Charbonier and Powell like moving through the apartment in Steadicam but this results in a soupy style that seeks to cover for the lack of positional imagination and rigour in the script.

The much-hyped battles deliver the giddy thrills we demand but in the moments when the pair aren’t at war there’s also a staggeringly well-built and extensive universe to explore and one that’s barely been teased in the trailers we’ve seen.

Terrifier 2 is not for everyone, but this tasteless wonder meets nauseating expectations.

A well-meaning film about the white liberal experience in South Africa – but, if you want to know about Steve Biko, look elsewhere.

Khan’s script is one of competency rather than creativity: a sound structure, a propulsive pace and a learned awareness of genre conventions but dialogue that often feels a little first draft, a little placeholder-heavy, zingers not really zinging quite as they should.

It’s a pleasure to find a comedy about bought sex that’s pretty funny – and funnier than the pun in the title might suggest.

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.

Its subtitle, A Rock & Roll Fable, contains all the elements Hill looked for in a movie as a teenager in the late 50s, and in 94 minutes it manages to be an urban western, a backstage rock musical and a biker flick set in an unidentified, run-down rust-belt inner city that might be yesterday or tomorrow.

It's a headspinningly wacky premise, and it takes a little while for the audience to get up to speed, but once this is achieved, there's an awful lot of unexpected fun to be had, boasting zany adventures with various historical figures.

From time to time, the script contextualises a little clumsily...but the playing and pacing are terrific.

Animator Raul Garcia’s 70-minute anthology of five Poe stories, Extraordinary Tales, has its moments, and will be a welcome respite for any middle schooler sitting through a boring lecture. But if we were ever asked if we wanted a second viewing, we’d have to quoth the raven: nevermore.

It spends its time among unfeasibly beautiful young people in microscopically tiny swimming costumes, and moves with them in a trance of heightened physicality, drifting across beaches, bars and dancefloors. The mood is dreamy unseriousness qualified occasionally by temporary stabs of jealousy or misery. The sexiness isn’t promiscuous exactly; more directionless.

Escalante’s storytelling vigour and his way with an unsettling image keep this film’s voltage high.

God, it’s so obnoxious. And the worst thing is that it works. I was smiling and applauding at the end, then I had to take a long walk alone to wonder what was wrong with me.

[A] gripping, well-acted and sharply-written low-budget drama.

The film is a derivative, if well intentioned, piece of fan fiction.

Nanijani and Rae work well together, although “chemistry” is perhaps a stretch.

Subtlety isn’t this movie’s strong suit and it’s often needlessly chary about drawing the parallel between sexism and racism. But it’s got a worthwhile story to tell.

Fantasy invigorates reality in this fond retrospective of the director who embodied the renegade heart of 70s Hollywood.

The closing stretch – including an exorcism in an imam’s incantation-lined apartment (interior design goals!) – is brutally effective. By this time, Aisha Kandisha is a towering succubus; postcolonial theory stomping in on a pair of terrifying goat’s hooves.

What sealed the deal for me – by a whisker – was the gigantic physical comedy that Dempsey, Zellweger and Firth uncorked as they try to get through the hospital revolving door as Bridget is about to give birth, the traditional romcom rush to the airport having been re-invented for this maternal drama.

It is superbly directed and shot with great scenes.

When you have two of today’s best working actors acting on a high-wire to do justice to two of the most recognisable figures of the 20th century, it’s best to keep the focus solely located on them.

The 99-minute film is long on yelling and guffaws, short on punchlines.

It is a typically calm, lucid drama, presented in the director's unforced, cinematic vernacular and attractively and sympathetically acted.

There is a strenuous earnestness here, which is made to coexist with entirely artificial romcom dialogue of a kind not spoken by real human beings.

Reasonably good fun.

Sadly, Savages plays up to Stone's worst tendencies: machismo, bombast and self-indulgence, and the factor that could conceivably have made this movie tolerable – humour – is off the menu.

Salvo is a strange, involving, if flawed movie.

Chasing Summer at least outruns the charge of being boring, though at what cost.

Insufficiently diverting ... Lux Æterna shows Noé reverting to the self-parodic silliness that Climax had taken him past.

Good Madam is an intriguing, atmospheric movie which doesn’t quite tie up all its sinister portents and implications in a satisfying ending. Yet there is something very unsettling in it.

Worryingly, there is an actual film-maker in the story who appears to be intervening in the action and The Nothing Factory appears to retreat into self-reference when it could be offering concrete ideas on the issue of people keeping their jobs.

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.

It’s all a bit earnest and derivative and sometimes a bit lachrymose, despite some perfectly decent performances.

It offers us a provocation, a jeu d’ésprit of outrage, a psychological meltdown that is more astutely articulated than in many other more solemnly intended films. And it gives us what it promises in the title.

It all tootles along inconsequentially enough, like a daytime soap about nothing very much in particular; all the supposedly important things feel negligible in terms of political or emotional weight.

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.

This sequel from Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto, co-written by the writer of the original, Derek Kolstad, really doesn’t have much of the humour and the storytelling chutzpah of the first film.

The only new titbit of information for Hemingway-philes is that none of his grandchildren read his books.

A terrifically enjoyable and exciting summer spectacular: savvy, funny, ridiculous in just the right way, with some smart imaginative twists.

Emma Thompson gives us a scene-stealing performance which is enjoyably macabre.

The film makes clear that being fearless and bold is a luxury megastars can enjoy, but the rest of us end up having to make compromises.

This movie doesn’t really follow through with its own ideas, either in the natural realm of the ageing couple’s relationship or the supernatural arena of an eerily possible apparition.

Paxton’s movie sketches out the sinister dread just under the happy-family surface; she is in expert control of her film, achieving her effects with economy and force. It is really unnerving.

The cleverness of Kingsley’s performance is the twinkle in his eye that leaves you wondering whether Dalí has disappeared entirely up his own myth. How much of the eccentricity is a put-on, brazen self-publicity to maximise sales? Disappointingly, the script invents a fictional art school dropout to be our guide to Dalí’s universe.

However grotesquely culpable Chuck has been, you find yourself wanting to hug him. It’s a clever comic trick to bring off.

Collette is a potent, unsentimental presence and Hardwicke and Banks know how to connect with the audience.

There is an outstanding film somewhere inside this sprawling mass of ideas, which might have been shaped more exactingly in the edit.

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

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.

[A] touching, insightful and, at the end of the day, extremely well-meaning film.

In true streaming economy form, it’s a smooth, ambient operator, made more memorable than it should be by a still underappreciated Mendes, who will hopefully upgrade to more headlining adults roles sooner rather than later.

Four John Wick films with Keanu fetishising his guns and sporting his increasingly werewolfy facial hair have been increasingly heavy going but now de Armas mixes things up and she is a smart screen presence. As for the ballet, the emphasis is on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; nothing wrong with that, of course, but if the Ballerina sub-franchise continues, let’s hope that different works are chosen and we see de Armas actually getting out there on stage in a tutu as opposed to simply racking up the kills.

The film’s freakiness and wooziness might have been a bit grating were it not for the glacial authority that Ferrara brings to every scene and shot – centred, of course, in the craggy gravitas of Dafoe himself.

This Joker has just one act in him: the first act. The film somehow manages to be desperately serious and very shallow.

Bailey is the best thing about this film but, despite a team crammed with talent, this live action reworking can’t match the magic of the 1989 classic.

This is a world of brutality and fear from which the movie averts its gaze at key moments, but the chill is unmistakable. The title appears to refer to a light which is inexorably fading.

It’s a striking, ambitious film, but there is something about the tone – both glossy and grittily real, stylising everything to mythic proportions – that left me a bit cold.

It's pulled this way and that by a hiddly-fiddly soundtrack, spun senseless by scene after scene of Radcliffe and Kazan trading flirtatious banter.

It looks and feels like an exceptional student film...Choppy editing and erratic time-shifts tend to undercut rather than enhance the character Ryan has magicked up. [5 May 2006, p.8]

It’s a confident, often engaging mix of music and no-frills theatrical performance, with Bono often coming across like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created but then suppressed due to undue levels of rock’n’roll pizzazz.

Inspiring until the end if not entirely entertaining.

It's not bad, exactly – but it is boring and very rarely funny. This is laboured. This is aimless. This Is 40. It's really quite a grind.

The latest in a 10,000-mile-long line of adaptations of Journey to the West, the 16th-century Chinese novel attributed to Wu Cheng’en, bounces along energetically, and has some exceptionally fun frills around the edges, such as a flouncy vocal performance from Bowen Yang as spiteful, effete baddie the Dragon King, who gets to sing the film’s best musical number.

There’s an unexpectedly huge amount of old-fashioned fun to be had in Disney’s spectacular new origin-myth story.

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.

Roberts, who also directed hit shark thriller 47 Metres Down and its superior follow-up, is mostly at his savviest and most ruthlessly efficient here, a confident leveling up for a genre film-maker finding his sweet spot. After a lacklustre year for horror, Primate makes for a wildly entertaining start to 2026.

It feels as if you've seen it many times before. Bill Nighy isn't in it, for example, and yet afterwards I had an intense memory of Bill Nighy being in it, the way amputees can feel their toes itching.

The movie has a high gloss and sheen, like something by Nancy Meyers, which creates a diverting disconnect, yet it flinches from the recognisable, tragicomic reality of a bad marriage.

As a performer, Biller is fearless in her pursuit of perfectly recreated cheesecake, but is a twitchy and not especially charismatic presence. Where her film lets itself down, though, is it's simply not funny.

It’s all too clumsily calculated to deliver the raucous two-drinks-in blast it so desperately wants us to have and in a year that’s already given us better, bolder B-movie examples than usual (Sam Raimi’s Send Help and monkey-gone-mad horror Primate), it creaks that much louder. It is film-making far too in love with itself to care if you love it too.

There’s also not really enough fun here, the repetitive nature of the fight scenes – quip, laugh, injury, wince – growing tired fast.

Unfortunately, with the big reveal having arrived in the first act, the film isn’t much more than an elongated debate that leaves you thinking: so what?

Parker clearly has ideas he’s aiming at, but lets his target slip in the fog of war.

The characters at one stage debate the merits of a smooth, fruity wine versus something more taut and acidic: it would be tempting to say that Klapisch goes too predictably for the first option, but the problems here are more with structure than taste.

Another film might have mined Steinem’s remarkable life for its complications and contradictions, but The Glorias settles for slapdash iconography.

Satrapi's disreputable little creepshow finally doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Maybe that's fine. The Voices provides an enjoyably trashy antidote to the traditional Sundance fare of soulful drama and crusading documentary.

It’s a likeable film which borrows liberally from everything and everyone, and if it’s put together by numbers, well, then it is done capably enough.

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.

God Help the Girl comes loose and easy, verging on the slipshod. It's warm and generous, verging on the sentimental; a film that crystallises the best and worst of Belle and Sebastian's songwriting skills.

The trouble with Nick Frost’s knowingly cartoonish and silly comedy paying homage to folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar is that Frost has done this kind of movie before, and better.

This film drips with pot boiler-ish twists and turns, and is saturated with genre machinations – engaged, like many mystery scripts, in surprising and one-upping the viewer. But developments in the last act especially – and there are no spoilers here – contain some tough pills to swallow.

At its best, Malick's cinematic rhapsody is glorious; during his uncertain moments, he appears to be repeating himself. But what delight there is in this film.

Kid Like Jake is an earnestly intended, seriously acted film, painful in various intentional and unintentional ways.

That’s mostly for the better. The Accountant 2 is a more fun affair than The Accountant, if you’re a fan of very loud shoot ’em ups, nonsensical crime webs and rogue good guys fighting obviously very bad guys, though this outing is sadly missing Anna Kendrick.

Dee’s investigations are not truly suspenseful, or governed by much hard logic. Without these, what remains is a restless action-comedy with a few nice reversals.

Another glossy, witty battle-of-the-sexes comedy featuring the squeaky-clean Pillow Talk pairing of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. [28 Jan 2006, p.53]

The debate over the utility of violence and the dignity owed prisoners of war has raged since time immemorial, and recent developments have only amplified the decibel level. Operation Finale zeroes in on these complex dynamics, only to erase their nuance.

It's bracing, but it does feel closer to panto than melodrama, more exhausting than illuminating.

Like the first film, it becomes a virtual non-narrative anthology of standard jump-scares that could be reshuffled and shown in any order. The second time around, your tolerance for this is tested to destruction and beyond because, unlike the first movie, it is just so pointlessly long.

Amusingly tacky and offensive though it is, proceedings grow a bit monotonous, because all the tunes have pretty much the same beat and everything is pitched at the same hysterical, OTT level.

This deafening fantasia of internal and external combustion delivers outrageous action spectacle magnificently divorced from the rules of narrative or gravity. . . . I think we can include Isaac Newton among the people who are getting their asses kicked here.

British actor/writer Nathaniel Martello-White’s directorial debut nudges at some uncomfortable fault lines of race and class, but tends to over-index unearned suspense for character development or insight.

The Snowden/social media plotline of this film does a bit to make Bourne more relevant. But the ingredients are basically the same.

Nocturne is simpatico with a protagonist who, in lieu of greatness, decides to steal – then play it like she owns it. An elegant, forking finale proves as much.

It’s cheerily done and competently made but broadly sentimental to a fault, the strings being pulled too visible for the film’s many coerced moments of emotion to really work. For a film all about the importance of heat, it’s frankly lukewarm.

What a peculiarly dodgy, conservative film this is – a lazy salute to a good queen and her faithful Indian servant. It’s a film about the Raj era that looks as if it was made back then, too.