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

It’s an engaging, sometimes touching, slightly narrow depiction of a great filmmaker in the winter of his career who’s intent on somehow recapturing the spring of it.

The Dubai section in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, in which Cruise spiders his way up the face of the Burj Khalifa, then sprints down it as if trying to break the vertical 800m record, proves everything Cruise wanted it to, above all that he’s picked the right director to make these set pieces fly. It’s better still in Imax.

[Zlotowski] creates a situation, casts it perfectly, and backs out of a fully achieved story. As drama, it’s coitus interruptus, with a Geiger counter doing the interrupting.

Dead Pigs’s intermingling of grit and polish is hugely satisfying: a potent combination of pearls and swine.

Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal spar beautifully in Peter Bogdanovich's homage to screwball comedies of the Thirties. [11 Feb 2017, p.32]

Disney, when minded, can still do this stuff as well as anyone – and in the pleasurable spring and snap of its animation, its at-times-unsettlingly comely character design, and set-pieces that swarm with humour and panache, Zootropolis 2 is proof.

Confronting the horrors of history head-on can make for cinema that’s impossible to shake, but Katabuchi’s painterly, introspective film proves a sideways approach can be just as indelible.

The shape of its story is ultimately conventional, and the way in which it’s told can sometimes feel familiar – like a Sunday evening drama smuggling in big ideas. But the line it draws between the earthy and the ethereal stays with you: it’s a well-timed double dose of consolation and escape.

Everything’s told in shards, and Amalric does very well to create a sense of emotional continuum amid all the procedural detail. His own performance is fantastic, jittery and dishevelled.

CODA is way too busy playing things cute.

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.

One of the finest films of the year: a shiveringly passionate period piece.

Tale of Tales dances on a razor’s edge between funny and unnerving, with sequences of shadow-spun horror rubbing up against moments of searing baroque beauty. The result is a fabulously sexy, defiantly unfashionable readymade cult item.

The moral maze of the premise is tautly negotiated. Shrewd casting helps, as does Eastwood’s trump suit: a forensic seriousness of purpose. Grappling with the mechanisms of justice and the workings of a lone conscience, he puts both in the scales, and no one’s off the hook.

Pumping Iron offers a revealing record of his [Schwarzenegger] earliest dalliances in the spotlight.

It’s an absorbing blend of comedy and tragedy.

Centered on Mara Wilson's extraordinary young girl Matilda, the kooky fantasy is comprised of charm, warmth and screwball comedy.

As ever with Scott, the film unfolds in a richly realised world and moves with an addictive, free-wheeling swagger. And his four main actors – Williams, Wahlberg and the Plummers old and young – have all been astutely cast.

The recommendation might be stronger if the mortifying moments for Craig didn’t make me, personally, want to cower rather than laugh.

A wild and righteous provocation.

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

Considine resists the usual narrative urges to bring down any kind of judgement or redemption, or to “make sense” of Matty’s story beyond the sense he himself can make of it. The film is not looking for a scapegoat. It just lets its characters live.

There's gambling, shootouts, shady characters and a bombastic score - what more could you ask for? [02 Mar 2016]

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.

Mickey 17, about a hapless clone’s misadventures on a colonising mission, is a throwback to blockbusters as the late 20th century made ’em: a $100m boisterous sci-fi satire that neither belongs to a franchise nor cares to start one, but instead jams as many eggs as it can into one increasingly precarious basket.

The director’s game is level, and typically mischievous, but lacks something - and it’s not just the vicious sting at the end of, say, Hidden.

Risk doesn’t burnish the Assange myth – it injects you into the bloodstream of the Assange story.