Miller is at the heart of the film; her natural and believable performance touches so many emotions, and makes them all look so real.

Songbird is an acceptably watchable thriller that’s more notable for what it achieves technically than anything else. For many, the topical gimmick will prove irresistible but for others, it will be repellent, making the decision to avoid an expensive, anti-escapist rental all too easy. Either way, it’s headed to the history books.

For a film renowned for its violence, Garcia unfolds at a leisured, almost lugubrious, pace with scenes allowed to unspool at a length that would never be allowed in any Hollywood thriller today.

Cherry is a fervent movie, corn-fed with drama and action, but maybe a little less than the sum of its parts.

In the end the story is told rather blandly, the edges sentimentally smoothed down.

Refreshingly, Msangi’s empathy extends in every direction.

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

A tale of the losers and chancers rattling around Hollywood's fringe, the film fatally lacks the black humour and nightmarish edge of Nathanael West's source novel. But there are some good elements swarming through the muddle, not least the performances from Karen Black as a lowly starlet and Donald Sutherland as the emotional wreck who falls under her spell.

The title is appropriate: it’s garrulous, elegant, bristling with classy performances from an A-list cast, and Deborah Eisenberg’s screenplay has a theatrical intimacy. It’s loosely and waywardly plotted, perhaps as a result of having gone through many drafts, though maybe not enough. It is slightly unfocused and uncertain as to where its emotional centre really lies – though there is a charm and a big dramatic finale.

It’s watchable, but don’t expect your mind to be blown – more gently prodded.

It is a human-oriented drama that builds a thoughtful and contemplative space, empathising with characters grappling with difficult circumstances outside the common experience. It is also the kind of drama you sometimes want to grab and shake to life.

You could just as easily picture this film playing on the white walls of a gallery as a cinema – if either were open.

The film dissolves in silliness and whimsy, but not before it’s given us some surreal spectacle.

Even viewers who might find 6ix9ine and his gangbanger nonsense repugnant can still find much to admire in this well-made film essay.

Perhaps there is less zap in Scream nowadays and archly invoking the newer generation of indie horror - Jordan Peele is mentioned, with absolute respect - only serves in the long run to remind you how elderly Scream is. But it’s still capable of delivering some piercing high-pitched decibels.

At its worst, it feels like an insufferable vanity project. But it’s pugnaciously well-acted, flavoured with vinegary insights and rage-filled denunciations, and a hilarious set piece of scorn about how awful film critics are.

Director Lance Oppenheim takes a gentle approach, capturing some hilarious moments, but there’s nothing patronising or mean-spirited about his film.

An interesting, grown-up musical profile.

I’m not sure how much, if anything, Coppola’s re-edit does for the third Godfather film, but it’s worth a watch.

The Dig is actually not a very earthy film, though there is intelligence and sensitivity and a good deal of English restraint and English charm, thoroughly embodied by the fine leading performers Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes.

It’s no surprise to learn Kostanski has worked as a special makeup artist on bigger budget projects such as Suicide Squad and It, but this proves he has a way with actors as much as a knack for latex and fake blood.

It’s a disturbing, challenging drama, but one that perhaps begins to lose its narrative focus as the story proceeds.

A thoughtful portrait of separate lives and destinies.

With a touch of Training Day, a smidgen of Eagle Eye, a dash of Eye in the Sky, a pinch of Ex Machina and an extra generous serving of all the Terminator films, Outside the Wire is losing every available award for originality, yet another Netflix creation born from its algorithmic cauldron, but taken on very basic low-stakes terms, it’s a competent enough January time-filler.

Where biopics often end up with a cardboard-tasting blandness, the focus on Jansson’s interior world gives this film moments that really come to life.

What the film does very well is show how doping became so normalised. It’s as much a part of the team’s routine as a post-race rubdown.

This heartfelt movie-musical of The Color Purple sugars the pill and softens the blow, planing down the original’s barbed and knotty surfaces, taking away some of the shock of violence and tragedy and tilting the experience more towards female solidarity and triumph over adversity.

Brantevics convincingly portrays Arturs’ four-year transformation from a callow youth to a war-weary one, but as a national coming-of-age story, The Rifleman never quite outgrows its innocent, uncritical patriotism.

The twin storylines should undermine the film’s pace and focus. They don’t. There are some impressively spectacular shootouts in the streets and a Bourne-level rooftop chase, together with some very crunchy close-quarters martial arts.

What’s missing from this fecund brew, which you could imagine being twice as long, is any kind of judgment or analysis of the subjects.

Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big: but feeling medium, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response which should be happening without any explicit instruction. Yet it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such black-belt movie stars as Pitt and Robbie and there is something funny in Babylon’s wild, event-movie gigantism.

It’s a breeze of a watch and with the bar for studio comedy being so very low right now, it’s at least mildly inventive and likably goofy, enough to warrant a cautious recommendation (premium rental price: no, next time you’re on a plane: sure).

Thankfully, we only see glimpses of the footage of tortured women on the hideously believable nemesis’s camera, so ultimately the movie – just about – feels more like a critique of the character’s woman-hating mindset rather than a vehicle for it.

The family dysfunction stuff is sensitively handled with some originality.

Ben Hozie makes his feature debut with this semi-insightful, uncomfortably funny indie drama about a man who becomes obsessed with an online sex worker. It’s a film with a slackerish mumblecore vibe, and Hozie is refreshingly grown up about sex. But it’s hard to see how his film adds much to the conversation about intimacy in the internet age.

There’s nothing to fault in the performances, but the characters are filo pastry thin and slightly bland-tasting – like less complicated, less interesting versions of actual people.

Dosch brings a wonderful humanity and sensitivity to the role.

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

Dead Pigs is an unassuming topical entertainment (rather different from the movies of its executive producer Jia Zhangke), but diverting and well-acted.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye’s focus might be all over the place, but our eyes remain trained directly on Chastain.

It’s [Del Toro’s] most strikingly beautiful film yet, a velvety, precisely styled noir with the year’s most impressively stacked cast (two Oscar winners and six nominees, all bringing their A game) but its sleek shell is sadly as duplicitous as its untrustworthy conman protagonist, blinding us with dazzle but leaving us tricked.

Emblazoned with mouthy Big Short-style info-dumps, and with a phone-selling scene reminiscent of The Wolf of Wall Street, Body Brokers outwardly seems to be aiming for high Scorsesian amoral operatics. But given the originality of Swab’s take, it’s a shame he couldn’t find the film a more appropriate style: at heart it is a more sober film intent on declaring its outrage.

With a running time of 107 minutes, the film goes on just a little longer than it really needs to before it gets predictably violent, grotesque and reasonably scary at last. But Milburn and Kennedy certainly know how to build a unique atmosphere.

In all honesty, the path towards the film’s final feeble twist is as discernible as a neon pink jacket on the ski slopes. But Let It Snow is well put together, from the spectacular location work to the strong use of sound to the sort of arresting imagery that recalls the haute body horror of Midsommar.

Coda is a mostly likable concoction, but one that’s just too formulaic and ultimately rather calculated to secure the emotional response it so desperately wants by the big finale.

In a flawed yet fierce return to form, Ben Wheatley has crafted a phantasmagoric treat with In the Earth, an ambitious, atmospheric little woodland horror.

While it’s ultimately a little too messy to work quite as well as it could have, given the interesting and ambitious ingredients, On the Count of Three is proof that Carmichael is a director to be excited about, hoping that perhaps he finds time to write his next script himself.

The result is predictably excessive, noisy and more than a little exhausting. But mostly in a fun way, as long as you’re not bothered by gratuitous violence, incoherence and a deep streak of silly.

It’s a fierce, muscular piece of work, not a million miles from something like the Coens’ No Country for Old Men.

Pleasure doesn’t take a doomily disapproving line on porn, and real pornstars and agents are given cameos. Yet neither is it necessarily celebratory or porn-positive. The people in charge are overwhelmingly male and Thyberg shows how the power relations in the business are really the same as they ever were.

It’s propulsively watchable if a tad light on reflection. And you may feel hoodwinked by one late reveal.

It’s all very 2021, and you can’t help wondering how it will age, but as a launching pad for the director and her cast, it’s a very serviceable platform.

The constant shifting between Italian, English and Québécois-accented French adds an extra texture, and the performances are as sharp as the suits.

The film never really carries out its implied deconstruction of the all-American family, but Poitier and Phoenix form an enjoyable bond. [23 Jun 2007, p.53]

One of John Wayne's jobbing westerns, a would-be comic transplanting of The Taming Of The Shrew. [08 Aug 2009, p.53]

This valedictory film allows sober recognition for all that he did.

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.

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

A lairy, likable film.

The Fever is a calm and quiet and subtle film, a little inert perhaps, but deeply engaged with the hidden lives of Brazil’s indigenous people. There is poetry in it.

It’s rare that a film captures so acutely the strange yet exhilarating feelings of two foreign bodies learning to adapt to each other, plus the difficulty of quickly disrobing your new lover of their jeans.

A film deeply rooted in a close-knit community, with excellent performances, a sophisticated control of narrative tempo and – at least initially – a tragic force that could almost be compared with Elia Kazan.

The film is a contemptuous slap at boredom, at hypocrisy and at everything petty and mean. I’m not sure that it entirely transcends all these things, but there’s a rebellious spark.

The real chemistry here is with the four-legged ass, not the human one.

If you have 152 minutes to sink into this morass of moral complexity and finely observed period detail, then it may well be worth it, although the ending is bizarrely, perplexingly abrupt. Perhaps there will be a follow-up feature.

Introduction, like so many of Hong’s films, occupies a delicate middle ground between whimsy and poetry, between inconsequentiality and epiphany, between lightweight and light. My feeling is that Introduction is closer to the former in each case, and I wanted to hear more about and more from Young-ho’s troubled father. But there is an unmistakable and mature film-making language on display: a simplicity and charm.

This is a film that tries your patience a fair bit, and yet there is something attractive in its kind of innocence.

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

The disparate ingredients do not always gel. But in fits and starts Bombay Rose casts quite a spell.

Squint a bit, relax your mind and you might find in it a touching allegory that accidentally corresponds to our own, collective emergence from the oneiric, mesmeric lull of lockdown life, in which sleeping too much and dreaming about dead loved ones could have become the new going out.

Very few films or plays can survive the stigma of having an exclamation mark after the title, but Fred Zinnemann's bigscreen version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, originally released in 1955, still has some breezy charm and robust American music, under those vast cloud-dappled skies in Cinemascope.

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

Writer-director Justin P Lange finds a satisfying way to update the possession-exorcist theme for a new generation grown wary of the Catholic church’s old ways, particularly in the wake of the abuse scandals that have shredded the clergy’s credibility in recent years.

Crampton and Fessenden’s easy, credible chemistry keeps up a steady baseline of bickering banter that’s charming throughout. The film could have been a bit more audacious about tweaking Christian pieties, but you can’t have everything.

The vague ending may be a bit of a cheat; but with its sly asides and unembarrassed absurdities, this Outer Limits-style yarn, directed in suitably plain fashion by the veteran Michael Anderson, manages to be more self-convinced, and more diverting, than a mega-buck offering like The Abyss. [19 Oct 1989]

The question of whether this is a ghost story or if Laura is experiencing a kind of psychological breakdown twists and turns in ways that lost me by the end. Still, it’s is a very accomplished debut from Gregg, and acted with subtlety and sensitivity by Riseborough.

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.

Charli XCX’s drive and heart are infectious, even for non-Angels.

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

Part delicious satire of Hollywood culture and part frustratingly muddled thriller. But the good bits are sufficiently impressive it wouldn’t be fair to hold its flaws against it too much. We mustn’t be greedy for perfection.

The focus on the job at hand works until it doesn’t as with just the slightest of characterisation, we’re invested in the problem rather than those solving it and the grip of the first two acts loosens as the finale beckons.

Smart, funny and endearingly sweary even when he loses the power to speak without computer assistance, Barkan is a charismatic character who’s easy to like, although one wonders how much the documentary crew resisted showing anything that might dent the halo the film sets round his head.

Ritchie mostly moves his mixed bag of pieces around the board with flair, showcasing his well-rehearsed knack for gnarly violence and chaos, giving us a sinewy B-movie that warrants a watch on a screen bigger than the one in our homes, another welcome shot of adrenaline for us and for the industry. I’m craving my next dose already.

This sharply crafted piece talks the talk and finally threatens to walk the walk.

It’s a sweet, undemanding film that, despite the title, is tamer than a sedated bunny. That said, the four-year-old I watched with spontaneously yelped “this is the best!” 20 minutes in. So really, what do I know?

Walken keeps you watching thanks to his inherent charisma, still undimmed in his late 70s.

It’s in many ways a minor, almost mundane, story with an ending that chooses the small over the big but it resonates just about enough, a quiet scream in the darkness, now able to be heard in living rooms across the world.

Leisurely pacing rather draws it all out a bit, but there’s real inventiveness to the way Park wrong-foots the viewer and handles the operatic displays of gunfire and death – and the leads are rather charming.

It’s a solid evening’s entertainment, assembled with an assurance rare at this budgetary level.

Crehan knits it together like a well-worn onesie: you know exactly what shape it’s going to be once you’re wrapped up in it, but that doesn’t mean it lacks for comfort and warmth.

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

Premiering as one of the more proudly mainstream offerings at this year’s Toronto film festival, David Oyelowo’s sweet-natured family adventure The Water Man gives us our first look at a commercial conductor in training, aiming to excite and thrill with adventure while making an unashamed appeal to our emotions shortly after, a Spielbergian combination that many have tried and failed to perfect.

This pulpy multiverse brain-teaser is reasonably compelling to watch – at least in this reality. In another, it’s straight to video garbage, and in yet another, it’s won the Palme d’Or.

As hammy, silly, and undeniably entertaining as ever.

Where some might praise an Eric Rohmer-style lightness of touch, others might see a certain slightness. And at barely 70 minutes, this is a fleeting affair in every sense. Perhaps that’s the point.

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.

The trance-like pacing and mystical meditation might frustrate viewers looking for an easy watch, but local film-maker Lois Patiño is clearly operating at the fine-art end of the cinema scale. He applies his distinctive mode to a story that’s both ravishing and unsettling.

The gags don’t always land, and some of the line deliveries plod painfully on, but there are moments that nail the strange comedy of sexual manners that must be navigated these days.