Steve is a thoughtful, impassioned film in practice. Yet it’s deliberately made itself secondary to its source material.

This is about as graceful and fitting an endnote as you could hope for.

It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year.

The Toxic Avenger is funny and charming, with a joke rate as consistent as this year’s The Naked Gun, and snappy editing that mimics the Edgar Wright brand of genre parody.

It is hard not to wish Wright had made an entire film set in the Soho of the Sixties rather than one that pays tribute to it through the prism of the present day. It is a pity, too, that the magnificent Taylor-Joy’s role wasn’t further foregrounded.

Really, all you can do is take what joy you can from Paddington in Peru, because its pleasures are rarer but still sweet.

Belo and Birch, and their star Jodie Comer, breathe life and fire into the mothers typically left stagnant on the apocalypse’s sidelines.

This lavish historical epic has plenty of campy treasure in it. [07 Aug 2013]

Paul Feig nods to ‘Rebecca’ and ‘Vertigo’ in this pulpy adaptation of the Freida McFadden bestseller, which has a secret weapon in the form of a quite brilliant Amanda Seyfried.

Whatever the genre, Aronofsky tends to oscillate between two modes: the savagely harrowing or the savagely sentimental. And it’s all there in Caught Stealing, but at such a low simmer that the film feels almost vacant.

There’s a mainstream, global scope to the film, but Smith and Peter Bayham’s script isn’t without the small quirks and observations native to British comedy.

Garland’s film, at times, feels a little like provocation for provocation’s sake. It suggests that all a male filmmaker needs to do to earn his feminist credentials is to show us men doing bad things. Think Bugs Bunny chomping on his carrot and, with a wink to the audience, declaring, “ain’t I a stinker?”

The callbacks, thankfully, are fairly minimal – but it’s still a comfortingly old school affair, in which its CGI feels at home next to a host of traditional practical effects, including that old gem of a slowly collapsing water tower. No bulging-to-the-point-of-bursting muscles needed.

With Alice, Darling, director Mary Nighy (daughter of actor Bill) delicately exposes how internalised and invisible the experience of narcissistic abuse can be.

As with Derrickson’s previous collaboration with Hawke, 2012’s Sinister, the director proves he can deliver an effective jumpscare – slick, and not too telegraphed. But there’s a thematic weight here that elevates The Black Phone above any of his previous work in the genre, a dark reminder of how often moral panics and bogeymen are conjured up in order to turn a society’s eyes away from the real and inescapable violence happening in people’s own homes.

This is Aster’s funniest film to date, and makes use of an ever expanding and shifting cast to dot the 150-minute runtime with well-observed comic details and visual payoffs.

There’s no room for the sentimental here. No Grinch hearts suddenly grow three sizes. That’s not how it works in the real world, and Oppenheimer is interested instead in the smaller, more subtle shifts.

The film is also bold and clear cut about the way women’s bodies are made into objects of both reverence and shame – but its pièce de résistance is the shot of a vagina during birth, an entirely natural part of human existence that, in America, caused such a fuss that The First Omen was nearly slapped with an extreme NC-17 certificate. What a way to prove this film’s point.

[Harris's] loud, rough, energetic tale of 'girlz n the hood' is low on polish and production values but certainly drawn from life.

The real way Safdie puts a chokehold on his audience is by examining Mark and Dawn’s physical and emotional weaknesses in such forensic detail. The Smashing Machine may not provide the pay-offs that audiences expect from more conventional sports movies, but this is the most raw and vulnerable that Johnson has ever been on screen. Once you’ve seen him this exposed, you won’t watch his typical action movie stunts in quite the same way ever again.

In fact, all the ingredients are perfectly lined up here, and, in the right combinations, and with the pure wonderment of Michael Giacchino’s score, The Fantastic Four: First Steps does shimmer with a kind of wide-eyed idealism. And that’s lovely.

What’s frustrating about Romulus is to see that the reaction to unpopular ideas wasn’t to come up with more, but to simply recycle the old ones as nostalgia.

This film is nasty, funny, and cogent about the era it’s set in.

With Fraser as her figurehead, it’s certainly a work of broad and deep compassion. But there are self-imposed limitations that you’d wish Hikari and her co-writer Stephen Blahut would cross, if not purely out of curiosity.

In a crowded field of dour horror, it’s a relief to find something so knowingly silly.

The Bad Guys 2 has just enough wit and spirit that you can take your kids to see it without feeling like you’re doing a disservice to their intellectual development.

By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war.

In short, it’s the life of Napoleon as only Scott can tell it, full of verve, spectacle, and machismo. Its battle scenes are thrilling, a throwback to the sort of spectacle no one in Hollywood – save, well, Ridley Scott – is interested in anymore. But it can be equally dispassionate, in a way that duly and accurately captures the man one contemporary described as “a chess master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity”.

Its self-congratulatory crusade to restore its subject’s reputation has, for the sake of entertainment, distorted reality to the point that it borders on farce.

The cast - Michael Horden, Ronald Pickup, Cyril Cusack - is distinguished, and the film not without sluggish charm. [27 Jul 1989, p.15]

The Guardians films have always been about the fact that many of us are like putty – shaped not by where we’ve come from but where we are and could end up. Vol 3 should make audiences thrilled about what comes next for Gunn in his new position as co-head of DC Studios. As for Marvel – well, it’ll be their loss.

Gladiator II, in short, shows us how to make cinema with a capital “C”.

The Apprentice’s most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi’s portrait of the early days of the former president and current presidential candidate a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly.

Hermanus gestures towards a sweeping story and in the process loses the pulse of the material that is there. As the window dressing is lavishly built up, the love story itself slips away.

Edwards presents himself as an ideas-on-his-sleeve kind of guy, who’s invested in readdressing the meaning behind some of the most commonplace sci-fi imagery.

Iain Softley, its first-time director, handles his actors with skill and has a real flair for comedy. But Backbeat also feels lightweight, not a landmark movie - it betrays its long genesis and many rewrites in an overpacked and unfocussed script, so often the weakness of Palace's previous productions. [01 Apr 1994, p.23]

It was Gyllenhaal, here in a producer role, who initially bought the rights to Gustav Möller’s Danish film. You could call this a vanity project, but at least his presence adds a dose of originality to this carbon copy remake.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget may not quite rise to its predecessor’s level, but if this is the closest Aardman ever comes to selling out then, well, there’s still hope for animation’s future.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is also disarmingly tender, blessed with a deep affectation for its subject that feels fuller and more romantic in its nature than straightforward respect.

Downton Abbey: A New Era is whatever the opposite of a French Exit might look like. Rather than a party guest slipping out quietly, it’s the bumptious visitor making their final, sluggish turn around the room.

As light as McAvoy’s touch might be – this is a film, after all, that features a James Corden cameo – there’s more to do here than simply cheer the boys on and hope they get one over on the Oxbridge elite. There are bigger questions to ask, and California Schemin’ is willing to ask them.

With barely a twist to speak of (at least in the traditional sense), his latest film Knock at the Cabin feels like a repudiation of the past.

H Is for Hawk concerns itself less with the healing of wounds, but rather with the prying open of them. Can we look so deep into the pulp that the fear of it eventually washes away?

As Fingernails goes on, though, it never transcends its leading questions. Instead it maintains a quiet simmer.

That one already notorious sequence aside, Triangle of Sadness feels a little like gnashing at air.

Maria is a tragedy, but not because of one of life’s piteous events. Instead it’s the tragedy of a woman’s failure to heal her wounds with her art.

In Christopher Andrews’s stark, haunted debut – anchored by two soulfully frayed performances by Abbott and Keoghan – violence becomes the only language left to speak when shame, resentment, and desperation have stripped the words right out of these people’s mouths.

The special effects are gruesomely convincing, and Robinson views the world of advertising with a characteristically sharp comic eye. [25 Jul 1989, p.29]

Affleck and Damon, at least, try to pump a little crotchety humanity into their characters. But any hope of suspense, any genuine mystery over who (if anyone) is on the path of betrayal, is swiftly dashed by how poorly defined these suspects are.

To the film’s credit, there’s also real style tucked into the periphery, as characters breeze past Richard Quinn florals and Lady Gaga, still in her Tim Burton demon era, performs on a runway of models in loose, patterned Seventies gowns and oversized hats. It’s a compromise. But, then, that’s what The Devil Wears Prada 2 has turned out to be all about – it’s artistry snuck in beneath the commerce.

Beau Is Afraid is an Oedipal farce hysterically outsized in its execution.

Michelle Yeoh comfortably steals the show in this starry adaptation of lesser-known mystery ‘The Hallowe’en Party’.

The fourth ‘Matrix’ film offers a volcanic cluster of ideas with ambition – and a reminder that long black coats and tiny sunglasses are, indeed, very cool.

There are all kinds of deception being practised in this whodunit, then, not least by Alfred Hitchcock. [28 Feb 2009, p.48]

Young Woman and the Sea is pure Hollywood fluff – but it’s hearty, wholesome fluff, of a kind that makes immediate sense once Jerry Bruckheimer’s name pops up in the credits as a producer.

You could claw together some brilliant short films from the best sequences here, but this 36-years-in-the-making follow-up should make us all question Tim Burton’s modern storytelling sense.

It’s when the film veers into more serious territory that it becomes unstuck.

Plane is stifled by just how ordinary it is, and how closely it hews to the standard tropes of action films with longer, more descriptive – yet less ridiculous – titles.

Cuckoo isn’t a horror movie for people who dislike unanswered questions, since Singer, who also wrote its script, is far more interested in emotional logic than the literal kind.

It’s a busy catalogue of gruesome absurdities that’s more consciously surrealist than the Final Destination series’s Mouse Trap-style executions, akin instead to the bizarro corpses crowding the afterlife’s waiting room in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), with a splash of Peter Jackson’s early, gore-splattered horror-comedies.

All that’s really changed is that How to Train Your Dragon is now distinctly less charming and less playful than before, with even its pièce de résistance Toothless losing some of the cute factor (he looks real mean when he growls).

It’s surprising how much the film can flit between clangingly obvious bits of exposition – aha! The source of the floppy red hat! A reindeer that happens to be named Blitzen! – and more mature perspectives on the holidays.

The problem with this brand of Hollywood tale is that, by excessively romanticising their subjects, they diminish their humanity.

Franco provides a platform for his two leads, Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, to give blisteringly intense performances. But the film would surely have benefitted from a little more nuance and delicacy.

Fire and Ash, I’m sure, will find its place in the canon. But that doesn’t excuse its flaws.

The film’s vision of the Twenties may be propelled to the very border of believability, but it’s rarely inauthentic. This is a work of studious imagination.

Bitter and twisted and a visual marvel. [18 Jul 1996, p.6]

Director Pascual Sisto has achieved something a little more clever than pure imitation. He takes his audience’s expectations, that his film can only lead to bloodshed and despair, and leaves them hanging in the air for as long as he likes – it’s both tantalising and deliberately unsatisfying. You’re never given the comfort of knowing what comes next.

This project should have been relatively straightforward: to provide a worthy showcase for Hudson, who is tremendous in exactly the kind of way that grabs the attention of awards show voting bodies.

While it pleads for us to reckon with the ugliest of truths, it shuts the curtains before its own reckoning is done.

There is something pleasantly nostalgic about the film’s straightforwardness.

It’s both wholly satisfying and ridiculously fun.

As a class satire, it reaches no conclusions. But it’s filled to the brim with darkly funny, bile-slicked revulsion.

No matter how enticing the prospect may sound on paper, and even with the efforts of director Chris Columbus (of Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire fame), the whole affair is so flimsy you’ll lose nothing from watching it on an iPad while cooking dinner.

Unfortunately, the further away from Tatum and Bullock you get, the more the film struggles.

It turns out that the point of the multiverse, and of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, isn’t its creative potential. It’s its cameos. A million universes could exist, and they’d all contain surprise appearances by people and things fans can hoot and holler over, before being purchased as toys on the way out of the cinema.

The talent of tomorrow has to play second fiddle to a generation’s inability to let go of the past. And that’s something a quick body swap can’t solve.

The film’s so plain in its ambitions – in its sense of giddy, well-intentioned fun – that it feels a little pointless to scorn its more superficial choices.

It all makes for an admirable rather than a likeable work, one which hardens its heart against contentment and even good luck. [13 May 1990, p.21]

The Many Saints of Newark is both instantly recognisable and somehow unplaceable. It’s fierce and brilliant, too – a work that both expands on and complicates the cultural legacy of The Sopranos.

It’s a little metatextual analysis served up with a generous side of guts and gore, stabbing its cake and eating it with gleeful abandon.

Nostalgia rarely factors into Lightyear, which makes the franchise connection feel almost like a bit of window dressing slapped on to an entirely unrelated sci-fi story. Maybe that’s the only way to get butts in seats these days. Especially to watch what is, at the end of the day, a film that does the job it needs to do but without a crumb of anything more.

The pathos is laid on very thick. At times, you wonder why a filmmaker as sophisticated as Aronofsky is resorting to such manipulative tactics. Beneath all its blubber, though, this turns out to be a film with a very big heart.

What’s surprising is that, though Miller’s imagination remains entirely untarnished, Three Thousand Years of Longing stands in defiance of all of Fury Road’s sagest lessons. The film sags where it should speed; it mumbles when it should pronounce; it narrows when it should expand.

Returning director Kevin Greutert knows what’ll satisfy his audience: a few buckets of blood and the gag-inducing sound of crunching bone. Here, they’ll get exactly what they want.

Gaga plays the film’s early scenes with a winking, playful innocence, consciously mirroring Patrizia’s story with that of Ally, her character in 2018’s A Star is Born – another ordinary woman plucked from relative obscurity.

It is, at the very least, far more interested in words than ideas – perhaps the defining feature of Sorkin’s work.

All emotions here are predetermined. The point is that we’ve simply been given licence to feel.

What’s worked before works here just as well. Tommy Shelby persists.

The tone is distinctly feelgood, but the film, directed by Shekhar Kapur, thoughtfully explores the different ways that relationships can be built, and what cultures can teach one another.

Behind the lazy, shock-tactic humour lies a streak of genuine humanity, something to carry the film beyond mere butts and boobs.

Deliver Me from Nowhere’s Springsteen is untouchable and untethered – little more than a bundle of hurt feelings floating aimlessly across the Garden State.

It’s conflicted, messy, ambiguous, and imperfect, but it’s treated with enough of a delicate, scrupulous hand to test the moral waters and not degrade itself in the process.

It’s obvious why this cast were attracted to The Forgiven – an actor’s most thrilling challenge is to find the brokenness hidden in between the cruellest of words. Fiennes and Chastain have always excelled in this area, as they do here. But the ugliness quickly wears thin.

It does, in its DNA, certainly feel like a part of the Wickiverse, even if Reeves’s inevitable cameo feels forced. And while it doesn’t add much depth to the world, it at least gives credence to the amusing suggestion that these films do, in fact, take place in an alternate dimension where every person on the planet is a professional assassin.

Nice casting can’t cover up the ugly visuals and lack of creative risk.

It's something of a personal triumph: Scott Ryan not only wrote and directed, but puts on a superbly believable turn as Ray - a low-rent, swaggering psycho, a long way from the suit-wearing assassins of Hollywood myth.

The pair operate at a low simmer of hysteria that feels farcical without ever losing believability, while treating sincere emotion like the bursting of a dam that threatens to drown them together. They love as they hate in The Roses, decadently and without restraint.