Perhaps the strangest aspect of Doctor Strange, within the lockstep rubric of these things, is how non-Marvelly it manages to feel.

The Suicide Squad (note the definite article) is such a drastic improvement in every respect that you almost – almost – feel sorry for the earlier version: it’s dazzlingly colourful and riotously crass, but also emotionally alive

Serraille, whose debut feature Jeune Femme won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2017, has returned with a film that feels like a jewellery box of telling moments: there is precious stuff here, and real sparkle too.

Elliot is a talent eccentric enough to make Nick Park look like an office drone, and the serious sadness underpinning his vision only makes the humour work better.

It’s extremely moving in the gentlest, most linear way, and the other performances are sterling, too.

The backdrop to this very English marriage – soot and grit and survival, and that basenote of touching bafflement – means all the tears are earned.

It has a whistle-stop quality, and you sometimes wish it would slow down to savour more personal details, rather than dishing out brisk bullet points from this amazing life.

The film is all feints for an hour – elegant feints, but far from kick-starting the dramatic motor, they have a habit of stalling it.

The Shrouds has potential to be morbidly hilarious, deeply twisted and strange, or rather moving: the fact that it only feints in those directions, while prioritising several less fruitful ones, makes it the steepest disappointment of Cronenberg’s late career.

Leigh Whannell’s film – one of the smartest and scariest yet to roll off the production line at horror specialists Blumhouse.

The two stars generate an astonishing sensual charge in a brilliant addition to the Batman canon that refuses to behave like a blockbuster

This is Penna’s debut feature, and he has set himself a high bar which he just about scrapes over, with Mikkelsen giving the entire project a super-strength leg up.

For all The Falling’s period trimmings, its uncanny power resides in these ellipses and blackouts – in elements that cannot be easily rationalised.

Portraying an instantly recognisable reality with a raw, utterly uncompromising intensity.

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.

The Imitation Game is a film about a human calculator which feels... a little too calculated.

An artistic spin on tragedy that’s deft, witty, very well-acted, and more diverting than it is profound.

Writer-director Alan Parker's utterly delightful, tongue-in-cheek love letter to the gangster genre.

Hyper-violent it may be but there is beauty in its brutality.

The best thing about Destin Daniel Cretton’s blockbuster is how confidently it goes its own way: these call-backs to surrounding Marvel lore are sly without being smug, at least until the obligatory end-credits gesture ushering Shang-Chi into the fold.

In all kinds of ways, Luca is the smallest film that Pixar has made, but it’s also unquestionably one of the studio’s loveliest.

The script makes a heavy meal of Naru’s personal growth, where a concentration on pure survivalist reflex would have made it leaner and meaner. But when the film knuckles down in sequences of wordless action, it slays.

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.

One of the great pleasures of the collection is watching human ingenuity at work almost in real time, as each filmmaker in turn fathoms what’s possible, then keeps pushing, to regularly thrilling effect.

Arrogance may be the Achilles’ heel of all Grant’s baddies, including this one, but a tip-toeing aversion to risk makes Heretic end with a whimper.

Serving as an allegory on post- and antenatal depression, Prevenge is a kaleidoscope of violence and humour, a tense tale that wickedly extracts laughs through the banality of its suburban setting.

It is what these films always are – source material for its own advertising campaign – but in this instance, it’s little more, which might have been a problem if said campaign hadn’t already proven such a roaring success.

Skilful photography boosts a standard-issue love triangle into one of Hitch's own favourite films from the period. [14 Jul 2012]

Franco is more skilled at getting us to think: not only about memory loss, but everything we choose to forget and can’t, and how these distinctions make us who we are.

Thank heavens, then, for the time-loop gimmick, which sustains a full hour of screen time with enough variations on its gambit to hook you in.

Haynes’s vision of two New Yorks, a half-century apart, is a marvel of nested detail, never overbearing, and interested in things rusted and forgotten rather than shiny and new.

Hacksaw Ridge is a fantastically moving and bruising war film that hits you like a raw topside of beef in the face – a kind of primary-coloured Guernica that flourishes on a big screen with a crowd.

It's bad enough that the film has such minimal interest in his victim – after two scenes doing the film's best acting, Afesi is out of the picture. But as portraiture, Welcome to New York flops too, despite Dépardieu's considerable efforts. [Unrated Version]

Goro Miyazaki’s film is about the point at which we decide not what we want to be when we grow up, but who, and the way the tiniest moments in our lives often have the most far-reaching effect.

This excellent film is a sequel and knows it, and wants us to know that it knows it.

There are those who find Žižek a delight; but well before the two-hour mark, one feels he has delighted us long enough.

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

The film passes the time with breezy good cheer and the odd well-wrangled cringe, but fades from memory in much the same way. There’s just nothing about this guy that gives you cause to remember him.

You could hardly ask for a sharper reminder of blockbuster cinema’s charms than the crescendo from swelling dread to snappily choreographed chaos that comprises the film’s tremendous 10-minute prologue.

The Sheep Detectives is a profoundly odd viewing experience – entirely pleasant, lightly funny and easily absorbed, yet every so often you find yourself thinking hang on a minute, I am watching a flock of sheep investigate a murder, and feel like you are having a stroke.

It's part sex comedy and part critique of the social divisions of Thatcher's Britain and despite its politically incorrect nature, the film is keenly observed and funny. [09 Apr 2011, p.34]

The energy, gruesome thrills and craziness of this flick are hard not to admire.

For a series that has always torn through technical boundaries at speed but whose storytelling stays scrupulously between the lines, it’s business as usual to the last.

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

Justin Kurzel’s blistering, blood-sticky new screen version of Macbeth unseams the famous Shakespearean tragedy open from the nave to the chops, letting its insides spill out across the rock underfoot.

Byrne’s film is concerned with the process and practice of myth-making: the way the right person, or action, or face, can capture a moment, or galvanise a movement – and, for both good and ill, transform politics into something like art.

It’s a wholly respectable adaptation, though perhaps a flash or two more of wildness wouldn’t have gone amiss.

With its watch-through-your-fingers cringe factor, this is an excellent black comedy of amiss-ness all round. It’s about millennials, their fibs, and their failures.

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.

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.

I don’t know how shocking Inside the Manosphere will be to people who are already inside it, but I was gobsmacked and appalled by the extent to which this regressive spiral has been packaged and sold via international tech platforms that should know better.

Ferrara has come up with something pretty special here: a subtle, seductive, lamp-lit hymn to one artist’s talents from another in the process of rediscovering his own.

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

The mood’s often as fun as it is funereal, and though the film occasionally feels clever in a way that isn’t necessarily a compliment, Sokurov’s ideas have a philosophical depth and richness that are found almost nowhere else in cinema.

The film’s strength is its plainness and melancholy, as it sketches the history of a marriage – ardent, in times gone by, and still movingly dedicated.

It’s certainly Redmayne’s film, and his performance is everything you could ask for: completely convincing in its physicality, credible in its pain, and warmly but not crassly optimistic in its nearly constant good temper.

Dogman unfolds its relatively straightforward story with both thrilling style and serious moral force: it’s a sensation judged on either bark or bite.

McQueen’s film is big-picture British cinema, of a scale and depth which hasn’t been seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Both London and the countryside are shot with a classical elegance that calls to mind David Lean, while the sequences portraying the bombings themselves flare with panic and horror.

Casting is a strong suit here, and even the incidental characters are distinctive and precise.

André De Toth's film noir benefits from lovely LA location work and a strong supporting cast, including a scenery-chewing cameo from Timothy Carey. [10 Dec 2011, p.38]

Almodóvar has always been the sole screenwriter of his films – but perhaps in this case, keeping an English assistant in a nearby antechamber might have been a wise move.

For all its decorative twists and curls, this is a sophisticated, searching work.

Flexing some of that Jean Valjean resolve, but with a payload of untrammelled, Wolverine-like rage behind it, Jackman comes closest to shouldering the movie, without ever seriously threatening to make it work.

Theater Camp’s comedy springs entirely from personality: the jokes aren’t really quotable because they depend on you knowing who’s making them to work.

Zemeckis turns the event into a kind of blockbuster Cinéma Pur – an almost avant-garde game of composition, movement and perspective, exhilaratingly attuned to form and space. ("Mad Max": Fury Road did the same.) The camerawork is subtle and meticulous, the 3D head-spinningly well-applied.

The rocker is too mercurial a figure for a biopic to ever fully capture him – but this gorgeous film comes as close as you could hope.

Everything Joan and Tom go through is handled believably, but with blinkers on. Their surrounding lives feel grey and pencilled in, as if by all-round agreement to deny them any colour.

Nichols’ film delivers a grubbily glamorous blast of underworld machismo of the sort that Scorsese himself made a mid-career speciality: think wildly charismatic performances, elegant camerawork, regular jabs of barbarous violence, and a skin-fizzingly sharp jukebox soundtrack.

A tough, vital, electrifying film.

Aatami is like some figure out of folk myth let loose on his persecutors, shaking off a ridiculous assortment of injuries between one set piece and the next.

Rush hurls himself into the film’s star turn with a cantankerous abandon that more than compensates for his slightly unsteady accent. It’s a wildly entertaining performance that feels vividly inhabited both physically and vocally.

It's hugely overblown, and tones down the novel's force, but is carried along by skilful direction from Otto Preminger and a magnificent score by Ernest Gold. [15 May 2010, p.31]

Think of The Nice Guys as candy noir: all the key ingredients from mysteries such as Chinatown and The Long Goodbye poured into a tall glass, then topped up with sugar syrup, a spritz of club soda, a sprig of mint and an ironic paper parasol.

Elke Sommer is good as the devious maid Maria Gambrelli but it is Sellers who steals the show as the inept detective fumbling and bumbling his way around solving murder mysteries.

Mark Sandrich's musical, written and scored by Irving Berlin, is a stone-cold festive classic. [07 Dec 2018, p.35]

It’s an underrated classic.

The film carries itself like a bright and mischievous character study in the style of Nicole Holofcener, but is ultimately just a dog weepie with airs.

Audiard’s trick is to make the overblown mélange into something amazingly confident – it’s clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful and absolutely bonkers. It’s hard to believe he pulls it off, but he does.

Beneath the mounting contrivances, Dunne’s sturdy performance supplies an earnest core which Lloyd should have trusted more completely.

Though Rudd and Lilly spark off each other just as appealingly as before, the more urgent point is for Lilly to earn The Wasp her equal billing, which she very much does.

Turturro deserves four stars – but the rest of Moretti’s saggy melodrama is scarcely half as good.

You can’t help but feel disappointed that a film with a relatively spicy premise becomes, in the end, so risk-averse.

A welcome reissue of the 1984 creature feature in which a Capra-esque idyll is besieged by ravening beasties.

It's directed by Michael Anderson (of The Dam Busters fame) with steely panache, and the clammy terror of the mission is well evoked. [11 Sep 2021, p.24]

As the Mini Coopers rock from side to side along a sewage tunnel, with £4 million in gold bullion in their boots and Quincy Jones's infectious score swinging away in the background, ask yourself this: is there a film - certainly a British film - that delivers a greater infusion of pure joy than The Italian Job?

Quietly disturbing but also darkly amusing to the end.

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.

Cinematogapher Dean Semler gets amazing colours as the sun sets, and there’s a bravely avant-garde debut score from Kiwi composer Graeme Revell, pumping up the pulse with sinister breathing sounds. The plot even thrives on a tacit cultural tension between the Australian stars and the arrogant interloper.

A terrific, despair-drenched final scene is the viewer’s reward for staying the course: pitilessly cruel, spare and shivery, it’s got everything the rest of this strangely stiff and synthetic film lacks.

For fans of Barratt, Boosh and mock-heroic Britcoms, it’ll mostly hit the spot.

The effective use of the split-screen creates a splintered sense of reality and piles on the tension. [04 Jul 2015, p.33]

Wiese’s film is an efficient piece of work, competent as a film but blistering as an example of human rights advocacy.

The film is inescapably hilarious too, though – such is the weird power of swearing when the swearer can’t keep a lid on it.

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.

Here and elsewhere, you sense the film knows more than it’s prepared to share, which gives it the queasy sheen of a PR exercise.

Sleekly enjoyable.

If Diao’s intent on confounding us, he has the courtesy to do it with frequently astonishing style and verve.

It’s a fantasy not of sexual satisfaction but sexual accomplishment, and perhaps no director other than Ozon would have the imagination and panache to carry it off.