Unrequited love is seldom so much fun.

The book may not show its age, but this adaptation feels more ancient than the oceans.

For all the disappointments, McQueen has delivered a grand mainstream entertainment that puts pressure on the tear ducts as it uncovers unspoken truths.

There are things to admire, but Bring Them Down is a hard film to like.

The deadpan tone recalls the drollery of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and What We Do in the Shadows. Montpetit channels the teen angst of a young Winona Ryder. The effect reframes this dark comedy as a species-swapped, harder-edged, very French Edward Scissorhands.

A welcome oddity.

There are interesting notes on the intersection between love, mental illness, obsession, performance, and fandom. If only the movie were a little better.

Will & Harper, a natural Netflix entertainment, oscillates between sincere openness and painful artifice.

It remains something to see, interestingly atrocious, misfiring on the grandest scale, and often best watched through the fingers. Megaflopolis might be a better name for it.

My Old Ass sensitively and sweetly negotiates coming-of-age themes, first love, wistful summer recollections and wise-cracking dialogue.

You couldn’t sincerely argue that The Outrun brims over with plot, but its rough, maritime texture is never less than diverting. It needles. It provokes.

Horror aficionados will find much to admire, but everything about this wild project defies generic expectations. It’s a thriller; it’s a cat-and-mouse game; it’s a truly messed-up love story.

The damaged, rising community depicted in Sugarland are in no mood for apologies. They want accountability.

A film that is no less thrilling for its sober rigour.

Director Coralie Fargeat follows up her gory 2017 rape-reprisal thriller, Revenge, with this outrageous comic body-horror, pitched somewhere between Sunset Boulevard and Brian Yuzna’s cult classic, Society.

A late narrative development swerves the meet-cute into less sure-footed terrain. But this remains an encounter to treasure, jollied along by quiet political protest and poignant notes on widowhood.

By the close, one is left befuddled. Is this a tragedy? Is this a comedy? Is it a moral fable? Cruelty to Homo criticus is the least of its problems.

For a film that depicts the discovery of the Holocaust, Lee is curiously flat and uninvolving. Miller and the images she captured deserve better.

James Watkins’s version easily justifies its independent existence, however. Four first-rate performances find new energies in the story. The shift in nationalities adds other interesting angles.

A worthy contender in a British revival characterised by eerie cult classics as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Lee Haven Jones’s The Feast and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men.

There are reminders of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and Sean Baker’s incoming Palme d’Or winner Anora in that urban chaos, but Watts’s bland style washes out all the grime to leave us with, well, something you might expect from a streaming release.

Pierre, who replaced John Boyega after the latter’s controversial departure, is a convincing and charismatic action hero. The supporting cast, particularly Robb, Emory Cohen, and Johnson, make for good company. The film’s cinematographer, David Gallego, does some nifty footwork around a thrilling Mexican standoff. Worth the wait.

Page’s closeness to the material grafts a fascinating biographical dimension to this intimate drama. The story may lack conflict and clout. But it’s great to see Page back on the big screen.

Though immaculately made in every respect, Paradise Is Burning never quite finds its narrative rhythms. The story is happily fussing over here and then gets distracted by something over there. But Sine Vadstrup Brooker’s lovely cinematography, drifting in the liminal spaces between city and country, keeps the viewer uneasily gripped throughout.

Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned.

McCarthy’s directorial precision is complemented by wit and an imaginative backstory that deserves an expanded universe.

Sing Sing itself does us all good while delivering a compendium of engaging personal dramas. Domingo rules over all like the most benign of creative deities.

The gunplay of the final act isn’t as much fun as the properly creepy build-up. No matter. This self-aware German-Hollywood coproduction atones with plenty of Teutonsploitation humour.

A glossy package. Not quite enough inside.

The most anxious Jewish comedy since the Coen brothers visited Jobian trauma on Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man stars Carol Kane as an adult bat-mitzvah student. This alone would justify the admission price, but there’s more.

The only distinguishing feature of this exhilaratingly bad film is its apparent close association with London’s tourism authorities.

A jigsaw puzzle, dream sequences and continuous snatches of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata build towards an uneasy denouement that will leave the viewer guessing and obsessing long after the final credits roll.

In Swan Song, feathers, synchronicity and sheer graft define the world’s most popular ballet.

Alien: Romulus remains a shapeless beast that never so much as hints at the disciplined elegance of Scott’s founding text. The action progresses rather than builds.

A carefully modulated tone allows zombie cows, end-of-life care and jokes about furious masturbation to coexist, sometimes in the same scene.

Unfortunately, the longer the thing goes on the less it ceases to be good honest rubbish and the more it expects us to care about the stupid, stupid plot. Console junkies will find themselves involuntarily hammering an imagined X button in the hope of getting back to the gameplay. No good. You’re stuck with this wacko BS.

Loyal fans will be pleased. Untold millions of BookTok users can’t be wrong, surely.

Janet Planet plays a little like a memory piece from an unknown future – the assembled past life of an adult who, as a child, grasped only a bare majority of the tensions unfolding about her. A lovely, flawed idyll.

Niasari, who writes and produces as well as directing, racks up the tension to match his psychopathy in this sure-footed debut feature.

The unlikely friendship between Michael and Kensuke is the heart of a film that touches lightly on environmental themes, loss and history.

With little of Crockett’s original charm remaining, the audience is left with a generic entertainment struggling to find a reason to exist beyond the need for more “content”. As soon seen as forgotten.

The vigorous, masterful script, written by the director his wife and frequent collaborator Ebru Ceylan, counterpoints the extended runtime. The director says he could have made the film longer; remarkably, most viewers will agree.

It’s a haunting spectacle that will leave you reeling, even before a heartbreaking aftermath.

The creators of Deadpool will argue, lamely in my view, that by admitting the puerile nature of the humour they inure themselves to criticism in that area, but no such excuses are offered for the onanistic self-regard. After two hours of this infantile mugging, one is left longing for the genuinely upending humour of the Batman TV series from 60 years ago. Awful. Just awful.

Following on from Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, Crossing gifts us the second essential Georgian screen heroine of 2024.

Nobody will walk away from Skywalkers: A Love Story raving about its soap-opera shenanigans. But as an exercise in physical unsettlement it could hardly be bettered.

Writer-director Josh Margolin, making his feature debut, based the eponymous character on his grandmother. The script, accordingly, is never patronising.

Twisters feels no need to offer footnotes and variation on its predecessor. It’s a big fat summer movie in its own right. And that’s something these days.

Hardwicke and O’Hara make for forbidding facades with unexpected depths, but impressive newcomer Ollie West, who appears in every scene, shoulders most of the emotional heft.

If nothing else, this fine debut feature from Korean director Jason Yu – hitherto assistant director to Bong Joon-ho – counts as a small masterpiece of tone.

This underpowered, $100-million-budgeted space oddity was originally intended for streaming. And it shows.

Völker’s sensitive film brings together these two wounded families to sit down for tea. It’s a fascinating encounter defined by guilt and unspeakable hurt. There is no sense of absolution or cathartic breakthrough. There is only imperfect reckoning.

Yes, the pulpy mythologies sometimes overshadow that carefully maintained mood. But it remains quite a mood. Hokum as high art.

A grim thrill rounded off with a chilling last shot.

Though largely for already-persuaded aficionados, Blue Lock The Movie: Episode Nagi has enough imaginative zing to make up for its somewhat monotonous storytelling. This is football reimagined as a heightened form of futuristic warfare. Those who already know they like it will like it very much.

Goth remains fiercely committed to the bit. West, a talented, ideas-driven film-maker, makes merry with contemporaneous tropes, yet falls well short of the substance or sleaze that defined Cruising, Hardcore, or the other films referenced throughout.

Murphy reminds us, albeit at a lower temperature, what caused so many heads to laugh themselves off shoulders during his pomp.

“If you had the chance to talk to someone that died, that you love, would you take it?” asks Christi Angel in this apprehensive documentary portrait of dead-raising digital capitalism.

The set pieces are well handled, but this prequel stands out most for its commitment to fleshy humanity.

It is plainly the work of talented individuals, but it ultimately leaves you with little to show for your patience other than a pounding headache.

The Caméra d’Or-winner Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq’s affecting quasi-autobiographical drama is sweetly reminiscent of Céline Sciamma’s childcentric will-o’-the-wisps Petite Maman and My Life as a Courgette.

The cross-cutting between activism, brutish military figures and merciless degradation doesn’t always work. But the haunted faces of actors such as Jalal Altawil are hard to forget.

Unfortunately the characterisation is so thin and the dialogue so clunky that the thing plays more like one of those 1960s surf horrors – Cannibal Martians at Wipeout Cove – that invited drive-in audiences to speculate about which beach denizen deserved to get eaten first (usually a hard question to answer).

The pacing can be too stately, but an impressive ensemble working through a surfeit of good ideas compensates for the lack of jump scares.

Most contemporary westerns end up mourning a vanished era of compromised freedom. The Bikeriders doesn’t quite believe in that myth, but it still finds time to dampen a handkerchief as its shadow recedes. A flawed, fascinating film.

Hang in there and it’s rewardingly novel, touchingly human and agreeably nutty.

There is, as there was in the first film, a profound sadness at the heart of Inside Out 2.

The miracle is that most of it sticks. Kane is a fine craftsman.

Mortensen’s script tussles between feminist revision and old-school male showdowns, imagining Vivienne as a Joan of Arc-inspired frontierswoman yet subject to the degradations of the era.

Arjona brings heat to an undeveloped character. Powell, who manages to wring a moment of magnetism from iPhone notes, inevitably steals the show.

The downside to all this is that it reminds us that video games tend to manage cleaner storytelling than the makers of Bad Boys: Ride or Die do. The film plays as a muddle of set pieces – some impressive, most unintelligible – that fail to form any kind of coherent line. One almost longs for Bay’s return. His satanic mayhem at least had a consistency to it.

The film has its flaws, but worriers will find much with which to identify.

All in all, a diverting entertainment that, unlike so much contemporary horror, is prepared to have a good time. Fun for all the family.

Straddling the current revival of the picaresque in US indie cinema (The Sweet East, Riddle of Fire) and cinéma vérité, this is a pleasing meander, skilfully directed, shot, and edited by the upcoming auteur siblings.

The many textures and mysteries don’t always fit together. Indeed, the movie is better when it trades in real-world patriarchal controls and abuses rather than things that go bump in the night. But this remarkable debut feature will keep you hooked until the final reveal.

The Nicolas Cage renaissance rages on and this unsettling Ozpoiltation thriller provides a perfect sandbox for “Nicolas Cage”, the actor who enjoys a good metatextual jape.

The cast rises to match a huge emotional register culminating in literal and figurative explosions. Audiard’s book reimagines the musical halfway between heated drama and song. Choreography, cinematography, and design equally lean into his Sprechstimme innovations.

An inspired cast jolly along Baker’s back-alley Lubitsch towards an unexpectedly circumspect denouement. Tart observations about money, class, and power are encrypted in a lumpenprole romp.

The seat-of-the-pants grit of the first film seems as distant as kitchen-sink verite.

The Apprentice lacks the gravitas or impact of [Abbasi's] earlier films, but it’s a pleasing enough doodle thanks to Stan, Strong, and a lot of period wigs.

Not everyone will approve of the big swing here. But few will resist the richness and fullness of [Arnold's] characterisation.

Whispered myths about periods and cleanliness coalesce into a perfect accidental riposte to Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Her words are clear, unsentimental and so evocative that you can almost smell the weed.

If comes together nicely in a moving denouement that almost makes sense of the fantastic clutter. Often touching. Often infuriating.

This is often a difficult film to watch. The subject’s physical frailty is palpable, and his resistance to even the least intrusive advice is infuriating. The atmosphere of fug, filth and peril is suffocating. But Chambers selects the footage cunningly to always allow whispers of charm to filter through the stubbornness.

Scorsese’s rhapsodical memories match the romance of Powell and Pressburger’s transportive storytelling and indelible images; his account of first seeing the rhododendrons in Black Narcissus on a nitrate print is as magical as the image.

Aisha is a portrait of unassailable dignity in the face of cruel happenstance.

The film is good enough to deserve the sequels towards which it there gestures.

Oh, well. Perhaps the best response to junk food is junk cinema.

Working from a novel by the Georgian author Tamta Melashvili, Naveriani and her writer, Nikoloz Mdivani, have crafted a warm, witty and wise film.

Nobody (surely) was expecting The Godfather from the director of Atomic Blonde and the writer of Hotel Artemis. Nobody (equally) could have anticipated such a dreary mess.

What keeps it ticking is the fiery gut-clenched romance between the two leads.

Elegant drone shots add indelible images to an otherwise forgettable action film.

If the film has a significant flaw, it is that it doesn’t get the room to breathe. Another 10 minutes to flesh out plots and subplots would have been nice.

A real stonker of an entertainment.

Barrera is a reliable and veteran Final Girl, but even she can’t save the film from collapsing under the weight of its own silliness. Fun for a while.

The script carefully draws details from the gospels as it journeys towards an ending that is miraculous in every sense.

All You Need Is Death, craggy and rough-edged, may be in constant conversation with the distant past, but it also puts up signposts to the future for Irish horror cinema. It’s about time somebody found a name for this artistic movement (if it is yet that).