It’s a disorientating, unrelaxing two-hour experience, but rewarding.

All in all, this is not a bad tale from the Disneyfied continent of talking animals, but a minor cousin to the first film’s movie-royalty.

Lowery’s film mostly plays it safe, only slightly remixing the beats we know a little too well, wrapping them up in a pretty enough package that will get tossed aside and forgotten about once opened. It’s by no means the rockiest trip we’ve taken to Neverland but let’s all pray it’s the last.

A queasy humour remains, thanks hugely to salt-of-the-earth per-formances that hardly look like acting. [15 Nov 2006, p.33]

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

This watchable, undemanding drama rolls along capably, enlivened by unmistakably Bennettian gags and drolleries which come along every minute or so.

It is a gentle, heartfelt relationship drama about – and for – intelligent adults.

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.

Williamson knows how to write a horror script – Sick offers moderate to intense thrills delivered in a compact frame whose Covid 2020 specificity adds more to the tension than it distracts.

Yes, it certainly is about her, but it’s almost as if everyone involved – Gabeira, people who were supposedly her closest associates, and even the director Stephanie Johnes – aren’t quite conscious of the fact that they’re also making a documentary about endemic sexism in sport.

Sighs at incongruously dumb behaviour and groans at the family soap are eventually drowned out by audible gasps at some of the wild twists, the kind that might not make much sense on reflection but do deliver cattle-prod shocks along the way.

Keshishian, as in Truth or Dare, works in moments which complicates Gomez’s angelic image: being short with a too-glib interviewer, refusing to listen to a friend, reacting poorly to genuine concern. My Mind & Me is strongest, and bravest, in moments like this, illustrating Gomez’s humanity through universal capacities we don’t want recorded.

The strength of the writing is in portraying Bunny’s reality, allowing us to wonder – like the social workers – whether she really is a reliable parent. This is thoughtful film-making, though I didn’t quite buy into the explosion of drama at the end.

It all bounces along amiably enough, due to the high-octane work of Boyega, Foxx and Parris. Perhaps they deserve to be in a more serious film or in a comedy that was skewed more to grownups. Well, it’s a film with its own peculiarly unexpected innocence and charm.

Basically, Deadpool is quite right – he is Marvel Jesus, he is the guy elevated from the ranks here to be the heroic saviour, the wacky character who is going to make sense of the whole MCU business by repositioning it as gag material and keep the whole thing ticking over, perhaps until the MCU in its original fundamentally serious mode comes back into box office fashion. It’s amusing and exhausting.

It all remains refreshingly and unusually old-fashioned. A gentle film aimed at the younger end of young audiences that will also find the approval of those that much older.

Viewers may be split on the question of exactly how satisfying it all is in the end. The performances are strong.

Without a doubt, it is an impressive debut from director Thomas Hardiman, even if his script doesn’t quite pull off a first-class whodunnit.

Nicholas and Alexandra boasts terrific performances and gorgeous production design, but it's bloated and unwieldy. There is more history here than the film-makers know what to do with.

Some Like It Rare is a tasty treat for herbivores and carnivores alike.

The film becomes rather jumbled and preposterous by the very end, but not before some perfectly good action sequences, and the CGI ape faces are very good. This franchise has held up an awful lot better than others; now it should evolve to something new.

The film is expertly bolted together from archive newsreels, snippets of classic war movies and interviews with surviving airmen.

Christmas With You could hardly be a more generic title, and the 90-minute bundle of anodyne cheer lives up to its vanilla promise.

With his reedy voice and fractionally mis-set eyes, Segan exploits his unsettling qualities in a deadpan performance that he lifts, as director, with pleasingly snappy, almost comic-book-like direction.

The first half is so energetically surefooted as to establish trust in Manzoor’s instincts and hopes for a second feature. But like The Fury’s would-be signature kick that Ria struggles to nail, Polite Society banks on one big swing it just isn’t able to pull off.

Perhaps this movie is a little anticlimactic, but there is often an atmosphere of real fear, especially when Natalia is driven to the edge by her newborn’s incessant crying: a horrible moment which is not supernatural in the slightest.

When focused, this film truly sings, but it takes its time and tests your patience to land on the right notes.

Silly but fun adventure starring b-movie specialist Doug McClure as an adventurer trapped on a mysterious island where badly animated dinosaurs roam. [26 Apr 2000, p.24]

Managing to get access to some of the biggest names in the industry, including De Beers CEO Stephen Lussier (who perhaps not coincidentally retired this month), Kohn opens up a bijou microcosm of capitalism in the age of quantum reproduction.

It is a strange, enclosed experience: Dafoe’s mastery of the screen keeps it meaningful.

It’s a movie straining for more than it’s achieving, moment by moment, but Goth’s toxic energy always holds the attention.

The film gives us a precious glimpse into LGBTQ+ life in the postwar period.

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.

There is without a doubt something uncanny, almost seance-like, in the way Canadian film-maker Kyle Edward Ball evokes childhood fear of the dark.

Beautiful Beings is shot with real style, with very good performances, but the cliched and consequence-free violence is a flaw.

The world of the film feels real, a splendid argument for less green screen, more green fields – kudos to veteran British horror helmer Christopher Smith (Severance).

At points I wondered if this is a film that tells us anything about anything. Some of its ideas feel a bit thrown together.

Despite the uneven execution, Condor’s Nest has just enough bite.

As a narrative, it gets a bit repetitive by the time we get to France, but the abundance of home video footage from back in the day, and campy dirt-dishing from the interviewees, makes for a touching look at halcyon period in New York history, before the last shabby corners of Manhattan were gentrified beyond all recognition.

A sweet, eminently sensible film.

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.

Director Pete Ohs and his screenwriting-cast deftly manage the transition from creepy to comic by slow degrees. The two female leads hold down the fort with dry delivery and somewhat haunted-looking expressions; they are bright attractive women who have had to put up with crap like this from leering men all their lives.

There are many things working well in Rockwell’s debut, Taylor’s performance chief among them, but the end result doesn’t match her character’s formidable strength.

Compensating for there being nothing in the way of any Narnia or Harry Potter-style flitting between realities, this film has crunchily animated brawls every five minutes and a playful embrace of sword’n’sorcery hokum that gives it a little lift.

The script gives us less about their emotional connection and to be honest, the will-they-won’t-they-stay-together drama is a bit of a snore. The best scenes are down the rugby club, portrayed with tremendous warmth as a happy-ish semi-dysfunctional family.

I don’t think L’Immensità quite encompasses what it’s straining for and I’m not sure that Penélope Cruz is directed towards her greatest strengths, very good though of course she always is. But Crialese has fervency and style and those fantasy worlds might even have a touch of De Sica’s miraculous Milan.

It’s a film with a decent bit of charm, and it’s hard to argue with the greed-is-bad message.

Good company is the name of the game here, both in the nourishing bond between these geriatric besties as well as the chance for us to spend another 100 minutes in the presence of showbiz royalty. But for all its congenial upbeatitude, this salute to blue-hair camaraderie has been molded into the shape of a movie without much finesse.

The focus is on his star quality and the qualities that made him a pioneer: sunniness, grit, passion for his sport, the unconditional love and support of his mother, and his unbreakable confidence to be himself. It’s undeniably heartwarming.

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.

Perhaps Fox and the film itself don’t quite put us inside his anguish at first getting the diagnosis and then his decision to go public, but his courage is the more moving for being understated.

The Starling Girl, anchored by a bristling performance from the always solid Scanlen, is at its best when it hews to the combustible suspense of a teenage girl glimpsing her own instincts – for honesty, for autonomy, and most threateningly for pleasure.

The characters are entirely credible and likable, the simply drawn figures highly effective against the lush background artwork. Time travel has rarely seemed so joyous.

While its craft is certainly interesting, there’s something decadent and empty at its heart.

You Hurt My Feelings is a movie about emotional pain, and there is something very astringent in it, a salty tang which isn’t really effaced by the later plot transitions whose emollient message is that we all fib a bit to our loved ones and it doesn’t mean we love them any the less.

It may not always land and gets lost in itself on the way there, but Jackson has crafted a beautiful experiment indicative of ambitious vision, one whose magic outweighs its weaknesses.

The back half is all over the place and doesn’t seem to know what to say – but Connelly never ceases to be anything less than mesmerising as the kind of older woman full of spit, vinegar and shrapnel who could go off at any second.

An immensely charming Hewson makes it all seem effortless, though, even as Carney’s manipulative string-pulling threatens to get a bit too forceful, an instinctive and quick-witted actor who drags the film’s sillier, flightier moments back to earth.

The film sags a little towards the end, with a few too many implausible action sequences: characters jumping out of helicopters and fighting on top of speeding SUVs, the choreography glossing over the basics of gravity and physics. Still, the cheers kept coming.

Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act – and too reliant on a handgun plot-point – is fluent and heartfelt.

Not since Snakes on a Plane has a movie promised so much, but despite a great cast the plot is too tame.

Gentle, friendly, faintly bleary – and sans makeup – Pamela Anderson is an authentically likable screen presence in this intimate, if somehow elusive, documentary portrait from Ryan White; it is about her life and times and the super-strength misogyny she has faced from liberals and satirists in the long endgame of her celebrity career.

The Persian Version feels a bit soft focus some of the time, but it takes on real depth and force when the action hops further back, to 1960s Iran, where Shireen is a 13-year-old girl (now played by Kamand Shafieisabet).

The gentleness of the connection between Jason and Georgie gives Scrapper its warmth. Just hanging out together on camera is much more difficult than it looks, and Dickinson and Campbell manage it well. Regan looks like a very impressive and capable movie talent.

Despite those based-on-a-true-story bona fides, the script is taut as piano wire, strings of inciting incidents strung like steel cables between concrete coincidences, ironies and tragedy.

Unsubtle and on-the-nose though it undoubtedly is, there is also an amiable, upbeat energy.

It’s made just-about-watchable by Sandler and Aniston again, whose combined movie star charm proves magnetic enough to carry us through the flatter moments, both nailing some effectively chaotic physical comedy and maintaining a warm, relaxed chemistry.

Outside of Savage’s visual verve, there’s really little else to The Boogeyman, its attempt to use its central villain as a metaphor for emotional trauma never working quite as well as it did in last year’s Smile (horror as therapy is getting a tad exhausting in general). It ultimately works best as further proof of his ability as a genre film-maker, sleekly gliding from a laptop to the big screen, better things to surely come.

This is a film with a lot of charm, and gives cinema its most lovable rats since Ratatouille. But I did wonder at points who the audience is.

Tetris finds its fun in the details of contracts and the specifics of deal-making, realising that even when it’s not on a screen in your hands, it’s all one big game.

A fun ride.

Where Teenage Kicks swung for the canon of LGBTIQ+ coming-of-age films, Lonesome is happy to be a provocative talking point, establishing Boreham as a queer film-maker unafraid of making an important or niche work.

It’s a political thriller that tells the story matter-of-factly, and is perhaps a little lacking in the pace department. But Isabelle Huppert carries it along with a performance every bit as gripping as you’d expect.

The film is more than a little repetitious, especially as it twice shows the black-and-white archive clip of Fleming explaining how he chose the name James Bond.

It’s a likeable confection, and a pleasure to see Marisa Tomei on very good form.

This is a watchable enough film

It’s super fun entertainment, which mostly disguises the fact it’s not going to stick in the mind for long.

The Survival of Kindness has static elements of an art installation, a non-narrative dream state that is part arresting, part frustrating.

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.

As the catastrophe escalates, the movie’s mood music of imminent horror gets gradually and continuously louder, without ever quite reaching a climax of fear – or meaning.

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.

If Damsel doesn’t exactly rewrite the storybook, it makes for a competent rework of it, a rousing revenge saga that provides a thin yet encouraging message for its younger female audience and a balm for those older viewers who grew up being spoon-fed the same old gendered cliches.

There’s plenty to keep many viewers watching for its 1 hour, 44-minute runtime. But given the bare characterization for everyone and the total lack of chemistry between Hart and Mbatha-Raw (despite her best efforts), not enough to elevate Lift above its many forgotten peers.

Gal Gadot leads the streamer’s latest ambitious franchise-starter that delivers just about enough dumb summer fun to have us curious for more.

Another broad, sitcom-bright crowdpleaser, prone to abusing the wacky sound effect button, this latest Mehta comedy has nevertheless been packaged with a professionalism that’s hard to deny.

It is a film that does not proceed in the narrative style and the title seems to suggest that we should think of it as a different art form entirely: a constellation of themes, ideas, tropes, moods in which the personae relate to each other as concepts rather than characters.

This is clearly a very personal project for Avilés, and the heartbreak feels very real.

Without a doubt this is easy entertainment, never dull, and it has some shrewd things to say about class and money – though the satire might have been sharper and the running time shorter by a good 20 minutes.

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.

Everything about this film is very well observed.

It’s a broad, enjoyable, lighthearted movie with a fair few not-insignificant plot holes, but a genuinely surprising storyline that keeps you guessing to the end.