Frears’ film is all nostalgia and inertia – a tale ablaze with historical import and contemporary resonance, reduced to commemorative biscuit tin proportions.

This film pretends to be cleaning house chez Mr Strangler, when it’s just pushing dust around.

Nerve zips along, looks really smashing and has the mental wiring of a hyperactive squirrel. You may well risk it anyway.

It has a perky winsomeness: there are jokes, not all of them morbid, about being dead. There are tear-jerking scenes that require a viewer to surrender. I struggled to do so. Funnily enough, Eternity drags.

That tension niggles away within The Highwaymen, a sporadically stodgy, dour production which often seems painfully aware that the really fun stuff is happening out of shot. But then Costner and Harrelson get to talking, the light lands on their features just so, and the film casts its own curmudgeonly spell.

Like most comedy sequels, it’s also content to dig out the same old punchbowl and dilute the dregs.

Where this documentary gets it right is in refusing to act as PR for the man – it allows him to to give his side of events, but also his victims’ and the others deeply wounded by his actions. It films his frailty and flaws as well as his genius. Does he deserve to be absolved? Like Galliano’s explanation, there’s no clear answer.

Rather than bionically enhancing all its characters, a better movie might have found ways to celebrate their sloth and slime.

Sisters is entertaining as far as it goes, but it only occasionally feels like it’s going far enough.

Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, if we mean respite, but in plunging its hero into a revenge-displacement grudge mission, it has the compensation of a rock-solid dramatic idea, and the intelligence to run and run with it.

It’s a project driven by ideas but made for a mass-market audience, which are always welcome in principle. The problem here is the good ideas are all extremely familiar, and the handful of new ones aren’t much to write home about.

The more tangled the plot becomes, the more hackneyed Skjoldbaerg’s tactics get.

Somehow, this celebration of early resistance to the Nazis, with its overbearing sentimentalism and lacquered, Oscar-hungry sheen, manages to trace the familiar contours of countless other dramas set in the period. Subtle this film is not.

By the time the credits rolled on River, I wanted to throw myself into the nearest one.

As satire it’s a dismal dereliction of duty; as comedy, a one-note joke that wears out fast.

Is Mother Mary a comment on modern stardom? Or the study of an intense, broken relationship? Or is it just an excuse for two hours of sculptural close-ups and artfully creepy tableaux? As you watch, you find yourself continually grabbing at meaning but, like a ghost, your fingers slip straight through.

Even when the film feels like a circuitous, effortful mess, it’s often an intentional one – and for everything in the film that doesn’t quite connect, that element of self-portraiture, with the artist as sap, strikes a wistful chord.

This Tex-Mex drama about a retired rodeo star on a mercy mission has an intermittent dawdling charm. It’s also slack and featherbrained – and set in the late 1970s, but you can barely tell.

Human moments are few, and overwhelmingly feature Christy’s fellow fighter Lisa Holewyne, a rival-turned-rock tenderly played by Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian. The relationship between Sweeney and O’Brian might be the gentlest, most unassuming part of the film – but it’s what stays with you.

When the culprit is revealed to the audience after an hour or so, and the film attempts to dig into the psychology behind their reign of terror, it quickly finds itself out of its depth.

Director Christopher Landon, a veteran of the Paranormal Activity series, keeps the energy levels so peppy and the twists coming so unflaggingly, you barely have time to lodge any complaints.

The existential crises of music industry hotshots in Los Angeles might struggle to mark it out, to say the least, as a film for our moment. At the same time, it’s a refuge – a balmy vision of cloudless blue skies, rooftop martinis on someone else’s tab, and a few soulful jamming sessions in a recording studio no one’s using. You could disappear into Nisha Ganatra’s film for a couple of hours and easily forget where the evening went.

The songs put Wicked to shame in every way. They cluster neatly around entwined themes: spreading your wings versus the tug of homesickness; finding your path but daring also to lose it. With a running time that brings us briskly ashore, the film is a grand voyage in miniature – a taster epic. Further feasts, if you stay seated for the end credits, are thrillingly promised.

The generational rewrite has been deftly done, with enough timeliness braided in to make it feel freshly relevant, but all the gags fans want to hear again left reverently intact.

Washington – Man on Simmer – keeps himself awake with a few fun, staccato line deliveries. But the flurries of pointlessly sadistic violence are jaggedly dispensed, botching the build-up.

Your hope, gradually dashed, is for The Seagull to convey more of a sense of human loss than this faintly so-whattish drama about a dead bird.

While a certain amount of drama is found in these revealing scenes, it is somewhat dis­sipated in the romantic relations between Leia and Solo....The dialogue given to the lovers is laughable, and their performances match it. So what is presumably intended as a great romantic finale comes to little, which might equally be said of the film as a whole....The appeal, perhaps, will be strongest to the young.

That it largely succeeds says much for writer-director Turturro’s sly, subtle skills.

The film hinges on the bond between dad and daughter and on the expressive face of Fanning, as we see her shift from a sort of nervous adoration of the unpredictable, if loving, Joe, to something more steely and independent.

Of course it’s lightweight, bordering on disposable.... But it’s also genuinely warm-spirited, with three lovable central performances from Gadon, Powley and Reynor

It ultimately feels like a counterfeit of priceless treasure: the shape and the gleam of it might be superficially convincing for a bit, but the shabbier craftsmanship gets all the more glaring the longer you look.

A second instalment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda.

It’s the Pixar film that has to remind its audience what a Pixar film is.

Stanfield’s dropout charisma can cushion a role fine, but can’t make this one very interesting.

What The Gorge does supply is a novel science-fiction premise and some captivating bursts of suspense.

Bizarre quantities of action simply don’t connect to anything at all.

Holiff assembled this memoir from his father’s papers and audio diary, although the portrait of Cash that emerges is that of a pill-popping religious nut, and there is next to no insight into his music or creative process.

There’s something glib, and occasionally maddening, about the film’s use of loveable fauna in peril to sentimentalise and sweeten what is, after all, an account of real human bravery in the face of an endlessly horrifying historical event.

Dupieux elevates it by seeding entire swaying crops of confusion: we can never be entirely sure where scenes end and the mess of making them begins.

If there’s a chink in your emotional armour, there’s simply no resisting what this film has to offer.

What a relief, then, that this isn’t terrible – though to get the best out of it, you may wish to convince yourself that it’s going to be.

Director/co-writer Babak Anvari made a startling debut with Under the Shadow (2015), but like his follow-up, Wounds (2019), this is a shakier pot-boiler – diverting, provocative in spots, a little head-scratchy in plot terms. The secret weapon is Ascott, an actor you itch to see cast in more films

Director Joe (Gremlins) Dante delivers some terrific spine-tingling chills on the way towards a disappointingly overblown climax.

It’s a pleasing if minor piece of work, like a semi-precious stone that you’d still keep.

This is otherwise rough-hewn, hard-bitten entertainment – with an irresistible puppyish grin on its face.

Encounter is bugged-out science fiction paranoia, stylish and sinewy, with an opening sequence that may have you bolting for the door, or at least the remote control.

Army of the Dead is a kindred spirit of, rather than sequel to, Snyder’s earlier film – but it still cleaves faithfully to the Romero template, with its gaggle of abrasive, slippery lead characters that don’t obviously qualify as heroes, and its generous dousings of vinegary cynicism and apocalyptic dread.

It’s a film whose final shape feels dwindled by compromise – not unappealing, but stymied, like a luxury jet which spends two hours taxiing on the runway.

First-time director Brewer was the visual effects supervisor on Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s this department that’s his forte, rather than marshalling actors, or stitching scenes together with functional continuity.

It’s funny and touching, but feels like a missed opportunity.

The film’s about a chapter we prefer to get out of the way in adolescence; revisited as this kind of helpless mid-life crisis, it’s exquisite torture.

Southpaw asks both too much of Gyllenhaal and not enough – he’s being forced to build a whole character out of scraps, sawdust, and horrendous clichés.

The sum total is superior in every way to what he dished out last time. With a third one openly teased at the end, the fog has lifted: Hemsworth has landed on his Bourne, and this is his Supremacy.

It’s another flick through a familiar and by-now bulging scrapbook, but it leaves you craving less – and more.

Forget computer-generated spandex: that top must be the single most psychologically precise piece of costuming in the entire Marvel project. That it also looks completely at home beside Hemsworth’s scarlet cape and induction-hob breastplate might be the neatest encapsulation to date of the franchise’s charms.

Sometimes it just takes one actor to elevate a film from innocuous, take-it-or-leave it fare into something winningly tender – and if your first film’s needing that kind of lift-off, you could hardly do much better than Monica Dolan.

Seydoux is coolly enthralling throughout: her mask-like face, often streaked with a single, strategic tear, mirrors the fundamental blankness of her line of work. Thanks to her performance, France is never less than intriguing. But it’s also extremely hard to get along with – a broadcast-news parable whose sense of purpose keeps fuzzing in and out.

Too hectic to be scary, and with a plot that’s regularly bogged down in optimistic franchise-building spadework, The House with a Clock in Its Walls never quite grasps what made its inspirations tick.

The film is street-hawking its thesis all over the parish. Had it tried a softer sell, it would have been much more tempting to stop and listen.

This is an innovative, occasionally provocative, often frustrating film, but one whose perspectives on guilt and victimhood offer a new angle on a notorious case.

If production problems didn’t thwart Maclean and crew from making a proper fist of all this, the editing took its eye off the ball.

The last thing you want to feel about the end of the world is that you’ve seen it all before.

The film has limitations. But it has Binoche, and that’s almost enough.

These characters get ghastly fast. It’s the pace and panic of modernity Moverman grasps best as morally corrosive forces: the soft ping of iPhone email alerts never letting us be, and consciences wiped clean as quickly as the next news cycle whips around.

The film is not a total disaster, however. There is a captivating, unsettling climax and some impressive supporting performances.

With Statham literally riding shotgun, Ritchie has binned any pretence at subtlety and goes back to basics with an bullet-strewn romp that kicks down the door first and asks questions later. And which is, in the end, nothing more than an excuse for its star to punch as many villains as possible.

Both the sweetest and the funniest performer is Love and Friendship’s Tom Bennett, endearingly innocent and dreadfully coiffed as a third-generation British hedgehog gently upgrading from his dad’s tired routines.

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

If it weren’t for the stifling earnestness about patriarchal dogma, you could mistake it for M. Night Shyalaman’s The Village given some kind of vague off-Broadway workshopping, and regurgitated minus the twist.

A stickler might argue – not wrongly – that Havoc is ultimately a handful of astonishing set-pieces, linked by interludes of Hardy growling and ambling around. But as Howard Hawks once pointed out, all a good movie needs is three great scenes and no bad ones.

Despite his free and easy camerawork, which generates some lovely moments between Ian and Sofi, Cahill's narrative jolts along in fits and starts.

Fuqua’s film is lacking much of an intelligible plot other than “tough hombre rights wrongs in ways pushing the boundaries of a 15 rating”.

Many things in this film have an off-kilter absurdity, for good and bad.

This modest ladcom scores rather higher on the sincerity scale, much like a best man’s speech that fluffs the jokes but semi-accidentally gets a deep sense of friendship across.

The plot, directed by Michael Curtiz, is thin but warm-hearted. [22 Dec 2014]

Like its absurdly named hero, Extraction gets a serious and deeply silly job done in style.

This expensive-looking follow-up, which tells the story of Simba’s father’s own coming-to-power, sheepishly papers over all of the now-unfashionable concepts on which its forerunner was built.

The animation is technically wondrous – the colour and detail amazes, while the Minions themselves have never looked more bouncily robust – but it’s always in service of the overriding slapstick agenda. Even the flat, side-on compositions – less than ideal for showing off graphical prowess – feel like knowing evocations of the deadpan staging of vintage cartoons.

Given that this family-friendly confection looks, sounds and tastes a treat, you’d have to be fussy to quibble.

It is an outrageously ambitious and intermittently staggering piece of work, though it completely lacks the kind of discipline or focus that might have made its themes or images really stick.

The film, rather like being in A-ha, just comes across as a bit of a slog.

Adams is already a six-time Oscar nominee: it’s very possible that for this, she could finally nab one outright. From out of its sitcom-neat package, Nightbitch unleashes something primeval and wild – thought it might seem cuddly, hot spit flecks its jaws.

The film is so myopically gripped by the idea of Marvel as endlessly fascinating corporate soap opera that in five years time, you wonder if it will make any sense at all.

Smith makes Nicky too obviously insincere, with a grating, gloomy edge – which means he never suckers you in, and the fun dries up before it ever starts.

It’s smart and watchable in a miniseries sort of way, and sets the current war in Ukraine in an instructive wider context – while Dano is ideally cast as the unreadable vizier serenely pulling strings behind the scenes. But it’s also overlong.

Director Jake Schreier (Robot and Frank) deserves some credit for the spark and timing of his ensemble – the supporting cast, especially Abrams and Smith, come close to winning you over, but they can’t disguise the mechanical, one-sided insights where this story’s centre should be.

An interesting film rather than an engrossing one, and it’s hard not to wish it was a little more energised by its subject’s enduringly transgressive spirit.

Hyena doesn’t stint on creating a grubbily repellent universe, but it never gives us one solid reason to stick around.

It’s an odd sensation to watch a Fast & Furious film and find yourself wishing the special effects lived up to the writing, but – well, here we are.

A densely funny, lovingly orchestrated hour and a half of amiable chaos.

It’s not entirely without redeeming features. Margaret Qualley’s game lead turn would fit into the joint Coen canon on its own merits, and the final line (yes, I’m reaching, already) does land with a certain Billy Wilder-esque comic grace.

Since Servillo is too great an actor to settle for caricature, he undercuts his monstrous role with pangs of sympathy: the carousing has a late-life wistfulness, the breakdown of his marriage to his apparently still-beloved Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci) rings with genuine regret.

It’s the kind of format that works as long as the characters aren’t all completely unbearable – which is, alas, not the case here.

It succeeds admirably on its own terms – more so, I think, than his two Sherlock Holmes films – and while it never really transcends pastiche, its ambitions don’t lie in that direction.

What’s surprising about Minions is that it squanders these yellow oddballs’ new-found freedom.

A fantastically dreary and flatulent anti-war satire.

I loved every minute of Filth, and couldn’t have stomached another second of it.

To call Fast X one of the most ludicrous action films ever made would be a borderline tautology for any instalment in the Fast and Furious franchise. But this one takes the cake.