Access and subplots are occasionally inconsistent against the political turmoil. Still, what it lacks in context and shape it makes up for with a sense of urgency and indignation.

There is nothing here to win over those habitually ill disposed to sword and sorcery, but anybody half on board should have a decent time. It is certainly a heck of a lot better than the over-extended Hobbit trilogy.

The high concept becomes a near irrelevance as we struggle with a humanist story that lacks the emotional zest Hirokazu Koreeda habitually brings to related material. The messages are inarguable. The means of delivery leaves something to be desired.

The problem – and it is no small one – rests with the leads. Elordi is fine as an unthinking hunk of abusive resentment. But the script cannot make sense of this Cathy as someone of Robbie’s age. At least one sarky crack confirms the character is no longer supposed to be a teenager (or anything close), but the dialogue does not satisfactorily retune Cathy to a woman in her 30s.

The final act descends into chaotic silliness, but watching Dinklage and Pike attempting to out-villain one another is never dull. Deborah Newhall’s costumes would look intimidatingly power-hungry on a clothes hanger, let alone Ms Pike. And there’s a terrifying subject lurking under the dark humour.

If anything, The Unbearable Weight is not quite tricksy enough.

Taking cues from the lively cast, Nabil Ayouch’s third feature to make it to Cannes is scrappy, occasionally messy, prone to distractions, and never less than diverting.

Anderson’s 11th movie is simultaneously furiously busy and curiously uneventful.

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.

A strong set of performances from a top-flight cast help close Malone’s deal.

Mostly the film is a showcase for Jude Law’s increasingly impressive late-career metamorphosis. The actor, who has spent recent years successfully probing wounded masculinities (The Young Pope, Firebrand), brings a strikingly controlled energy to his portrayal of Vladimir Putin as a lofty and weaponised civil servant.

Wonka is not any sort of disaster. It is made with enormous professionalism. It abounds with good nature. And it does offer at least one fascinating titbit about the protagonist’s background.

Imagine a Roger Corman film made with the combined budgets of every Roger Corman film and you are halfway there.

It is made with respect. It has educational value. But the film-makers, working with a modest budget, have made sure to include much head-splitting action.

It lacks the wild provocations of Schrader’s scalding recent trilogy, but Oh, Canada pokes and probes in quieter, sneakier ways.

It falls to the charming cast to outshine the flimsy material. Gladstone and Tran are as warm and well-worn as a much-loved bed sweater. Bowen Yang thrums with millennial angst. Joan Chen steals scenes as Angela’s loudly gay-positive mother.

Save for some Skittle-coloured CG and cartoon violence, the original West End director Matthew Warchus puts a filmed version of the stage show onscreen. Theatre fans will be delighted; movie fans will wonder where the wide-angle chorus lines went to.

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 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.

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.

Rich in imagination and ambition, and highly original as it explores the darker, sexual side of familiar fairytales, chiefly Little Red Riding Hood. [04 Nov 2005, p.9]

One remains puzzled as to what these films want to be. Not nearly enough is done with the animal natures of the heroes.

It is often argued that The Strokes are the last rock stars and that their Manhattan peers are the last great bohemians. It’s an Americentric view, but it’s gospel truth for this appealing if impressionistic time capsule.

The final impression is of a thesis only partially expanded into satisfactory dramedy, but, thanks to casting in depth and good writing on a line-by-line basis, Irresistible never feels like a chore.

This isn’t as funny as Blades of Glory or The Other Guys or premier league Ferrell outings. It is, however, amusing and good-natured.

It’s certainly something to see – especially Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes and Jade Healy’s production design – and plenty to mull over but both the viewer and the film-maker should have guessed from the offset that there can only be one Barry Lyndon.

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.

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.

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.

Technically impressive and anchored by two terrific turns, Copilot walks a fine line as it attempts to delve into the humanity under extremism.

Under the satire, there’s an authentic sense of emotional uncertainty.

It is 15 minutes too long and, with all the emotional and literal clamour, loses some of the intimacy you desire for a rural golden-age-of-crime lampoon.

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

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.

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.

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.

For all the bustle, flow and noise, there is little here we haven’t seen before.

The sustained twitchy energy of the script amplifies the jangling nerves of Hanna’s fight-or-flight dilemma. But Liv’s weak-mindedness can feel implausible and the grandstanding denouement feels jarring and unearned.

Many will be won over by the emotional surge of the closing moments. Others will wonder if there is a word for a manipulative drama that fails to satisfactorily manipulate.

From Wim Wenders’s Hammett to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth, the English-language debut is a rock on which many directors have run aground. So it proves with Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, a picture stuffed with good performances, pretty things and weighty dialogue that nonetheless fails to coalesce into the shape of an Almodóvar film.

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

For all the impeccable production values – including Bakker’s outlandish 1980s costumes, all lovingly recreated by Mitchell Travers – the film’s generosity towards its controversial heroine feels like an unwarranted canonisation.

This French-made documentary, though not nearly as much fun as Banksy’s own Oscar- nominated doc Exit Through the Gift Shop, presents a decent potted history of Bristol’s (?) most famous export since Cary Grant. Various art correspondents and dealers pop up to discuss Banksy’s cultural significance while a number of investigators put forward their theories.

A paternoster of strong scenes and strong performances serve only to highlight pedestrian writing elsewhere.

Many worse horror titles will make it to cinemas throughout the coming year. This is pulp as pulp should be.

Extra Ordinary is not always subtle, but most viewers will yield to its mystic charms.

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.

The triumvirate of actors at the heart of the film are so committed and so good. The songs are pleasing. The script is clever. There’s a charming Aristilean intimacy about the fixed location. Conversely, there are too many ideas and ambitions here to fit into a low-budget picture.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It hardly needs to be said that, as it goes on – and it does go on – the film loses coherence and slips into rampaging chaos. But, coming a year or so after that catastrophic Exorcist sequel, The First Omen feels a lot better than it needed to be. That may have to do.

The attempts to get us interested in fictional NFT art are no more successful than the international cabal of idiots’ efforts to draw us to the real thing. For all that, there is a sort of honest energy to Lift that deserves just a sliver of respect.

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.

Fair play to Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, the songwriters drafted in to replace Lin-Manuel Miranda: Moana 2 can’t quite match the showstopping highs of the original film’s How Far I’ll Go, but the songs are consistently, toe-tappingly good.

Bjerg’s central performance is a lumbering delight and Youssef’s comparatively straight-man routine makes one pine for a spin-off sitcom.

Coming 2 America understands its relationship with nostalgia and by golly, it wrings every last warm feeling for the end of cultural history.

It is a strong, stoic performance from Talpe in a film that doesn’t allow its secondary characters much nuance.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody plays by the rules of the TV movie to efficient, if scarcely groundbreaking, effect. It will change no minds about Whitney Houston.

An engaging chronicle, nonetheless.

It feels almost like a pitch to direct Bond and – in common with the recent 007 spoof scenes in Minions – it’s a better Bond film than (at least) the last two entries from that franchise, save for a couple of things.

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

The Pale Blue Eye is beautifully shot and absurdly plotted.

It accordingly falls to Ford to save the day. The octogenarian’s gruff charm endures against the brain-numbing CG tableaux.

Elio is a half-formed thing. The basic story beats suggest that subplots and jokes have gone missing. Even the buddy comedy between Elio and Glordon is curiously marginalised. The candy-coloured character designs will please younger viewers, but the all-ages pleasures of peak Pixar are in short supply.

Thankfully, Tron: Ares is less ponderous than Tron: Legacy, and the music is turned up to 11 in the hope you won’t notice all the shortcomings.

It’ll do well enough for summer-break popcorn-lovers, but as DreamWorks Animations go, it’s no How to Train Your Dragon.

Goodbye June is messy, humanistic and shamelessly sentimental.

The film attempts both an in-depth portrait of the late author and a scattershot meditation on the persistence of his ideas.

Screamboat is no classic, but it knows its audience.

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.

A film that turns the savagery of apartheid into a crisis of conscience for one relatively privileged white boy. Worse yet, it suggests that his crisis is a matter of urgent concern for countless South African blacks. [9 Oct 1992, p.11]

The remake succeeds in recapturing the suspense of key sequences such as the tense bathroom scene and the restaurant assassination, but most of the time it's a pedestrian piece of work unimaginatively directed by John Badham who lacks Luc Besson's skill for distracting us from disbelief. [2 July 1993, p.11]

Neither as fun as the early seasons of Cobra Kai nor as effective as the 2010 reboot, Karate Kid: Legends relies heavily on franchise favourites while bringing nothing new to the party.

All sincerely intended. All a bit rickety. Still, The Bride! does just about get by on suave style and committed performances.

The real issue is the distracting and disturbing “digital fur technology”. Every time Cats settles into an admittedly avant-garde shape, an ear twitches or a tail flicks and you’re back thinking about how ghastly the actual cats look.

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.

North shows all the signs of being one of those movies that get "straightened out" in post production, with any life they have being squeezed out in the process. [29 Jul 1994, p.9]

Named for a Buddhist concept referencing the transition between birth and death, Bardo may transport the viewer to a dream space but not perhaps the one Iñárritu intended. Zzzzz.

The movie loses its way, piling on pointless narrative twists and relying more and more on very contrived coincidence. [07 Apr 1995, p.13]

This messy romantic phantasmagoria is a hinterland for no one: a musical without musical numbers, a romcom without comedy. Sincerity saves it from collapse.

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.

The costuming and production design are so crisp one can often overlook the vacuum within the packaging.

Based on an acclaimed documentary, the film looks to be asking us to fill in the many gaps in its Swiss-cheese narrative.

What we really needed was something in the vein of the second Scream film – a sequel that, rather than just deconstructing classic Disney tropes, satirised emerging conventions of the streaming sequel.

Marianne may learn to “pass” for a cleaner – kind of – but she can never experience the precariousness faced by her subjects. Her idea that these people are entirely invisible is bogus from the get-go. The script wrestles with these problems but it simply cannot overcome them.

Among the undercooked female parts, Cruz converts a nothing wife role into fabulous distress. Even she can’t save Ferrari. Who knew a film about fast cars could be such a slog?

It doesn’t quite work. Actors as talented as Negga and Patel can’t enliven the “zany” auxiliary friend roles. Levy’s script, more damningly, can’t quite reconcile grief with the film’s romcom ambitions. A promising first film, nonetheless.

All of these parties try hard with a script that, while credited to Jen D’Angelo, doesn’t appear to have been entirely written as yet.

Anne Robbins’s costumes are dazzling. The production designer Donal Woods makes a dull country-fair storyline look magical. But for all the nostalgic gibberish about passing the baton, this latest instalment stalls and curdles.

Adams, as usual, gives it her all, but it’s as if Kafka’s Metamorphosis had been adapted as frivolous comic operetta.

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.

Even if such a proposition didn’t quite work out it would surely be the right sort of failure. Maybe a gloriously camp Jailhouse Rock. As it happens, we have ended up with a drab affair that never gets properly started.

The only noteworthy achievement of Jurassic Park Dominion is to render the dinosaurs mundane and superfluous.

Here [Bertolucci]'s desire to communicate simply has become simplistic as he skims the surface of ancient ideas of reincarnation and nirvana. [20 May 1994, p.11]

Laurent Tangy’s slick cinematography adds to the sense that we’re watching a luxe commercial. But for what? It’s impossible to figure out who this empty film is for or why it exists in the first place.