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.