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 an engaging and garrulous film, and Hockney is now a cheerful, grandfatherly figure, and an object lesson in taking the boy out of Bradford, and not the other way around.

The on-stage moments of Entertainment are revelatory but, unfortunately, some of the in-between meat of the film doesn’t quite connect.

Twisters is a fun film with some big setpiece scenes, and Ramos and Powell make gallant admirers for Kate. I do think though that the movies still haven’t given Edgar-Jones – so excellent in TV’s Normal People – the well-written big-screen role she deserves. Some spectacular stormy weather, though.

The clunky script feels like it’s been re-drafted and re-drafted to the point of incomprehension – blowing any chance of conveying a message. However well-meaning, it makes for a surprisingly dull watch. That said, my five-and-three-quarter-year-old (and clearly a few other younger people in the cinema) were a bit scared by some of the dicier moments of action-adventure peril.

Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment.

It may be just more of the same from Fricke, but with his unique process, another incredible-looking lap around the world is more than welcome.

You might argue that there is a kind of hubris in all this, and its very giganticism condemned it to marginal status and a kind of cultural smallness. But what excitement there is in these folies de grandeur.

The Transfiguration is a character study first and foremost, spending all of its time with Milo. Problem is, he’s so opaque that as a protagonist, he’s completely impenetrable.

For cinephiles, this will be effective propaganda in service of a belief they already hold, a reaffirmation of their purist convictions from a simpatico mind. ... [But it] can sometimes slip into slightness, as Ferrara pads an already slim run time.

There is a tenous narrative logic - in which Jodorowsky himself, dressed in cowboy black, must gun down four desert-dwelling killers - which gives the film a measure of watchability. But it's hardly deep.

It’s a very strong performance from Kendrick, who disturbingly conveys the tiny and not so tiny symptoms of emotional abuse.

[Fahy's] dialed-in performance is thankfully matched by an overarching crispness to the proceedings – just enough flourishes, an enjoyable but not unbearable amount of stress, no wasted time, a perfect match of star, script and style.

Perhaps the film could have got under Charlie’s bland surface more. A creepily watchable drama nonetheless.

Magazine Dreams itself, though flawed by a cumbersome flashback structure in which he is talking to a counsellor, has powerful moments and Majors is very good, especially in the bizarre scene when Killian insists on going onstage at a bodybuilding event just after being beaten up.

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.

Breezy, comically self-referential and totally likable. But its charms nevertheless feel like they came off an assembly line – one that has been engineered to deliver Marvel-like results, in animated form of course.

Developed by China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate and directed by butt-kicking luminary Donnie Yen, The Prosecutor is a bizarre mashup of courtroom procedural and action flick; it is just as keen on lionising due process and the “shining light” of Chinese justice as it is on reducing civic infrastructure to smithereens in several standout bouts.

Fatih Akin’s mediocre revenge drama In the Fade is the TV movie of the week: feebly uncontentious and un-contemporary.

Some of the wisecracking dialogue falls a bit flat and the narrative line is occasionally uncertain, but Grainger creates a watchable quarterlife crisis.

In light of the strange, brutal ending that’s more foreshadowed than it seems, it’s hard to work out where Weisse wants to land on issues around the best way to coax talent, especially in fields such as music where you have to put in a relentless amount of hours to achieve the highest results.

There is no accumulation of drama or tension or intellectual revelation and the setpiece shootout is ultimately valueless. What exactly is it saying that we didn’t know already? The wait for Aster to recover his directorial form goes on.

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

As a bit of anthropology offering a glimpse into Tibetan life today, it’s perfectly serviceable.

At two and a half hours, Oppenheimer’s strange and ambitious deconstruction of human behaviour – with its bleak but adorning visuals and its novel spin on ideas we’ve seen in The Hunger Games and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth – can also be draining. Maybe that’s intentional.

This is an attractively unparochial drama with a bracing interest in excellence.

It generally feels secondhand, though the final musical scene has an authenticity and heart that the rest lacks.

Wonderful entertainment.

The film’s big experiment feels only semi-interesting.

This gentle, authentic-feeling coming-of-age drama from Ukrainian film-maker Kateryna Gornostai premiered at the Berlin festival in 2021. Released in the UK almost a year to the day since the Russian invasion, her film has become unbearably poignant.

A flawed, but interesting drama.

Byrkit’s parable about choices and how they make us who we are has an eerie potency.

Gondry's argument – that pack mentality crushes individual expression – follows a similarly predictable route, but there's enough of his signature playfulness (especially in the use of mobile-phone footage to present flashbacks) to keep the journey entertaining.

Like the luxury goods that in one scene we see being stolen, the performances are out of the top drawer, and it is a great pleasure to see Moore on such good form: no one cries more needily, and with more nakedly sinister intent, than her.

This 70s-set prelude to the classic satanic horror has flair but struggles with the weight and familiarity of what came before.

The good news is that Ejiofor is great even in the scenes that don’t go anywhere. Those who find heaven here on earth in the form of strong film performances ought to commune with Come Sunday. The rest can sleep in.

Khebizi gives a heartfelt performance.

Nevertheless Cargo is a very strong, at times stirring achievement: a zombie film with soul and pathos.

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

The Unknown Woman is an odd, dramatically stilted and passionless quasi-procedural concerning a mysterious death; it depends on a series of unconvincing, and in fact borderline-preposterous, encounters and features a bafflingly inert performance from Adèle Haenel, whose usual spark appears to have been doused by self-consciousness.

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.

Entertainment as wholesome as mom's apple pie. [13 Jan 2007, p.53]

There’s an undimmed freshness, warmth and freewheeling energy in this 1992 indie gem, and its director Leslie Harris – whose career since has chiefly involved writing and teaching – deserves a far bigger presence in US film history.

Pacific Rim's wafer-thin psychodrama and plot-generator dialogue provides little for the human component to get their teeth into.

The film does not really permit the various emotional crises and issues to supersede the importance of fighting all that much, and the fighting itself is not transformed or transfigured in the drama.

From the current vantage point, this film, not yet entirely dominated by digital effects, looks like a 1960s-vintage second world war film.

Overall a very silly movie – though it’s keeping the superhero genre aloft.

Cushing relishes the role of his career as the sociopathic dandy whose passion for science overrides all moral considerations, while Christopher Lee conveys the dire plight of the creature through body language alone.

It is a harrowingly effective film, though flawed by the actions of Weaving’s officer being unconvincingly motivated at the end, and perhaps born of an emollient screenwriting need to split the difference between the Irish avenger-hero and his enemies.

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.

It’s one hell of a yarn, which makes The Lovers and the Despot’s strangely soporific style something of a disappointment.

It needed bigger laughs and more of the big, ironic comedy that Erskine can clearly deliver.

Jiménez's drama is crisply imprinted; another fine recent Chilean effort.

People will want to make their own minds up about the film, but for me there is something worryingly crass and naive in it.

The film feels over-determined and self-satisfied.

It is weirdly opaque and internalised, and doesn’t ever really come to life.

Riveting, seamless, at points genuinely shocking, Last Breath exemplifies the possibilities of human collaboration – a feat that has stuck with me and, yes, took my breath away.

We leave the documentary loving the films rather than the film-maker.

Gender, sexuality, status and power are all in flux here, a playful effect that is however withdrawn when we arrive at the sacrificial seriousness. It is a sweet tale which floats self-consciously out of the screen.

Michôd creates a good deal of ambient menace in The Rover; Pearce has a simmering presence. But I felt there was a bit of muddle, and the clean lines of conflict and tension had been blurred: the dystopian future setting doesn't add much and hasn't been very rigorously imagined.

There is a sustained emotional seriousness in this movie, with committed performances.

Director Sarah Gavron does well to galvanize her story with a degree of urgency: the result of swift, assured camerawork and a brilliantly understated performance by Carey Mulligan.

The strong, credible performances oil the wheels during these clattering shifts of gear and serve to distract from its occasional moments of implausibility.

Raised up on the big screen, the victories look even easier and more jaw-droppingly elemental: flashes of lightning, allowing us to share in the pleasure of watching a fellow human doing something simple preternaturally well.

It’s a shame that, as it ramps up, this generational tension isn’t dramatised with the sharpness it might have been.

There’s perhaps not enough new material to justify a re-release, but as a whole it’s still great, and a reminder of just what a class act Michael was.

For all that this film is about the revolutionary and disruptive business of art, it takes a pretty un-subversive view of art and artists, compatible with the museum gift shop. But I have to admit, it’s executed with brio and comic gusto – the “past” sections, anyway – and Lindon’s performance has charm.

Director Joshua Erkman’s feature debut manages to deliver an impressively creepy horror exercise that’s also a bit of a send-up of horror conventions.

The resulting movie is a technically competent piece of work; but no matter how ingenious its references to the first film (let down, however, by borrowings from the A Quiet Place franchise) it has to be said that there’s a fundamental lack of originality here which makes it frustrating.

There are plenty of heart-pumping moments, plus a fair few false notes, a couple of implausible coincidences and some exposition-y dialogue spelling out the film’s message, which is about how the two sides see each other.

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.

The refreshing – and rare – blend of Jewish humour and horror makes Attachment a fun Valentine’s Day watch for those who like their queer romance with a sprinkle of spooky chill.

Xavier Giannoli’s The Apparition is a flawed but heartfelt film about the mysterious workings of divine grace, and things that can’t entirely be explained away.

In a sea of family content that’s more often than not annoying, Thelma the Unicorn surfs, for the most part, above the crowd.

It’s a very powerfully performed, intimate piece, perhaps inspired at some level by the classic adventure The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Mullan is very good at suggesting the careworn wisdom of someone who has to be a father figure, or even grandfather figure to men who don’t have his skill in self-control and self-denial.

While it may have more punch as chilly horror-drama than allegory, it’s a decently put together film.

The film is a pointed, astute and unflinching look at unbridled machismo and its consequences.

West mulches up a thick impasto of pulp, gore, filth and fear and gets away with some colossally self-aware scenes.

It is all presented earnestly and engagingly, though self consciously, and if the political debates are unsolved, well, that could be because they are unsolved in real life. It’s certainly a heartening demonstration that new ideas can flourish in a religious society.

There’s more of the same in Enola Holmes 2, an equally boisterous romp that’s equally as hard to remember once it’s over but one that should keep its many fans engaged enough to warrant further sequels.

This is a watchable, if blandly celebratory and unchallenging portrait of a massive rock institution.

An entertaining skewering of the hidden global politics in retail trendiness.

Ride or Die is well-made and engrossing, despite its occasionally meandering pace.

As the synopsis suggests, plot is nothing more than an excuse to create a string of humorous set pieces featuring visual gags, snappy one-liners and lively song-and-dance numbers.

This is an intriguing, if undeveloped performance piece, elevated by Thompson’s class.

Sitting in Bars with Cake careens from zany bar-hopping to hospital, cake baking ASMR to cancer weepie. You could argue that that’s life itself – a lot of chaos, bathos amid the profound – but that’s giving too much credit to the film’s murkier, underdeveloped bits. Still, it has a lasting bittersweetness to it.

Not a knockout, by any means, but a win on points.

I wanted a clearer, more central story for Captain Marvel’s emergence on to the stage, and in subsequent films – if she isn’t simply to get lost in the ensemble mix – there should more of Larson’s own wit and style and, indeed, plausible mastery of martial arts. In any case, Captain Marvel is an entertaining new part of the saga.

It is bafflingly complacent in its sentimentality and its sheer, fatuous implausibility, which makes it valueless and meaningless as drama and comedy.

With so much intense focus lavished on the action, there’s none to spare for the characters’ emotional lives, and it’s hard to care much about who lives or dies.

Robles isn’t hard to root for but Unstoppable, a rousing yet overdone biopic, tries too hard to get us there anyway.

There’s a swirl of creepy noises in A24’s new hyped-up horror Undertone – screaming, gargling, singing, banging – but nothing is quite loud enough to drown out the swirl of films it’s cribbing from.

Opinions will divide as to the film's final moments: some may find it all too much, and the film does not quite digest everything it wants to encompass. But there an energy and boldness in the debut work from Daniel Wolfe.

It’s carried by a winning performance from Hasna.

It’s amiable entertainment, and Hamm may well develop in the character if this becomes a franchise.

Hoffman has delivered a love letter to the elderly thesps of his adoptive country. We can forgive him its falsehoods.

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.

Ridley Scott has counter-evolved his 1979 classic Alien into something more grandiose, more elaborate – but less interesting. In place of scariness there is wonderment; in place of tension there is hugely ambitious design; in place of unforgettable shocks there are reminders of the original's unforgettable shocks.