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

The plotting has an off-kilter swerve to it that catches you nicely off guard, and the images have the warmth of nostalgic recall

Sorry, Baby is of a different order of achievement. Walking a tonal tightrope between comedy and tragedy with an exquisite balance that recalls Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain of last year, the film manages to address a difficult, dark subject with a blunt candour that is also slyly funny.

The film builds to a magnificently sad climax, with Clooney breaking the fourth wall and delivering probably his best screenwork ever.

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

Guadagnino is also on the form of his life, directing with assured style and structure, and offering a lovely closing device that asks us to relax, calm down and remember that it’s all just playtime.

La grazia is wonderful. It is slow initially and sometimes difficult but it gradually, seductively seeps into you and becomes near impossible to shake.

Mirren, of course, smooths over most quibbles with a character who begins in pure camp and enjoys a cheeky nod to her off-screen ex-beau Liam Neeson in Taken, and then gradually evolves into a serious, stony-faced sleuth.

Hallstrom also works wonders with the principal cast, finding hidden depths in Cline and mostly neutralising Apa’s unnerving propensity for blinkless serial killer stares (it’s like he’s going for Blue Steel but just, well, misses).

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.

Where to start with this utterly gorgeous, commanding, terrifying and masterful suspense thriller? Firstly don’t believe the hype — it’s not a horror. It’s bigger than that. Not a slasher, a creeper, a spooker or a demented killer movie. It’s better than that.

There’s more of everything. More narrative convolutions, more subplots, more supporting characters, more one-liners, more slapstick, more musical interludes, and even more tear-jerking finales.

This film isn’t particularly new or original but it’s just like its predecessors, which is more than enough.

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.

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

It doesn’t help that the director, Polly Steele (The Mountain Within Me), has seemingly chosen to fill the narrative longueurs with endless drone shots of the Irish countryside. Pretty, yes. But they can only offer so much damage limitation.

All of this, to be clear, is hilarious. Emotionally desolate, but hilarious.

Every single scene here is about what the scene is about, creating the deepest vat of cinematic s**t imaginable. The screenplay is shamefully inept.

The two Spider-Verse movies proved that brash and branded Hollywood entertainment does not have to sacrifice novelty and innovation. Smurfs, on the other hand? Profoundly, oppressively empty. There’s no reason to see it.

Ending with uncertainty, and a sense that Brazil is never too far away from another military dictatorship, this is sobering, essential viewing.

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

The entire film is like this. Random and unfocused. Bit of this. Bit of that. Lots of charm. See how you go. There are great lines hidden in the mulch, mostly delivered by Fellows.

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

In the end, though, the pairing of Edwards with Koepp is the complementary master stroke. They are camera and script in harmony, deftly entwined for a franchise that is finally, after thirty years, worthy of rebirth.

It’s bigger, brasher, more inventive, more “roboty”, certainly more entertaining, but missing just a sliver of the first instalment’s raw-bones charm.

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 sense of hallucinogenic sweatiness won’t be to everyone’s taste but [Garland] and Boyle should be applauded for taking such big swings and having the flair and confidence to pull them off. It’s an astonishing piece of work.

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.

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!

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 very little narrative sense here and even less psychological realism.

You just want to punch the air and shout, “Yes, this is what it was like in the before times! With actual acting, crafted lines and plot!”

Howard makes a fine straightwoman, however, in a film powered by the gaucheness of Mohammed and the ridiculousness of Bloom.

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.

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.

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.

Roustayi handles the change of gear impeccably, though, balancing extreme events with layered characterisation.

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.

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

This kind of unhinged ambition is what cinema does better than anything else.

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

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.

The film instantly falls into the seemingly insuperable live-action remake trap — the deluded belief that simply putting the original on film, sometimes via a frame-by-frame copy, is enough in itself.

This Indiana Jones knock-off is staggeringly slapdash.

Johansson and her excellent cast nail the big moments and revel in the small ones.

There’s little dramatic jeopardy here and certainly no danger. Instead, by the closing credits Cécile has barely changed, and the musical around her has barely registered. Sorry, the film with songs in it.

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

It’s knotty stuff for a first film but Lighton finds a delicate balance between disturbing, funny, sweet and sad.

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.

This is original, explosive (literally — you’ll see!) and ovation-worthy, cinema.

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

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.

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.

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.

Schilinski is in such control of every frame, every cut, prop and camera move that it’s often breathtaking just to witness the emergence of this grandly interlaced tapestry of grief.

Jacobsen is an instinctive stylist and the film sometimes slips into cottagecore territory, complete with chunky knitwear and crepuscular lighting. Yet the truth of the family’s situation always surfaces, making the beauty hollow and the loss more keenly felt.

It’s not often that films get better on a second viewing, but this dense, challenging and intellectually rigorous documentary about “Hitler’s favourite film-maker” Leni Riefenstahl is one of those exceptions.

Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys deliver a concentrated burst of parental trauma in this propulsive psychological thriller that’s set almost entirely inside a Land Rover late at night. It’s like Tom Hardy’s Locke but more intense.

Towards the end, that mood changes devastatingly. Another film might have needed a murder to send these chills but Donaldson is in such control of the tone, and her cast are on such exquisite form, that a single sentence has massive reverberations.

Building a whole movie around leaden, titter-inducing chunks of ersatz anti-drama is madness.

And then, saving the best till last, literally (of the entire franchise), there’s a helter-skelter biplane chase along South Africa’s Blyde River Canyon that’s simply one of the most extraordinary and apparently death-defying stunt set-pieces that anyone, let alone an A-list megastar, has ever attempted to put on film. And for this, Tom Cruise, we salute you. Mission accomplished.

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.

Everything ultimately descends into an overblown and hyper-violent firefight south of the border, near Juárez. It is an action movie, after all. But it’s one of the good ones.

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 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.

[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]

In the end the most radical element of this revamped Marvel entry is its suggestion that the problems of the world can’t be solved by a super-powered punch to the face, but by a heartfelt group hug. Sappy and saccharine, perhaps. But possibly the movie we need right now.

Yes, the canine element is structurally paramount, and yes, Apollo the Great Dane, as played by Bing, is adorable and regally sad throughout. But this is pedigree material.

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

A witty premise and a muscular cast are cruelly betrayed by this flaccid Tinseltown satire that features Robert De Niro delivering one of the most wretchedly cartoonish performances of his career.

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.

This is nearly two and a half hours of eye-gouging spectacle with jabs of heartfelt emotion, deftly orchestrated by the relatively inexperienced writer, director and animator Jiaozi (remember the name).

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

The bogus tone is grating from the start. It’s vanilla Quentin Tarantino, featuring long, diner-based exchanges, inexplicably glowing boxes and sudden eruptions of violence. Yet, unlike Tarantino, the dialogue is bland, the violence augmented with CGI gore, the set-ups devoid of jeopardy.

The ending’s a bit iffy, the action so-so. And yet the genre-mashing audacity (part horror, part historical epic, part musical) is so assured, the characters so rich, and the flights of fancy so ambitious that it’s impossible not to be moved.

It doesn’t help either that the cheap-looking CGI unicorns are wildly unconvincing or that Jenna Ortega, as Elliot’s disaffected daughter Ridley, seems to have wandered on to the set from a different and far more subtle movie.

The London kids are all right, and then some, in this sun-kissed love letter to teenage angst, human frailty and the uncommon beauty of the capital city.

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.

It’s a testament to Binoche and Fiennes that the heat they create on screen is intense enough to solder any cracks. Their scenes together are riven with pain and resentment yet bound by love. These are two of the greatest living actors nailing two of the most iconic roles in Western culture.

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.

A heartwarming coming-of-age story about a raw boy slowly ripening to manhood, this impressively mature debut is earthy, compassionate and never too cheesy.

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 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?

This is a movie that’s as difficult to watch as it is to forget. It’s a sensory blitz, a percussive nightmare and a relentless assault on the soul.

Believe the anti-hype. It’s that bad.

Soderbergh knows his spy movies and so is careful to inject the film’s more cerebral proceedings with just the right amount of lore and giddy genre hokum.

The look is mid-period Transformers. The dramatic tension non-existent. And the performances uniformly weak. This is top-dollar tedium.

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.

Cole and Liu are grippingly believable, despite doing much of their acting through helmet visors, while Harrelson provides much-needed levity. The subaquatic cinematography conveys the vastness and terror of the open ocean.

Ayo Edebiri, the award-winning star of The Bear, is on typically charismatic form here, delivering droll reaction shots and angsty frowns aplenty on a one-woman mission to rescue this extraordinarily toothless celebrity satire and half-cocked horror.

It’s left to Leonidas, in the only substantial female part, to steal the show. She plays Dani with an easygoing naturalism that bestows some much needed soul upon the project and suggests that Love might yet have a glittering future ahead in women-centred melodramas. If only he could ditch the swaggering.

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.

He may have developed, produced and directed just one movie — this boisterous Robert Pattinson sci-fi comedy — but, yikes, has he packed a lot into Mickey 17.

It’s Hugh Grant, returning as the ageing, inveterate “ladies’ man” Daniel Cleaver, who steals the show.

It’s so inane and confused, in fact, that it suggests there are no storytelling iterations left for the Marvel Cinematic Universe other than, perhaps, a wounded retreat into the overloaded one-joke irony of the Deadpool flicks.

The writer-director Peter Hastings preserves Pilkey’s key ingredients: lavatorial sniggers, winking details, a kid-made aesthetic.

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.

It’s badly shot, full of pointless jeopardy-free action sequences, with a flat-lining story and airless characters poorly performed by floundering actors at their lowest ebb. The search continues for DeBose.