It’s another film to leave you sighing over New York’s lost 70s heyday of gritty reality and creativity and danger.

A film that tries to empathise with everybody runs the risk of pleasing no one, and no doubt there will be viewers enraged by this or that detail or unspoken perspective, but the ambition is nevertheless pretty impressive and on the whole well executed.

Everything about this robotically made movie looks derivative and contrived; the videogame aesthetic is dull and the quirky high concept plays like a pound-shop knockoff of Inside Out and Soul.

It rattles strenuously on and on and on with unexciting and uninterestingly choreographed fights, cameos which briefly pep up the interest and placeholder non-lines where the funny material should have gone.

Whodunnits require so many moving parts to be expertly placed and played with, and, ultimately, the script isn’t as sleek as it needs to be with a board as ambitious as this. The game is a fun one, but you might feel a little cheated once it’s over.

When a writer-director of some undeniable talent throws so much at the wall, it’s inevitable that elements will stick and in Vengeance, there’s just about enough to make us curious to see what happens when Novak learns to tighten his focus. Vengeance is less the film we need right now and more the one he thinks we do but hopefully next time, he’ll figure out how to make something we want instead.

The ending chorus of conclusions wraps up a bit too neatly, though that doesn’t invalidate the enjoyably deranged ride before.

Not Okay is like many “internet movies” before it – approaching uncanny valley, somewhat obvious, just a little off — but this unsettling darkness makes it a solid entry into the canon of just-okay social media films.

True to its animated predecessors, Super-Pets pulls off what other superhero entries have struggled to summon from the CGI universe: lighthearted fun and self-aware humor woven with real evergreen themes – the fear of change, learning to love friends through transitions, trusting that love will remain through the seasons.

Every actor involved sells it hard and it’s good natured, but the unbelievability factor is just too high.

This family could be blown into pieces. And yet an irrepressible defiance and comic energy bubbles under every scene.

They really were amazing personalities: almost like children, although they came to be depressed that their work was not inspiring governments to work on evacuation protocols.

There’s perhaps not enough new material to justify a re-release, but as a whole it’s still great, and a reminder of just what a class act Michael was.

Veteran French director Jean-Jacques Annaud serves up some high-octane film-making with this old-fashioned disaster movie, composed in a docu-realist style, about the catastrophic fire that engulfed Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral in 2019.

Traucki manipulates the suspense competently enough, but this film mostly depends on tedious jump-scares for its effect, and has a few too many scenes where someone looks around in terror at the water with a worried expression.

Juggling palace politics, magical animals and medical ethics, The Deer King can’t get over major pacing problems: the emotional moments are not given enough time to land, as the plot rushes to its next world-building intrigue.

The film really comes alive when it simply lets Donna be the star of the show. From her spontaneous dancing in the streets to a moving reunion with her sister, her warmth and vivacity towards others distils the essence of LGBTQ+ solidarity.

A very touching and insightful film.

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

Anything’s Possible is another needed step in the right direction – a just-fine high school romantic comedy about an unapologetic, bold trans teenager on a major streaming platform.

The raffish charisma and sinister, saturnine handsomeness of Javier Bardem is what raises this movie above the standard of soap-opera … mostly.

Despite the film’s historical interest, it plays like a Carry On film without the gags, and the way it is shot makes it look like a coffee commercial.

Where the Crawdads Sing never really had an interest in complications, or hardship, or racism as anything beyond wallpaper for its central nature girl fantasy of self-reliance. It would rather stay above the fray, gliding prettily along the marsh without actually getting dirty.

There is something clotted and heavy about this film, with sadly not enough of the humour for which Peele justly became celebrated in his double-act days with Keegan-Michael Key. It’s not the positive response I wanted to have.

The end result is nowhere near as persuasive or grounded in solid screenwriting as Leo Grande is, but Phillips has always been a charmer onscreen and, like Grande’s Emma Thompson, she’s more than willing to use her talent here to make a case for women learning to manage and take charge of their own pleasure.

As Chiara, Rotolo’s face dominates the screen in closeup for much of the film, and she manages to look very young and yet very worldly wise at the same time. Another very impressive achievement from Carpignano.

While the effort put into research for this documentary is commendable, ultimately the aestheticisation of the information dampens its impact.

It’s a fetching package, which makes it all the more frustrating that the script isn’t tauter and sharper. But Krige is terrific and there should certainly be more films about angry post-menopausal women tapping into their dark side.