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

Suzume is perhaps Shinkai’s most spookily beautiful work to date, while remaining treasurably odd.

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.

The whole thing remains ridiculous, partly since Avery can’t persuade us we’ve been watching a possessed boy so much as an overtaxed child actor he’s putting through boot camp. This was William Friedkin’s – and Blair’s – quite particular achievement. Think of Avery’s go as a goofy cover version you can indulge just the once.

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.

It’s daft, disposable fun while it lasts.

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.

Somehow, this new animated adaptation of the video game is even worse than the abominable 1993 live-action. Even the CGI is second-rate.

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.

Even at practically Kubrickian length, though, the lockstep slaughter barely gives you pause for breath. It’s a barrage, and a blast.

It could have been one more late-career hurrah by Fonda and her fellow screen greats. Instead, 80 For Brady flubs the touchdown.

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

In terms of representation, you couldn’t ask for more. And that’s just as well, because in terms of entertainment, you could barely get less.

The showdown (in the usual abandoned auditorium) is perhaps the campiest yet to be unveiled, proving that a generally-clapped-out franchise is capable of some fairly fun death throes.

The whole thing is stupefyingly unfunny and un-tense, and doesn’t end so much as just give up and grind to a halt.

The debut feature from 33-year-old Raine Allen-Miller adjusts and updates the classic Curtis formula to a small urban chunk of contemporary south London – and captures the place’s clatter and bustle with such undisguised love, it makes the blossoming of romance there feel like the most natural thing in the world.

The version we get feels like it’s been eagerly pitched, passably storyboarded, then handed over with a defeated shrug to somebody’s second unit.

Even with the steady supply of clichés and occasional leaps of logic, the dramatic scenes smoulder away nicely.

When [Penn] steps aside, or simply lets Zelensky talk, the film hits home as a crudely earnest plea for more principled military aid, and you can’t really fault its message. The delivery, though, leaves a lot to be desired.

This is Sachs’s eighth film and one of his best.

As things go on, Cross’s plot doesn’t so much thicken as coagulate into nonsense. Serkis’s evil plans don’t always make much sense, even when factoring in the whole murderous psychopath thing, while the grislier imagery is often too poseur-ish to unnerve.

As in Landon’s terrific body-swap horror comedy Freaky, there’s often a surprisingly thoughtful undercurrent to these zany riffs, and the tone is nicely judged for younger teens. But where Freaky was relatively honed, this rambles to a fault, taking numerous optional detours . . . en route to an emotional climax that doesn’t quite land.

It’s a grinding disappointment all round, though at least now we know that what bears famously do in the woods can extend to their film work.

Cinematically, Golda doesn’t altogether avoid a TV-movie stodginess – it looks a bit drab, with some duff effects and uneven staging. But it has a businesslike running time, and doesn’t waste it.

Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realised piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge.

Your Place or Mine is thoroughly mild, considerate and well-behaved. But where’s the fun in that?

It’s mostly very charming, if perhaps a bit self-consciously so, given Fleischer Camp’s tendency to gurgle delightedly on camera at every other line.

I snorted with genuine laughter, hard, at this film’s closing notion of what being a comedy even is.

Bizarre, beautiful, moving and playful, this is an oddity to cherish, with depths that only reveal themselves – entirely aptly – on the hoof.

There’s an entire pick ’n’ mix stand of eye candy here – more than enough to satisfy younger viewers. But alas, it’s all empty calories.

The film mounts its thesis while hardly needing to verbalise what’s going on: it mesmerises by reaching inside them to listen, even while others talk.

It's so rare in British cinema to see the "L" in "LGBTQ+" up there in such bold type, which makes Blue Jean not only a biting look at this historical moment but a riveting act of redress.

Despite a morose colour palette that can feel a little eat-your-vegetables at times, the film is beautifully performed and gripping in a chewy, nuanced, contemplative way – as its title suggests, the talking, as well as the thinking it kindles, is the point.

For a franchise in need of refreshment, it’s anything but a quantum leap.

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.

For the microscopic subset of cinema-goers who watch Magic Mike films for the plot, Last Dance may prove disappointing. Returning screenwriter Reid Carolin doesn’t come up with anything novel to do with the hackneyed let’s-put-on-a-show premise.

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.

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

In a sickly-sweet genre, it’s almost bracingly sour.

Whatever one’s familiarity with this searing chronicler of lives on the margins, the film is riveting and essential.

The thing about Spielberg these days is he makes this stuff look easy.

There’s lots to enjoy in this aviation disaster thriller slash tropical shoot-em-up, with its uproariously blunt title high on the list.

In spirit, it’s all very Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But in execution, it’s far closer to Meet the Parents with a heavy dose of identity politics.

The undersung director, Emily Atef, does well to make the business of dying, which can be the hoariest of cinematic subjects, feel like a fresh quandary here for two people making up the rules as they go along.

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.

The Nicolas Cage aficionado carries two hopes into each of the 59-year-old actor’s new films. The first – not often met, truth be told – is that it will be good. And the second, failing that, is that it will be mad. Alas, this thin and lumpy western is neither.

Marketed cannily towards Gen Z – for her meme value is beyond compare – M3GAN is essentially the anti-heroine of a catnip horror film which tips far more towards the “campy fun” end of the spectrum than the raw terror end. No one will be quailing under their seats during her campaign of slaughter, but that was never the point.

Banderas is good value, playing the role a few shades more seriously than it deserves, while first-time director Richard Hughes deploys much fizzing neon and halogen to strike a convincingly sleazy tone. But even at 90 minutes the plot feels padded, and it’s all so preeningly sordid.

If you’ve seen Eastwood’s Gran Torino or Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man, you’ll know the sort of cranky redemption arc we’re eventually in for here, but this is the flat-packed, self-assembly-kit version – more likely to exacerbate a mild depression than warm the cockles.

Piggy presumably aims to test our sympathies, but just forfeits them entirely, in the service of a facile plot and a heroine even the film itself can’t seem to stand.

Having slyly slipped the bonds of the past, Corsage eventually allows its heroine to make a very modern break for it in the film’s (wholly fictional) final act. It’s a fun, coolly outrageous manoeuvre – and the final shot is so freeing, it’s as if the laces on your own invisible corset had suddenly been cut.

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.

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?

How deep can an authorised portrait of Whitney Houston delve? The answer: not very. I Wanna Dance with Somebody aims, instead, to climb high – to cheer and celebrate as a glitzy biopic, where documentaries have tended to dwell morbidly on Houston’s downfall.

One of Howard Shore’s routinely excellent moody scores helps our wend through the wilderness. But the irony, for a would-be-macabre mystery about hearts being ripped out, is a flatlined pulse and a puzzling absence of red meat.

The film is thrillingly reckless enough to make you genuinely dread what’s coming next.

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.

Emancipation is a finely crafted, unflinching pursuit thriller about a slave seizing his freedom in 1860s Louisiana, and the first notable thing about it is that Smith is terrific in it.

The script, co-written by Del Toro and Patrick McHale, is perhaps a little slick when it comes to hustling the plot towards the next moral lesson. But the storytelling itself is unashamedly old-fashioned, and forays into the political and the macabre are all carefully tailored to younger viewers.

Like its precursor, Glass Onion doubles as a dazzlingly engineered gizmo and a raucous cautionary satire, with implications that billow out into the world even as its mechanisms snap satisfyingly shut.

Parts of The Menu taste familiar. There’s a dash of Michael Haneke’s winking mercilessness; a soupçon of Midsommar’s black-hearted mischief; the sheeny satire of super-wealth comes straight from Succession. But the cast and filmmakers’ commitment to nasty delight is unswerving, while the dinner ends in the most gratifying way imaginable: just deserts.

Spirited never gets you to a place of soaraway joy, exactly, but it’s busy, silly and not a bad time.

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.

Adams almost makes it work through sheer force of musical-comedy will: her mimicry of “classic wicked stepmother poses” is a scream, and despite the thin material, she never looks less than fully, beamingly engaged. Even so, it’s hard not to wish she’d just stuck with her happily ever after first time around.

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.

Of all the gonzo flights of fancy, though, perhaps Al’s romance with Madonna (a bubble-gum-popping, uncannily inspired Evan Rachel Wood) is the most helpful at getting this uneven spoof into its groove. The idea of her courting him just to secure the so-called “Yankovic bump” in her record sales is pure Madge, and as such, delightfully persuasive.

Unashamedly rousing and immaculately crafted, The Swimmers is up there with Creed as a sports drama with more at stake than individual glory – a global-humanist purview to which it ascends without getting the slightest bit preachy.

Against this enticing, enigmatic backdrop, the odd sops to mainstream taste – some comic shrieking, a sprinkling of toilet humour – feel unnecessary, but forgivable. It’s the sort of film you’re relieved to discover still exists.

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.

Deadwyler does magnificent work in it, making bold, risky choices to communicate a near-operatic range of emotion.

If we’re reaching for something, anything nice to say here – and we absolutely are – Theron’s black trouser suit and trench coat is a strong look.

Grandage’s feature debut, the literary biopic Genius, was an all-star dud; this is colourless, miscast, adrift. He hasn’t yet found cinematic lift-off: the camera gazes endlessly into the soupy sea off Peacehaven, as if it were a Magic Eye picture hiding the drama of a Turner painting inside. Amid the drab ruin of these lives in the 1990s, and their equally cheerless salad days, rare sparks of life succumb to a great deal of mopey regret.

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

The middle stretch is genuinely scary, though, thanks to the film’s clammy aptitude for trapping us alone in the dark. Somewhere in here, there’s a thesis brewing about how predators ply their trade and cover their tracks while purporting to be the good guys. The product of their actions is ghastly, and it’s lumbering at us fast.

Berger’s evocation of war and its horrors ultimately connects not at an intellectual level but where it truly matters: in the gut.

It’s the “rom” that’s the killing shortfall. But I must admit, Bros put me in such a sour mood that its “com” got sabotaged into the bargain. It’s distinctly smug about pitching itself as a landmark, while being really more of a setback, and a pretty low bar for the next one to surmount.

Much of the film’s success comes down to Plaza, who has left that deadpan sphinxlike mode of hers some way back in the rear-view mirror. Grit replaces irony, and it’s fascinating to watch her think her way through every predicament here, deftly and in detail, weighing the percentages.

Against serene and haunting backdrops, the animation itself has a raucous energy that’s constantly thrilling, and leans into the children’s vulnerability as well as their high spirits.

This quietly courageous debut feature from Anastasia Tsang, which had its world premiere at this year’s Tokyo Film Festival, is an elegy for that lost Hong Kong – and suggests that in certain corners of the city, its old spirit still fizzes and glows.

The film has whizz, and bang, and you’ll forget it by tomorrow.

Still, there is no denying that the film clicks up a gear when he’s on screen. He says nothing and his motives have not moved beyond “kill, kill, kill”. But he is one of horror’s true stars and, if Halloween Ends often sluggish and silly, Myers powers through the mediocrity one brutal swipe at a time.

The idea is that Chickie’s experiences will challenge his simplistic view of the conflict, but Farrelly frames his jaunt as a glorified gap year, with various atrocities repackaged as opportunities for personal growth. Napalm

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s epic drama springs off the success of Black Panther and roars into action: it’s every bit as propulsive, as detailed, as richly imagined. It’s fast, and it’s loose, and it totally works.

It’s a thoroughly pleasant if flimsy film – a sleeper hit already in America’s sleepy arthouses – with a distinct perfume of nostalgia wafted towards us, say by the sight of Gitanes lit up on cross-channel flights.

Amsterdam might encompass 15 years of history, straddle two continents and throw in innumerable subplots, but it becomes increasingly hard to shake the sense that you’re watching a very thin idea twiddling its thumbs.

Dunham’s film has the kind of winning light touch that’s impossible to fluke.

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

Heidi Thomas’s screenplay, cannily expanding a little on Bennett’s glisteningly witty original script, shows its hand with tactical finesse.

When it’s in-flight entertainment this winter, no one will necessarily moan, but it plays like a soothing feature-length trailer for your first cocktail on the beach.

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

The film has a sheepish, hair-shirt quality, as if it wants credit for intersectional largesse. What it does do quite well is challenge the temptations of unquestioning nostalgia.

The film contains deeply felt work by Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby, but it’s an otherwise drab, simplistic, mechanical thing that wears its workings right on the surface.

Mark Chappell’s script has a refreshingly high laugh-rate as these things go, with a seam of pure English silliness that sets it well apart from Knives Out, without gunning for anything like that league of plot ingenuity. It’s closer, really, to doing for Christie what Scream did for the slasher flick – goosing the formula with winks and tickles.

Blonde is severe and serious-minded almost to a fault: you rather wonder how many viewers at home will soldier on to the end when it lands on Netflix after a limited theatrical release. In the cinema, though, it swallows you up like an uneasy dream, at once all too familiar and pricklingly unreal.

Robert Zemeckis, who should be well above this, imprints a bit of personality on this nightmare exactly twice.

The Eternal Daughter is a minor film at least partly by design, but it leaves an ethereal trail of sadness and creepiness.

Things keep barrelling along thanks to both Pugh and the plot’s punchy critique of certain recent trends in the internet’s more testosterone-raddled dark corners. With a smudgy red-lipsticked grin, Don’t Worry Darling drags them out into the blazing desert light.

This is an often shoulder-shudderingly funny film, whose comic dialogue is dazzlingly designed and performed. But McDonagh leaves fate itself with the last, black, bone-rattling laugh.