There is a great, moving story to tell about the real Sam Bloom – but this film only gets part of the way there.

It’s good to see Hamilton getting a robust role, although, sadly, she has to concede badass superiority to Davis. This sixth Terminator surely has to be the last. Yet the very nature of the Terminator story means that going round and round in existential circles comes with the territory.

It’s a film with something to say but it’s not all that good at saying it.

The comedy is at odds, perhaps even at war, with the gravitational downward pull of bittersweet seriousness, and the sucrose content is pretty high by the end. But it's an entertaining film.

Empire of Light is a sweet, heartfelt, humane movie, which doesn’t shy away from the brutality and the racism that was happening in the streets outside the cinema.

Hinds is a strong, wounded presence, but the laboured structure cuts insistently around him to get at a psychology mostly scrambled in translation. This Sea's just too choppy.

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.

His to-the-point revenge thriller Silent Night isn’t good enough for us to erupt into the applause Woo has so often deserved, but it’s also not bad enough for us to mourn the film-maker that he once was, a mostly competent exercise that serves less as a victory lap and more as a warm-up.

Jim Jarmusch’s undeadpan comedy is laconic, lugubrious and does not entirely come to life, despite many witty lines and tremendously assured performances by an A-list cast.

A lairy, likable film.

The snuff-porn aesthetic might suggest a realist drama, but a supernatural dimension is brought into play, making the plot directionless. There isn't an ounce of ingenuity in the way the movie is concluded, but some generic expertise in the way it is put together.

An ingenious, elegant counterfactual drama.

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.

There’s a grubby, late-night appeal to his dialled-up trash aesthetic and The Beekeeper mostly works because of it. Bee prepared for a sequel.

The life lessons being taught here about self-acceptance, self-love and self-worth might be a little pat and some of the darker elements could have afforded a tad more darkness, but It Ends with Us leads with heart first, everything else later. It’s a film of huge, sometimes hugely unsubtle, emotion but it has an effectively forceful sweep to it.

It’s less of a film and more of an actors’ workshop, an exercise for everyone involved but meaningless to us.

Brilliantly acted but never entirely credible and not quite the force for feminism it wants to be.

The younger Day-Lewis shows promise as a film-maker – Anemone certainly looks serious, the correct scowls and swirling skies and wordless, eerie montages to suggest weighty themes, big emotions and ominous suspense. The tools to back up that style with emotional punches that land like the real ones of the brothers – best believe they tussle it out, because of course – are not yet refined, but in this father-son duo, at least, I have faith.

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 fluid and nippy telling of a tale that still seems strangely urgent.

Too often the film loudly announces its noble intentions with slogans instead of dialogue.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that a genuinely arresting documentary was cast adrift somewhere along the line.

Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell. A vanilla dystopian romance.

There’s little in the way of dramatic conflict or base wit to keep us hanging around to see what happens within each.

Lemercier’s weirdly grinning, gurning face superimposed on the child’s head creates an unnatural chill that the film fails to shrug off, even after Aline as an adult is supposed to be glammed up with her teeth fixed.

Murphy’s maverick cop – and his theme music – are back to fight corruption, but four decades on there’s little energy to enliven their formulaic reunion.

There are moments of visual brilliance here, moments of reverence and even grandeur. He is always distinctive, and anything he does must be of interest. But his style is stagnating into mannerism, cliche and self-parody.

Irrational Man is a good idea, a sketch for a movie, but the movie itself is unrealised.

By the end of this relentless, sprawling and bloody crime opera it may be you who is on your knees, begging for the damn movie to just hurry up and end it.

A feast of kitsch and gaudy colour, set to the tune of an 80s synth soundtrack, the film plays like a G-rated music video. And Trenchard-Smith maintaining a buzzing energy throughout.

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

If you’re going to do a send-off this huge, there are a lot of goodbyes to say, and a lot of loose ends to tie up. The fact that The Rise of Skywalker manages most of them and within a vaguely coherent story is something of an achievement in itself.

It's as if the film-makers felt they couldn't deliver the didactic lesson unless they wrapped this up in pulpy, thriller trappings.

The slaughter does start to get monotonous, but the film rallies in its final third.

The two adjectives in the title should be replaced with "annoying" and "unendurably tiresome".

How Herbig fails to capitalise on the sheer physical terror of their flight – the balloon’s basket is more a flimsily strung boxing ring – makes you wish someone like Werner Herzog had mounted this mad escapade for real.

It all works up to an only mildly surprising “shock” ending, which is bad news for all concerned, a twist that would be more tragic if it were possible to feel sorry for any of them.

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

If the plot is a little sketchy, the action, conversely, is drum tight.

Some of the storytelling gets clotted, leaning too much on the girls shrilly screaming at each other. Bad Things, though, is sharply filmed, with cinematographer Grant Greenberg feng-shuiing the hotel spaces into tone-setting tableaux (with a touch of Twin Peaks’ kitsch).

This could be projected on to a wall at a club, but actually being made to sit down and watch it in a cinema is a weird experience.

It’s all a bit too sanctified and safe – lacking in rock’n’roll edge perhaps – but Fortune-Lloyd’s core performance is deeply empathic and buoys the film up as it races through the stations of Epstein’s short, sharp shock of a life.

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.

Even if some of the late-stage plotting seems sloppy and increasingly preposterous, there’s a callousness to the brutal last act that, together with the far patchier, yet similarly hard-edged First Purge, feels like a definite product of the time we’re in, as war on terror-era torture porn did in the mid-2000s.

Annabelle Comes Home is hopelessly light on scares.

It’s a pulpy slab of exploitation masquerading as an important treatise on the struggles faced by the working class in rural America, thumping us in the face with its shallow viewpoint until we beg for mercy. Or at least the credits.

Crash is still creepy, still menacing, still hypnotic, and it is still dedicated, in its freaky way, to the ideal of eroticism, to just drifting from erotic scene to erotic scene without much need for story. But Crash is no longer so contemporary. [4K re-release]

This movie is content with congratulating itself for being on the right side of history, with little attention paid to questions unanswered and history unresolved.

There are some good ideas, strong moments and a blue-chip cast in Broken, the feature-film debut from award-winning theatre and opera director Rufus Norris. But they somehow don't come together successfully.

At 85 minutes, Destroy All Neighbors gets a little indulgent, and the plot, as William finds his creative mojo in the company of his newly acquired ghoulish ensemble, is throwaway. But it’s a gleeful lo-fi rampage all the same.

It is lively, colourful and genuinely funny, and doesn’t break what didn’t need fixing about the original.

This low-key oddity has the potential for some proper horsepower given the odd but intriguing casting of Peter Dinklage and Shirley MacLaine, but it never manages to build up much comic or dramatic speed – much like Dinklage’s electric scooter, his main mode of transport throughout.

It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take any of this when it’s so unclear what the makers’ intention is and so the film’s deeper cuts fail to truly wound because so much of it is mired in silliness.

This is a strong, fierce, heartfelt movie.

Spencer works hard to keep us on her side and it’s her messy, melancholic character work that endures, a portrait of a woman broken and breaking those around her that’s really quite hard to shake. Ma is a few more drafts from perfection but the actor playing her is the real deal.

The performances are fine, but the questionable decision to cast not one, not two, but three Brits can’t help but intensify the off-putting sense of Americana cosplay.

It’s always good to witness Young’s authentic acoustic presence.

Within the first 15 or so minutes of Apple TV+’s Palmer, something clicks in, a feeling of overwhelming familiarity, an inner voice quietly realising, “Ohhh, it’s that movie.”

It’s not that its heart isn’t in the right place, it’s just that its heart has been transplanted from somewhere else.

All told, there’s hardly a single smile in Lilo & Stitch ’25 not generated through the stolen valor of the earlier screenplay, and hardly a poignant moment that’s not more admirably raw in the G-rated version.

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

There are some pretty broad emotional strokes here and maybe a fair bit of grandstanding. But it’s made with some style.

Gyllenhaal rises above the tedium; sadly, not far enough. Great English accent, though.

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.

Hunt, though, gives an excellent performance in the lead role, agilely running the gamut from deadened admin serf and hipster-bar dating veteran, to infatuated young lover, to abuse victim. She brings emotional suppleness and complexity to what is – despite some flaws – a bold and stylish take on the endless samsara of digital romance.

A bafflingly botched misfire ... Quite what the film is and who it’s for remains a head-scratcher, a stilted jumble of somethings boiling down to nothing.

Penguins of Madagascar is an injection of sugar direct to the pineal gland and woe betide any parent who tries to get their children to take a nap after seeing it.

Hart comports himself with a more dialed-back version of the jittery everyman affability he’s developed over decades in the comedy circuit, a schtick that reads as just that – a pose, a well-honed affectation. There is an immense and documentable falseness at the core of his performance that drags down the salvageable movie all around it, far from the redemption arc clincher his handlers may have had in mind.

There’s slow cinema and there is boring cinema, and this is an unfortunate example of the latter.

Webb's film is bold and bright and possesses charm in abundance. It swings into the future and carries the audience with it.

Little here is going to challenge the opinion of Roth as a bratty provocateur, but it’s still fun to experience a latter-day thriller pushing so many buttons in broadly the right order: if Knock Knock’s no more than a sick joke, it’s been very shrewdly constructed.

Christophe Honoré, now edging into veteran status with his 12th film, once again steps up to the oche of desire and infidelity. But this peppy, flighty and self-involved film – a hybrid of marital drama, chamber piece, erotic farce and crypto-musical – hovers frustratingly outside the bullseye.

It’s a forgettable film, with a fair few gags that strike a depressingly sexist note.

It’s a strained, dramatically inert and often frankly silly odd-couple bromance fantasy about the Northern Ireland peace process negotiations.

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 awkward, misjudged, occasionally sexy film has seeds of a radical, fresh story and flashes of directorial brilliance but is hobbled throughout by the confounding decision to write her 26-year-old main character as either insensitively neuro-divergent or more sheltered child than adult.

The problem lies not strictly with what’s on screen – which on its own, reduced terms is basically watchable and not unlikable – but in what’s been elided or forgotten about in the rush to duplicate the original’s surprise success: any sustained wit or personality.

It’s heartfelt and sweetly earnest, but humdrum and disappointingly unmagical. The animation doesn’t help: characters speak with blank paralysed faces as if they’ve had botched Botox.

The Killer Inside Me is a particular distillation of male hate, as practised by repulsive and inadequate individuals who have been encouraged to see themselves as essentially decent by virtue of the trappings of authority in which they have wrapped themselves. And Winterbottom is tearing off the mask.

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.

Eisenberg does an honest job with the role of Marceau, but it is a subdued performance. Marceau emerges as animatedly nerdy before the Nazis invade, but when the film has to show his heroism, Eisenberg plays him pretty straight. The result is a performance that could have been turned in by anyone.

George Clooney has long been a force for good in movies and public life – but what a bafflingly bland, indulgent, gritless oyster of a film he’s directed here.

Headland has comic smarts enough to venture both filthily revisionist readings of My So-Called Life and riffs on the Potsdam conference, while refusing her audience any comforting safety nets.

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

What none of the tonal shifts and story tweaks can do is distract us from his boringly flat direction, failing to justify why something so drab and cheap-looking would warrant the surprisingly wide theatrical release it’s receiving this weekend.

It’s terrifically watchable, a high-octane automobile of a film with dodgy steering, but exciting in a world of dull and prissy hybrids.

A handsomely made return to form for a series that had been showing signs of fatigue.

Remove the subtitles, and it's one of Cameron Crowe's head-in-the-clouds dramas, as scripted by M Night Shyamalan: an insultingly arbitrary reveal, preceded by vast, wailing washes of Pink Floyd and Sigur Rós. A very vanilla sky, this.

The goofier it all gets, the more one starts to warm to it, leaning further away from its initial A-trappings and nestling into a far more likable B-movie mode.

In other words, smart concepts, talented people, solid blueprint. But there is too little risk – in the defanged satire, in the muddled thematic sprawl, even in a late-stage satirical swing that, for this fan, jumped the shark – to rise above its sharp-eyed construction.

Just occasionally, Lyne brings the right kind of flash, brash and trash to this fantastically silly and unbelievable story. But the film plods along in such a disconcerting way: there is no ratcheting up of tension, or plausible psychology.

It’s an effective retelling, though the film could have concentrated more on her tragicomic relationship with her oil plutocrat husband. Could it actually have been a love story after all?

Without Reynolds this would be pretty run-of-the-mill; with him it’s a perfectly acceptable family movie. Given the history, that’s a giant leap for Pokémon-kind.

The aimless and unfunny shenanigans of Atropia never really lead to anything and they certainly don’t lead us anywhere that demands the sudden level of dramatic seriousness that the ending brings about.

Chao is the standout here. She deserves more – a leading role of her own, at the very least, and a character with an inner life and interests of her own.

Thewlis keeps the film from sinking completely: the haunted, unhappy man resigned to his unjust burden of guilt and shame.

It is refreshing that this story does not simply unravel into miserablism, but the film’s weird narrative leaps are implausible and jarring.

Viceroy’s House is no very profound work, but it is a nimble and watchable period drama.