There are laughs, but they’re meek.

[Pearce] gives us a carefully crafted dramatic setup, an intriguingly curated selection of suspects for the crime and all of it building to a fascinating, finely balanced ambiguity in the movie’s climactic stages.

Journeyman is flawed, but intelligent and heartfelt.

Watching a couple bicker about the specifics of their relationship can be illuminating when done right, but here it becomes a chore, the problems they encounter feeling contrived and silly.

Somehow in its pure uproariousness, it works. It’s just a supremely watchable film, utterly confident in its self-created malleable mythology. And confident also in the note of apocalyptic darkness.

Woman Walks Ahead is a solidly crafted and well shot, if basically unchallenging film.

If October feels more tentative than Piku, which had rock-solid star turns to ground it, its emotion is at the last earned honestly: any structural wobbles will be nothing compared with the audience’s lower lips come the finale.

Uncommonly alert to small, telling details, while more expansive in its attitudes, the result proves far richer and worldlier than anything previously observed coming down the Khyber Pass.

Belleville cranks up the colour saturation and ironic Yuletide soundtrack, but all his slo-mo hedonism can’t disguise an otherwise addled story treatment: we chop haphazardly between hemispheres, leaving characters and subplots treading crystal blue water.

It’s a melancholy, interesting film, slightly opaque, a cine-journal about the way youth is clouded by experience.

Even though the script might let her down, Schumer does still manage to sell a smattering of the comic moments (the opening scene has a promising knockabout tone), but when she reaches the more dramatic elements, she struggles to convince.

It is a smart, supremely watchable and entertaining film, and Close gives a wonderful star turn.

In its simplicity and punch, this is a film that feels as if it could have been made decades ago, in the classic age of Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man.

One can never quite tell with Dumont if he’s deadly serious about all this or laughing up his sleeve. That’s sort of what makes his work fascinating, although in this instance, viewer patience is severely tested.

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.

It is entertainingly over the top, although perhaps the CGI work isn’t quite out of the top drawer.

The director, Jeff Wadlow, has a puppyish eagerness to impress, shock and entertain and as silly as the film might get, it’s never dull.

The effect of this movie by the Australian director Warwick Thornton is cumulative, subtle, almost stealthy.

This is fiercely powerful storytelling, simple and muscular in one way, but also conveying nuance and sophistication in its depiction of character.

Those who come away cheering for Ready Player One will likely have enjoyed the film’s many references, the story’s breakneck speed and playful visual design. Others may want to unplug from the paint-by-number characters and shallow plot.

It’s a celebration of her musicality and extraterrestrial scariness, and a reminder that films about female singing stars need not be gallant tributes to tragically doomed fragility.

Paradox is choppy and directionless, better seen as an experimental concert film that attempted to do something more ambitious than the average music video.

It might drift out of the memory just as easily as it drifted in, but there’s a goofy likability to Pacific Rim: Uprising, a primal thrill to be had, and a confident slickness behind it that means, despite a nearly two-hour running time, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

This is a calm and often affecting study of L’Arche, a community of people with learning disabilities in Trosly-Breuil, northern France.

It’s a film which demonstrates that debate, the exchange of ideas, can be as thrilling as any ramped up action flick.

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.

It’s a quietly devastating film.

Ghost Stories is a barnstormer of an entertainment, a fairground ride with dodgy brakes.

Throughout Vikander maintains a kind of serene evenness of manner. Blandness is Lara’s theme.

The first world war is one of the 20th century’s oldest, grimmest tales of futility and slaughter. Dibb and his excellent cast put new passion into it.

Despite an element of gross bodily fluid-laden gags, Blockers manages to be heartfelt and endearing – even if the film’s message is sometimes heavy handed.

A Fantastic Woman is a brilliant film: a richly humane, moving study of someone keeping alive the memory and the fact of love.

There’s something to be admired about a film that can gracefully defy simple genre categorization but Submergence feels like a clumsy melange, a confused adaptation made by people who don’t seem quite sure what they have on their hands.

The film periodically livens up, and Oyelowo shows that he can play comedy, but his performance isn’t given much guidance or room to grow and the direction is very flat and uninspired.

The cast all perform adequately, with Hendricks in particular proving effective, but it’s just difficult to really invest in what happens to any of them. Before long, characters are all making stock horror movie decisions, and there’s no amount of effective craftsmanship that can sell stupidity.

It’s by no means impossible to carve a challenging, meaningful story out of difficult interchanges between the east and west. To return to Scorsese, consider Silence, a fine film about European men slowly realizing just how little they understand of Japan. But neither Zandvliet, Baldwin, nor Leto care to look beyond themselves. They’re worse than the simple gaijin, or the over-affectionate weeaboo – they’re tourists who think they own the place.

The film is tentative and over-protective, as though it’s terrified that a story empowering kids to help good battle evil could give someone a nightmare. It reduces the whole universe to one girl’s self-esteem.

Jason Clarke is strong as the weak senator, and he wisely goes easy on replicating the unmistakable Massachusetts accent.

This could be satire, but Roth and screenwriter Joe Carnahan refuse to take a stance. Ironically, a film about a guy with guts doesn’t have any itself.

Oh Lucy!’s plot feels overthought. The tone see-saws wildly. What prevents it collapsing are the warm, heartfelt performances, together with Hirayanagi’s obvious affection for her chief protagonist.

It’s a film so light that it barely exists but Huppert makes it worth remembering.

Subversive entertainment it ain’t. But nor is this well-paced yarn – with pleasing albeit narrowly scoped performances from a perky cast – bereft of pleasantries and surprises.

No movie with these excellent actors can be a complete dead loss, of course, but it’s the kind of feelgood film that somehow always manages to set a keynote of feel-bad, feel-sad gentility.

It’s a hugely charming crowd pleaser, an infectiously entertaining coming of age film that feels primed to attract and retain a loyal eager-to-rewatch audience. There’s a wealth of snappy dialogue and what feels like an attentive grasp of teenage life.

It’s a gorgeous film to watch, but a better and bigger one to think about. The key to unlocking this hugely ambitious genre hybrid – a classic Australian film and a masterpiece of outback noir – is understanding that Goldstone is a country, not a town, and its name is Australia.

“Surprise and speed is the key,” someone comments at one point; the only surprise is how unspeedy and unsurprising this project turned out to be.

Watching Jones passively bob in the deep end of his imagination, a viewer longs for the compulsory baseline competence of the big studios – anything but the blandness masquerading as future cult bait.

There are sparks of interest and some powerful moments, but it is structurally disjointed, tonally uncertain, unfocused and unfinished, with some very broad drama-improv-class acting from the kids and a frankly unrelaxed and undirected performance from Halle Berry.

The absurdity and the galaxy of plot holes in the farcical final act just undermine everything.

Annihilation is more than mere visuals and it will shock, fascinate and haunt whatever screen it’s watched on.

The Jason Bateman comedy model hasn’t quite been radically altered in Game Night but it’s one of his more entertaining outings. Just don’t count on remembering much of it once the night is over.

It doesn’t entirely work, but there’s something about its full-throttle nastiness that lingers, and it’s refreshing to see something that exists in the studio system that possesses so many queasily perverse elements. It’s just not quite as seductive as it thinks it is.

There is so much detail in the breakneck race from image to image that Isle of Dogs will reward multiple viewings as much as any Anderson film, visually if not narratively.

This woman, for all her flaws, is clearly a warrior first and foremost.

As usual it’s left entirely up to the beleaguered Johnson to make any of it even remotely watchable. She remains a compelling presence, trying her darnedest with lifeless words, but, again, she’s stranded by the energy-sucking vortex of nothingness that is Jamie Dornan. He’s better than this...but he knows it and his boredom is lazily apparent throughout.

The intriguing thing about Black Panther is that it doesn’t look like a superhero film – more a wide-eyed fantasy romance: exciting, subversive and funny.

The Cloverfield Paradox is an unholy mess...As the film bumbles from one confusingly mounted scene to the next, disappointment turns to boredom. The eerie early scenes fade into standard space horror panic and given how crowded that particular subgenre is, The Cloverfield Paradox emerges as a pale imitation.

This kids’ animation is altogether lively and funny with just enough soul, even if it comes at the expense of Potter’s sensitivity and delicacy.

A staggeringly pointless supernatural non-chiller featuring some very tiresome jump scares.

An ambitious essay documentary that is often brilliant but is let down by a parallel focus on Greenfield’s own family and career which becomes too sentimental and stretches the film out beyond its natural length.

Spall is good casting in the lead: miserable, hangdog, humorous and scared, like a handsomer version of Josh Widdicombe. James-Collier is a fierce screen presence: some film-maker needs to find something more for him to do.

Some of the jokes will need carbon-dating to ascertain their age, but the good-natured humour never loses its fizz.

This is at least concentrated dramatically in being brought to an endpoint. For fans only.

This long film is blisteringly brilliant for the first hour or so. Then there are shark-jumping issues.

What a bland and sugary texture there is to this very conservative, undemanding oldster roadtrip.

It’s all very easy: a feelgood war tale from what feels like a distant age.

While it’s unfolding before us, it provides – whatever else the courts insist we call it – stirring, seductive spectacle.

Thanks to inventive camerawork, mesmeric performances and incisive yet elliptical editing and storytelling, the claustrophobia becomes a feature instead of a liability.

There are plenty of great moments, but they jump out amid a jumble of strangely flat scenes. This doesn’t feel like the work of a great master; it’s a discordant brew that just doesn’t blend right.

This brief, winsome feature is a typically stylish, if ephemeral piece of work in the classic New Wave manner – almost a time capsule.

For all its topicality, Step Sisters is a bit underwhelming, although it makes for entertaining lite fare in the vein of Pitch Perfect or Bring It On, and the choreography is first-rate.

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

The makers of Proud Mary don’t know what to do with their terrific ensemble cast. Henson may be due for a Taken-style career boost (and Proud Mary may very well be it). But she deserves so much better than this.

Perhaps you can’t ask too much from a modest, mid-range crowd-pleaser like this, but the experience ends up something like a commuter service itself: you know where it’s going and it gets you there perfectly well, but in a few years’ time you’d be hard pressed to distinguish it from dozens of similar journeys.

The film has some startling moments.

It is an introspective and downbeat film, but forceful and personal, with excruciating and all-too-real moments of mortification. And it can be weirdly moving, almost out of nowhere.

For all its flaws, Bright is still a headlong leap into a bracingly different new world. Cinema could do with more of that.

It’s not a film to break moulds or test boundaries. Yet Jackman’s real charm will carry you along.

All The Money In The World is not perfect; there is a touch of naïveté and stereotyping in its depiction of the malign Italians with their one, redemptive nice-guy gangster. But with the help of Plummer’s tremendous villain-autocrat performance, Ridley Scott gives us a very entertaining parable about money and what it can’t buy.

So many movies end with trite sentiments about “family” and “sisterhood” but it doesn’t feel forced here. It looks like these performers are genuinely enjoying themselves, and it’s infectious.

Antiporno has a kind of energy, but is also shallow and frantic.

It’s an engaging film, but it leaves you with a feeling that there might be a deeper, darker, more specific story yet to be told.

The Last Jedi gives you an explosive sugar rush of spectacle. It’s a film that buzzes with belief in itself and its own mythic universe – a euphoric certainty that I think no other movie franchise has. And there is no provisional hesitation or energy dip of the sort that might have been expected between episodes seven and nine.

Miss Kiet’s Children is a lovely film.

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.

Sadly, the problems affecting the Raineys, the African American family whose north Philadelphia home accommodates this heartening documentary, are all too familiar: poverty, drugs, gun violence.