Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right. Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency.

The film has zero finesse even by Ritchie’s standards, but if star ratings were calculated on body count alone, give it hundreds.

Slaloming between Hoffman’s testimony at DeLorean’s trial and the caper that got both men there for no obvious reason beyond it being the way these things are usually done, the film obediently pads through the shaggy-dog motions.

A nicely maintained amiable tone takes the edge off the inevitable lavatorial humour, while the 14-year-old Camp, of Big Little Lies and The Christmas Chronicles, strikes up an impressively plausible emotional connection with her goofy, lolloping co-star (not Whitehall, the dog).

As a masterclass in having as little fun as possible with an irresistible premise, JT LeRoy is a hard act to beat.

This supernatural thriller has a wild conceit about a time-bending beach, and every creaky device to hand gets thrown in to keep it going.

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.

The film has lots of fun with its premise – until America beckons, then suddenly it seems to lose its head of steam. ... Yet it rallies in style for a beautifully judged and surprisingly moving finale.

Speeding vehicles are clunked and donked into one another with xylophonic zeal, while the camera snakes and tears between them faster than seems physically possible. I mean it as a compliment when I say there are entire sequences here which look as if they might have been shot by a monkey in a jetpack.

Stone packs a ton of information in, then lurches to a halt; while he milks Kennedy’s mistrust of the three-letter agencies, his grasp of “what really happened” is still fundamentally guesswork. Still, he does persuade us of smoking guns out there that weren’t Oswald’s, or anywhere near the book depository.

As a platter for meat-and-potatoes, bump-in-the-night thrills, it’s a little on the shaky side, but they’re still delivered to the table.

The engagement with JM Barrie’s themes here is palpably sincere, and I found myself pulled along, not only by Zeitlin’s tugging showmanship, but the ache he manages to create around childhood as an enchanted space.

This Prohibition-set noir, directed by Byron Haskin, stars Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott, ably supported by Kirk Douglas, in the first of seven films he made with Haskin. Rumrunners Douglas and Lancaster run a thriving racket until one night they approach a police roadblock while carrying a fresh supply of hooch. They double their luck by splitting it up and rip-roaring chase kicks off. [03 Jun 2020, p.31]

Just when it’s threatening to pay off, it ends, with an experimental cliffhanger, not Levy’s idea. It reminds us – by simply not working – that abrupt, unresolved endings are the hardest kind to earn.

Could this be the late-emerging hit movie of summer 2013? No chance, although if this was August 1987, a time when we allowed action films to be smart on their own dumb terms, it might have cleaned up.

While he arguably fails to rein in his leading man (or half of him), screenwriter-turned-director Helgeland has a light touch, leavening the ultra-violence – and there are gory scenes – with a flair for absurdity.

About Time is itself a film less directed than quilted: it’s a feathery old patchwork under which you might snuggle at the end of a tiring week.

Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in this full-body sensory bath movie which follows a struggle for power among the elites of New Rome.

As the narrative approaches its desired fusion of Gallic and Indian cuisine, so too Hallstrom looks to have hit his sweet spot: the very middle of middlebrow.

For all its sporadic wackiness and wonder, on balance Aquaman still comes out a bore. But they’ve given it a heroic shake.

The shock of seeing tough guy De Niro as suburban dad Frank, falling in love with suburban mum Meryl Streep after a chance encounter, was insurmountable for some film goers. But time and distance lend this modern Brief Encounter (with added adultery) a certain glow and De Niro and Streep repeat the chemistry they first showed in the Deer Hunter. They were born to act together.

It bombards you with overwritten monologues and try-hard music cues in an attempt to drown out its dramatic shortcomings.

Enjoyment of The Flash hinges on two things: how much Ezra Miller sprinting about you can realistically withstand in one film, and whether multiverses seem cool any more, a year after we just flogged them to death. I wish you the best of luck.

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

Though it coasts on some wildly uneven star charisma, there’s nothing particularly objectionable about Double Tap, finally. It’s fine? It’s just a time-killer we didn’t much need, a decade after we hardly needed the first one.

In a classic Brit-com flanking manoeuvre, the film tries to simultaneously reduce the viewer to tears while inviting us to bask in the fuzzy glow of our friends and neighbours’s innate decency. Luckily it succeeds, thanks in no small part to the commitment shown by Horgan and Scott Thomas.

Perhaps the biggest compliment you could pay the film, apart from that it’s by and large hysterically funny, is that it is unmistakably film-like, with a smoothly arcing plot and gross-out moments staged with the verve and ceremony of an action-movie set-piece.

With something to say about the suffocating social mores of the time, it is one of the better-surviving chic-flicks of the Forties. [05 Jan 2013, p.32]