The movie thumps through successive events of Foreman’s amazing life in efficient, unsubtle, on-the-nose style, skating over his many marriages a little.

The film’s good-natured warmth wins the day, just.

All this is acted with smouldering intensity and authenticity, particularly by Filipovic, although it’s possible to wonder if there is anything unexpected to come in the third act, or if we can roughly guess where it’s all heading.

The film’s strange scrappy indefinability is both its blessing and curse. We’re left with pieces, interesting on their own and sometimes together, but not quite enough to complete the puzzle.

Hallelujah is one for the fans, thorough and informative, like a set of cinematic liner notes, largely content to marvel at the majesty of its subject and the vibrant afterlife of his work.

This is an absorbingly told story; Knightley’s vocal performance is engaging and Charlotte’s face, in particular, is strongly and expressively drawn. But the film arguably fudges one of the most important issues of Charlotte’s life: her grandfather’s abusive relationshipwith her.

In the end, it’s a film with a melancholic feel, which probably has a lot to do with its timing.

The issues involved here might have been discussed a little more extensively and the provenance and context of the TV interview archive material could have been labelled more clearly. But this is a decent film.

Becoming Cousteau is no hagiography, but greater distance might have also allowed Garbus to reflect more on the man’s environmental legacy.

The tone of the film is sometimes a little opaque. There is some slightly cliched 16mm footage of subway scenes and indulgent home-movie material and Huntt’s own voiceover has something of the student graduation piece about it. But there is a rich, dense texture to this very questioning, personal film.

Silent Night is not exactly a satire of well-off and well-connected people as such – everyone is supposed to be basically pretty adorable. But there is something undoubtedly startling and bizarre about seeing the end of the world generically grafted on to this jolly Britcom mode.

A fog of menace descends on this hauntingly photographed, oppressive and driftingly directionless movie from Lucile Hadzihalilovic. It has the intensively curated atmosphere of body-horror noir – if not the conventional plot structure – and some way into the running time you might find yourself awakened from its reverie of formless anxiety by a sudden, horrifying stab of violence.

Wilson and Burke give formidably good performances: a woman who desperately wants to give and receive love, and a man who hasn’t the smallest idea what any of that means.

It gets turgid in its final third but backed by director Gigi Saul Guerrero’s cartoonish punch, Barraza’s cantankerous grimace and hair-trigger rejoinders are a pure pleasure.

Its history assignment comes out pretty jumbled but this breezy YA vampire flick shrugs “whatever” and gets back to nailing the undead.

Director Axelle Carolyn maintains a pleasingly teasing rhythm so it’s a pity that, as the sprightly nursing-home gothic fun winds up, it descends into Scooby Dooish over-explication.

Cross of Iron is an atmospheric, unflinching tale of the German retreat, though its sedate pace holds it back from greatness.

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.

There are also some well-observed touches, especially concerning the fleeting friendships dog-walkers make with each other and the diversity of London’s population.

It’s a far better version of a romantic comedy than we’re used to streaming of late.

Even in terms of its attempted emotional cross-section of the pandemic, Convergence spreads its net too wide.

It’s best not to think too hard about it and just let the striking imagery and saturated colours wash over your retinas.

What first-time feature directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis seem to be going for here is a Herzogian waking nightmare, but the necessary sense of horror and despair never fully comes off.

It’s slick in one moment and a little too scrappy the next but Ritchie’s puppyish insistence that you have as much as fun as his stars is hard to resist. The film’s bizarrely reticent rollout might have already killed any chance of further operations but there have been far, far worse franchise-starters in recent years.

It all playfully flirts with horror film conventions, offering up a winking orgy of patently fake gore and irony that’s for the most part pretty fun. At least the cast seem well in on the joke and are clearly having a blast, although the package could have been improved with a fewer sharper one-liners and tauter comic timing.

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 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.

After Blue is a preposterous film, easy to ridicule. But it’s surely already halfway to cult classic status – destined to play midnight slots, watched by students smuggling bottles of red wine into the cinema under their coats.

You find yourself admiring Madonna’s desire to focus forward artistically and to recast her music as expressly political, while wondering if the songs from Madame X are really good enough to warrant so much of the spotlight.

This is another film about a white European mixed up in a Middle Eastern war they barely seem to understand, but on its own terms it’s a story well told.

There are moments of inspiration that light up this film like flashes of lightning.

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.

It feels worthwhile – funny and true about growing up and getting a life.

Dolph Lundgren and Scott Adkins make a fine odd couple in this meatily satisfying action film – once it gets moving.

Maybe the Indian influence on the Beatles’ music didn’t last, but India’s own prestige, its soft power in the west, was immeasurably enhanced.

Made in America, from 1993, is essentially an extended episode of a lame, cheesy US sitcom from the late 80s/early 90s – more My Two Dads or Perfect Strangers than Frasier or Seinfeld. It's awesome.

It’s an entertaining, uncontroversial film directed by the actor Sadie Frost, who pulls in her celeb mates to do talking-head duties: Vogue editor Edward Enninful, Kinks guitarist Dave Davies, and even interview-shy Kate Moss gives a quote or two.

Director David Verbeek’s script doesn’t quite wield the scalpel with enough sadistic glee. Instead, this film feels ever-so-slightly sluggish and dour in places.

A third-act plot twist is audacious enough to regain our attention, but Reuten and Wolf don’t quite have the charisma to fully carry it off.

The film catches the excitement of this moment for Clarice, and Dynevor’s performance is wonderful.

We didn’t need a Predator prequel (have we ever really needed any prequel?) but Prey is a nimble beast, far nimbler than it could have been and while it’s not quite enough to make us crave more from a franchise that’s already given us too much, it’s enough to justify the journey way back.

It’s an entertaining, fairly overwrought piece, a little tightly buttoned.

Ameen has perfectly plausibly brought off a high-gloss mainstream picture with a big heart and a very nice supporting cast, including Stephen Dillane as Shirley’s new boyfriend. For Ameen, it’s another step on the way to Hollywood stardom.

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.

It’s a film of desperately upsetting details.

An ingenious, elegant counterfactual drama.

This is confident, distinctive work.

The film pinballs cheerfully about the place, from crisis to crisis, from losing the tickets to getting back the tickets, with no great narrative purpose other than fun.

However dazzling the vortexes this film shoots us through at supersonic speed may be, they still deposit us somewhere we’ve been before.

This is Tarantino for ankle-biters with a bit of Ocean’s 11 thrown in: funny, energetic and just smart enough.

This is all amiable enough, with the all-important dimension of laughs: Tatum and Bullock showing that they are smart enough to know how silly it is, and that they know that we know that they know.

But there’s a perkiness that’s hard to resist and a base-level competency that’s hard not to appreciate, a small beam of blue light in an otherwise dark time for superheroes.

With his work now migrating online and his jerry-rigged methods increasingly outsourced to post-production effects, Jeunet can’t avoid the impending digitization of cinema, nor life. Still, he’s not going down without landing a few good fingers to the ribs first.

With its unabashed focus on bodies, luring us in with their nudity before hacking them into tiny pieces, the back-to-basics slasher X arrives as a bold rebuke to all things staid and dignified.

There is something lighter, almost flippant and French-farcical about this new Von Kant: a man brought low by l’amour, inviting from the audience hardly more than a worldly, sympathetic shrug.

Against the Ice is a Danish story flattened for a global audience.

Impressively made though some of the acting lets it down: Robbie's a real scene-stealer. [04 Mar 2006, p.53]

Against considerable odds, a very, very low bar has been met and then shuffled over with this mostly effective and incredibly nasty update, a jolting little slasher that should repulse and satisfy those with a suitably depraved idea of what they are clicking into.

There is something winning in this calm, walking-pace drama – and the landscape is amazing.

The tricky mother-son relationship is well managed and Moore always brings to this kind of Oedipal drama a seriocomic intensity (as in Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace from 2007, playing opposite Eddie Redmayne).

It is well made and well acted, with a fervent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o.

Boyega’s performance has an essential sympathy and dignity that are vital to this drama; an unshowy sense of self-worth that keeps it together.

This is a fluent and very watchable work, and Johnson and Burghardt carry it.

It certainly has its moments of poignancy and sadness and McGregor’s droll tones as the longsuffering cricket provide some grace notes of fun.

Call Jane never quite rises to the level of a rousing battle cry, but does offer a studious examination of a past that could, terrifyingly, become our future.

The movie shrewdly creates a shiver of nausea in the institutional use of “diversity” as another prestige-marker.

[A] decent retelling of an amazing true-life story.

Am I OK? is strongest when embedded in the two friends’ well-worn, effusive bond, in sickness or in health – when the fight comes the barbs are believably lacerating, the kind only best friends can wield.

The standout star is the passionate and fierce Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a Korean-American musician for whom music was an escape from racism and sexism.

Nothing Compares is simply more about the Sinéad you already know. But a critic’s original sin is to review the movie you want to see, not the movie that exists. To that end, with expectations managed, Nothing Compares is a quite engaging document.

It’s a gentle and superbly shot film.

It’s spectacle coasting on the evergreen draw of time travel paced with beats of occasionally effective human emotion – grief, regret, self-loathing and acceptance in sometimes moving, very manageable amounts.

It’s a thriller by name but less edge-of-your-seat than lounging on the couch, absorbing beats of plot like the ocean tide. A little provocation with slight commitment – that’s not a bad night in by any means.

Braff and Union have passable chemistry, but Union’s charisma and confidence is magnetic in any context including this one. It’s all breezy – there are no bad actors or malicious intent (other than that one Calabasas woman), so the drama is light and the messes are quickly cleaned up.

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.

Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.

While the lurid twists and turns are enjoyable in a 90s erotic thriller kind of way, the sudden shift towards suspense hampers Padukone’s performance.

The threading together of the different stories is overly opaque at times, but Evgeny Rodin’s atmospheric cinematography is a marvel, imbuing a Tarkovsky-esque ethereality to a land that has fallen out of step with the modern world.

Claire Denis’s new film is a seductively indirect love triangle, a drama of the mind as much as the heart. It’s intriguing if contrived and anticlimactic, though acted at the highest pitch of sensual conviction.

It’s not quite on par with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the film it undoubtedly wants to be likened to, but it’s infinitely better than it had any right to be.

Intense performances by Doupe and Bracken give it a real emotional pulse.

This is a film that doesn’t set out to push your emotional buttons all that hard, or even at all. But it covers a surprising amount of narrative ground and there is always something engaging and tender to it.

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

The film engages with Cave and Warren Ellis’ creative bond, one that’s produced some sublime work but also self-indulgent noodling (of which there’s a little too much here). Indeed, some might wish the spotlight was on Ellis more, a fascinating character who may be the more musically gifted of the pair, but not as capable of holding the spotlight like Cave – who has his suits, rumbly baritone and carefully coiffed too-black hair.

Most welcome of all is the generous sprinkling of good one-liners thanks to screenwriter Max Taxe’s witty script, solid direction from Christopher Winterbauer, and a cast with nippy comic timing.

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.

There’s a propulsive, driving force to the way the film is directed, but there are some things that don’t entirely track.

As you’d expect from a movie originated by Robert Kirkman of The Walking Dead zombie franchise, Renfield is also resplendent in gore. Dracula’s grotesque visage – decaying in reverse as he gathers strength – is a prosthetics triumph.

This is an engaging ensemble piece, acted with vehemence and sincerity, though it concludes a little melodramatically.

Right down to its blaspheming finale, The Exorcism of God burns with a subversive desire to rip back the veil on the church’s earthly corruption – but the iconoclasm is somewhat undermined by the daft horror mechanics Venezuelan director Alejandro Hildalgo props it up with.

Fizzy and bubbly, the film feels like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day, leaving us with a pleasant reminder of the thrills that summer can bring.

Gold is a minimalistic production, story and setting wise, with an interesting kind of contextual ambiguity: we know there is a wider world beyond the frame, though we don’t know what it looks like. Sparseness is intriguing, but this film is so damn sparse.

The apparently depressing twist gives Linoleum’s entropy-defying optimism successful lift-off.

Not Okay is like many “internet movies” before it – approaching uncanny valley, somewhat obvious, just a little off — but this unsettling darkness makes it a solid entry into the canon of just-okay social media films.

The film’s moments of truth or constantly countered by moments of compromise: for every wicked detail targeted directly at the queer target market, there’s a lumpen passage of explanation for the straights and squares.

Whodunnits require so many moving parts to be expertly placed and played with, and, ultimately, the script isn’t as sleek as it needs to be with a board as ambitious as this. The game is a fun one, but you might feel a little cheated once it’s over.

Although the whole concept is quite daft, Winter’s energetic and committed performance adds a bit of heft without ever forfeiting the comedy entirely.

Thanks to the breezy chemistry between its largely Inuit cast, Slash/Back has an endearing charm that is hard to resist. From a first-time film-maker, this is a fresh, entertaining update on well-worn tropes.