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.

It’s a sturdy, straight tribute to an undertaking that feels wacky, quixotic and heroically mad – proving little that it set out to prove, but a great deal accidentally, about resourcefulness and survival in extremis.

Square, lacquered, and livelier than you’re expecting, Joachim Rønning’s film obviously adheres to all the formulae a doughty sports drama needs, starting crucially with the backdrop of adversity.

The film moves like a pyjama case full of angry weasels, and finds ingenious ways to cram every scene with just one more loopy, disposable gag or slapstick thwack. It may not be the year’s best animated film, but it’s almost certainly the most.

This chamber-horror oddity from the English actress-turned-auteur is too weird, too wonky; intermittently gross, and often gruelling.

The baseline for these things should be a little higher than ‘doesn’t retroactively sour you on its predecessor’. Even today – never mind in another 36 years – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the option of watching the source plumping for thi

It’s a witty and affectionate if rather slight archive documentary.

It’s hard to decide if Black Sea is a good idea put over with sub-par execution, or an iffy idea handled as well as possible in the circumstances.

It is a drama in which, like the constituent parts of a Michelin-star-wannabe dish, every component feels painstakingly tweezered into place.