Yes, it’s a bright and splashy jukebox epic with an irresistible central performance from Austin Butler . . . But in that signature Luhrmann way, it veers in and out of fashion on a scene-by-scene basis: it’s the most impeccably styled and blaringly gaudy thing you’ll see all year, and all the more fun for it.

The director’s 28th feature is a magnificent slab of dad cinema, with Phoenix a startling emperor and Vanessa Kirby brilliant as his wife.

“A person’s a person, no matter how small,” Dr. Seuss once memorably counselled – and that’s as good a binding philosophy as any for Alexander Payne’s exhilaratingly odd new film.

While unlikely to steer future comedy in any direction you could identify – it’s barely in control of its own running time, frankly – the film is genuinely silly, at a time when silliness is quite welcome.

Flawed but compelling ... [A] hallucinatory gimmick feels a few rewrites away from working smoothly, and the thematic linking of Philippa’s plight with that of her subject’s never quite convinces. But Hawkins is quietly impressive.

Forbes has a delicate but unsentimental approach, which gives her film the same infectious energy that blesses and curses Cameron. The end result feels good without feeling superficial.

Any Hollywood gloss has been scoured away: the plot is raw, episodic and wholly unsentimental; a gruelling onward rumble from one brush with death to the next.

Samuel Peckinpah drank four bottles of whisky a day while filming his only war movie, but clearly it did nothing to diminish the power of his last masterpiece, related from the viewpoint of a German platoon retreating from the Russian front in 1943. [05 Apr 2014, p.33]

It’s addictive fantasy, satisfyingly snappy even in its absurdity, and something no Chastain fan can afford to miss.

It has the desperate vitality of something barely made-up.

Everett overdoes the lachrymosity right at the end, the one part of the film where a more subdued rigour would have served him better. At the very least, though, it’s a command performance he puts in front of us, an uncompromising feat of empathy in the role he’s made his own more than any other.

What we’ve seen since the beginnings of the Marvel serial in 2008 is an ongoing stretching: bigger casts, grander set-pieces and more intricate interplay between characters, with no clear end in sight. Ant-Man scuttles off in the other direction. Brisk humour, keenly felt dramatic stakes, and invention over scale. You know: small pleasures.

Mockingjay – Part 1 is all queue, no roller-coaster. The third of four films in the successful and admirable Hunger Games series is any number of good things: intense, stylish, topical, well-acted. But the one thing it could never be called is satisfying.

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

Writer-director James Gunn finds moments of inspiration in this sequel, but the plot is a mess, the film irritable and frazzled.

It is first and foremost a picture of her, but it is also a picture of us; and just as Jennings did in his wartime documentaries, it reminds us not just of her profound decency but also, oddly enough, of ours.

De Mornay is oddly compelling as Mott. There’s a gleeful joy in watching her slow, insidious progress, and it’s hard not to secretly root for her character.

Scrambling to keep up is part of the fun, but nowhere near as much fun as the parts where the film settles on a good idea for a set-piece and just gallops with it.

The hardship of the trek is vividly and stomach-lurchingly portrayed, particularly when the storm sets in, but it never makes the crucial leap from the screen into your bones.

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

While Paul Mescal impresses in Ridley Scott’s riveting sequel, a stellar Denzel Washington rather eclipses the rest of the cast.

For all the emptiness of Nobody, it’s sleekly watchable.

As for kindness itself, I can’t say much jumped out on a first viewing, unless it was of the you-have-to-be-cruel-to-be sort. But it’s exactly the sort of film that makes you want to look again.

Once the initial thrill wears off, it’s a hollow kind of fun, which is almost certainly the point.

John Ford's Second World War film is a morality play that is both sentimental and comical. [02 Nov 2013, p.40]

The Muppet Christmas Carol's warmth, wit and obvious affection for Dickens make it one of the greatest Christmas films – and literary adaptations – of all time.

Café Society isn’t Vonnie’s story, but it’s Stewart’s film.

Nymphomaniac, which mainly plays out in the banal home-and-office settings you might expect from a 1970s porn shoot, is less drop-dead gorgeous than Antichrist but significantly more human.

The main problem with Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice is that the film is a character study with very little character to study. ... Still, what the film lacks in revelatory insight into the Trump psyche, it makes up for in enticing context.

The History of Sound has fashioned a deliberate non-epic from wispy material, keeping such a tight lid on sentiment, it’s like an obstinate clamshell with its secrets. Expectations need recalibrating beforehand so as not to feel lightly underwhelmed.

Dora and the Lost City of Gold has contraptions to spare – falling platforms, lava pits, a water slide that pays homage to The Goonies – but its storytelling is commendably lean and faff-free. In the depths of summer break boredom, it’s a treasure horde of fun.

In every shot, the mix of gritty local colour and artful digital augmentations is riveting: you’re always vaguely aware that what you’re looking at can’t all be real, but the line which splits reality from fantasy is impossible to spot.

A searching, timely drama about the dehumanising effects of waging war at a distance.

Much scarier than fellow possessed child flick The Exorcist, which predated it by three years, The Omen contains some of the most memorable untimely deaths in cinema history.

A classic adventure story that brilliantly transcends its fairly average formula (buttoned-up city gal is softened by devil-may-care chancer while outwitting baddies in foreign lands) through a mixture of perfect casting, lashings of chemistry between the stars and a clever script.

While Gyllenhaal thrusts himself into the role with energy, you can sense his awareness that his acting has to carry the whole shebang, like a chef in the kitchen doing every last job. He’s entertaining, but guilty, like The Guilty, of throwing nuance in the bin.

This uproarious sequel to the Bristol studio’s beloved debut feature, which premiered at the London Film Festival today, takes what mercifully no one has yet labelled the Chicken Run Cinematic Universe and moves it on precisely one cultural notch.

Shot entirely in Welsh, this pristine debut from Lee Haven Jones has a methodical chill to it, laying steady groundwork for a buffet of grotesqueries. It’s horror-satire, with its eye on environmental plundering, and a demonic revenge to exact.

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

François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful is, in the very best sense, a film that won't add up.

The acting, most of it by non-professionals, is at times a little shaky and the sound is patchy. But it's great to see again this bolt of ghetto joy, a kind of updated West Side Story, that shows hip-hop as a living, breathing expression of cultural resistance rather than a crunky, cheerless set of cruddy grunts and boasts from which to make money. [10 Aug 2007, p.29]

Piece by Piece is a razor-sharp pronouncement on the nature of stardom in 2024. That you leave the cinema wanting to buy toys and records isn’t simply the idea of the story: it’s the moral.

Nyad’s theme of women pulling together just about lands – thanks chiefly to Foster. But following the recipe of human interest this slavishly is a fast track to not being very interesting at all.

It’s a film that feels emotionally half-fulfilled, never quite grabbing or devastating in the way you’d hope.

The distinctive charms of Wain’s aesthetic certainly come over, especially daubed across the lovely end credits, by which time this jumpy curio, with almost palpable relief, has laid itself to rest.

Denial certainly isn’t great cinema – it gets stuffy and repetitive, and Lipstadt’s frustration at not being allowed to testify herself isn’t the burning issue it ought to be. Still, it’s textbook advocacy, and a teaching tool of genuine value.

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.

Pitch Perfect 2 is a joyous harmony of bawdy humour, campus high jinks and crisp musical performances.

“We have to be able to enter the 1930s with our heads held high,” Dockery says – another hint that further Downtons may just keep roaring down the road, Fast & Furious-style. But it’s hard to believe that any could serve as a better send-off than this.

As for Andrews, she is just a joy, conveying enough doubt beneath that brisk, clean exterior to stop her character becoming a prig; her comic timing and the way in which she convinces in her relationships with the children are so understated they can be underrated.

The crazy surfeit of style can only go so far to compensate for the story, which is well-nigh impossible to care about.

Charming seasonal fare. [15 Dec 2012, p.36]

It's too cruel to be all that much fun, and lacks the antagonistic zip of the earlier Dunne/Grant divorce romp The Awful Truth. [08 Nov 2003]

From a premise of purest hokum, the Sixth Sense director wrings out an impressive amount of sweat – it's a real return to form.

Puig’s story is trivialised by slickness, and the tragic ending barely registers.

This is exasperatingly thin stuff from Loach and Laverty, who have in the past built far more textured narratives, peopled by far richer characters, even while maintaining the fierce, politicised charge they aim for here.

[Folman's] film is an alluring curio, a protest against the digital frontier which gets stuck with a knotty internal paradox – it starts out as thoroughly its own experiment, and ends up like a counterfeit of too many others.

As a film, Tallulah has a bedrock of grounded, believable performances to latch onto, but makes the mistake of grasping after crude types and abstract themes instead.

What kept me smiling right through this overturned odyssey is that the men in it aren’t brave pioneers or scary outlaws or any such thing – they’re incorrigible nerds, a century before the word was coined.

Schrader can do this stuff in his sleep, and in Master Gardener you sometimes wonder if he might be.

Well-played and divertingly handsome, it’s one of those pedigreed visions of love and war which backs away from specifics, reassuring us almost to death with its lavish craft. It’s thoroughly easy to sit through, when it should probably have been harder.

The Limehouse Golem may be hokum, but it’s glorious hokum that brings something fresh to the stale old cadaver of Victorian melodrama.

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

Smartly cast and gluing that career ever-more-diligently back together, LaBeouf gets under the McEnroe skin with twitchy gusto.

A prestige drama it may be, but it’s at its best when it’s a little messy and wild, and content to let the feathers fly.

It’s rough, to say the least, and that’s not just a matter of hasty visuals: the whole thing feels provisional and half-hearted, like a scrunched-up charcoal sketch.

Nikou’s film is wonderfully astute on love’s unruliness: it wants you to both delight in and despair of it, and have fun doing both.

The points of Östlund’s Triangle are far from subtle. Vanity is toxic; fortunes corrupt; everyone loves to see an Instagrammer getting their comeuppance. But across its well-earned two-and-a-half-hour running time, epic schadenfreude keeps edging into genuine sympathy, and we feel just sorry enough for these awful people for the next humiliation to sting just as hard.

What we get is a collection of moderately violent action set-pieces untroubled by humour or broader coherence.

Jolie is given ample space to dazzle, but less to surprise. Dazzle she does though, with a fine understanding of just how camp she can go without proceedings becoming too operatic for their own good.

The film brings us down, as well as letting itself down somewhat – a late scuffle in a peat bog is poorly motivated, the ending too vague. But the jangling escalations of the first half still mark Andrews out as a name to watch.

while every detail matters, they don’t all point towards a kick-yourself climactic revelation. All you have to do is climb aboard, keep checking your blind spots, and enjoy the rackety ride.

Somewhere in the specifics of Cronin’s is-he-or-isn’t-he scenario – played with gripping detail by Kerslake and Markey – there’s a decent little midnight chiller.

The plot strong-arms the characters into increasingly contrived and overly familiar positions that leave you longing for the more relaxed vibe of Shelton's earlier films.

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

Gloomy? Not even a bit. This is a glossy and sophisticated workplace comedy about the end of a gilded age of sophisticated froth – deftly written by Aline Brosh McKenna and fizzily directed by David Frankel, both returning from the first film.

Far more than his previous films, which tend to unfold in a dream-like daze, Free Fire is a mad contraption, bristling with bravado and black, sardonic wit.

Keanu is cool and breezy enough to live up to its title amply.

Wheatley and his collaborators have produced something that some of us thought would be impossible: an outrageously entertaining film that feels utterly rooted in the bleak era in which it was made. Lockdown project or not, it’s a milestone.

The issue here isn’t the moment-to-moment loopiness. It’s that the film’s cumulative unmanageableness soon starts to look like a put-on – Aster seems much more interested in pushing the limits of his audience, rather than his own.

Kenneth Branagh returns as Poirot, but, rather than jazz things up, the film's many Danny-Boyle-esque stylings are a constant distraction.

There are snatches of fun to be had early on, before the teasing gimmickry about reality and fakery expires. But the second half is just a slavish rehash of all the series’ best-known tropes. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, crossing through this looking glass, we may simply wind up less and less curious.

Where Fassbinder crafted extraordinary tableaux of self-parodic misery, such as the drunken, prostrate Petra diving for the phone on her white shag carpet, Ozon breezes through this exercise instead with his usual snappy relish. He has plenty to say about the original’s magnificence, but perhaps not an awful lot to add.

There’s an inevitable and perhaps unavoidable hitch. People in sitcoms generally don't change at all, while people in films can rarely afford not to – and a movie-sized plot, with its multiple emotional crests and dips, isn’t the kind of environment these characters were built to thrive in.

If big-tech hubris is now a non-fiction Dewey classification all of its own, this was nonetheless an extremely well told tale of arrogance, carelessness and the destruction – not disruption, please – that follows in its wake.

Though working on a thin budget from Allied Artists, director Don Siegel managed to create a compelling and violent tale of juvenile delinquency. [05 Jul 2014, p.32]

For giddy gore-hounds, Roth’s Thanksgiving is a bloody feast to savour.

Love and Monsters is mercifully zombie-free, while serving up a refreshingly different vibe from the word go. It’s not mock-heroic in a winking way; it doesn’t seem so pleased with its own punchlines. It’s rueful and shrugging.

This uneven but fascinating thriller from Alfred Hitchcock is good - how could it be otherwise - but it is not the director's best. [07 Aug 2010, p.31]

Solo dutifully fills in key moments from Han’s backstory.... But it also expands and enriches the Star Wars galaxy with thrilling new texture and detail – Solo might be a fun adventure, but it’s a dream come true for cosplayers, and features an even-more-extraordinary-than-usual new range of costumes and knick-knacks to goggle at.

Black has an instinctive feel for balancing action set-pieces against the passages of soap-opera that are required to make them matter.

This defiantly blank canvas may strike you as a puzzling, even a dubious, heroine, but Ryder’s terrific. And at least she has the last laugh: no one can get their graffiti to stick.

Without giving in to bromides, the cha-cha, surprisingly feel-good rhythms of Nagy’s direction make this heroine's sudden sense of purpose rather exhilarating.

Joy adopts the most basic possible template for its fluffy history lesson, but still has an impressive habit of joining all the wrong dots.

It's bawdy, sexy, gory, schlocky, and rollicks along at a cracking pace. [28 Feb 2014]

A summer blockbuster that’s not just thrilling, but that orchestrates its thrills with such rare diligence, you want to yelp with glee.

There’s a kernel of philosophical intrigue in The Assessment, encased in a sleek shell of dystopian science fiction, and unfortunately flung a million miles away from audience engagement.

This cherishable Irish B-picture is one of those rare horror films with an unimprovable premise.