High-class sex work is presented as a financial quick fix and a route to female empowerment, but the film’s sex-positive politics gloss over any of the job’s potential pitfalls.

In Oscar Isaac’s enigmatic blackjack player “William Tell”, with his wary hooded eyes and closed book countenance, the film has a broodingly commanding central performance. It’s a pity, then, that much of its promise is squandered by sloppiness, both in the writing and elsewhere.

For all the impressive qualities of the picture, it does feel as though there is a rigid upper-age limit for its audience.

Reorienting a typically white male genre around themes of feminist awakening and racial tension is an intriguing proposition, so it’s frustrating that Brosnahan remains blank and the film’s pace plodding.

Buckley, as always, is terrific, bringing the picture more emotional potency than it perhaps warrants.

It’s possibly the most Russian thing ever created, and it’s most certainly not a soothing viewing experience. But there’s something grimly fascinating about it nonetheless.

The theatrical origins of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom weigh heavy on this film, directed with a stagey air by Tony award winner George C Wolfe.

This flimsy movie about an American millionaire caught up with the English aristocracy is performed with considerable style by Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons. [29 Jun 2008, p.18]

There are some gory moments (a man’s leg is sliced, the flesh falling off like meat from a rotisserie, and a sleazy character has a grisly encounter with a lawnmower), but the film extracts more laughs than genuine scares.

It may be big, brawling and somewhat inelegant in approach, but this Gerard Butler vehicle is an aviation fuel-powered good time.

If you’re looking for a film that explains where the Spielbergian tropes you know and love came from, then The Fabelmans is for you.

The picture, a big-budget spectacle guided by the sure hand of action director Seung-wan Ryu (Crying Fist), is at its most effective when the hurtling camera is strafed by bullets. It’s less successful when the headlong pace falters to allow the screenplay to hammer home its message of collaboration and tolerance.

It’s perfectly watchable but a film with this puttering pace is never going to get the blood racing.

It’s all fairly predictable. Anyone who has seen more than a couple of serial killer movies will have no problem assembling a list of possible masked murderers. But Josh Ruben’s film goes above and beyond when it comes to squelchy, visceral gore.

Provocative and challenging, if not the most subtle piece of political commentary, the film certainly cements Kaouther Ben Hania as a name to watch in Arab cinema.

Anderson’s backdrop, a kind of steroidally enhanced Frenchness reminiscent of films such as Belleville Rendez-Vous and Amélie, is rather lovely, if ultimately as far removed from reality as is the film’s romanticised view of journalism.

This perky computer-animated adventure leans a little heavily on its meta self-aware storytelling devices (expect numerous fourth-wall-smashing to camera asides), but it’s a fun, if slightly macabre option for family audiences.

Poehler, herself a gifted comedian, doesn’t include her own voice in the film, though we still get a sense of her feminist perspective.

In the lead role, Anya Taylor-Joy creates an admirably spiky character who is less likable than some of her screen predecessors, and all the better for it.

Sara Forestier is likable enough as the somewhat hapless Sophie, who dreams of working as an artist but whose main preoccupation is finding a man.

The story is a little flat, but the gorgeous, hand-crafted puppets and sets give the film dimension.

Letts gives thoughtful context to the way he was able to straddle the racially delineated worlds of dub reggae and punk rock, drawing parallels between the merging of subcultures in 1970s London, and the intersection of hip-hop and rock’n’roll in 1980s New York.

The acting by Melvyn Douglas, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn and Barbara Harris (particularly good as Aldas wife) is of a high order, the settings are authentic, but its all a trifle predictable. [30 Jan 2000]

It’s a droll, perceptive and shamelessly sentimental look at generational tensions.

Rather than a slick, high-concept fantasy action picture in the vein of Everything Everywhere All at Once, here is a B-movie throwback with its roots in the pulpy creature features of the 1950s. Viewed from this perspective, the shonky special effects are just part of the fun.

No amount of resourceful set dressing can convince us that this poky MGM backlot is a perspiring slab of French Indochina in monsoon season. [03 Aug 2014, p.6]

The force of Fuhrman’s performance – as she demonstrated in last year’s The Novice, she can be a remarkable and unsettling presence in front of a camera – goes a considerable way towards reclaiming the role of the malevolent mini psychopath Esther. Even more impressive is Julia Stiles, a supremely talented yet underused actor who dominates this film from a gloriously unexpected midpoint twist onwards.

Billy’s inane babbling gets a little wearing, but the action sequences, featuring dragon-based mayhem, cyclopes and an army of formidable hell unicorns hopped up on candy, are pacy and fun.