In her own coolly analytical way, Coppola makes some trenchant points about the way Priscilla is controlled by the men in her life. She is living in a gilded cage. The wealth and luxury she experiences don’t compensate for her complete loss of freedom.

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

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.

You, Me, & Tuscany is its own micro-miracle, a pure romcom where its protagonist isn’t jaded by romance, has no impulse to deconstruct the modern relationship, and isn’t forced through any preliminary Hinge date humiliation ritual. Here, all we need are two very charming and attractive people – Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page – and the soft, undulating hills of the Italian countryside.

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande showcase phenomenal vocal ability in this adaptation of the blockbuster musical, but they’re let down by a film that is aggressively overlit and shot like a TV advert.

The Substance doesn’t quite gel as it should, but it’s potent.

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 Texan auteur’s new film – his 22nd, and the first of two due for release in this year alone – boasts a fine, quirky and courageous performance from Ethan Hawke, but it’s a stagey affair which at times becomes very stilted.

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.

As imperfect as Armageddon Time is, its director’s honesty is something to be appreciated.

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.

Another Simple Favour has no aspirations beyond being a quick morsel. And a morsel it is.

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

This 1950s Hollywood examination of mental illness won an Oscar for Joanne Woodward, who plays a frumpy housewife, a sultry seductress and an urban sophisticate, giving a virtuoso performance which manages to compensate for Nunnally Johnson's flat direction. [25 Jun 1999, p.21]

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

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

There’s an odd timidity here that borders on self-denial.

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.

Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s impassioned and atmospheric direction really takes hold.

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.

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.

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.

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]

The Equalizer 3 is about as good as the first film – it neatly counterbalances Fuqua’s baroque, blood-and-guts action with Washington’s ability to command attention while sitting perfectly still.

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]

Most of Silent Night’s pleasures are to be found in the strength of its cast – Knightley, whose comic talent is frequently underused, can turn on a kind manic perkiness that’s as endearing as it is absolutely terrifying. It’s a smile that says, yes, if I ever were to murder you, they’d never find the body.

It’s a rare achievement contained within an even rarer type of film: a Black-led, British romantic comedy. But there are, unfortunately, limits to how new and invigorating Boxing Day actually feels.

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