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.

Genres don’t come much more formulaic than frat-house comedy, and nobody, in this fair-to-fine example, feels like rocking the boat.

Aronofsky’s sixth film is not the Noah you know, but a hundred-million-dollar Chinese whisper; a familiar story made newly poetic and strange with a flavour that’s less Genesis than Revelation.

Seydoux gives the film’s best performance: even wrenching moments are played at a glassy remove. But unlike Cronenberg’s Crash, which shook Cannes to the core in 1996, there’s no shock of the new in Crimes of the Future – a crucial requirement for every true festival coup de scandale.

With the filmmakers almost palpably high-fiving between these takes, it’s no surprise they wind up with a star performance that has to count as one of this star’s most strenuous. Treated as this zoo exhibit, he isn’t unleashed to express himself creatively. He’s caged.

For the most part it’s as briskly enjoyable as the studio’s output tends to be, with likeable characters trading polished repartee while large computer-generated objects explode convincingly in the background. Yet perhaps for the first time, the briskness often doesn’t sit right with the material at hand.

There’s a subtle, astute parable here about the media’s role in the shaping and streamlining of public morality – happily wrapped in a romp.

For all its world-building sprawl, The Way of Water is a horizon-narrowing experience – the sad sight of a great filmmaker reversing up a creative cul-de-sac.

The film’s tendency to go broad wherever possible renders it fairly un-scary, while in place of Get Out’s deep and needling cultural allegory we instead get pointed jabs at American film and television trends. It’s all good fun as far as it goes, but Story and his cast could have afforded to sharpen their own blades a bit.

The film’s ambitions might be on the limited side: it’s a clipped survival tale with little of the anguished spiritual dimension that end-of-the-world stories have summoned in the past. But Affleck has certainly surrounded himself with the right people.

All-pervasive millennial unease – the sense the world no longer works as it used to, or should – is Vox Lux’s plangent root-position chord, and the film offers no easy cure – beyond Celeste’s genuinely great, and Gaga-like, music.

Packed to the rafters with musical numbers, this cheerful documentary features moments from films such as Gone with the Wind, Meet Me in St Louis, and Singin' in the Rain - a fun watch, even though it was not as commercially successful as Part I. [01 Nov 2014, p.32]

Everything that works in Nocturnal Animals is intoxicating, provocative, delicious – and happily, so is everything that doesn’t.

Effectively the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup with a Cuban spin. It looks cheap, which is funny in itself, and satire and spoofery are crammed in until it bulges at the seams.

Like the original, T2 is happy enough spending time with its characters whatever they get up to. Very little that happens in the film seems to affect where it’s going, and the few things that do feel dashed off, almost as an afterthought. It’s also littered with callbacks to the first film – some as stirring as they are subtle, others exasperatingly cute.

This apocalypse isn’t a nightmare so much as the ultimate bromantic fantasy, one in which – with the removal of any responsibility – the boys are free to bicker, banter, and bed down together.

[An] impish and riveting talking-heads piece.

Call it a landlocked variant on Robinson Crusoe, but it’s a hypnotic one, with a sense of mystery and interior life that are all its own.

You wouldn’t call it profoundly scary – the one thing a wiped-clean slate can’t do is instantly defamiliarise us with every iteration of the monster that’s come since Carpenter. But it’s robustly suspenseful and shot with loving care.

The film leaves you enlightened and disillusioned, but still furious at Armstrong, who seems to have drawn the conclusion that he is now a tragic hero.

Would the film have ideally been a bit smarter? Perhaps. But it gets all of the dumb stuff just right.

There’s an unmistakeable timidity to director Leigh Janiak and Phil Graziadei’s screenplay: it feels odd to watch an 18-rated horror that feels as if it’s going out of its way not to offend.

The Family Fang, based on a book of the same name by Kevin Wilson, looks on paper like your typical, middleweight, dysfunctional-family angst-fest. But it’s rather better, and considerably more eccentric, than you might expect.

The Last Duel, which was adapted from a non-fiction book by Eric Jager, is a knotty, stimulating drama with a piquant #MeToo edge and the heft and splendour of an old-school historical epic.

As a filmmaker, Baumbach is sharp enough to call out the clichés of his trade, but also generous enough to put them to good use anyway.

Long Promised Road doesn’t really bring us any closer to comprehending the inner workings of Brian Wilson’s extraordinary mind, but it might just remind us that there is a real suffering human being behind the musical magic.

The film gets too caught up in its svelte, talky stylings to stay properly watertight as a suspense piece, and when it goes for broke in the last reel, it has too many characters – major and minor – behaving like buffoons. It definitely could have ended better.

As always in Nemes’s films, the period detail is so enveloping it feels utterly natural. But his great gift as a director is his facility for portraying 20th-century European history as a great grinding machine, into the blood-stained cogs of which anyone might have found themselves dragged.

Featuring a particularly strong central performance and great effects, the film has had an enormous influence on many subsequent sci-fi films.

Carax has an unparalleled knack for constructing scenes that feel like vividly remembered dreams – some of the images here carry such a strange dual charge, by turns eerie and drily comic, that you find yourself wondering afterwards if they actually happened, or if your subconscious has been playing join-the-dots.

The movie sorely needs a tighter edit, and direction from Apatow that isn't so slapdash and sitcommy.

Plays entertainingly like an Asian version of a Michael Mann film, albeit with the plot of Mean Streets. It's not quite essential, but the deeply felt ending looks like a jumping-off point for all that Wong has made since. [22 Jan 2005]

[Dolan's] raised his craft, and made by far his best film yet.

It’s Theron, underrated in comedy, who brings something fresh to the party, looking alive in the kind of uptight, self-mocking role that Sandra Bullock frequently corners.

When it’s in the mood, horror can be a sexually subversive genre; it can also be a flagrantly non-PC one. Freaky treads a treacherous line between the two with aplomb.

I’ve always enjoyed the idea of the Fast & Furious films more than their execution, but this feels like the series’ strongest, even though some of its action sequences are so muddled they can barely walk straight.

Cage commits, again, to his latest malcontent on the verge, without troubling himself with an Aussie accent in any way, which is classic Cage. It’s a performance that belongs quite high up in the canon.

That sense of gooey euphoria runs through everything that’s good in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.

It’s unlikely to change anyone’s life, exactly, but it’s genial, funny, and invigorating.

Other Carney films have been funnier or sweeter; but this has a seen-it-all take on the music biz that’s refreshingly acerbic. It knows how fame and fairness are practically banned from sharing a bed.

Even by the series’ own now well-established standards, this widely presumed last entry in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise is an awe-inspiringly bananas piece of work.

Only Nyong’o and Winston Duke, whose avuncular mountain tribe chief M’Baku makes a welcome return, actually feel like human beings. Elsewhere it’s drainingly apparent we’re just watching the nth round of chess pieces being rearranged. Like Namor with his dinky ankle-wings, this franchise has become super-heroically adept at treading water.

While there’s nothing here to remotely trouble young minds, there’s nothing much to stick in them either. For the most part, the film just seems to waft along, and though Charlie Brown's life is low-key by nature, the stories are mostly flimsily low-impact.

The hesitancy of the storytelling, with its comforting lulls and odd delays, is a funny sort of boon.

The film ends exactly one scene too late, lessening the brutal statement its ending might have made. But these really aren’t deal-breakers in a crisp bullseye of a debut feature which has guts and brains to spare.

On his broadest canvas yet, Trapero mounts a saga about the role of conscience, which might seem old-fashioned if it weren’t so urgently imagined. An added fillip is Michael Nyman’s stirring score, his best in years.

Merlant’s film isn’t being unladylike: rather, it’s asserting that ladylike is what all of these things really are, and it’s high time cinema admitted it.

Very little is out of place in Branagh’s do-over, but that’s almost a problem: there’s a feeling, throughout, of going perfectly through the motions. The film is all smoothly-operated crane shots, excellent hair, gleaming teeth. Originality is the glass slipper it never even tries on.

The role fits Farrow like a silk slip, but its kooky premise doesn’t quite shake up the by-now familiar narrative concerns.

This is Holmes intentionally slowed down to a hobbling, reflective, end-of-life pace: dare we call it refreshing? It’s a film to rummage around in, picking up old clues, considering their meaning, and turning them in your palm.

As metaphors for life go, wine has a very high yield, and Gilles Legrand’s sensitive screenplay tramples out every last drop of juice.

All the best parts of the movie are transitions and montages, jazzing up the video-game-ish plot with mock-heroic exuberance. The summer ahead is looking madly stuffed with talking animals, but Po has jammed his bulging frame through first, and done it with style.

It’s the interplay between the film’s many different characters, rather than the blow-up-the-world crisis they’re trying to defuse, that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Captain America: The First Avenger is all utility. It has everything you might want from a movie of this kind — bangs, baddies, nonsensical backstories — except for the most important element of all: surprise.

It’s a film of few frills or flourishes, which never tries to dress up its subject or soften its blows. Yet in its rage and its pain, in the wire-brush scrub it gives to the movies’ woozily romantic notions of alcoholism, Glassland feels wholly honest and true.

The groundwork is laid here for something potentially high-octane – think La Haine meets Ready Player One – but 20 minutes in, the film enters a holding pattern it never really escapes.

The problem with Sausage Party is that, for all the silliness, it so desperately wants to be taken seriously. What should have been a shamelessly filthy stoner movie has been watered down with ill-judged, undergraduate musings on religion, philosophy and race.

At a time when digital animation is breaking radical new ground, it can be tempting to view the hand-drawn sort as its old-fashioned forebear, with no more scope to evolve. But Momose’s film elegantly proves otherwise: it has the artistry, but also the visionary spark.

The slotting together of songs and plot is often done with a spark of inspiration.

Novello again, in an underrated road-to-ruin melodrama, plays a public-school rugby champ disgraced when he takes the fall for getting a waitress pregnant. Visual experiments abound and there's a justly famous scene with the curtains of a Paris nightspot being pulled back, exposing its superannuated regulars to the unsparing sunlight. [14 Jul 2012, p.4]

There is a danger of filing Peterloo away as an “important film” – but it is also a complex, rousing and rewarding one for anyone prepared to meet it on its own unapologetically ambitious terms.

Alpha Papa’s biggest laughs explode from moments of pure inconsequence.

It wants to become a cat-and-mouse game between the leads, but the leaky script dampens any real hope of suspense.

The whole is rather less than its constituent parts – which didn’t really fit together in the first place.

This prodding, acidic, bumpy-but-worthwhile movie is about even the world’s consenting creatures winding up with nothing they really wanted, while a dog submits to human will just to make us feel like we’re the ones in charge.

At times it edges towards the saccharine. The director asks no challenging questions, and the only other people to appear in the film are Anderson’s supportive sons, Brandon and Dylan.

It’s a chewy watch, heavy on the socio-political carbs, and its method can be a little exhausting. But its determination to do right by its subject – and Gitai’s own country too – is soberly compelling.

It’s eye-opening, well acted and darkly entertaining.

The comically impish and frankly outspoken instincts that have served Capaldi so well in the social media age prove a gift for a documentarian. This film is not so much warts and all as twitches, farts, curses and everything else.

Perhaps more than any other Disney live-action remake to date, Mulan feels like a blockbuster version of great mime – it’s performed with such consummate precision and showmanship that at times you would swear you were watching something with a heart.

It’s an absorbing but disappointingly tasteful watch.

Director Justin Lin has become the man to give this franchise legs: the start and finish here, defying every imaginable law of physics, are series highs.

Sasquatch Sunset barely gets started – though it does have remarkable prosthetics and some lovely sunsets.

As a toy-advert movie full of artistry and heart, it’s as slyly progressive as it is shamelessly nostalgic.

It’s profoundly compelling, expertly made, and quite intentionally horrifying.

Coppola’s uproarious and bitingly timely film feels every inch a necessary artwork.

Causeway is an excellent, moving, determinedly low-key slice of US indie cinema.

It’s Deneuve who musses up the formula and makes the film worth seeing, by generously bringing out her inner vulgarian.

Its sombre sincerity and hypnotic, treasure-box beauty make Crimson Peak feel like a film out of time – but Del Toro, his cast and his crew carry it off without a single postmodern prod or smirk. The film wears its heart on its sleeve, along with its soul and most of its intestines.

That the film winds up cramped, underwhelming and strangely thwarted is hard to square with all the effort up on screen – or perhaps it just feels too much like effort.

It’s an elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class.

It’s a weighty technical accomplishment – the extraordinary detailed motion-capture technology alone, which stretches Rylance’s human performance to giant-sized proportions, is river-straddling bounds beyond anything you’ve seen before.

This film leaves you itching to read a meaty biography, even as it solidly maps out Hepburn’s emotional life, and explains the relationship with trauma which cut her out so well to be a UNICEF ambassador, raising millions for Bosnian war orphans and Somalian famine relief.

[A] beautiful, humane and moving biopic.

The set-pieces are quick, light and for the most part fun. What Game Night lacks in (any) plausibility or coherence it makes up for in Friday night, pleasingly brainless entertainment.

Sketchy it may be, but the film finds dreamy consolation in the final curtain.

It is grippingly unpredictable – a film with a glint in its eye and smoke curling from its nostrils and underpants. But you dismiss it, or miss it, at your peril.

Like any good chocolatier, King has obsessively focused on texture and flavour. And it’s those qualities – tuned to mass-market tastes, yet held in connoisseurish balance – that give his film its irresistible velvety sweetness.

Blanchett makes us feel the creeping horror of professional disgrace, the fear and stigma, however unfair Mapes argues her treatment may have been. We watch a polished professional come apart at the seams, caught up in self-incrimination and spiralling neurosis.

Writer-director Jeremy Lovering, in his feature debut, keeps a skilful handle on technique — his film is a calling card that could give you paper cuts.

William Devane's performance – as Major Charles Rane, a former POW who sees his family get killed by hoodlums – remains magnetic: stoic and unhinged.