The Last Wish is visually gorgeous with an attention to detail you might not expect given it’s a sequel to a spin-off of a two-decade-old film.

The filmmaker always shows the same painstaking attention to detail as his homicidal hero does to the logistics of murdering his adversaries. Fassbender is well cast and gives a typically committed performance – one leavened by moments of very deadpan humour. However. The Killer also often drifts into the realm of self-conscious pastiche.

The film is always on the move, and yet somehow oppressively claustrophobic, as the tension gradually builds to the point of no return suggested by its title.

There’s an argument to be made that Splitsville’s noncommittal on the subject of polyamory. I think that might, in fact, be the point: Covino and Marvin aren’t interested so much in whether polyamory is the solution to, or destruction of, a longterm relationship, but more the fact people’s stated beliefs and innate desires tend to be two entirely different and conflicted concepts.

Ferrari drives determinedly in an uncertain direction.

A thoughtful reframing of the Disney original’s metaphor for racism – with new character Gary De’Snake stealing the show.

One of Them Days is funny as hell, but it also speaks to something sharply honest when Dreux sighs and mutters, “It shouldn’t have to be this hard.”

Fire Island is a true, escapist romcom at a time when audiences are still undernourished when it comes to queer romances that don’t end in death and despair.

Bros lumbers when it should glide, lectures when it should joke. Wherever you fall on the Kinsey scale, you’ll probably find it a miserable experience.

This is the rare musical that actually allows its performances room to breathe. There’s an inherent theatricality in the staging and a complexity in the choreography.

Timestalker certainly puts on a show.

Robinson, really, is a genius at all this – the way he extends his “f***”s like he’s watching the fabric of the universe collapse around him, or how his smile can both burn with frightening intensity or the fragility of a lost little child.

Picture the ‘Mean Girls’ queen bee Regina George if someone had given her a knife and a death wish. And she was an android.

For all the cruelty and buffoonery that might surround his hero, Bong lets us in on a revelation: what we’re really watching is a man learning that it’s OK for him to be happy.

In its morbid and provocative way, the film is often funny but it’s thought-provoking and very creepy too.

The Outrun’s true tether, however, is Ronan, and here she works to all her greatest strengths. The film wraps entirely around her, yet she’s far too honest an actor to ever play up to the audience’s expectations of a woman in crisis.

There are echoes of Jarmusch and Wenders, yet the film looks surprisingly ordinary, especially given Frank's credentials as a photographer. [28 Dec 1989]

It’s a feverish, agonised document of addiction and abortive passion, into which the director has weaved further elements of the author’s life.

While it’s been argued that Lanthimos harbours active disdain for other people, Don reminds us that there’s a poignant streak of empathy to be found in even the most nihilistic of his stories. Hope, in Bugonia, is mostly lost. But not entirely.

When it comes to Mad About the Boy, it’s less that Bridget Jones has finally matured, and more that she’s shown us how human she really is.

In a blockbuster landscape that’s become depressingly monotonous, it’s a blast of fresh air straight from a spellcaster’s staff.

It bleeds pure, righteous bitterness. Larraín jumps at the chance to turn political ideology into a literal horror show.

Die My Love captures most meaningfully the feeling of spiralling mental distress as like a dam that’s about to burst with no river to carry its water.

It’s small in scope and may prove relatively minor in Cooper’s filmography. But, still, the intentions of Is This Thing On? feel worthy. Here’s a filmmaker fully invested in what divides the personal from the creative, and willing to look at it from all angles.

The thrill of Eileen lies in how McKenzie plays off the film’s inciting spark, a blonde-bobbed enigma played by Anne Hathaway.

The sick body is represented as equally tragic and sexually desirable. It’s complex, but radical, too.

Matt Reeves’s take on the Caped Crusader may not be a genre-defining miracle, but it delivers a tapered-down, intimate portrait, while Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman brings an almost-extinct sensuality to the role.

As its intricate hand-to-hand combat sequences play out, the crunch of bones seems to ricochet around the room you’re in – as does the satisfying thud of a throwing axe as it embeds itself into a tree trunk.

Like so many entries in this hybrid genre of late, it passes both ends of the generic test: unsettling enough to have audiences grimacing, funny enough to provide a few belly laughs.

While Beck and Woods flirt with convention in the film’s later stages, as it grows wilder and more gruesome, Heretic is a wordy horror that holds up surprisingly well under scrutiny.

Most of the callbacks are played for light humour, not self-importance. Yes, it’s easy to tell you’re being manipulated. But it’s just as easy to respond with: so what?

Together, both actors rise above the most blatant of Memory’s manipulations.

Pretty Red Dress reaches out gently to a few untouched corners of British film – not only in how it tackles gendered expectations, but in how it finds in Candice neither hero nor villain.

It’s a bit much, to be frank. But at the time, the all-hands-aboard desire to take so absurd a premise and insist it be about something offers its Midsomer Murders-lite world a sense of weight and substance. The melodrama helps land the comedy. And there’s some real charm to be found here.

Pugh is very much at home in this kind of role, but it’s no less arresting in its familiarity.

Audiences may spend the running time of All My Friends Hate Me waiting impatiently for the shoe to finally drop. But Stourton and Palmer’s script points heavily at a secret that’s far less satisfying in the reveal than it is in the build-up. Maybe that’s the point. Here’s a film that leaves you with the same sickly, hollow feeling you might get spending time with the ghosts of your own past.

Ultimately this is an expensive Netflix documentary that’s provided maximum exposure to individuals who consider any kind of attention a win. It leaves a bitter, nasty taste in the mouth.

Caine, as Bernie, allows his natural, domineering presence to carry most of the performance.

It’s a war picture, in the more conventional mould, that feels new and revelatory purely because it’s being viewed through the eyes of its singular director – expressionist yet rarely sentimental, disquieting in its terrors yet tender in its hope, and profoundly interested in the ordinary lives of others.

Theater Camp has no shortage of actors lining up to poke fun at the self-indulgence of their own vocation.

Despite the drip-fed reminders of contemporary history (the Cuban Missile Crisis! the Kennedy assassination! Weren’t the Sixties wild, man!), A Complete Unknown struggles to fully engage with Dylan’s relationship to that intersection between politics and music.

Robert Taylor plays the Roman general and Deborah Kerr the Christian slave he's attracted to, but it's Peter Ustinov, hamming it up a treat as the Emperor Nero, who steals the show in this long and lavish epic. [05 May 2007, p.48]

Assayas's attention to even the most marginal character is a joy, as are his mesmerising changes of pace and register. A slow-burning delight. [11 Feb 2000, p.11]

Audiard’s efforts don’t always pay off, and in Emilia Pérez they come across as impassioned but featherweight.

Del Toro can do worldbuilding in his sleep, but you might also find Cooper’s brittle performance, filled with such elemental sadness, hard to shake off. Nightmare Alley is the shadow that lingers.

I Swear is a crowdpleaser that doesn’t make a spectacle out of its subject, nor mines the darker chapters of their life for tearjerking sentimentality.

Radcliffe, who remains movie-star ripped for the film’s duration, is a genius casting choice. He has pitch-perfect comic timing without necessarily coming across as someone trying to tell a joke. There’s a real sincerity to him and he has the eager grin of a Broadway performer about to take their bow.

This, then, is everything you expect from a Wes Anderson film. If you like his work, you’ll love it. If you don’t, you’ll probably break out in hives again.

Evil Dead Rise provides blood by the bucketful without ever crossing the line into outright cruelty.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is damn funny, often deliriously so.

Greek myth by way of the US film producer and special-effects artist Ray Harryhausen, best remembered for the fantastic four-minute sequence (four months in the making) in which an army of sword-wielding, stop-motion skeletons are spawned from the teeth of the Hydra. Bernard Herrmann's score also adds to the exciting atmosphere. [26 Jul 2008, p.48]

Sickeningly effective.

What lends Dead of Winter its evocative chill is the way all three women here – kidnapper, kidnapped, and rescuer – are left with nothing but themselves to rely on. There’s no one out here to care for or support them, turning survival into a daily matter of physical and psychological endurance.

Loach is so cohesive here, in accommodating the expansiveness of all these social ills, that characters have an unfortunate tendency to become mouthpieces.

A great actor shouldn’t only be judged on what they can do with a masterful script, but also on how they can take a lesser work and still let it soar. Anthony Hopkins has achieved this with grace in One Life, a somewhat thin, reductively sentimental retelling of the life of British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, which its star has empowered with raw, much-needed complexity.

Even when Leonard’s chatting away with his semi-captors, his words seem rather weightless, as if they were something simply to fill the air while his mind quietly calculates his next move. He’s like a chess master, in a way, and few actors could maintain that magnetic stillness quite like Rylance, who always seems to express so much while doing so little.

Every aesthetic decision here seems carefully made, even down to the brightly painted frontier towns (the historically accurate choice), which play in jokey contrast to a literal “white town”, in all meanings of the phrase. That’s what makes The Harder They Fall feel so thrilling – it’s a film that exists in the past, present, and future, all at the same time.

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo and based on his cult cartoon, the film is a computer graphics showpiece: best at swooping round structures (skyscrapers) and rotating three- dimensional objects (lots of explosions). But it's the hallucinogenic sequences that tell you why it has become a cult. [03 Feb 1991, p.24]

Considering every horror film these days seems to be “about trauma”, Smile suffers from never evolving past the basics – that trauma begets trauma and, if left unchecked and unexamined, can consume a person’s life.

Thunderbolts* does feel different to what’s come before, not because of those indie credentials, but because it’s the first of its kind to seem genuinely self-aware.

True Things isn’t quite as effective as the director’s 2018 debut, Only You, which tracked the fluctuating desires of a couple (played by Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor) undergoing IVF treatment. But it does reiterate Wootliff’s fluency in the unvarnished, messy spaces of female desire, operating in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the actual sexiness of her work.

Esmail goes big and bold with his Hitchcock allusions and showy camera work, not unlike M Night Shyamalan. At times, he’s a little on the nose, also not unlike M Night Shyamalan. It suits his vision.

The Wedding Banquet old and new may take different paths, but they end with the same conclusion: there is indefatigable strength in the chosen family.

Elvis's best film, in which he quite convincingly plays an unsavoury character sent to jail for killing a man in a bar brawl, but is reformed after he's introduced to the music business by his country-singing cellmate and becomes a big star. [18 Oct 2008, p.48]

While director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda can certainly shoot cars as well as they can planes – it’s all plumes of smoke from the tyres and the bone-rattling rumble of starting engines – F1 represents the spiritually bone-dry, abrasive inverse to all of Maverick’s giddy pleasures.

A Quiet Place: Day One can’t boast the freshness of concept of the first film, but, in pure emotional payoff, it’s the most satisfying of the series.

Crime 101 is sleek like a Michael Mann venture, but with a healthy dose of 2020s nihilism.

Cary Joji Fukunaga has made a smashing piece of action cinema with No Time to Die – it’s just a shame it had to be a Bond film.

David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult lead a movie that doesn’t just serve as a referendum for superhero films, but for the cinematic future of DC as a whole.

This is a film rich in ideas but with very little tension or passion. At times, it’s more like a cerebral art gallery installation piece than a full-blooded dramatic movie.

What really caught me off guard about The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is its sweetness.

Where in the public consciousness is the line drawn between thief and Robin Hood? Van Sant may ask the question, but his vision’s too narrow to answer it.

Cameron, at this point, seems interested less in being an artist than a cinematic frontiersman. That’s the point of The Way of Water – it’s not about what the film has to offer us now, but what it tells us about the future.

In The Idea of You, it’s actually fun to buy into the fantasy.

The Last Duel is perfectly engrossing as a slice of historical intrigue, a clash of iron wills and iron swords, all muddied on the battlefields of medieval France. But there’s a tendency here for the film to present basic facts about contemporary gender politics as some earth-shattering revelation.

A very cleverly crafted screenplay, co-written by Baumbach and British actor-writer Emily Mortimer, balances the in-jokes with perceptive observations about status anxiety, the vapidity of celebrity culture, and the fragility of family ties.

To frame it in Fresh’s own language, all we get here is a single bite – not the whole steak.

What we get is a film that’s watchable, when it could have been wonderful.

So much time in The Legend of Ochi is spent traversing these beautiful landscapes looking for something to grab onto – a thought or an emotion – but there’s nothing really here other than the simple conflict between nature and the men quick to whip out their shotguns when faced with the unknown.

The Surfer is what you might call a slow-burn Cage. There’s the manic, hollering prize at the end (and even a line of dialogue worthy of a future meme), but also plenty of the actor’s more undervalued speciality – the expression of gargantuan helplessness, the look of a fish who’s been thrown to land and left to die

The Final Reckoning, final or not, presents us with a fascinating contradiction: Ethan Hunt is both a pure singular and a state of mind. He’s cinema as the madman dreamer’s paradise.

There’s more than enough wit, beauty, and imagination to Wakanda Forever to outweigh its weaknesses.

For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience.

While this might be a flashy, American production (courtesy of Blumhouse, behind the Insidious movies and Get Out), it’s also the distinctly observational work of a British writer-director. And then there’s McAvoy, delivering one of the most impressively repugnant performances of the year.

A film of two halves - and not only because of its use of voguish split screen. The first, filmed faux-documentary style, is a grim police procedural featuring Henry Fonda's grizzled detective. In the second, Tony Curtis puts in a nuanced performance, playing against type as the real-life serial killer Albert DeSalvo, who killed 13 or more women in their homes. [16 Oct 2010, p.26]

Pamela, A Love Story may not feel particularly revelatory, but its sheer pathos is undeniable.

The director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer.

Causeway has two incredibly gifted performers at its centre, and knows they’re who you want to see.

The very best moments of Cyrano take place in near-silence, when all we can hear is the breathing of lovers enraptured by each other’s gazes.

As Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die gets weirder and weirder, it only further provides the evidence of its own thesis.

The Oompa Loompas are still problematic, but director Paul King’s follow-up to the Paddington movies can’t help but charm.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers sees fit to both indulge in nostalgia – largely through Ellie’s wide-eyed adoration of the old show – and poke fun at it.

The film’s most interesting onscreen partnership is Ali and, well, Ali. He essentially delivers the same performance twice, but with variations so minute that you’re left to wonder whether you simply imagined them.

The conclusion that Chaplin remains inscrutable feels neither new nor substantial.

The tension of Thirteen Lives is implicit, and ramps up like a vice – how long until all these people’s luck finally runs out? But I do wonder whether all this soberness has prevented a good film from being an extraordinary one.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a patchwork quilt of familiar notions.