Not atypically for a portmanteau picture, this surprise winner from last year’s Venice film festival is intermittently arresting and wildly uneven.

It’s fortunate that Dylan O’Brien has just enough goofy charm to hold all the plundered Build-a-Bear bits together.

For all its abundant flaws, The United States vs Billie Holiday is clearly the work of a man with hot celluloid running through his lymphatic system. I guess that is a compliment.

We bounce from one adventure to another without settling into anything like a rhythm. But the nuanced acting and characterisation elevate a film that feels securely connected to a particular place and time. The Bronx has rarely been so affectionately evoked.

Williams and her contemporaries are excellent. The senior actors do, however, steal the show. It’s lovely to see both having such a disreputably good time.

Edebiri works hard, but her notebook-clutching Nancy Drew asks dimwitted questions, even after the guests start to “disappear”.

They don’t make them like this any more. To be fair, they never made them quite like this. Passes the time very nicely (and occasionally horribly).

Nicholas and Tryhorn’s new film for Netflix, though plenty laudatory, presents a contemplative Pelé that appears human after all.

Mr Malcolm’s List plays like Jane Austen fan-fiction, which isn’t the worst subgenre in the world, even if nobody could ever confuse the plot with that of Lady Susan, let alone Pride and Prejudice.

It is all very on the nose. It’s all shamelessly manipulative. Mind you, a cynic might argue you could say the same of Diamond’s best songs. And there’s nothing wrong with a hatful of Neil.

There’s not much formal romance here, but there’s a great deal of love.

And yet. Howard is so irrepressibly charming that Argylle proves hard to wholly resist. Her inherent warmth and charm add interesting balance to the violence she ultimately gets to inflict on circling maniacs. One must also grudgingly acknowledge Vaughn’s dedication to an epic mayhem that strives towards a blend of Bollywood, Hong Kong action and Golden Age musical.

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.

This is a fond requiem from a Bowie fan, made with reverence for his art and respect for his privacy.

Watchable, if a bit lopsided, it’s far from the catastrophe that some of the more unkind reviews have suggested.

What is most conspicuously absence is a hint, in even the vaguest technical terms, of what made Bernstein such an admired conductor and composer. It is not enough to have people tell us (and him) he’s a genius. The film does, however, give us a dramatic tribute to the passion he put into his work.

There are some good ideas here. The overpowering prettiness is welcome in the windy months. But the characters are somewhat lost in a busy rush to find some new angle (any new angle) on a much-adapted text.

The film is (like its predecessor) no classic, but it would play well enough to a packed Friday-night audience in Megaplex 3.

Occasionally, the narrative is almost as wilfully undisciplined as its commendably rebellious heroine.

Daliland is an entertaining if disappointingly formulaic entry into the Harron canon.

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

Many will roll their eyes when Williams is praised for supposedly ground-breaking collaboration with luxury brands. But the real problem with this tolerably diverting film is that he isn’t really that interesting.

All this might be unbearable were it not for some lovely performances and, despite the familiar tropes, a commitment to treat Louis and his condition with respect.

Like the village it depicts, the film is meticulously crafted yet oddly two-dimensional: a map, not a place.

DeVine gets away with a barn-door broadness that, nodding to the Jerry Lewis tendency, chimes with a film that works a surprising amount of explicit violence into its hectic slapstick.

The appearance of Malik Zidi rounds off a fine cast and introduces intriguing echoes of the amnesiac romance of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That and decent tech specs, including some nifty shots from veteran horror cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, offset the slightly cobbled-together feel of the material.

Cowboys nonetheless gets by on goodwill and a passion for compromised Americana. Only a lowdown dirty heel would cuss it out.

Hardcore fans will rejoice in telling us it is not for children. It’s not really for adults either. But the eternal inner adolescent that lives within us all will almost certainly have a swell time.

It’s a fascinating delve or “kaleidoscope” as the film-makers have it. The film is as complete a portrait as we may ever get.

The emotional pyrotechnics that scaffold most cancer dramas, give way to something that is as honest as it is understated.

The film never attains the Shakespearean-sized tragedy of the Korean director’s Decision to Leave or the bludgeoning impact of OldBoy.

Almost entirely set in the island community, The Road Dance delivers on its mission to entertain without defying any long-standing conventions. A pleasant slice of afternoon telly for the big screen.

Clocking in at just over an hour, Get Back: The Rooftop Concert turns out to be simultaneously too much and not quite enough.

Once Upon a Time in America remains the most “problematic” of Leone’s major pictures. It is enveloping, operatic and slightly mad. We can forgive the confusion and the non- synchronised dialogue. But to this day the misogyny remains indigestible. [2014 re-release]

The Bard’s most famous creation may be many things, but Scarlet’s earnest moralising about empathy and collective responsibility feels more like Polonius’s vibe.

Will Gluck, who presided over the disastrous 2014 adaptation of Annie and the misfiring comedies Friends with Benefits and Easy A, makes for a competent presence in the director’s chair. It’s the human stars, however, who truly shine.

Reviews will be mixed. But it has every chance of being resurrected as a cult classic.

Malmkrog is a talky, challenging slog, but it’s seldom short of ideas. One is unlikely to find greater consideration of pelagianism in any other film this year. Or decade.

Sure, you will learn more – and hear more of the original recordings – in Asif Kapadia’s great documentary Amy, but Taylor-Johnson does a decent job of making a tight drama from the same tragic yarn.

Mendes’s script, though it contains some memorable scenes, tries to do too much, as it takes on racial and sexual inequality, mental-health issues and, incongruously, the romance of cinema.

The longer it goes on, however, the less fun and more earnest it becomes.

This remains a sincerely felt piece of entertainment that, unusually for current mainstream cinema, treats the audience and its characters like adults. Worth indulging.

Onward falls well short of magical.

We are left with a perfectly respectable, eminently professional slice of prestige arthouse. Nobody with even modestly open-minded sensibilities will walk away in a blind fury. Few will leave in an ecstasy of transcendence.

We should celebrate Winterbottom’s determination to get these points made in a mainstream entertainment. Greed is good enough (sorry). But we still deserve something better.

Has Denis Villeneuve succeeded where others – most notably Alejandro Jodorowsky – have floundered? Given the extensive runtime, it’s impossible not to think of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s alleged assessment of the French revolution: “Too early to say.”

If the writers were really doing it by the numbers there’d be a drunk one, a foreign one and a mad one. Cattaneo gets the digits back into the formula, however, for a rousing finale that – as we all knew it would – bounces back from a last-minute setback.

Beefed up with one too many musical numbers from the protagonist’s dad, The Perfect Candidate feels a bit slight on plot and character. But Zahrani’s performance and the urgency of the issues elevate it from the ordinary. A great last shot compensates for all deficiencies.

The French Dispatch is a lovely, lovely thing. But it is as impossible to grasp as a handful of water.

For all the cast’s best efforts, however, Foe never seems more than a theoretical exercise, a sketch for an uncompleted project.

There is both too much and too little going on. It passes the time busily, but leaves us lost in copious allusion and unfinished narrative.

Prentice Penny directs her own script with verve. Mamoudou Athie, who’s been knocking on the door for a few years, is good enough to suggest that he’ll be unavoidable in a year or two.

The viewer may struggle with the continuing inconsistency — the film is more comfortable with the supposedly compromised Elvis than the barely seen roots artist — but the audience is, at least, propelled back into the street in something like an elevated mood.

In common with Edgar Wright’s recent portrait of Sparks, Tornatore’s film largely eschews such niceties as documentary structure in favour of enthusiastic chronology. And then Ennio worked with Pasolini; and then he worked with Dario Argento. And so on. It’s an interesting biography, nonetheless.

This is a deliberately puzzling, oblique affair that never runs when it can sneak.

Full of sound and fury, signifying something. If only we knew what that was.

Wildcat remains a tense, diverting study of a man struggling with internal demons while doing his best for an initially helpless creature.

Not everything works here. Too much is overfamiliar. But Run Rabbit Run retains a clammy grip throughout. Definitely worth a stream.

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

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

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

What really makes Bruised worth sticking with, however, is the epic closing fight sequence.

The camera dutifully records esteemed actors – including one Corrie veteran, as it happens – talking in beautifully appointed rooms, but it seldom finds the cinematic spark that might elevate the drama beyond a polished theatrical exercise.

There are qualities to admire here even if it always feels like a movie manufactured by a committee.

Ziegler’s performance is the best thing about Music. For friends and family members of those on the spectrum, it’s a revelation and an acknowledgment that people with autism can be remarkable without having remarkable abilities like those found in Rain Man or Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

For all the good work, however, the film fails to fully capture the madness of the response at home.

A perennially sun-dappled kitchen. Cast-iron pans. Belle-époque bustles. Gastroporn doesn’t come more XXX-rated than this insanely pretty, airily vacant livre de recettes.

Afterlife is fine. It passes the time. But somewhere between the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man recycled as hundreds of Tribble-alike menaces and Muncher, a fatter variant of Slimer, one finds oneself wishing that studios might use their vast resources for something more than the repackaging of old rope.

Neeson is, of course, perfectly capable of chewing through the quips while carrying the city’s sins on his broad shoulders. But he needs more help from a rigid script to make sense of a character that seems defined by archetype alone.

The storytelling is routine. It warrants neither its hard-core disciples nor its worst enemies. Ignore the dishonest huffing and puffing.

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.

It is still a thundering mess that ends with the usual boring battle in a CGI sky. But, on a scene-by-scene basis, The Flash passes the time better than Gunn’s own puzzlingly lauded Suicide Squad.

Its backwards glances serve only to remind us how transcendent Disney animation once was – as recently as Frozen – without offering any hopeful signposts to the future. But, yes, cracking songs.

A worthy, if workmanlike, tribute.

Ultimately, for good or ill, one has to accept that Bono’s compunction to spill his emotional innards is, for fans, more of a feature than a bug.

It is impossible to watch the picture without meditating on the way video games have changed action cinema. Similar thoughts kicked up during the very different 1917, but the loop is more dizzying here.

Thunderbolts* works best as a jokey romp at home to tolerable quips amid mounting chaos.

By focusing on human-sized and domestic drama, The End We Start From can’t match the escalating jeopardy and horrific narrative punch of such similarly themed, bigger-budgeted fare as The Road or I Am Legend.

Bombshell is entertaining throughout, but it offers little more nuance than a morning spent with Fox & Friends.

Sadly, the film falls short of being A-ha’s Some Kind of Monster (Metallica’s cringy group therapy epic).

Coming after the exhaustingly overstuffed Superman, First Steps rattles along with a refreshing clarity of purpose.

The film frantically tries to juggle farce, family comedy and the inherited trauma of the Holocaust. The results are not as egregious as Life Is Beautiful, but too much feels unearned and wildly inappropriate.

It’s a pleasing enough vibe, nonetheless – Sevigny and Wolff channel Gen X-worthy self-deprecation. Del Campo and a wandering horse come close to delivering the magic promised by the title.

The new film is a plodding affair, characterised more by fastidious set dressing than by narrative tension.

Mid-grade comedy Drac at best. Diverting for all that.

Nobody with a brain in their heads will compare Dial of Destiny favourably to the first three films. There is a sense throughout of a project struggling to stand beneath the weight of its history. But Mangold, director of Logan and 3.10 to Yuma, knows how to keep his foot on the pedal. The recreations of the 1960s vistas are gorgeous. The agreeable cameos keep coming.

Seydoux and Poupand bring plenty of emotional clout to their roles, even if the script straddles uncomfortably between verité and melodrama.

A lovely, pastoral pleasure that admits its share of blood-drawing barbs.

The thing still works well enough as a middlebrow hankie dampener.

A cult waiting to happen. [22 Sept 2006, p.13]

The problem here is not insight but narrative stagnation. Too often H Is for Hawk confuses slowness with contemplation, repeating emotional beats and trumpeting parallels between Helen and Mabel.

The script is smartly self-fulfilling. Devil’s Due co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett deliver jump-scares with mechanical precision. The thrill, however, is gone.

LeBron has charm to burn, even if his performance is unlikely to keep Denzel awake at night. It’s a shame this messy film can’t keep pace with his likability or mad skills.

The moon is square and the action is so daft that it makes the Sonic the Hedgehog sequence feel like the work of Ingmar Bergman.

The Croods: New Age remains a sequel that no one was crying out for. It’s busy. It’s well-staffed. It passes the time.

Affleck has made no secret of his struggles with alcohol and has talked about the catharsis he experienced shooting Finding the Way Back. It’s a career-best performance, one that marries hulking physicality and internalised demons, as Jack battles grief and addiction.

The Fire Inside has enough quality to please genre and sports enthusiasts even if it feels like an undercard fixture. For all the talent on both sides of the camera, the nuts-and-bolts script lacks innovation and the pacing neither bobs nor weaves.

The perfunctory attempts to address social issues do not really come off. But it works through its tolerable high concepts with a great deal of verve and charm.