Birdy, in many ways, is basically a pint-sized Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s onscreen alter-ego and the de facto lead of Girls. Both wrestle with the insecurities that stem from never quite aligning with traditional expectations of femininity. Both refuse to ever consider that the blessings and burdens they carry may not be universally shared among their acquaintances.

All in all, the film is exactly as you’d imagine a Hollywood remake to be. It’s too po-faced, too stripped of its meanness. And so drearily inevitable.

It’s a joy to watch Julia Roberts and George Clooney fall in love. It’s an even greater joy to watch them bicker.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is damn funny, often deliriously so.

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 is a messy, convoluted affair with some very contrived plotting.

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.

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.

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.

First-time feature director Lee Cooper’s sweet, soulful documentary Maisie captures Raven in the run-up to his 85th birthday celebrations and provides a joyful insight into the trailblazing life of Britain’s oldest working drag performer.

Peele, really, is the magician disguised as a filmmaker. Nope is the sleight of hand so slick you’ll never question how the trick was pulled off.

Beast represents the apex of low-expectation cinema.

Official Competition may be yet another satire on filmmaking, but it’s the rare iteration that’s nuanced enough to understand that self-awareness does not equal absolution.

The film’s distractingly scattered in its attempt to capture the full breadth and width of its social commentary. In fact, it’s so stuffed with tangentially related ideas that even its timeline feels confusing and difficult to follow, signalled only by the erratic changes in McKay’s hair colour.

There’s a surprising amount to enjoy here, with director William Brent Bell (behind The Boy franchise, with its equally ludicrous premise centered on a haunted doll), making the smart decision to turn the unintentional camp of Orphan into intentional camp, alongside adding a dose of satire about the corruptive pressures of the nuclear family.

And I hate to ask for this, in a world where an excess of lore has been the downfall of so many projects, but Day Shift lacks any sense of context to what exactly this vampire hunter union is or does.

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.

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.

Pitt’s funny here – there’s a precise comic timing to the way he shoves a venomous snake down a toilet bowl – but Bullet Train feels so try-hard in its quirky theatrics that it’s a little like watching a kid repeatedly calling for their mother’s attention before they cartwheel into a brick wall.

While the calibre of star voices here is superb, it seems odd to centre the entire film around Johnson and Hart. So much of their chemistry in Jumanji or Central Intelligence was rooted in odd-couple physical comedy – a guy who’s always cracking jokes about his own short stature versus the closest we have to a living demi-god.

It’s hard to treat Joyride just as a pleasant but easily disposable romp, especially when Reynolds loads up the film with so much cheap symbolism.

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.

It feels like She Will spends its entire runtime on the very cusp of a completed sentence. I was desperate for an explanation, but the film is frustratingly secretive – those answers, it seems, are still buried deep.

Does the fact the film largely ignores the book’s treatise on nature and virtue absolve it of all connections to Owens’s real-life controversies? It certainly doesn’t, on an artistic level, improve what’s already contained on the page. Newman’s vision of rural South Carolina is scrubbed so clean you might as well call it #swampcore – the Spanish moss looks bright and pristine, the flower petals on the water almost consciously arranged.

The Railway Children Return is part-sequel, part-remake, with a carefully selected smattering of callbacks for the fans.

Everywhere looks so slick and empty that it’s impossible to differentiate any scene from your standard luxury hotel ad.

Above all, at no point during Carrie Cracknell’s directorial debut do you ever get the sense that anyone’s actually read Persuasion.

Of course, Ragnarok’s distinctive humour is carried over, and there’s a blissfully dumb running joke about a pair of giant, heavy metal-screaming goats. But, really, it’s the heart that matters here.

There’s nothing all that special about The Rise of Gru, but it runs like a well-oiled machine.

Nitram is a stark, difficult, but deeply reflective film that asks sincerely why we describe these crimes as incomprehensible at the very same time as we watch the same patterns unfold, again and again.

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.

Empowerment is only one piece of the puzzle, which together forms a refreshingly nuanced portrait of sex work, desire and self-perception.

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.

Kappel’s astounding performance constantly draws the film’s energy back to her in a way that ensures the audience is never in doubt of Linnea’s own agency, even in her most vulnerable moments.

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.

Though Dominion marks the end of the Jurassic World trilogy, I can’t imagine this is the last we’ll see of the franchise. As they say, life finds a way. Hopefully next time they’ll have actually figured out what they’re doing.

Stanley Donen's 1957 musical represents a triumph of form over content.

Dashcam is pure chaos, headlined by a character with a maelstrom for a personality.

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?”

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.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie proves that more of the same is sometimes the very best thing.

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.

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.

Benediction isn’t a cradle-to-grave biopic, nor does it dramatise a single, pivotal event. It’s one man’s breathless search, careening back and forth through the chapters of his life in search of something concrete and true. It’s beautiful, but only in the way it tends to its tragedies with such care.

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.

Everything Everywhere All at Once exists in the outer wilds of the imagination, in the realm of lucid dreaming and liminal spaces. It bounces off familiar representations of altered states, whether it be The Matrix or the phantasmical films of Michel Gondry, while feeling entirely unclassifiable. It’s both proudly puerile, with a running joke about butt plugs, and breathlessly sincere about the daily toil of intergenerational trauma.

Is Noé suddenly feeling self-reflective? Not to be contrarian for the sake of it, but I struggle to find anything gentle or humanistic in Vortex. That’s what’s so mesmerising about it. It is the ringing of the death knell, a memento mori in action, and an alienating if ultimately deeply humbling experience for its audience.

Top Gun: Maverick really isn’t packed with the kind of craven nostalgia that we’re used to these days. It’s smarter, subtler, and wholly more humanistic.

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.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair doesn’t quite go where it’s expected, or hit the most obvious talking points. It offers something all the more intriguing – a last-minute twist that forces us to reexamine what we’d already accepted as either truth or fiction.

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.

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

In Benedetta, master provocateur Paul Verhoeven demolishes the line between the sacred and the profane. The breast becomes holy, a source of nourishment from which religious fervour can stem. The Virgin Mary, in turn, inspires not only boundless grace but sexual desire.

True, grief is universal – but To Olivia never embraces the fact that stories draw their power from specificity. It’s what makes them feel real.

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

It’s a big risk to spend that much cash on an auteur-driven historical epic at a time when historical epics have largely fallen by the wayside. But what a beautiful risk it is. I call upon Odin: may The Northman make a billion dollars.

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.

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.

The Bubble’s script is credited to Apatow and Team America co-writer Pam Brady, and there are occasional flashes of barbed, satirical wit here. Generally, though, The Bubble resembles a flutter of loose ideas, to which a vast ensemble of reliably funny actors have been tasked with adding colour.

At no point here – or during the last film – does it feel like anyone actually figured out how Sonic works as the centre of a live-action movie.

‘Spider-Man’ spin-off is too flavourless to even be the wild, untethered disaster some were secretly hoping for.

The Worst Person in the World carries a shimmery feeling of definitiveness to it. It’s the rare piece of art actually invested in why an entire generation can seem so aimless and indecisive.

Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.

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

Lyne can laugh at these people because he holds little respect for them, and there’s a general sense of revulsion directed here towards the rich and reckless. His camera navigates queasily through the film like he’s capturing a natural disaster in action.

Rex actively underplays Mikey’s self-interest and cruelty, so that – in a way – the audience becomes an equal target of his manipulation.

The tone here aims for a vague combination of time-travelling romps like Back to the Future and Flight of the Navigator plus time-travelling weepies like Forever Young and The Lake House. It wears both those tones unconvincingly, like a serial killer in a skin suit.

In its earliest stages, Turning Red is bracingly different, and filled with an earnest warmth when it comes to themes of girlhood and the panic-inducing weirdness of the human body. That it becomes a loud and action-driven spectacle seems disappointingly inevitable for a Disney film.

The Duke reminds us once more, [Michell] knew how to get the very best out of his actors without forcing unnecessary dramatics.

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.

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.

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

Soderbergh may not have intended Kimi to be a film primarily about the pandemic, but it understands intimately what it’s felt like to live through it.

There’s a lot, in fact, to Uncharted that feels haphazard or under-considered.

The film is perfectly adequate. Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 murder mystery is texturally conventional, even if he’s made his own adjustments to the cast of suspects.

In an era in which many of Lopez’s romcom peers – namely the Witherspoons and the Bullocks – have pivoted to dark dramas, it’s lovely to see her still banging the drum for a genre that’s never earned the respect it’s deserved. Then again, she knows what that feels like.

It is a tender, sprawling drama that feels less inert than its predecessor and far more compelling.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye has done right by its subject, but only at the cost of shrinking down her world.

It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. And it’s exactly as absurd as you could ever hope it would be.

In Sing 2’s defence, the film is at least enthusiastic about its own overabundance, and the new celebrity voice additions – Halsey’s mollycoddled, rich-girl wolf or Letitia Wright’s street-dancing lynx – fit nicely into the mix.

Parallel Mothers, in that way, brings a new sense of depth to Almodóvar’s gallery of fearless women – suggesting that their strength is not always by choice.

Branagh doesn’t seem as eager as Cuaron to interrogate his own memories, or to reckon with how the protective veil of one’s parents can shield a child from reality.

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.

Arnold’s Cow is grimy and unvarnished where it counts, laced with poeticism whenever the banal cruelty threatens to leave its audience numb.

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.

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.

The 355 is a mark of progress only in how wholly unremarkable it feels.

Boxing Licorice Pizza inside the realm of juvenile memory more often feels like an excuse than a conceit.

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.

It’s a body horror that’s really a family drama; that’s really a sly comedy about the discomfort of being trapped inside all this vulnerable, imperfect flesh.

McDormand carves out a little space for anger, though underplaying her performance so early on gives her further to leap when Lady Macbeth must succumb to her eventual madness. But, if anything, it only adds to the terrible weight of inevitability that hovers over Coen’s film.

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.

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.

That’s the wonderful thing about The Lost Daughter – it embraces thorniness. It treats it not as a personality flaw but as a badge of survival. Sadness is lanced through the heart of Gyllenhaal’s film, which she both adapted and directed, but it’s rich and luxurious in its texture.

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?

All the pleasures of The King’s Man find themselves inevitably undermined by its hollowness.

There’s something oddly satisfying about the way McKay's film lets us laugh at our own doom.

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