Spider-Man: Far From Home offers a breezy, Europe-set intermezzo between Avengers: Endgame and whatever is coming next – a kind of sorbet in blockbuster form to punctuate the binge.

It’s hard to decide whether Annabelle: Creation gains or loses points for this immensely daft set of developments, but surprisingly little damage is done to the business of turning up the scare dial.

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.

Keanu is cool and breezy enough to live up to its title amply.

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.

Kirk Douglas gives us a manically impressive Vincent van Gogh in this biopic based on Irving Stone's novel, which was inspired by the painter's letters to his brother Theo. Director Vincente Minnelli brings his own palette to bear on van Gogh's artistic struggle and emotional isolation, yet the plot could do with more of a defined structure. [10 Dec 2016, p.32]

The plot strong-arms the characters into increasingly contrived and overly familiar positions that leave you longing for the more relaxed vibe of Shelton's earlier films.

It gets by more on goodwill than inspiration, but it’s lightly amusing and well played.

While the plot often has a trudgy, through-the-motions feel, the same can’t be said for the animation itself, especially in the musical interludes.

The crazy surfeit of style can only go so far to compensate for the story, which is well-nigh impossible to care about.

Mockingjay – Part 1 is all queue, no roller-coaster. The third of four films in the successful and admirable Hunger Games series is any number of good things: intense, stylish, topical, well-acted. But the one thing it could never be called is satisfying.

Nouvelle Vague stylishly captures and celebrates a certain approach to making cinema – reactive, incautious, free-range – but leaves you wishing there was a little more of it in the film you just saw.

Hunting Bourne is more than ever a business now, with a bottom line to worry about, a crowd to please, and presumably hasty deadlines to meet. It’s not that there’s no pause for thought in this still-good-fun episode. There’s just not enough thought in the pauses.

A highly entertaining, though undemanding mixture, of sci-fi, romance and comedy, which could hardly have come off at all at any lower artistic level, nor without such a happy choice for the central part as Christopher Reeve.

To borrow a screenwriting buzz-phrase, "fun and games" is all you get, and the lack of meaningful connective tissue between the antics means the film begins to flag far earlier than it should.

The Lone Ranger is a grand folly that, in a sane world at least, would never have been made, although I’m really rather glad someone did.

John Ford's Second World War film is a morality play that is both sentimental and comical. [02 Nov 2013, p.40]

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.

There may not have been such an awkwardly homoerotic bromance-seduction on film since Jim Carrey molested Matthew Broderick in The Cable Guy, but it’s one of Central Intelligence’s redeeming features that it’s generously forgiving, rather than nastily phobic, of Bob’s quirks.

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.

Willis himself could not appear less enthusiastic in the role, and doesn’t phone in his performance here so much as clip it to a nearby pigeon and hope for the best. Yet perversely, his apparent lack of interest works rather well: McClane, after all, is now a grizzled back-number who has bumbled his way into a younger man’s action movie.

These complications want to spin off into fluffy absurdity. Instead they thicken into treacle. It’s a mistake to have Lohan and Curtis mainly interact as new characters, because the emotional core between their old pair gets dislodged – though it certainly helps that Butters is such a splendid, grounding co-star both before and after the switcheroo.

While you can’t imagine the film ever making it to Cannes under anything other than its own steam, the jaunt proves to be a surprisingly worthwhile one.

The film’s sincere core is threatened a little by its flashier directorial effects.

You miss the lingering after-sting of catharsis that was a regular signature of Lumet’s work, but in the heat of the moment, Money Monster’s bluster and nerve keeps you hooked.

While it too often sands the complications off what you sense should feel like an uncomfortably splintery issue, in its best moments, it’s a quietly fearsome piece of drama.

The Mustang could have held more surprises, but as a landscape study – “Prison, with horses” – it’s ruggedly stunning.

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]