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.

Now 85, Scott again proves there is nobody so efficient at pressing contemporary technology to the limits. He also draws heroic performances from fleshy human beings

The urgency of the project ironically detracts from the drama. The story is simply too recent and too fresh to yield any surprises on the big screen. The characters appear mostly fleetingly and without time and space for development. This is precisely why the genre demands recognisable faces with baggage.

Along Came Love (which has a deceptive title) does not torture the emotion or tax the brain, but, well acted and easy on the eye, it just about delivers on its early promise of knotty personal drama. It also has important things to say – implicitly for the most part – about the unjust expectations placed on women in French society.

Moving from his standard New York neurotic, Eisenberg does a convincing job of moving from frustration to a violent, active mania. Poots is better still as someone who can’t find the words to communicate her growing despair.

For all the extravagant special effects and efforts to tug at our heartstrings, what we get is more of an epic variety show than coherent space opera.

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.

The film – like its subject – lets the pomp and circumstance do the talking.

There are technical blips. Occasionally, the 3D character animation and frame-rate stutter in the margins. But the film’s approximation of temporal confines never leaves the viewer feeling stuck in a moment.

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

The narrative parallels with Gladiator – taking in soft-edged shadows of the earlier characters – only press home the current project’s second-hand status. It’s no Gladiator. It’s no Asterix the Gladiator.

This is ultimately an inspirational yarn focused on the value of standing by convictions.

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.

What we have here is something like a supervillain origin story, with Cohn spelling out almost every negative trait that now defines the former president. That makes for momentum, but the approach – supposing a man is made by other men alone – is also inherently trivial and reductive.

The wafer-thin characterisation and over-reliance on musical recitals make it hard to buy into the film’s premise of enduring love.

Adults and smarter kids will enjoy the digs at the pomposity of professional saints. Everyone else can laugh at the genuinely funny talking guinea pig.

The Creator sticks to a strong, pulpy narrative that never lets up in pace. There are vast action sequences and intimate, scruffy fight scenes. The film is, however, as memorable for its cinematic texture as its twists and turns.

Though Dawn of the Nugget is not on the same plane as a masterpiece like Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, it delivers zippy good-hearted jokes at a cracking pace without outstaying its welcome.

Pitched somewhere between folk horror, ecological revenge and scathing class critique, The Feast is at its best during the elegantly atmospheric, nervy first hour, as cinematographer Bjørn Ståle Bratberg picks out ominous details.

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.

Working from Julia Cox’s agreeably prickly script, the Oscar-winning filmmakers revel in Nyad’s reputation as a thundering wagon. They are aided in no small way by Annette Bening’s fierce performance, work that trumpets the arrival of awards season.

Had we seen none of Cumberbatch’s earlier troubled intellectuals, we might embrace his performance with enthusiasm. But there are a few too many familiar manoeuvres for comfort in a performance that treads water throughout.

For all the moral compromises and narrative confusion, you couldn’t say A New Era is boring. There is a constant sense of excellent actors making the best of indifferent material.

An appropriately monstrous hit with audiences at London’s Sundance and Dublin’s Horrorthon festivals, this is not quite a fairy tale, but it comes close enough to cast a spell.

The film exists to give Lopez an opportunity to bring the house down. She does that, but it’s not quite enough.

At 76, more than 20 films into his storied career, Paul Schrader can still deliver a sucker punch.

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.

For all the plum-on-the-nose satire, Östlund does not, however, fall into the trap of making every target a monster.

Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned.

When film-makers aren’t asking people to read their films as westerns they are asking for them to be read as Greek tragedies. For all the commitment of the actors and brooding ambience of the film-making, Bring Them Down can’t quite sustain that comparison.

At its best, The Devil Wears Prada 2 engages saltily with the social and economic changes that have set in since the 2006 original. One yearns for a little more of Miranda’s amusingly half-hearted attempts to accommodate woke restrictions on her acidic put-downs.

Not everything works in the admirably bizarre In the Earth, but nobody can deny Wheatley is back in his freak-folk wheelhouse.

Beau Is Afraid is all clatter and stress and movement, but the director is in control throughout, engineering both comic set pieces and existential show trials with equal invention.

Branagh’s decent performance and Christie’s indestructible reputation may just be enough to see the film through to a modest profit and, later, decent figures on Disney+. But A Haunting in Venice feels like a misguided experimental sprig from an already compromised operation.

In Lana Wachowski’s defence, much of Resurrections does play like a sincere conversation with herself. She and her sister invented this extraordinary world, and they have the right to analyse and deconstruct it. But she is a victim of her own early success.

For all that emotional content, Amanda is a pleasingly unsentimental film, never more so than in its understanding of children.

This is a rather conventional artist’s biopic for an unconventional person and it’s a film that ends as suddenly (and frustratingly) as it begins.

Rather than just pushing the characters through their familiar beats, the well-judged narrative arc takes them on something like a proper journey.

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

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.

It’s just a great story, you wonder why nobody thought to make a movie before.

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

There is a sense here not just of Vietnam-era experimental cinema but of contemporaneous postmodern novels by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and the recently late John Barth. Smart and dumb. Fascinating and frustrating. An absolute blast.

The film, which always feels like classy telly rather than a pioneering effort befitting its subjects, might have made more of this dilemma.

Amulet has been billed as a feminist revenge horror. It’s a savage one, powered along by the same metaphorical heft that made The Babadook such a sensation.

It remains a fascinating, stylish, uncompromising thriller for all its repugnant prejudices: punk rock movie-making for the ruling elite.

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.

The parallel father-and-son storylines may feel a bit too tidy, but Nabulsi’s film is powered along by terrific performances and palpable fury.

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, for all its razzle-dazzle, never loses sight of its northern working-class roots.

This is a Terrifier movie: everything is bigger and scarier, including the psychological damage.

The film’s failure is a shame. The straight romantic movie deserves to thrive and African-American talent deserves an opportunity to play out its stories in the mainstream. But The Photograph is too nice, too leisurely and too lacking in friction. Oh, for more of the briefly glimpsed satire that, in scenes set in the 1980s, sees Mae’s mom competing for a job against an unending line of banal, primped, Upper East Side princesses. That’s what we’re looking for.

Dumb, fun, and definitely not for the acrophobic. See it. Then go argue plot points with people on the internet.

The film, set within the bland, institutional corridors of a Norwegian primary school, chronicles a single afternoon that stretches into a surreal purgatory of suspicion, guilt and (finally) something like the compellingly demented choreography of Climax, Gaspar Noé’s dance horror.

There is a fair degree of fun to be had before the script gets too caught up in its own mythology.

The dialogue is yellow-pack, the set-up is so silly you wonder why they didn’t parachute in a dinosaur or set off a volcanic explosion for good measure, and the sparsely populated commercial flight screams budgetary constraints. Still, it ticks along, makes merry, and everyone works hard and sweatily to put the “AAAAAAH” back into action.

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 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.

Good old-fashioned disgusting fun. I had a blast.

No sensitive viewer could deny the spirit of the original remains, but Jeremy Sims’s charming cover version reverberates with unmistakably Australian harmonies.

One could bang on all day about how familiar so much of this seems. But it is only fair to acknowledge that, judged as an independent entity (if such an assessment is possible), the current How to Train Your Dragon works as sleek, charming, funny entertainment.

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

It doesn’t exactly subvert expectations, but the sharp writing and subtle acting make for a more satisfying experience than a bald synopsis promises.

A winning cast, mostly drawn from the ranks of Gen Z, ensures that Rosaline’s spurned, sulky plans to steal Romeo back from Juliet can be fun.

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.

Rarely has anything looked simultaneously so spectacular and so monotonous. It’s like being drowned to drunken death in a lake of curaçao.

It hardly needs to be said that the film will not be for everyone. But even those frustrated by the knotted plotting will admit that Hadžihalilović masters the crucial trick of presenting the narrative as if it makes sense to itself.

For all its confusion, Babylon really does function as celebration of an increasingly threatened medium.

For the most part...A Life on the Farm is a warm-hearted celebration of an oddity for the ages.

There is some fun to be derived from supposedly maggoty peasants muttering rosaries against inclement weather while looking as if they’ve been styled for the Emmanuelle reboot. But not enough to justify a feature film, let alone all those paintings.

What Respect does have going for it is Jennifer Hudson and some stirring musical sequences. Just as these films have become loaded with cliches, the reviews have too often lazily argued that “[Lead Actor X] just about saves the day”. Well, here we are again.

She’s a marvellous, magical character who, in this adaptation of the popular manga, takes second place to the male auteur she has plucked from obscurity.

Onward falls well short of magical.

For all the Hollywood gloss, Vanderbilt sounds an alarming relevance in Göring’s sneering claim that Hitler “made us feel German again” and Triest’s warning that “it happened because people let it happen”.

Franchise fans will appreciate another glimpse of Plankton’s unlikely hillbilly clan. And there’s plenty of room for traditional SpongeBob bungling. Who knew marital discord could be so much fun for all ages?

Sarandon is, sad to say, not the best thing in a film that only occasionally rises above the anarchic mediocrity we expect from the DC Extended Universe.

Hassan and Ingar deliver compelling, complementary performances: Hassan is as quiet and vulnerable as Ingar is fiery and charismatic. Clarissa Cappellani’s fluid cinematography and Fiona DeSouza’s stylish edits and inserts keep pace with the youthful exuberance. Judicious use of flashback sets up a gut-punch coda.

There is much rushing to little purpose. Too many dull contractual glitches get in the way of the enthusiastic performances.

Directors Danny Clinch, Taryn Gould, and Colleen Hennessy have sifted through hundreds of hours of footage to fashion something that allows for a sense of the person behind the rock casualty. To this end, they do a splendid job.

Fennell sets off in the right direction. A strong cast helps her on her way. But conviction falters long before the tables are kicked over.

Marc Evans’s film is a lovely thing.

If you found yourself internally screaming for Ryan Reynolds to shut the hell up during Deadpool, then the relentless, zany narration of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn will likely send you gibbering and ruined towards the emergency exit after, oh, 23 seconds.

Unfortunately, the longer the film goes on the more blankly didactic it becomes.

Sure, the film borrows shamelessly from Romancing the Stone, but that film was itself slip-streaming behind Raiders of the Lost Ark. Everything about The Lost City is yelling “fun, fun, fun!” in your lughole. You are being dared not to have a good time.

What we have here is an efficient compilation of the hoariest sporting cliches given a breath of life by some charming actors.

The film is not a dead loss. The sheer chaos of the thing is welcome in an age when big-budget films travel along too-straight lines. Raimi is allowed a few moments of characteristic invention. But nothing here suggests there is much room to manoeuvre within the Marvel straitjacket. A disappointment.

House of Cardin drags out fascinating archive interviews to tease and tantalise. Cardin is articulate about his creative strategies, but the man inside remains something of a mystery.

This old-school confection, smartly reuniting the original cast, delights in every silly scene.

See How They Run is not quite so self-regarding as Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, but See How They Run is a delightful, shamelessly affectionate deconstruction of ChristieLand that outstays not a second of its welcome.

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.

A humane work devised by serious minds.

There’s enough drama to hold the film together for the uninitiated, although many fleetingly introduced characters suggest that – for all David Chase’s protests against streaming – we’re watching a pilot rather than a truly standalone project.

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.

Lightyear may well feature the studio’s best opening gambit since Wall-E and Up, but the film quickly falls into, well, adequacy.

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

The director of shockers such as Requiem for a Dream and Mother! has had his mainstream moments, but he has never before been quite so at home to tawdry soap opera.

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

Miller has, as directors often will, followed up a succès d’estime — this is his first film since Mad Max: Fury Road — with something of a personal folly. Better that than bland boilerplate, but Three Thousand Years of Longing grates as often as it charms.

It’s not exactly a world you would want to live in but Jumbo, nonetheless, is awash with a sympathetic visual aesthetic that gives us some sense of where the odd passion springs from. It needs a strong actor to compete with that madness, and Merlant does not disappoint.