Lame Ferrell, through some weird freak of his talent, tends to be the best Ferrell, and despite the film’s general mediocrity in most departments – let us swish briskly over everything about the way it looks – his floundering star turn delivers the goods.

As a scratchy string quartet for the four actors, it continues to work surprisingly well – you might hand it back with a B+ in that department. But as a storytelling assignment, it droops little by little into the C zone.

Yes, the film's clunky. Yes, it's dumb. But it's fashioned with such charm that it's also lovable, poignant and funny.

It makes genuinely important points about homelessness, and the middle-class horror of ever crossing that line. But the script, by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, She Said) is a surprising letdown.

What’s impressionistic on the page has to be re-sculpted and honed to a point on screen, but the result is that the novel’s tenderly hidden secrets become rather blatant twists.

The film is mature, relatable and risks being terminally uncool – full of evident chagrin from Holofcener that she can’t be a new voice these days, but also comfortably embracing the old one.

You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, and there’s a lot of smooth here. Jim Broadbent has the balance of jollity and melancholy just right as Santa.

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.

If the film had been tightened to two hours of Crowe and Shannon ruthlessly going at it, we might have been mesmerised.

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.

The secret weapon, though, is dimpled star Ben Wang, the 25-year-old lead in the Disney+ series American Born Chinese.

These relationships are poised to be explored in more depth than they are.

You’ve seen almost everything here before, but never within the same film.

The film bears its real-world resonance as lightly as a button, thanks both to the steady supply of well-turned one-liners and the rippling chemistry between Nanjiani and a never-better Kazan, who’s so disarmingly funny here that I kept catching myself pulling puppy-dog faces whenever she was on screen.

And there’s a hidden triumph in the supporting cast from the always-reliable character actor Bill Camp (Black Mass, Midnight Special), whose spectacular, hideously convincing wipe-out as a guy called Harlan Eustice, in the course of a single night, sets much of the plot in motion.

There’s so much incident crammed into this tale of misfortune that there’s never quite enough time to truly tangle with the sheets and sails of its meaning.

There’s nothing soft and romcom-cuddly here, but a brutal dissection of competitive friendship dynamics, eating disorders and selfish misery.

Part Heat, part Miami Vice, this sinewy thriller keeps motives hidden as a police unit weighs duty against dirty money.

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

There are clever and sensitive touches right through, and a moving ending. But Fanning seems wholly uncomfortable, and not always intentionally.

For those of us old enough to have been terrorised the first time round, it delivers a nasty-but-nice-enough childhood flashback.

It takes a love of Springsteen’s widescreen balladry, perhaps – all hail the mighty Thunder Road – to get on the film’s wavelength, but it’s an invitation right there for the taking.

It’s all patently ridiculous - and surprisingly watchable.

Gradually, the simplicity yields an idiosyncratic charm.

While the camaraderie of the Flossy Posse might be raucously imperfect, at least it’s real.

This Emma is pleasant enough in passing, and nothing if not scenically lush. I just couldn’t get on with its Emma at all.

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

The final hurrah for Mercury’s genius, this huge, hubristic spectacle lets you grant his troubled film a pass: at least it keeps on fighting to the end.

It is vivaciously, even triumphantly, OK. If there was an Oscar for Most Adequate Picture, we’d be gearing up for a sweep.

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

Their improvisation has been honed to the point where the jokes land solidly without losing naturalism.

The film’s narrative obliqueness heightens its gallery-piece surrealism. What payoffs we get are affecting, though.

Klaartje Quirijn’s engaging film portrait of Dutch rock-photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn goes a long way towards explaining the emptiness and isolation that characterise his work

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

Despite its great cast, this is certainly not one of Hitchcock's triumphs. [28 Sep 2013, p.40]

About Time is itself a film less directed than quilted: it’s a feathery old patchwork under which you might snuggle at the end of a tiring week.

If it sounds insane on paper, the film is even more bizarre up on the screen. Demonstrating considerable skill as a director, Young gives the action an eerie, artificial sheen.

Ultimately, this is a rollicking adventure that will enchant young audiences. It’s just a shame that its odd creative missteps tend to linger in the memory once the magic has faded.

It’s jocular, never feels like a screed, and it’s refreshingly outward-looking.

It’s the character dynamics here, more than the dark and stormy set-pieces, that get things off the ground.

Hoffman's performance has a sadness, an unexplained loneliness, which gives this slightly diffident piece a centre of sorts, and there's a pleasing air of melancholy all round.

There’s only so much lovable bad behaviour you really want to indulge them in now.

While the film never shocks it almost always compels, and Breillat crafts some images that keep tingling in the mind long after they’ve faded from sight.

The story’s insistent ambiguities ought to make it seductively complex, but it never quite shakes off a stuck-in-the-mud vibe.

The Ones Below is a creepy genre exercise by a craftsman finding his groove.

It's pretty standard fare, but it's always uplifting to watch Spitfires stick it to the Stukas. [25 May 2019, p.32]

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.

In order to be “clever” – scare-quotes extremely necessary – the film sweeps away all of its hard-earned smartness, and the previously gripping uncertainty around the exact nature of Marlo and Tully’s connection is tidied up in a way that feels jarringly cheap.

It’s absorbing and well-acted enough that at times you could almost forget you were being asked to emotionally invest in which company gets to slide its wares onto a rich young sportsman’s feet.

Cedar might have built up a broader satirical thesis from all this wheeling and dealing, but he’s happy to let the film rest gently on Gere’s shoulders – these days, a pretty safe foundation.

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.

On this present occasion, Farhadi may hardly be reinventing himself, but his old tools serve him just fine.

It’s well-acted, especially by Healy (The Innkeepers), who makes you feel the pain of every wound, the ratcheting torture of every dilemma. But the film’s also a gimmicky exercise whose hollowness and credibility are constant problems.

Does it add up to much? Not really. Not finally. But it’s a suggestive puzzle-box of a picture, worth turning over in your palm.

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

Watching it is like settling into a reupholstered armchair which still creaks in the same old places.

Take one high-concept format, two big stars and lots of songs... this romcom isn’t perfect, but you can’t help rooting for the main couple.

It’s a casual breakthrough, normalising what was once a taboo.

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

What lifts it to a major degree is Rahim’s performance. We know little of Salahi’s life outside Guantánamo, dealing with him as a virtual blank slate, but he fills this in with a remarkably charismatic personality, riven with contradictions, and clinging to bursts of mischievous humour as a survival strategy.

It doesn’t have easy access to human emotion, instead deploying a series of techniques to fake it.

As a way of capturing the horrors of that night, the spareness of the film-making is powerful. But in terms of giving us the full picture, it falls short.

For all its occasional fumbling, Mogul Mowgli fully justifies its existence in every bristling detail of Ahmed’s performance, which never plays as self-pitying so much as impatient and hotly aggrieved.

Only God Forgives is the spectacle of a brilliant young director spinning out in style. It’s a beautiful disaster.

Struggling with tone and urgency during its recruiting phase, the film clomps along to a pedestrian drum-roll, summoning a stark, brooding edge without quite enough lift-off.

It’s a lovely, coherent piece of storytelling, with a unique sense of place.

The film’s scope is limited, but as far as it goes, All Is Lost is very good indeed: a neat idea, very nimbly executed.

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.

The animation (which owes a debt to Winnie-the-Pooh and The Little Prince) is gorgeous, bringing Mackesy’s ink and watercolour drawings to life. Tuning in does allow you to switch off from the world for half an hour. And if watching it feels like drowning in a vat of golden syrup – well, don’t we all overdose on sweet things at Christmas?

The film’s forgettable fluff, but perfectly genial, and it’s hard to imagine many hardcore objections to curling up with it.

The new film Dog is essentially an hour and three quarters of Channing Tatum rolling around with a dog – and quite frankly, for many of us, that’s enough.

The film’s a little wobbly on actual charm; stronger on smarm, in-jokes and Bond-riffing action pastiche. Yet whatever their niggles, families can flock to it, relieved to be getting brand new entertainment that entertains.

Daphne du Maurier's rum tale of romance, ripping bodices and roguery was rewritten for this so-so Alfred Hitchcock screen version to accommodate the demands of its star and co-producer Charles Laughton, who felt himself deserving of a grander role than any du Maurier had deigned to write. [30 Mar 2019, p.33]

Lovelace tells a difficult story creditably, yet its period detail has the effect of distancing the story, and its heroine remains an enigma.

Sin City 2 glowers and sulks and is determined to show you the best bad time you’ve had in years. It’s neither high art nor noir, but it’s what a Sin City film should be.

The key to the film’s success, and the reason it often left me hooting with laughter, is Aniston, and her character’s struggle in vain to maintain her sweetheart persona.

The film is like a cheeky seaside postcard with swastikas and cryptography on the reverse.

Oddly bloodless, but thought-provoking in a discussion group kind of way, it’s less successful as a film than as an exercise, but at least it’s a worthwhile one.

Through all the film’s bumps and scrapes, Firth does invest a lot of commendable energy in helping us grasp Crowhurst’s besieged state of mind. It’s a good performance in shaky circumstances, but at least he honours the man’s contradictions, on top of his terror of public failure, and even greater one of exposure as a fraud.

What sense there is of big ideas being thoughtfully chewed over stems largely from Rapace’s steely, wounded central performance, which often feels like a decade-later echo of her work in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films.

Only a film as big as Africa could have done Adichie’s novel full justice; the treatment it gets here, equally honourable and hurried, reduces it to Nigerian soap with BAFTA-level acting.

Ridley Scott's crime drama feels like a soap opera with airs, but its star's sheer chutzpah ensures it's never less than watchably raucous.

It’s a candy-coated underworld romp, and pleasingly weird at times – when we’re invited inside Harley’s cutely tattered parlour, no explanation’s given for why she has a stuffed beaver in a pink tutu on her kitchen table. It’s just… the kind of thing she would have. Yan’s film converts her from livid to likeable, and doesn’t give a hoot if you mind.

Who knows what it’ll look like down the line as a record of its own premiere – the live-streaming may well have been its oxygen. But we did watch the boundaries crumble outright between live performance and real, on-the-hoof film-making, to amply entertaining effect.

There’s something ever-so-chic, a touch too manicured about the film’s despondency, and only rare moments land to touch us, especially. But it’s a gentle, genial watch.

It is down to the strength of the acting that the film succeeds as far as it does.

Perhaps the play’s overfamiliarity is the one thing holding this back in the end: you’re expecting it to cross the barrier from solid to gut-wrenching, and that never quite happens.

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.

The film has an impetuous, let’s-try-it-on quality that makes it a modest pleasure.

Harold’s trek has its moments to savour, but Wilton seizes the day by sculpting her own mini Mike Leigh film on the side – armed with only a vacuum cleaner and a face like thunder.

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.

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

It can’t be denied that as a piece of cover-all-bases, hi-sheen, lo-thought, built-to-order corporate product, the film runs with a steady and satisfying whirr.

His recollections are as sobering as his images, and a great many of both will embed themselves in your head.

Director Camille Delamarre and Luc Besson, who co-wrote the screenplay, relocate the story to Detroit and tone down some of its (admittedly broad) social satire — although the Parkour remains centre-stage, and is mostly hair-raising.

As a critic-turned-partisan who also narrates, Krichevskaya is the right kind of observer here on paper. But there’s too little airing of her own views at the time of walking out, when she didn’t have faith in Dozhd’s true independence.

The Miracle Club’s own manoeuvrings can, at times, feel a bit pat and convenient. But its final moment of reconciliation – Smith and Linney back home by the shore, having pruned back 40 years of emotional overgrowth – justifies the trip.

The plotting meanders its way to the very brink of incoherence, but as the scenes tick past, the vague sense of a many-tendrilled mystery being solved does gradually descend.