tiresome cliches in documentary – solemnly playing the audio of a phone conversation, with subtitles, over an exterior shot of the building where it is taking place, giving the impression that this is smoking-gun proof of something sensational, or at any rate interesting, when it is pretty ordinary.

Baumbach seeks to mine his material for laughs, no matter how desperate the situation becomes.

It might look the part, with the director Paul Feig successfully capturing the glossy, tourist-friendly London one would crave from such a film, but the script feels like a rejected first draft with unfunny filler one-liners and a scrappy, ill-thought through narrative. It’s a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift that’s filled with rotten turkey leftovers.

Lady and the Tramp works well enough on its own simple terms as watchable, competently made home viewing.

It’s nice to see these figures again, but I couldn’t help feeling that there is something a bit underpowered and contrived about the storyline in Frozen II: a matter of jeopardy synthetically created and artificially resolved, obstacles set in place and then surmounted, characters separated and reunited, bad stuff apparently happening and then unhappening.

Harvey is mostly a watchful observer with a notebook; sometimes she reads lines of poetry she’s jotted down on the voiceover. But we barely see her interacting with anyone on the ground, which gives the whole thing an impersonal feel.

There’s intermittent fun to be had in this throwaway relaunch of the female secret agent franchise but the party is cut short by incoherent action and a clunky script.

Let It Snow is a prime example of what happens when the Netflix algorithm machine spews out something that actually feels like a real movie. It ticks all the right buzzword boxes for the platform (YA, Christmas, romcom, cast filled with recognisable faces) but does so with such ebullience that you’ll fail to notice, or at least care about, the many strings being pulled throughout.

This movie rattles along with terrific energy and dash and the flashback sequences show that it’s actually far more daring and ambitious that you might expect. It’s a great duel between McKellen and Mirren.

Solid first and third acts can’t disguise a so-so middle section stuffed with conventional story beats.

Like watching a statue for two-and-a-half hours, there’s nothing to do but sit back and yawn.

This a watchably stylised period film, with interesting visual setpieces and faces looming up at us out of intricately contrived backgrounds.

It’s cheesy, it’s stupid, but it’s also really quite charming.

It’s a film with charm and sweetness but a twinge of anxiety, a little gravitational pull to darker places.

I was less taken with the wait-is-this-really-happening moments that tend to undermine the emotional currency in which the drama is presented to us. Some real tremors, though.

Gives us an amazingly candid and rather shocking study of the legendary fashion designer, and his apparent physical and mental deterioration at the age of 60.

With well-timed rhythms and backchat, the ensemble is quite credible as a gaggle of slightly obnoxious, mildly likable millennials on the brink of middle age.

The mystery has been dialled down, the treacle dialled up, and what we are left with is basically Eat Pray Love 2.

Here is a valuable and deeply felt documentary, celebrating the work of the sound designers, sound editors and Foley wizards in the cinema, and if it feels like a feelgood in-house promotional video for Hollywood technicians … well, they’ve got an awful lot to feel good about.

It is more than half an hour longer than the Stanley Kubrick film, although it seems more than that – laborious, directionless and densely populated with boring new characters among whom the narrative focus is muddled and split.

Apted has honed his skills over the years, becoming less presumptive and more content to let narratives unfold naturally. And, of course, the unprecedentedly long relationship between the maker and his subjects has led to more give and take between them.

Farming is a tough film on a tough subject. There’s not much light and shade – but there can’t have been much light and shade going through it in real life – and Gubu Mbatha-Raw’s role as the concerned teacher is weakly drawn.

A little of the intimacy is gone, and I have to admit to not being 100% sold on the cowboy-inflected songs, which feature quite a bit of dime-store sentimentality. But Springsteen is undoubtedly magnetic, his voice a honeyed growl.