It's the successul synthesis of the two – action and emotion – that means this Spider-Man is as enjoyable as it is impressive: Webb's control of mood and texture is near faultless as his film switches from teenage sulks to exhilarating airborne pyrotechnics.

A melodramatic tale at heart, but carried off with some wit and flair. [01 Feb 2000, p.24]

This odd, nasty yet rather funny little film tears apart ideas of sisterhood and female friendship and replaces them with burning hate and gratuitous violence.

Tamahori builds a largely credible aura, supported by uniformly strong performances and Gin Loane’s classy cinematography. But The Convert is one of those films with occasional moments that make you go “huh?”

The big treat is seeing Jett herself talk and watching her still-strong bond with producer and best friend Kenny Laguna: two leather-clad old mates, constantly bickering but inseparable.

It’s a calm, crisply made film (one can again see how it matches the Apple aesthetic) but one about heartache and tumult, and I found myself craving something that felt as difficult and stinging as the feelings it was trying to stir up.

[A] decent retelling of an amazing true-life story.

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

It is a lovely-looking, lovely-sounding movie, handsomely designed, meticulously shot and impeccably performed — and it also has interesting things to say about the emotional toughness and the Greeneian splinter of ice in the heart, that is needed by a writer. But I have to admit that, despite my liking for slow cinema, I found something a bit indulgent and classy about the unvarying andante pace.

The film’s old-fashioned charm and sweet-natured Yuletide spirit has held up, although it interestingly seems attractive now more for these softer-edged qualities than for the straight-ahead SNL-type Will Ferrell comedy that it seemed to promise back in 2003.

This is detached, flat film-making at its most bare. You figure out which lines of dialogue deserve to be underlined.

It is an involving story, with a strong lead performance.

A brilliantly textured film to be savoured.

The result falls somewhere between a slave-escape drama, an action thriller, a western and even an unexpected kind of superhero film. It’s a winning combination, although Lemmons does not immerse us in the agony and injustice of slavery as such; she puts together a well-crafted movie that is the showcase for an excellent performance from Erivo.

It works for the most part because of Ruben and Cash and the spiky chemistry they share.

Stripping the narrative of its gods and monsters, and almost two-thirds of the chapters, is great but the vacuum isn’t filled with much more than his two magnetic leads and consistently sumptuous cinematography. The Return is gorgeous to behold, but there just isn’t enough there.

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.

As comeback projects go, Blood Father is stellar. It’s a wonder Quentin Tarantino, the king of career resurrection, didn’t get to Gibson first. The actors completely tears into the role of Link, a battered and disgruntled ex-con. Richet matches him, delivering a muscular and deliriously entertaining B-movie that is sure to play like gangbusters with genre aficionados.

That entertainment enchanter JK Rowling has come storming back to the world of magic in a shower of supernatural sparks - and created a glorious fantasy-romance adventure.

This documentary, by the first-time director Jack Pettibone Riccobono, is a deep drink of bleak. But there are incidental moments of beauty or startling surreality to marvel at.

This is Obama’s own film, so we can’t expect any tough scrutiny.

Overall, it’s an entertaining bit of summer fun.

Its outsized mean girl ruthlessness with a candy-coated shell, led by Mendes and Hawke’s commanding performances, is a biting, if overlong, good time.

More than any comedy or even film I’ve seen recently, this is movie driven by the line-by-line need for fierce, nasty, funny punched-up stuff in the dialogue, and narrative arcs and character development aren’t the point. But as with Succession, this does a really good job of persuading you that, yes, this is what our overlords are really like.

The hippo, as a German tour guide tells us at the very beginning, may look fat and placid and rather cute, but it’s fast-moving, aggressive and dangerous to humans; perhaps the film itself, so mysteriously distended with huge digressions and non-narrative scenes, is as exotically fleshy and strange as a hippo. Yet it has bite. And the hippos themselves are entrancing.

A drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour.

The "breathing" of the title becomes a cleverly recurrent motif, and Markovics's script circles around the themes of death and life in thoughtful and elegant ways: it is a well-carpentered screenplay which bears every sign of having been a labour of love, worked on fruitfully over many years.

It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.