Howard’s film is a paean to the courage and canniness of the seasoned non-professional: subterranean heroism has never looked so down-to-earth.

There’s so much distinction here, and maybe just a slight vagueness about theme as Husson nears the finish line: it’s a tough ask to end a film well which is so given over to memory, and this becomes a bit of a waft in the general direction of closure.

Kim rattles you with this family’s bizarre and pitiful plight, and only then, from a place of agonised discomfort, does the laughter follow, in great whoops and roars.

Fanaticism – even in one so young and theoretically still savable – is a uniquely bad match for the brothers’ methods.

The whole package is so sleekly watchable, if risk-averse to a fault, that I can’t recall a recent time at the cinema where I learned more by thinking less.

The headline draw remains the headline draw – and sometimes it’s enough for two lead actors to animate, complicate and enrich a project by lending it all the mysterious gravity you could ask for.

Sincerity and conviction are now rare qualities in the blockbuster field, but this is a film that puts its monkey where its mouth is.

In the grizzled spectacle Gibson willingly makes of himself, it has a B-movie equivalent of that A-plus Mickey Rourke comeback, delivered with just enough clout to count as a step in the right direction.

The film is immaculately cast, and the chemistry between its four heroes holds your eye with its firework fizz.

If you're a fan of hers, you've heard it all before. Still, if you're a fan of hers, there is plenty here to enjoy.

Needless to say, Armstrong’s script is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the zingers, and you could spend an enjoyable evening in the pub debating your favourite gags, but it would all amount to nothing without Mountainhead’s unsparing psychological insight.

As a feat of adaptation by Max Porter, from his 2023 novella Shy, it’s quite fascinating.

With its uncompromising commitment to gross-out injuries, nerdy pop culture in-jokes and inappropriate touching, Deadpool 2 was clearly made to cater to existing fans with every innuendo-filled moment (they should stay through the credits for some important story points that are very nearly thrown away).

So what’s to dislike here? Hardly anything – it’s finding things actively to like that poses more of a problem.

Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed) doesn’t make images pop like the Coens, but he knows how to get a plot simmering, and he can milk a sit-down to perfection.

For the most part, Rob Marshall’s film hews painstakingly close to the original in style and structure. But it comes to life thanks to its own consummate artistry and rafter-rattling gusto – watching it feels like reliving a classic, rather than merely retreading it.

The premise sounds morbid but the execution couldn’t be sunnier: think Snoopy does RoboCop.

It’s not a peak for the doughty franchise so much as a reverential goodbye. Jollity is also served, when it’s not straining for misplaced importance.

But in its best moments, there’s a yarn-spinning intimacy to it too – an old war story told around a spectacular campfire.

Pike and Oyelowo have a hearty, wholemeal chemistry together, and play their small moments with sincerity and a light elegance.

Wright is both a gifted stylist and master technician, and Soho moves as smoothly as a Maglev train, gliding on an invisible cushion of its own meticulous craft. Its pristine pop-art finish occasionally feels at odds with the grit of its milieu; as it barrelled along, I felt a constant contact-high, yet little contact grubbiness. But the high is rich and giddying, and the weaving of allure and horror gleamingly assured.

It’s all impeccably pleasant, just a tiny bit bland.

Staying Vertical is a script by a hot talent never quite getting round to being fully written, and instead disappearing down a series of suggestive dead ends.

Amalric transcends mere dishevelment here: in some scenes which flash back to the start of his relationship with Sylvia, the former Bond villain looks like a pile of leaves with a coat thrown on top. [Cannes Version]

Stars at Noon is at its best when it has Trish and Daniel suspended in horny limbo, with Denis building an atmosphere of sultry languor that makes the film feel as if it’s constantly stretching and circling, like a sleepy cat.

The Butler might bite off more history than it can chew, but it packs a sustained emotional punch, more than a pinch of wit, and a superb performance from Whitaker as a man burning with passion beneath his immaculate, repressed exterior.

With her actors, Belo captures moments of staggering grief that are moving in their restraint: we deal, usually, with the stricken aftermath.

This is high adventure in safe hands.

This slice of class-baiting British ordeal horror from writer-director James Watkins is potently made. It's also exploitative trash, serving up silly levels of alarmist editorialising about kids today.

It’s in the wit department that this trifle wobbles most, dodging irony and cosying up with convention.

Laid-back caper movie, adapted by William Goldman from a Donald Westlake novel and directed with the lightest of touches by the perennially underrated Peter Yates. There's lovely footage of early 1970s New York and Quincy Jones provides the ultra-cool soundtrack. [09 Jul 2011, p.30]

The film is much too anxious – desperately so – for us to feel that Barry is a fundamentally decent guy.

There’s very little marring this as a pleasant experience all round, even if little, outside the performances, ramps it up into the realm of the truly memorable.

For all its seeming modesty, this is a mature, contemplative and mostly rewarding experiment: no awards-season bruiser, but a worthwhile B-side for Ashby’s venerable American classic.

Seyfried reads the tone of this hokum better than anyone, and knows restraint is hardly called for, using every excuse in the book to go completely bananas.

It’s callous and conscience-free, the work of an auteur in the mood to flex his style chops while saying literally nothing.

A cram-it-all-in adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s 2010 history book of the same name, which knuckles down to its task with sleeves rolled, upper lips stiffened, and vast sheaves of exposition to whip through.

Maguire tries hard, and has a good stab at Fischer’s twitchy rage, but can’t bring much freshness or specificity to anything else.

Peter Baynham, best-known for Borat and Alan Partridge, co-wrote this script, which offers just the right of blend of madcap farce and piercingly precise gags about social media.

Late in James Stewart's career he made this sturdy western, the beauty of which lies in its simplicity. [09 Jul 2016, p.32]

Unlike Walter Salles’s recent adaptation of On The Road, which embraced the Beat philosophy with a wide and credulous grin, Kill Your Darlings is inquisitive about the movement’s worth, and the genius of its characters is never assumed.

After the subterranean sluggishness of the last film, too thinly spun out from the first third of Suzanne Collins’s final book, Mockingjay – Part 2 returns the series to its characteristic high gear.

It’s Thompson as the heroically unbiddable Travers who makes the most of it; her bravura performance effectively dominates the film.

It’s the music that makes it particularly special, and appreciating that is entirely the point of the live-action remake.

This is one of very few westerns that casts African-Americans in the lead roles. [27 Jun 2015, p.32]

Scott’s Alien: Covenant is a mad scientist film – arguably, one of the maddest. It’s grandiose, exhilarating, vertiginously cynical and symphonically perverse.

It is a confection in every sense, but plump with natural sweetness.

Metro Manila is so spellbound by its setting that it is a good hour before we discover what kind of film it is going to be. It begins as a swirling drama of survival in the Filipino capital — but then suddenly it slips off down an alleyway, only to emerge a scrupulously engineered, Christopher Nolan-ish crime thriller.

The animation is photoreal – startlingly and mesmerisingly so. And the depth of feeling the tale of their friendship evokes is matched only by your incredulity, as you paw at your eyes six minutes later, that you are crying about two computer-generated umbrellas.

The fourth-wall-smashing is fun in a Ferris Bueller kind of way, but it’s never pulled off with the devious panache of Blazing Saddles, let alone Funny Games or Hellzapoppin’. Since it's this stuff, rather than the ongoing thud-thud-thud of bad language and gore, that feels mould-breaking, it’s a pity Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s screenplay doesn’t have the courage to experiment a little more.

Cooke’s sturdy, old-fashioned approach to staging and shooting pairs well with his leading actor’s precise, engaging performance, and makes scenes like this anxious backstreet exchange – or Greville and Penkovsky’s two visits to the ballet, each one serving as a clever psychological pivot-point – all the more fun and absorbing.

It’s the sort of film that rattles you in three ways at once: through the grim candour of its themes, the chill precision of its craft, and the nightmarish throb of its images.

Everything is adequate might not have the same ring to it, but it would make a fitting jingle for The Lego Movie 2.

Art was a labour of love for Maud Lewis: that much Lewis’s film makes clear. But by zeroing in on both the love and labour of it, the art itself – and the point of Maud’s life story, by extension – gets exasperatingly short shrift.

Not a hugely comfortable fit for the silent treatment, Noël Coward's play might have transferred better in the stagey confines of the early sound era. [14 Jul 2012]

Ballard’s concept is meticulously, lovingly recreated, like a museum exhibit of itself. But the tone is always more playful than it is disturbing, a walled-off black joke which opts out of saying anything new.

Paradise: Love flits nimbly between humour and sadness, and treats potentially ponderous themes such as sex, race and the rancid legacy of colonialism with a welcome light touch.

“Everyone is looking all the time; you just have to train yourself to look harder,” Hockney explains. This warm, affectionate, perceptive film makes looking harder look easy.

The visual effects tower and terrify, but crucially, never as effects. The prevailing sense during every chase, escape and scramble for cover, is one of watching real people battle nerve-wilting odds.

Schrader is a million miles from the potent anguish of First Reformed, the 2017 film that won him an Oscar; rather, this nearly rivals his 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan, for bewildering tedium.

It’s a modest but polished psychological drama that keeps threatening to mutate into an old-fashioned toxic relationship thriller – and the tension between what it actually is and where it might be going makes it an enjoyably nerve-jangling watch.

Drop is ludicrous. OK, so are all films in which a taunting psychopath calls the shots, but this one takes the biscuit because of the so-not-cutting-edge tech element.

Lindholm’s stealthy restraint fits the material like a glove, and both get under your skin.

It’s the film that’s hell – and a very dull, desperate hell at that, as if these dungeon masters have realised we aren’t sufficiently scared by the main event, and try throwing the kitchen sink at us, almost literally.

These poor players have all hand-picked their roles, and are resolved to strut and fret as convincingly as they can, right up until the curtain plummets.

The film’s magic is how it slips the skin of sappy and mendacious formula, stepping away from cliché scene by scene, and in quietly revelatory ways.

Its success may depend on how alert you’re feeling, but for once you can’t complain that a movie hasn’t given your synapses a thorough workout.

The endgame could be… sharper. There’s an elaborate hoax that’s too easy to suss out – even for us, and we’re not the seasoned con artists on the receiving end. At this point, the film’s own confidence seems to falter just a fraction. Then again, the chinks in these crooks’ cynical armour are what give it texture, a mottling of human desperation. Instead of smug gotchas, it traffics in mistakes.

Stevenson has configured her tale as female body-horror fit for a dissertation, without giving it much of a spine: while slick, the set pieces are few, far between, and over too fast.

It’s only in the final stages of assembly that you start to realise some bits are missing.

The Phantom of the Open is a rousing salute to a very English strain of nincompoopery – and a wise and witty reminder that that the pleasure of doing something spectacularly badly can outstrip the satisfaction of a job well done.

At first, watching Pacific Rim feels like rediscovering a favourite childhood cartoon – but del Toro has flooded the project with such affection and artistry that, rather than smiling nostalgically, you find yourself enchanted all over again.

The Smashing Machine is a crunchily satisfying fight movie that innovates subtly.

There’s no bold genre reinvention afoot in this reboot, and its thwart-the-baddies plot remains bound to familiar equations, though at least now the equations actually balance.

Imagine Arabian Nights, filtered through a Sofia-Coppola-esque feminist sensibility, but spiced up with camp. That gets you some of the way into 100 Nights of Hero, a British indie romp based on a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg. It has saucy wit –especially up to the hour mark.

Michôd’s film consciously plays like an outback western, peppered with jagged and unpredictable outbursts of hard brutality. But it could do with losing control a little more often – and with establishing the dangers of its dog-eat-dog world more precisely.

It’s written, shot and acted with a hot-blooded urgency that reminds you the struggle it depicts is an ongoing one – and which shakes up this most well-behaved of genres with a surge of civil disobedience.

Given his otherwise grim recent form, Allen himself may have simply got lucky with this one, but the charm and sparkle here are real.

Gory, hammy fun. [16 Oct 2010, p.30]

Romulus might inject an appalling new life into the Alien franchise, but it won’t do much good for the national birth rate.

For all its feints and innovations, Frozen II knows its audience inside out, and wants to ensure every last subdivision leaves feeling both seen and satisfied. That’s obviously good business. But it’s also generous, deeply charming filmmaking.

The Vanishing makes an unmistakable effort, but also feels like one, and fades almost fittingly from the imagination within hours of seeing it.

The style is impeccable. The substance, not so much.

Casablanca Beats just about gets by on restless teenage energy and its bustle of winning young faces. But it’s a new arrangement of a very familiar old song.

The first Enola Holmes was colourful, spirited – and made for cinemas, though it was fast-tracked onto streaming during Covid. The sequel, however, has the silty pall of content: scenes often look dreary and move more drearily still; you’d swear in the fight scenes the actors are just taking it in turns to be hit. Elementary? Not really – just basic.

Marvel films are all about anticipation: they’re designed to make you crave the next helping before you’ve even swallowed the current one. But this is the first in a while that I’ve found myself immediately hungry to revisit.

A supremely sweet and touching comic drama.

Lopez is particularly good at this stuff, giving another of the messy lioness performances at which she’s excelled in the past.

In this wildly promising debut feature from the 36-year-old British filmmaker Daniel Wolfe, the landscape becomes a kind of holy sanctuary for two young lovers fleeing a murderous plot.

Visually, it’s one great shrug, but to get by with a throwaway murder plot this routine, the zingers at least must zing. They rarely do. There’s something turgid and defeated about it.

This tale of epiphanies and religious schooling at a tiny monastery in the 1940s has a woozy, episodic lyricism all Thornton’s own. It’s also fuzzy and unfulfilled, groping for its images without ever precisely knowing what it needs them to say.

Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, the two-man writer-director team, are swinging at serious targets here... But their point soon wears itself out, and what remains is schlock with airs and tired black humour.

Anyone interested in animation needs to pay attention to what these films are doing. The writing formula may be crude, but the whiz-bang aesthetic is sensational.

Bombshell is a bright, watchable film on a subject that ought to make us squirm.

Dispassionate engagement won't fly here. You either stagger out early or plunge in up to your elbows.

Both actors, unfazed by the sheer oddity of their task, rise energetically to the occasion.

Parts of it tingle with a creepy, curtain-parting intimacy.

There are lightning-flashes of pure, ornamental brilliance throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, although there’s not much happening on the landscape they illuminate.