More persuasive is the testimony from the half dozen men we meet, who bravely discuss their pain and distress while the cameras roll.

Even if much of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in need of a rethink, it’s hard not to enjoy the scrappy, animated brainstorm taking place in front of us. The mess of it all is at least a very human one.

The effect is tender, sympathetic, diverting and often very elegant and indirect. But it withholds from us the full, real pain of damaged love.

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.

Being Eddie, a new Netflix documentary on Eddie Murphy, isn’t his best movie. It isn’t his worst.

Reminders of Him does, in fact, remind of that earlier time, when It Ends With Us over-delivered on sweeping sentimentality, a brief glow before everything curdled. We cannot go back there, but I’ve heard far less pleasurable echoes.

The work is the most important thing and Addario’s speaks for itself.

Audiences might, by the closing credits, think they still don’t quite know what happens to Helen and Mabel in the end, or perhaps at any time, but then again real life can feel messy and unfinished in just this way.

There’s just about enough here to show signs of life...but Williamson often feels like he’s treading water when he should be drawing blood.

The film is essentially a legal procedural: solid, mostly entertaining and occasionally gripping.

As it is, Merv is slight and sweet and entirely to expectations. Making a movie about co-parenting a dog is not a bad idea – though I wouldn’t say it’s a great one, either.

It’s the problem faced when one of these films is raised just above the gutter-level norm, you end up wanting it to be that much better. As it stands, Jingle Bell Heist is as good as it’s getting for now.

It is an amusing and gruesome premise, which writer-director Damian McCarthy stretches out into a convoluted, bizarre extended narrative.

The plot pings about hyperactively, so dizzying that Cosmic Princess Kaguya! may leave audiences over 15 years old feeling more ancient than the original tale.

Perhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu.

It is a resoundingly confident drama.

Ten years on, it’s moving to hear Visconti, his lifelong friend and collaborator, talking about recording in secret what they all knew would be his last project. It would be wrong to call it going out on a high, under the circumstances, but it’s heartening that Bowie could craft such a poignant, defiant, dignified exit.

Best of all, Zenovich and her editor, splicing and dicing 50 years of archive material, get across Chase’s abundant talent at its best, particularly his masterly command of the pratfall, and his immaculate comic timing.

If Union County serves as proof that Poulter deserves more substantive work and shines a light on people in a remarkable system, then it’s more than worth the choice to go docudrama over drama. But I still craved more of the real people.

It’s carried through by an all-in Hawke who is really put through the wringer, arguably his most physically gruelling role to date (the upside of a low budget is that his hardships are made to look that much harder), a muscular and entirely persuasive performance that continues his winning streak.

It might perhaps have been more ruthless. The movie ends on a bit of a flat note too, with personal growth where you might have hoped for a murder, or at the very least a public humiliation. Still the performances are unfailingly entertaining.

The whole package is an easily digested guilty pleasure.

If it’s not quite devious enough overall, Redux Redux still opens up a punchy murder-revenge side alley for the genre.

British director Hardy has far more fun here than he did with 2018’s mechanical franchise entry The Nun.

At times, it feels hopeless. But eventually the victories come, sometimes from unlikely quarters.

Relationship Goals is no less parochial a take on marriage, presented yet again as a woman’s only path to true and lasting peace in life. If you can turn a blind eye to that message and focus on the familiar funny faces instead, the tractor-beam ride to the credits is heavenly enough.

It succeeds in fits and starts – I laughed more than I have at many a comedy in the past year – but its wild, scattershot humour is so hit and miss, too many jokes going nowhere, that it’s not quite the rousing win I wanted it to be.

The movie is about how people ruin everything with their destructiveness, but also about the beauty of the human heart. It’s so inventive and imaginative that I wanted to love it more, but in the end found it a little bit psychologically uninvolving, perhaps because of its nonstop swirl of ideas and stories.

It’s an earnest tribute to a lot of things – a city, a time, a genre, a mentality, an actor in Turturro – and while we’ve definitely been here before, it’s nice to come back.

For a film so sincerely intent on bringing us into the process of sibling grief, I still left a stranger.

Frank & Louis is a solidly made drama, but Ben-Adir and Morgan are something special.

Like the film around him, [Ritchson] does what he needs to do, everything here just about serviceable for the moment yet never memorable enough for the moment after.

For good to prosper, it seems, all it takes is enough good people to take action. It’s an uplifting message in a watchable movie.

Blades of the Guardians offers a duly impressive spectacle, chock-full of epic set-pieces that lean more on physical effects than CGI, and of course lashings of exquisitely choreographed fight scenes mostly using – as the title suggests – swords.

Chopra Jonas gamely commits to the pulpiness of The Bluff, even as it doesn’t ask much of her beyond its impressive action sequences and a few tart one-liners. But there’s cinematic swoop to the movie that you might not expect in a straight-to-streaming swashbuckler, and you feel the grisliness as she drags herself along the ground in blood-splattered clothes like so many final girls of gory slashers before her.

It’s not a deep work, but it’s relentlessly fun if you’re not squeamish, or indeed sentimental about animals getting killed in the opening minutes.

The cherry on top of this admittedly weird cocktail is a strong streak of genuine sensuality – if it’s your first encounter with tentacle sex on screen, you might be surprised how appealing Heimann and his cast have managed to make it seem.

Held together by Molina’s typically commanding voiceover, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a simple, heart-first drama of broken people trying to put themselves back together.

Roommates might not rival the fizzy, formative teen films it both references (Clueless) and often directly cribs from (Mean Girls) but it still belongs in a different league to what we’re mostly served right now. Could someone possibly tell that to Netflix?

We know he is an intelligent man who lives in this world – the silent supposed bafflement and dependence on giving people enough rope to hang themselves, which are such a large part of his arsenal, look like increasingly feeble weapons when the matters are of such increasing importance in all of our lives.

Where it’s lacking in psychological bite, Wardriver’s demi-monde is convincingly venal in general terms. Thomas lends it enough fast-driving attack and romanticised ferment that it might just pass in the darkness for a Michael Mann film.

Balls Up is juvenile entertainment, handled by professionals.

Nothing here is to be taken very seriously at all but it is mostly devoid of the suffocating, and often nihilistic, smugness one has come to expect from modern action films.

You, Me & Tuscany is a perfectly wholesome and harmless meet-cute that starts by asking: “What if the Little Mermaid had a Lady and the Tramp-style hookup with the season one heart-throb from Bridgerton, spaghetti and all?”

It’s hard to outline what makes this work interesting without spoiling it, but let’s just say that as a satire it has helicopter parenting, sinister medical innovation to extend lifespan, and our obsession with youth and beauty in its sights. It’s a shame the final chapters don’t quite coalesce these fertile themes in more satisfactory fashion, and the film just ties everything up with some cursory violence.

It’s a riff or theme-variation on Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love – with a twist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window – doggedly spinning a spider’s web out of itself. The result is intricate, elaborate, though a little nebulous.

Instead of letting the visuals do the talking, the voiceover steps in to verbalise the characters’ feelings, and the need to provide multiple backstories through flashback veers into over-exposition. Still, Departures remains a highly thoughtful exploration of love and identity, and an excellent showcase for northern talents on film.

This hectic fantasia struggles to plumb deeper depths.

The anti-war sentiment is overplayed, but it's a good gritty war drama for all that. [08 Oct 2005, p.53]

It’s cheerful and watchable, if a relentlessly on-brand fan promo, corporately policed and controlled, using vintage archive photos and video rather than closeup talking-head footage of the band now.

Thankfully, Zappa was a far better composer than he was a movie director. Whereas the film, with its self-indulgent and incoherent celebrations of drink, drugs and groupies and its tiresomely scatological bent, was largely gale-force gibberish, its sprawling soundtrack, dissonant and atonal but rich in wit and humour, has aged surprisingly well.

Still fully in possession of every marble at the ripe old age of 100, Sichel reflects to camera on his middle-of-the-action view of events during the cold war, and a little tea gets spilled along the way, but not so much that he’s likely to get in any trouble for revealing state secrets. Still, he’s unabashedly critical of some CIA operations, such as the plots to destabilise leftist regimes including that of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them.

At all events, [Nemes] undoubtedly brings impeccable craftsmanship, and the performances and production design are strong.

It’s tender and sometimes beautifully made, but also contrived and occasionally features some too-good-to-be-true caring characters. Frankly, it’s rather precious.

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

The film is beautifully shot in saturated colour by Robby Muller, the cinematographer of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas and many other remarkable looking films, but has one of those minimalist screenplays that drives one mad since nobody says anything which makes much sense at all. Its direction seems to ask us to look past the characters for significance, while enjoying their offbeat lifestyles. [07 Dec 1989]

Much improved by its new cut, Revolution is an atmospheric depiction of soldiers' lives in the American revolutionary war – despite its flaws.

It's an obvious rip-off of George Romero's superior 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. [12 Apr 2007, p.34]

A somewhat double-edged Arthurian romance. There's a sharp side, with Sean Connery the noblest of kings, Julia Ormond an impressive Guinevere, and some genuinely epic imagery; on the blunt side, the tragedy is Camelot-via-Tinseltown: Richard Gere's Lancelot is far from convincing and the armour is just too shiny. [31 Dec 2005, p.49]

The sheer laborious silliness of Avatar feels like harder work the second time around and its essential problem is more prominent. [2022 re-release]

It has to be said that there is a level of cheerfully self-aware ridiculousness, which means that 300 is not entirely without entertainment value.

The cast certainly seems to be in on the whole joke, or at least must have felt all those hours in the makeup chair getting swaddled in latex was worth it in the end.

Refn delivers some shocks - but not the shock of the new.

Mandy Lane feels bogus and compromised: an unreconstructed horror romp in the guise of a nerdish intellectual.

The furrowed-brow seriousness of X-Men is its least attractive quality, but that is the mood that dominates in this film. It's hard to see how anyone other than hardcore fans will find much to entertain them.

Tamahori, director of Along Came a Spider, does a competent, if over-fussy job, but the pace flags in the showdown in Iceland.

There are some good gags and routines here, but loads of them, particularly the one about what it was like being eight and getting hit by your mother, have been done with far more invention and wit by Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.

Despite all those fierce confrontations and tribal divisions, exhaustively rehearsed and mythologised, nobody's really a bad guy and nothing's really at stake.

Is it a psychological thriller or a giddy horror of the evil-in-them-there-hills persuasion? This split-personality number can't quite decide.

On the Road does, ultimately, have a touching kind of sadness in showing how poor Dean is becoming just raw material for fiction, destined to be left behind as Sal becomes a New York big-shot. But this real sadness can't pierce or dissipate this movie's tiresome glow of self-congratulation.

It's a film which fatally fails to hold your focus: events seem both predictable and mumbled; the monochrome looks grubby, the splashes of colour and blood joke shop cheap.

It is oddly like an Agatha Christie thriller with all the pasteboard characters, 2D backstories and foreign locale, but no murder.

The result is tangled and overblown.

Pearce has fun; world-weary in the style of a 15-year-old told one too many times to tidy his room – but shoddy special effects and the surface-level sass of the president's daughter leave this one spinning in low orbit.

Hollywood's latest play for the growing Asian market revisits the ancient Japanese legend of self-sacrifice, hoping to offset its garbled narrative and grinding humourlessness with 3D and Keanu Reeves as a samurai Jesus.

It's a thriller in which the twists become so absurd that it becomes a kind of caper, but without the humour.

It’s rare that a film so convoluted also manages to be so determinedly boring.

With the fourth film, the Ice Age family animation franchise is looking almost extinct.

It's a bit of a flavourless CGI-fest, without the character and comedy of the Arnie version, and it never really gets to grips with the idea of "reality" as a slippery, malleable concept.

It's evasive and feeble; Julia Roberts is not a properly funny or satisfying villain, and yet neither is she the interestingly flawed, even sympathetic figure she might have been if the film had kept the all-important question she asks the mirror.

It's amiable enough, but it makes "The Flintstones" look like it was scripted by Karl Popper.

For me, it never came to life.

Bill Nighy and Toby Kebbell liven things up in the supporting cast.

There's some comedy in there, too, intentional – mostly. As a poignant study of the ageing process, it's on a rough par with "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For The Expendables 3, they might want to consider enlisting Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Judi Dench.

Inevitably, the guys wind up sentimentally telling each other they should do this every year. Please no.

There's undoubtedly a good film to be made out of the scramble for oil in the Arabian desert in the 1920s – but this, for all its herculean efforts, is not it.

Someday Hollywood will think of women as more than fallopian tubes in heels; until then, we're stuck with this kind of project.

Movie 43 is sketchy, in every sense. It's a collection of short comedy films in the manner of the 70s cult classic "Kentucky Fried Movie," each with a separate director, in which many very famous actors have been persuaded to take part.

Comedy gothic isn't exactly novel, and frankly there is a sense here of a movie coasting along on Halloween hype-marketing, without providing as many laughs and ideas as it really could have done.

Toning down his usual act in a manner that suggests he’s finally read his reviews, Butler gives it handfuls of dramatic ballast, but this vessel has been badly compromised: any interest seeps out by the frame.

The spirits fly in and out of The Lone Ranger at random. It's nice to see them come and go. I just wish they'd stay for longer.