His tender, witty, wondrous The Phoenician Scheme is the most Andersonian Anderson film to date – but then again, they all are, and that’s the fun of them.

Summoning ghastly spectres of the real past, with the tragic ballast this one lends, always carries the risk that they’ll frighten mere fictions off the screen.

While a late twist may potentially dismay, it also allows Mackenzie to raise the stakes in a battle of wits whose participants previously felt more like opponents than foes. It gets personal – nasty, even – and this ice-cool throwback suddenly bursts into flames.

Respectful if not revelatory, Bouzereau’s film gives her legacy a massage, gently probing, but also leaving her in peace.

It all comes across as one-sided, which makes the whole thing play like a PR video rather than a genuine examination of her premiership.

It’s a film that creaks as reassuringly as leather.

The film’s addictive patterning draws us into its cycles of obsession as hungry observers: each part dispenses only as much new information as Moll wants to give away.

The tone oscillates between earnestness and mischief, a little uneasily. There’s a trippy, funhouse aspect to it which yields a couple of splattery punchlines, but it could have gone further in this direction

Body Double isn’t trash, misogynistic or otherwise. It’s unrepentantly trashy – not the kind of film you watch while your parents or kids are in the house, or with your curtains open. But it’s also a complex, provocative suspense thriller that bears comparison with the three immaculate Hitchcock classics – Vertigo, Psycho and Rear Window – it gleefully drags through the sludge.

The script never lunges for cheap drama by forcing Saroo into a binary choice between mothers, and the most complex beats are about tip-toeing around, often counter-productively, to avoid hurt or betrayal.

What a step up for Moretz this is. Her wobbly credentials as a leading lady – oddly, and maybe ill-advisedly, there’s a Carrie reference in the script – suddenly feel like a thing of the past. There’s eye-rolling resignation in her performance, then bottomless despair, then tentative hope.

Not only does Egerton have Elton’s look and mannerisms down to an uncanny degree, he also musters up enough of his subject’s signature showmanship to give a performance that’s joyously at peace with its own preposterousness.

Yes, Evil Dead Rise indulges in the odd bit of homage, from its chainsaw-based final showdown to an amusing opening gag about Raimi’s trademark demon’s-eye-view tracking shots. But it mostly just wants to scare you witless – and (for this critic, anyway), resoundingly succeeds.

As a rattling ghost-train ride through sewers and derelict houses even David Lynch would think twice before exploring, the film toot-toots its way around at often deafening volume, but settles for doing only partial justice to King’s epic ambitions. Perhaps Muschietti has more of these stored up for the sequel, once an audience has gained faith that the scary stuff – petrifying, when it peaks – is well and truly in hand.

Morris gives it the old college try, but Rumsfeld is too smooth an operator to let anything slip.

A gothic horror story and revenge thriller, it’s one of the darkest Westerns going. As much a ghost story as anything else, it stars Eastwood as a gunslinging cowboy paid handsomely to protect an idyllic Californian mining town from bandits.

It’s consistently absorbing as well as evocative to the harsh finish, with mordant plot surprises Connolly keeps smartly tucked away.

Leslie Mann’s warmth and air of charming confusion have helped many a film before. But she gets some definitive moments for the clipreel here.

Perhaps La Grazia is enjoyed best as a more optimistic B-side to either Il Divo or Loro, Sorrentino’s lewd and scurrilous biopics of the former Italian prime ministers Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi – both of which, incidentally, were also played by Servillo. But I know which ones I’d rather put on for fun.

Boy Erased could have been more sharply etched, all told – there’s something naggingly indistinct about it. But the lessons of Conley’s experience fight manfully, all the same, to punch through and be counted.

This is a fun piece of play-acting for as long as it lasts, but it never quite feels like much more. Things may become kinky in front of the lens, but you can sense Polanski lurking behind it throughout, always ready with his safe-word. Cut!

Barnard once again evokes a grubby, gothic landscape that’ll get right under your fingernails. It’ll stay there for weeks.

Jackson inhabits the film beautifully, if more gently: in the role of peacemaker and sounding board, he’s the least pushy of all these performers, but finds the music in Wilson’s words and wastes none of it.

While his ambitious conceit hangs together over two hours of loudly-declaimed meta-metatheatricality, my word, does it feel like an unholy slog.

The premise sounds as though it must invite a satirical reading, and there are many well-aimed ironic jabs at aspects of the leaders’ national character and the box-ticking rigmarole of modern politics. But directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – three beloved cult Canadian experimentalists – also poke fun at the notion that their intentions could be so clean-cut.

The film is a whirl of pure pleasure that just keeps whirling: Sondheim doesn’t write show-stoppers but show-surgers, and from the moment the glorious opening number whips up, introducing the central players, the film cartwheels onwards until it lands at its unexpected but quite beautiful happy-ever-after.

The film has scads of charm and only token gestures at redeeming moral value. That’s why – kind of in the Beano spirit – it’s such a delight.

Eighty minutes ought to be a tight frame for this sort of hokum, which takes no effort to watch, but the only thing that escalates is how silly it is.

Considering these characters are bounced round like pinballs, it’s amazing Hawke and the hitherto unknown Snook gain the emotional traction they do: even those struggling to keep up can’t fail to notice how these two are burnt, figuratively and literally, by their experiences.

The Princess tells us nothing we don’t already know, but there’s bracing value in seeing it crisply spelled out.

The depth, subtlety and wit of Pattinson and Debicki’s performances only becomes fully apparent once you know where Tenet is going, or perhaps that should be where it’s been. Still confused? Don’t be. Or rather do be, and savour it. This is a film that will cause many to throw up their hands in bamboozlement – and many more, I hope, to clasp theirs in awe and delight.

Noé has created a churning, repellent, wildly sexy tanztheaterwerk of pure Boschian decadence and derangement. It’s nice to have him back.

Because genre lets us know roughly what to expect, it can put us at ease, which is the last thing Denis wants to do. So she leaves questions hanging and mysteries unsolved.

Spider-Man: Far From Home offers a breezy, Europe-set intermezzo between Avengers: Endgame and whatever is coming next – a kind of sorbet in blockbuster form to punctuate the binge.

The 22-year-old Van Patten is a more than capable solo lead: the breakout star of Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, she has an invaluable knack for making her characters’ worst traits their most compelling features.

Patriots Day is stirring, well-acted, moving and built with conviction and flair. But a film about such a senseless attack shouldn’t be scared, now and then, to make a little less sense.

The film is ultimately little more than a trifle, but Hudson is the cherry topping: as this messy, crafty, grasping nightmare, the actress is more fun than she’s been in years.

Woodley and Dern breathe a ghost into the machine. Willem Dafoe has fun, albeit not too much, in a brief, vital role as a creepy writer. Most crucially, the words that survived from Green’s novel did so for a reason.

It’s not enough for Loach and Laverty to have their hearts so reliably in the right place. The Old Oak is sluggishly predictable in plot, but also sharply unsatisfying at the end.

Teen Titans Go! To The Movies may be unflaggingly daft, but outright silliness is rarely this smart.

It's Hardy's performance, above everything else, that sneaks up on you.

In a pivotal scene, the younger Nicholas explains to his colleagues that he has faith in ordinary people because, well, an ordinary person is all that he is. One Life’s wholehearted embrace of that sentiment is the root of its limitations – and its potency too.

Perhaps the unexpected ascendancy of Trump is simply no laughing matter – there are precious few zingers hitting home on this occasion. Or maybe what’s demanded by Moore’s one-man leviathan hunting is a less rusty set of harpoons.

It’s testament to the artfulness of Moore and Johnathan McClain’s screenplay that your suspicions flit constantly between all four parties, and the denouement – which takes a surprising yet just about merited turn for the macabre – still manages to surprise.

It would be hard to overpraise Burghardt, a debuting actress on the spectrum whose scenes are so tender, relaxed and generally sweet she deserves at least half the credit.

The whole package is still charming on its own cosy terms – the film equivalent of a loveable old hound that fetches your favourite slippers, rolls over for a tickle, curls up on your feet, contentedly passes wind, then nods off.

It is less a true-life thriller than a kind of justice procedural – and a sharp, scouring work of moral seriousness from Greengrass.

The set-up is grabby and effectively alarming, even if it lends itself to more nail-biting stress than actual suspense.

It feels like a Blazing Saddles gag writ large – no bad thing – and the jab of Mel Brooks humour it provides feels considerably more inspired than the hackneyed split screens, freeze frames and wobbly zooms which are regularly deployed in the rest of the film for winking grindhouse cred.

In fairness to Beyond, it makes very few promises it can't keep, but also goes halfway out on every limb it can find, risking next to nothing.

Despite its well-worn ideas and themes, Gary Ross’s provocative, pulse-surgingly tense adaptation couldn’t feel fresher, or timelier.

Berg’s favourite subject...is heroism at the brink, but the rescue efforts here aren’t pushed to the outsize or sentimental extremes they might have been.

For a film that spends so much time with its thighs around other people’s throats, it has a surprisingly delicate touch.

There’s enough in Mr Jones to make you want a good deal more.

It’s the opposite of what a Borat film should feel like: business as usual.

Wan’s film is a sturdily built supernatural chiller, with next-to-no digital effects or gore, and it delivers its scares with a breezy lack of urgency.

Arriving under the radar, The Meddler is a surprise treat. Go see it with your mother.

The mood flits between solemn and rascally, and the pacing is measured: this is storytelling at a mosey rather than a trot.

This controlled unveiling of a fuller picture is certainly engaging, but the film has the respectful air of a tribute – to Bernheim, as opposed to her father – and its sheer seemliness means it lacks the intellectual and erotic fizz of Ozon’s best work.

The latest Marvel title is just dollop upon dollop of dourness, leaving its stars no space to show us what they might bring to the franchise.

There is something about the cast’s doughy physiques that has allowed Park’s flair for caricature to run completely berserk, with every character model pushed right to its expressive limits.

Come the final act, the best political thrillers don't play nice, after all – they twist the knife. This one’s so concerned with making the world a better place, it retracts the blade and wipes it clean

This is the trouble with nihilism as a foundation for horror: it can’t quicken the pulse, drum up scares, or elicit any fruitful response from the viewer at all. Being impressed with a whole lot of nothing doesn’t mean we are.

It’s hard to shake the suspicion that Depp is playing a type – almost as if he’s trying to replicate the kind of performance Nicholson might have given in the same role. You long for him to roll his sleeves up and grasp the character’s shape and soul himself, ideally without the aid of those distracting prosthetics.

The Hateful Eight is a parlour-room epic, an entire nation in a single room, a film steeped in its own filminess but at the same time vital, riveting and real.

The film is thoughtful, tender and generally quite beguiling.

One of those films whose plot and texture are entirely inseparable.

It’s a film that exploration boffins will cherish most, but there’s plenty of grizzled male hardship here to engage fans of The Terror or The North Water. Unlike in those, you’re assured of at least one happy ending, too.

As a gently exploratory portrait of adolescence, Spring Blossom is tender, amiable and sweetly played, but it doesn’t risk (or say) all that much.

Admittedly modest, but the epitome of jolly, this is like the companionable second volume of an autobiography in film form – you'll whip through it in no time, and come out wanting more.

By managing to keep faith with this fast-unravelling person, even in her most bozo moments of losing the plot, Wilson turns in her best and bravest work in films to date.

It’s really the style and performances, more than the pseudo-experimental structure Layton has chosen, that keep the film grabby.

The film looks good and moves well. It earns its initially forbidding running time. It’s driven by human behaviour you might actually recognise.

Farhadi’s screenplay does an artful job of keeping vital fragments of each of its characters secret until the very end. But the climate of over-determined melodrama is rather less involving: characters synopsise their grievances so often, and so thoroughly, that many pivotal scenes have the corny texture of a “previously, on last week’s show” clip reel.

What keeps it on its feet is the snappy direction of Jeremiah Zagar, a Philly native who shows off his home town with unmistakable pride, and has a lot of vivid strategies for what the camera’s doing (there are more time-hopping match cuts than I could count) or which song to put on top.

Organisationally, the movie has a struggle on its hands not to seem like the contents of a toy chest simply chucked down the stairs, with all the chaos of limbs and accessories that implies.

There’s so much in this seething cauldron of a film, so many film-industry neuroses exposed and horrors nested within horrors, that one viewing is too much, and not nearly enough. Cronenberg has made a film that you want to unsee – and then see and unsee again.

It’s a film which understands the pleasure of seeing familiar roads driven with consummate expertise. The F does stand for formula, after all.

John Wick has such stylistic assurance that even when it falters – the music’s a bit moronic, and the subtitles for Russian dialogue get a naff, pseudo-pulpy typeface – it mainly tends to remind you how much you’re enjoying everything else.

Its star isn’t exactly overburdened with Hollywood charisma, and its various argumentative manoeuvres are pulled off with the grace of a reversing bin lorry. But it still politely seizes you by the lapels, makes its case with range and precision, and sends you home with a carbon-neutral fire in your chest.

Beneath the mousy indie stylings of Rachel Lambert’s new film, adapted from a 2013 play by Kevin Armento, beats a proudly mushy romantic-comedy heart.

Scriptwise, it's as stilted as any other 1950s studio horror flick, but De Toth does a great job at making the melting waxworks look genuinely creepy, and, yes, that really is Charles Bronson (credited with his original surnme, "Buchinsky") loping about the museum as Price's deaf-mute assistant Igor. [28 May 2005]

Laika may not be conquering the world with this outing. But if every studio’s three-star films were as bounteous with the eye candy, we’d be in clover.

There’s fun to be had here of an undemanding sort – but anything fresh, or memorable, or remotely unexpected? Neigh, neigh and thrice neigh.

This is an energised romantic drama overflowing with humour and passion.

Sagging at times, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind feels as though it might have played better as a mid-length short film, with subplots pruned back.

You’re left wishing that Adler had focused more on the no-win moral tangle of the handler-informant relationship, and less of the mechanics of its execution.

As before, the act of watching with an audience is part of the fun, with each pin-drop-silent sequence playing as a challenge to viewers to maintain their collective hush at all costs. This is the pleasant surprise of the summer so far. See it. Don’t bring crisps.

There’s no breakneck pace, no urge to pulverise the audience with action. Bart Layton’s film is methodical and moody – that mood being one of bone-weary fatigue. These are stuck lives, the products of bad luck and unfortunate choices

it’s often very funny indeed. The mood is often closer to the perkier passages of the Connery films, and the humour feels contemporary and British: the Phoebe Waller-Bridge script polish evidently yielded the desired result.

As filmmaking, it’s as mindless as Hollywood’s worst.

It's a bureaucratic noir nightmare that may put you more readily in mind of Kafka, albeit with a tone of tongue-in-cheek bleakness that's bracing and funny – at least at first.

It’s a watchable national identity crisis in microcosm.

Strange as it sounds – and is – Kumiko comprises a lingering display of empathy for its heroine, marching stridently on through her own peculiar headspace.

While politically unimpeachable, Just Mercy is simply too lethargic to be the major awards race player Warner Bros. were evidently hoping for. It’s a pity for Jordan, who has steel and energy in his part, and an especial shame for Foxx, who gives a beautifully modulated, unflashy and quietly moving performance, easily his best in at least a decade.

Kirk Douglas gives us a manically impressive Vincent van Gogh in this biopic based on Irving Stone's novel, which was inspired by the painter's letters to his brother Theo. Director Vincente Minnelli brings his own palette to bear on van Gogh's artistic struggle and emotional isolation, yet the plot could do with more of a defined structure. [10 Dec 2016, p.32]

Indeed, in a genre infamous for feints and teases, Gunn’s kitchen-sink approach feels refreshingly generous, and his excitement for the character shines through.

At the end, it’s hard to avoid the sense you’ve watched a grab-bag of horror conceits, a kind of pot-pourri-potboiler with organising principles cooked up to provide a veneer of cohesion.