Skarsgard and Reinsve are excellent as two damaged people who are only able to open up when they’re working, but you yearn for the film itself to open up. It’s an intriguing premise, stylishly executed but sometimes lacking a bit of heart.

His legal ambitions are thus stymied at every turn by missed appointments and disinterested power players, resulting in glacial narrative pacing and a miserably predictable outcome. It is, at best, vaguely Kafka-esque but also, for the viewer, quite the trial.

The film is very much a paper tiger — what feels at first like a prestige production is ultimately toothless and unconvincing.

It’s a decent film about an underexplored subject and adequately acted by a cast of inexperienced unknowns, but nothing we haven’t seen before from the determinedly low-key Dardennes.

The film, alas, and it pains me to say it, is not very good. It’s overwhelmingly, unfortunately, self-serious, and thus accidentally very Monty Python. There’s little dramatic tension and the music is close to agony.

This being Reichardt, white-knuckle thrills were unlikely to be on the menu either, but you would have hoped for something to engage with beyond a vague hum of disappointment.

It is highly likely that Macdonald is making explicit connections between the US military industrial complex and the system of consumer-based capitalism that supposedly dulls the masses and funds the wars. But, sheesh, does it have to be such a drag?

You can’t lie in a close-up, which is lucky for Stewart. Because her lead actress, on camera throughout, expresses the kind of deeply moving primal agony and preternatural resilience that never once feels false, and ultimately compensates for the ostentatious nonsense around her.

One of the most committed performances of Ethan Hawke’s career is cruelly undercut by some ridiculous “shrinking” tricks in this biopic about the Broadway songwriter Lorenz Hart.

It is not the greatest Frankenstein ever. It’s not even an especially good one. It’s just, in the end, serviceable.

It looks nice and, at best, it’s tapping some vague sexual anxiety about marriage-wrecking shaggers with big moustaches. But really ...

If Zimny’s aim was to create, as far as possible, the experience of watching Springsteen live, then he succeeds. His sweeping shots and quickfire close-ups are dazzling. But there are longueurs in a film that spends a lot of time on the minutiae of fashioning a set list, and on some rather lifeless rehearsal-room footage.

It’s not quite vintage Jarmusch (for that see Night on Earth and Broken Flowers), but it is light and compassionate.

Personally, I gorged myself silly on the esoteric references, and appreciated profoundly the way that this ersatz Belmondo, just like the real thing, rubs his lower lip. But I’m not convinced that everyone else will.

The film plays like a well-leafed anthology of Irish folklore, handsomely enough shot but lacking the unifying conceit that has driven, say, the great Australian horror movies of recent years: The Bababook, Talk to Me, Bring Her Back. Hangings, hauntings, howling winds? For McCarthy, it’s all just good craic.

It’s more funny peculiar than funny ha ha and, alas, doesn’t always work.

A sensual reframing of a story that must still be raw for Simón, 38, the film doesn’t quite match the subtlety and originality of Summer 1993. It’s a satisfying enough addition to the saga, though, and a fillip for the Galician tourist board.

The writer-director Runar Runarsson makes a virtue out of this narrative simplicity, however, and delivers the equivalent of sweetly moving “slow” cinema, where we get to luxuriate in the characters for long, long, sometimes wordless takes, and to find in the exemplary performance of the relatively new and untested Hall a heartbreaking expression of hidden grief.

It’s always compelling, and a powerful first feature.

Sometimes, a couple of scenes can make all the difference.

All this is window dressing that might have been less conspicuous had the film been in the possession of a thundering narrative core. Yet the debut writer-director Laura Piani relies so heavily on hopeless Bridget Jones clichés — lots of pratfalls — that the surrounding locale eventually takes centre stage.

There’s lots of fun here, some of the one-liners are exquisite and the helter-skelter finale is delightfully overstuffed. Frustratingly, it’s still second-grade Pixar.

Far too much time is spent with the tedious off-camera histrionics of the brattish co-star Shia LaBeouf, and the admission that Figgis was hand-chosen (“invited”) by Coppola for the documentary renders it slightly toothless.

It’s visually appealing, obviously, because Guadagnino does not make ugly films. But it’s difficult to convey how little, dramatically speaking, is happening here.

In short, Yorgos, move on.

Returning to the screen after a long absence, Lawrence manages such profound levels of eye-rolling pissed-offness that it’s difficult not to take it as a sign of the actress pushing back on the suffocating levels of adoration she has been subjected to.

Mazin’s script has some fun with whodunnit tropes — the late-arriving wild card, the police blaming a drifter, the clue lying in the victim — but the film’s flaw is fairly straightforward: the sheep don’t do enough detecting.

Thatcher’s performance is mostly a marvel. She’s instantly sympathetic, the most deliberately “human” being in the film, and yet the genius of her characterisation as a robot is in the way she slightly over-enunciates her dialogue and walks with the odd shuffle of a Thunderbirds marionette.

Still, Norton’s great. It should’ve really been the Pete Seeger story.

There’s only one thing worse than being trapped in a theatre watching a badly staged play: being trapped in a cinema watching a badly adapted stage play. And so it is, frequently, with this Ibsen update that’s pulled in too many directions at once by its ambitious director, Nia DaCosta, and the producer-star Tessa Thompson.

Fans are calling this the Brothers Grimm meets The Substance but it’s better than that sounds. And certainly harder to watch.

On the positive side, Threapleton, the daughter of Kate Winslet, is sensational. Quietly commanding, but always glowing with charisma, she is the discovery here.

The film is fun for a while, and it’s certainly the most commercial project that the experimental Canadian director Guy Maddin (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) has delivered. But it’s also pretty tedious and not half as smart as it might have been. Plus it’s very lazy, and smug.

There’s an unashamedly “enthusiastic” cross-promotional quality to the film, like a two-and-a-half-hour Formula 1 commercial, that never quite gels with its hoary central story.

Layton’s direction is powerful but patient and Berry brings real bite to her insurance agent, who at 53 is prey to the bitter realisation that the system is not built in her favour.

There are glimmers of intrigue, as well as quirks and curios.

The film ends far too neatly and with a speedy pass over the failures, but there is much here to savour.

[Hitchcock] has managed to breathe some life into it. He has not made it credible--that would be expecting too much--but he has at least made it seem far less ridiculous than one could possibly have expected. [12 Oct 1927]

We are simply beaten into bored submission — yes, we get it, he’s maaaaaaad! There are also glaring plot holes and contrivances aplenty. By the closing-reel murder it’s almost impossible to care.

Nothing here resonates and its slavish adherence to recent Pixar formula is ultimately deadening. Yes, Elio, you are unique and wonderful. Your flaw is your gift. Now, please, can we all go home!

It has its moments, mostly in the initial set-up. And Armstrong still lands a few zingers.

The film, written by Julian Fellowes on autopilot and directed by Simon Curtis (in a trance?), climaxes with a scene that is simultaneously grossly saccharine and deeply cynical.

Well, the bad news is that Paddington in Peru isn’t as good as Paddington 2. The good news is that Wilson has made an entertaining and endearing yarn that is worth 106 minutes of your time.

It’s unashamedly derivative but also entertaining. Butler and Kravitz are charming together and dripping with chemistry.

Majors plays the central character, Killian Maddox, with subtlety and sensitivity.

It’s loud, multicoloured and garish, like sticking your head inside a giant tin of Quality Street while someone whacks the outside repeatedly with a polo mallet. Only this time, for once, it’s slightly more pleasurable than that sounds.

It’s an ambitious contemporary western shot last year yet set in the summer of 2020, and ostensibly aims, in almost every scene, to analyse and ridicule the political obsessions and digital neuroses that dominated that moment. And, well, it’s quite the mess.

The film hovers uneasily in a narrative grey zone, post-audition yet pre-show, and repeatedly castigates social media and reality TV for turning a generation of human beings into vacuous, camera-ready twits.

The true naked aggression of Raging Bull seems beyond the reach of Johnson, or of this rather sweet-natured film. Instead it’s Gently Engaging Bull.

It’s when they return to Earth-828 that the film reverts to type: enervating action, platitudinous script, predictable ending.

If you want to soak in what amounts to a concert film with an origin story, Becoming Led Zeppelin is sonically impressive and visually arresting.

The film is peppered with alarmingly dull and horribly written sequences featuring water-treading conversations about democracy, power and the dream of Rome. In short, no, we are not entertained.

The last act has a disappointing inevitability, with little of the transcendent emotion of the first hour.

It works. Peake is that good. Isaacs is also that good. And the subject is compelling and timely.

It’s not going to rock everyone’s world and neither is it a patch on Carol. But it’s competent, sometimes clever, film-making with ideas and lots of heart.

This is a film fed by, and consistently cutting to, the operas that defined its subject. Yet there is not a single moment that is emotionally operatic. It is wilfully, wearily flat.

The earnestness slowly becomes suffocating, and Grandmother’s endless lessons grating. Yes, nature is the ultimate healer. And?

Keaton commits fully to the puerility demanded by the title role. And yet the mania feels consistently forced. The fun is diluted.

It’s loud and diverting and very young children are sure to be entertained. But it’s also utterly dead, right down to its hollow, greedy, cash-grabbing core.

In the end Good Fortune is perhaps too ambitious, and indulges in too much sermonising, especially when Gabriel also joins the human workforce and, like Jeff, experiences financial hardship. Reeves is good value as the clueless angel but an unfortunate sense of repetition sets in.

It’s difficult to convey just how little dramatic urgency there is in a film that’s effectively a computer-generated diorama, one that’s filled with fantastical flora and fauna and mystical beings who are all dressed up with nowhere to go.

The Uninvited is similarly haphazard and, even by the film’s shamefully saccharine finale, has little to say other than “life is short, and making movies sucks.

The film, despite themes of empowerment, is really a strange cinematic palimpsest. Scratch the glossy feminist makeover to reveal underneath a still smirking, leering, chauvinistic pig.

Flawed to its core but never less than riveting

Fall is an instinctive visual storyteller, the two leads have a winning chemistry, and the location shooting in Istanbul is vivid and authentic. Just a shame the film is less so.

The film is so dewy-eyed about the process that made him a star, it overlooks the more devilish bits of the bargain. In truth all biopics ought to have some aspects of a cautionary tale: there but for the grace of God go we.

A painfully derivative buddy movie.

The supporting character interactions can be creaky and stiff, as if the director Benjamin Caron was so convinced of Kirby’s prowess that he presumed she could carry the film, flaws and all. And she almost does. Almost.

The twists are many and some predictable, but the mood here is mostly, and unapologetically, guilty-pleasure hokum.

Eternity might have worked if the three leads conveyed anything beyond jaded inertia in each other’s company. They are supposed to be consumed by a love so passionate it propels them into adventures beyond the grave. They look, instead, as if they could barely get out of their trailers.

This is a mildly distracting guilty pleasure romp that is undone by its own casting crisis.

The music is from the TikTok stars Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, who bring some verve and serious Frozen-esque power to the standout track Beyond (chorus: “Can I go beyoooooooond?!!!!!”). It’s just a shame that the surrounding film, unlike Moana, never really finds its way.

It just coasts, with breathtaking laziness, on the power of nostalgia, and it seemingly hopes that the sight of our beloved trio gathered together, mostly on chairs and improvising badly, will be enough in itself.

There’s very little narrative sense here and even less psychological realism.

Evans is a film-maker with an instinctive understanding of frame space (The Raid is a joyful camera ballet), but he seems constrained here. As a screenwriter he leaves no cliché unloved.

The movie treads narrative water for the entirety of its running time.

Remarkably Bright Creatures milks My Octopus Teacher for Hallmark-card dollops of anthropomorphic sentiment, but fails to live up to the promise of its title, abundantly. Nice but dim is closer to the mark.

Provocation is just people-pleasing upside down — it has the same empty rattle. A wind whistles through the centre of this film, and not the Brontëan kind.

The narrative arrives in clumsy self-contained chunks that don’t always gel.

Despite the game involvement of actors as fine as Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Thomasin McKenzie and Anna Maxwell Martin, this Downton Abbey spoof is often aggressively unfunny.

It’s mostly a dirge, but the younger Day-Lewis has an artful eye and his indecently talented dad is clearly crying out for better material.

Sadly, the mockumentary Zamiri’s film most resembles — at times, eerily so — is Spice World: The Movie. No, really. Same manic energy. Same faux crises. Same shouty one-note line delivery.

Yes, it’s ostensibly sweet and inoffensive. But it’s so inoffensive that it’s almost, well, offensive.

The problem with this is that it howls at everything and nothing, while also using the kind of conspiracy theorising about sinister global cabals that’s more suited to foam-flecked podcasters and Elders of Zion loonies.

Like the original movie, this isn’t super funny, unless burping, farting and people being hit in the groin with golf balls is your thing.

Unburdened by narrative logic, there is a joie de vivre in the way Davis, 59, throws men over her shoulder, elbows them in the face and sprays them with machine-gun fire.

It would be funny if it weren’t so dull and so strangely played by Malek, an actor who seemingly believes that a complex internal life is best illustrated by hyperactive facial muscles and the blinkless stare of a sullen zombie.

It’s sloppily directed by David Ayer (Sabotage) with a depressing lack of urgency and a sense that everything here has been done better, more efficiently and with more emotional engagement before.

The poster might as well read “come see Orlando Bloom get put through the wringer”. It’s awesome on some level but it’s not much else.

With Bader and Blyth on quietly charismatic form throughout, [Haley's] made a film that is eminently slick, consistently palatable and instantly forgettable. The perfect Netflix product.

My two stars are for [Pike] alone. She’s an utter hoot in every scene, part Miranda Priestly, part Hannibal Lecter, and it’s an unsettling testament to her power as a performer that she tilts the sympathy axis of the entire movie towards her.

The Colleen Hoover school of social realism is back — and this time it’s more idiotic than ever.

There are some mildly diverting moments, and it’s pleasing to see Ed Harris emerge later on in a significant set piece. Like everything else in this ill-judged effort, his appearance is a wasted opportunity.

It looks great, and Cronin is a gifted stylist. But, as with his debut The Hole in the Ground, there’s too much slavish imitation and homage here. His greatest accomplishment is the downtime family scenes. They throb with easy realism. He should dump horror and do drama instead.

It could be seen as a cynical capitalist move by the best businesswoman in the game. And it definitely is — at least partly.

Coen has gone back to his happy place but this time he’s not taken the audience with him.

The director Todd Phillips said there would be no follow-up to the original, but he changed his mind and the result is a derivative musical.

The most memorable aspect is also the best memorial to Hutchins’s skills — the on-screen composition of beautiful, open landscapes, captured in daytime and dusk, and at night the flickering of fire illuminating Baldwin and McDermott’s faces as they talk.