If co-directors Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom paint a sometimes confronting picture of the price of ‘free love’, that never tarnishes their subject. You’re left with the sense that she was a butterfly neither the Stones nor any of the other men in her life could ever trap – a fitting epitaph to a mercurial life.

It also benefits from some engaging supporting characters.

With The Fall Guy, stuntman-turned-filmmaker David Leitch and his bang-on-form stars, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, have nestled a frisky, winsome romantic comedy inside the framework of an old-school, full-throttle action movie and conjured up a pretty perfect Friday night at the movies in the process.

It’s not quite Roman Holiday, but it’s got a charm of its own.

If the story construction is intricate, the tennis is ferocious.

This is a delightfully-pitched, gory horror comedy that energetically creates a crossover genre we never knew we needed: the vampire ballet.

Cavill’s band of rebels are drolly enthusiastic, which is really all that’s asked of them. Kinnear’s Churchill impersonation falls flat, but Til Schweiger’s chief Nazi is aptly villainous, and Elwes is a delightfully dry M. Aside from the overlong denouement, the action zips by so quickly that the end notes – about the remarkable true-life team – pull us up short. These extraordinary heroes had no time for larking about. But they’d probably be chuffed to see themselves as spies insouciant enough to inspire 007 himself.

It’s a pungent articulation of American chaos. The problem is that it’s not telling us much that we don’t already know.

Nègre is free to fictionalise the story any way he wants. The times, however, arguably call for a more clear-eyed examination of the dangers of turning a blind eye to the less palatable actions of ostensibly friendly nations.

Not all of these vignettes are duds – Amy’s meet-cute with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell, excellent) over pints and pool in a Camden boozer is genuinely terrific – but they don’t make a script that already feels soft-soaped to get the Winehouse’s estate’s approval, feel any less pedestrian.

Stark social drama meets boy’s own adventure in this strikingly photographed African-set, Oscar-nominated adventure.

It’s horror hokum told with unswerving commitment.

Eva Green’s full range of skills have rarely been so thoroughly showcased.

Its brainless brawn is again pretty entertaining, until the credits roll and you can instantly forget the whole thing.

The new Dev Patel is taking no prisoners in this slice of Mumbai mayhem, announcing himself as a filmmaker with possibly the most ferocious mainstream action movie since The Raid, and as an action star by sticking a knife into a goon’s neck. With his teeth.

Entertainly, director Michael Mohan, who worked with Sweeney on the 2021 thriller The Voyeurs, twigs that the Catholic Church isn’t just a source of spiritual tension, but a terrific arsenal too. Immaculate makes imaginative use of crucifixes, rosaries, and at least one crucifixion nail in all kinds of ways the Papacy didn’t intend.

This sequel brings everything back to the original film – even recycling some of the same jokes. But they’re a pale echo of its greatness in an overly stuffed and only occasionally fun spectral adventure.

From sombre Islamic prayers to café-touba-fuelled socialising, Banel & Adama is stitched beautifully together from the fabric of rural Senegalese traditions.

Osika is perfect as Rita, half-child, half-woman, but then Hausner's cool, compassionate, naturalistic script, reminiscent of early Fassbinder, gives her plenty to play with.

It’s wonderfully creepy and unnervingly familiar, like Alan Partridge by way of The Exorcist. If that doesn’t automatically enter it into the pantheon of classic midnight movies, I don’t know what does.

The batshit fever dream that Kristen Stewart’s fans have been waiting for, Love Lies Bleeding also happens to be the best B-movie of the year.

The combination of Gyllenhaal’s easy charm, some Florida sunshine and at least one fight scene for the ages make this Road House worth stopping by. Just try to grab a seat in a quiet corner.

Do you work to live or live to work? If you’ve got a half-decent job, it might just be the latter. For young millennial Angela, a hard-pressed PA at a Bucharest film production company in Radu Jude’s self-described tale of ‘Cinema and Economics in Two Parts’, it’s barely even the former.

It’s a timely and galvanising telling of a remarkable story that every football fan should know, and one that will hopefully go some way towards ensuring that Copa 71 finds its way into the sport’s history books.

This is a film equally grounded in realism and empathy, and a reminder that no two people have the same story.

Stopmotion feels born out of the sheer mental challenge of being trapped in a room with macabre creations that come to life over weeks of painstaking labour.

At just over an hour, Diop’s strange, captivating and rigorously intellectual film leaves a mighty impression well beyond its compact length.

The Outrun is adapted by Scottish journalist Amy Liptrot from her own searingly honest memoir, with German director Nora Fingscheidt as co-writer. Fingscheidt handles her true-life traumas with great care, but without sparing us any of the harsh realities of recovery.

It’s a testament to [Franco's] skill as a storyteller that Memory survives a calamitously mishandled plot point to slowly reveal itself to be his best work since 2012’s After Lucia, the first of three of his films to win awards in Cannes.

It’s anthropology, not violence, that provides the sting in the tail – a thought-provoking coda to an often pulse-pounding survival horror.

Sure to be a cult classic, it’s quite literally cuckoo – and often gloriously so.

As a take on a very difficult topic, made even more so by current events, this is admirable and handsomely executed, but it’s rather like walking through a museum exhibition: it’s packed with fascinating detail, but doesn’t let you close enough to touch it.

As a sequel, it works for the same reasons that make The Empire Strikes Back so many people’s favourite Star Wars film: there’s a darkness, a bleakness, that makes the fist-pumping moments feel all-the-more earned.

It’s a vividly personal work, full of tough memories translated into neon nightmares, with an arresting visual palette and occasionally abrasive sound design that may put off the less adventurous.

It’s a profound performance by Murphy – perhaps even more so in fewer words than Oppenheimer – as Bill’s anger burns with tragic urgency.

The two gifted comedic actresses give their characters depth while also finding moments of lightness that stop the drama from ever bringing the pace down too much. It makes for a wickedly funny spin on the safe old British period drama.

Bob Marley: One Love is a strange mixture of the authentic and the broad. Taking place in a perma-fug of ganja smoke, director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s (King Richard) intermittently engaging portrait of the reggae superstar is shot through with sincere intentions, but too often leans into the trite.

It would have been great to have seen even more myth-busting around weight and health in this doc (presumably that’s covered in her book ‘What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat’), but Gordon is a funny and frank subject: a tour of her vintage diet book collection is a treat.

The handling of the drama is always sensitive, anchored by a perception-busting performance from Efron. Even the High School Musical phobic would have to admit that he’s a revelation here.

With top performances and real heart, American Fiction is a film that diagnoses the problem and presents a cure.

Culkin, just as motor-mouthed and f-bombing as Succession’s Roman Roy, but here with an extra slug of despair, is the manic yin to Eisenberg’s neurotic but compassionate yang. It’s an inspired on-screen pairing that plays to both actor’s strengths and finds space for melancholy amid some deeply awkward laughs.

Grief is fertile territory for horror, but while the script picks at Baghead’s thematic underpinnings, Corredor skips all but the most essential exposition, staying focused on delivering what the audience wants.

It is a rich and intensely moving experience.

It’s far from a ham-fisted, tasteless Bialystocky nightmare. But neither does it avoid some jarring dissonance, as Celie, a young Black woman in 1900s Georgia, goes from a deep personal hell to some hard-won peace via slickly choreographed saloon-bar stompers, banjo-picking blues numbers, and an awkwardly-staged soul ballad framed within an RKO-style dream sequence.

If nothing else, Radical Dreamer is a never-ending stream of great anecdotes.

If the film ends up somewhere a little too neat, Comer makes the journey always worthwhile.

2024’s Mean Girls needed to be loud, full-throated and unashamed to steal the original’s glittering plastic tiara: instead, it’s an enjoyable exercise in nostalgia that won’t win too many superfans of its own.

'We need an edge!' is Coach Ulbrickson’s verdict on his crew, and the same can be said about the film as a whole. But there is enough in The Boys in the Boat to keep you invested come the final showdown.

With its intensely-felt performances, haunting winter lighting, and seemingly inescapable claustrophobia, it leaves a mark.

Wilkerson’s book offers a new way to look at age-old concepts. DuVernay’s film gives us a new way to process them.

This has the warm, cosy sense of a film that, even with its few flaws, could very easily become regarded as a festive classic.

Humane to the last, Earth Mama is a vital but all-too-rare exploration of Black motherhood struggling on the margins of American society. Hopefully, there’ll be many more to come.

Where Loving Vincent imagined the great artist’s world in the style of his paintings, The Peasants lacks that same clear purpose. Instead, it’s an animation that feels like a live-action film in disguise.

[Arcel's] crafted a kind of Danish The Last of the Mohicans that’s full of passion and political conviction. It should stand the test of time almost as well as its rugged hero.

With a Bully XL jawline, the scale and intricate design of a Gaudi cathedral and the rage of a grumpy old codger, the subsea icon emerges from the cracks of modern blockbuster-making to remind the world that there is a much better way to make a monster flick.

All of Us Strangers is a miraculously uncheesy study of loneliness, forgiveness and, above all, the power of love.

As a piece of London social history, Scala!!! is winningly leftfield and its spirit is wildly infectious. But you could watch it without having been within a thousand miles of this once-seedy corner of King’s Cross and still get a kick out of it.

Ultimately, though, The Boy and the Heron is yet another testament to Miyazaki’s evergreen ability to embrace philosophical themes with boundless imagination. Jaw-dropping visuals, tender moments, and a pinch of comedy make it the perfect Christmas treat for Ghibli fans.

When even Alan Tudyk can’t rinse laughs from a sidekick role, your script probably needs another sprinkle of magic.

It’s refreshing to see a first feature which isn’t just a calling card, but driven by an authentic need to find a fresh angle on representing an undervalued cultural heritage.

It is art ASMR of the highest order.

Held back by a more conservative aesthetic and emotional approach, One Life comes nowhere near the power and veracity of Steven Spielberg’s film. But it does have an ace in the hole in Anthony Hopkins, whose performance delivers a subtle but profound gut-punch.

Ridley Scott delivers a spectacular but flavourless French history lesson.

It could have a lot of sentimental mush, but with Jackson and Caine on this form, it’s a total heartbreaker.

It all loses a bit of its circadian rhythm with a tacked-on sci-fi storyline involving social media ‘dreamfluencers’. But as a giddy showcase for a bang-on-form Cage, with some needle-sharp observations about fame in the 21st century, this Ari Aster-produced dark comedy is the best kind of cheese dream.

With a 105-minute running time, making it practically a short in the MCU, it has just enough good stuff that it doesn’t outstay its welcome. But the intricate plotting that was once a Marvel selling point is now becoming a millstone around its muscular neck, keeping newcomers out instead of welcoming them in.

The Holdovers is a triumphant comeback story for Alexander Payne, too. The director bounces back from 2017’s misfiring Downsizing to find his tone – a rare kind of jaded hopefulness – with all his old assurance.

Fennell has captured something real about these unreal people and the world they live in. Her film slices with a scalpel, peels back the layers and finds only hollowness beneath. Maybe that’s the real twist.

Subject acknowledges sensitivities are shifting but also pointedly makes clear, for the damaged souls here, they didn’t change quick enough.

Nikou’s film is brimming of humour and excellent ideas, but is mostly a rebuke to anyone who thinks algorithms and technology are the answer to human problems.

It reunites director Kitty Green with her ’The Assistant’ star Julia Garner and should marry provocative genre thrills with a cerebral feminist subtext.

The death of le Carré feels like the end of an era. The Pigeon Tunnel is its enthralling epitaph.

The level of brainwashing, privation and systemic abuse makes for an enraging, confronting watch, but it’s refreshingly focused on the people, rather than geopolitics. Just like for its two fleeing families, Beyond Utopia is an emotional journey.

The first ten minutes of Michael Mann's ’50s-set Ferrari offer a wordlessly kinetic ode to industry: glossy racecars speed across open Italian tracks, stately trains glide into stations packed with anticipation, bedside phones jangle off hooks and onto nerves. But then the dialogue begins, and this carefully engineered movie starts its downshift into neutral.

Berger doesn’t make concessions for the easily teary: Robot Dreams is a film as much about separation as togetherness. But while the final reel is a low-key heartbreaker, the bubble never pops on the loveliness of what came before.

Apart from a fascination with the hate-spitting mouth and throat of Lyubov Petrova’s vocally pyrotechnic Queen of the Night, the visual gimmicks are individually tolerable. But they don’t add up to anything particular.

20 Days in Mariupol can’t match For Sama for a Hollywood ending. That film sought to cut its bleakness with a whisper of hope – a new baby born in a shelled maternity ward – and a sense that something might, just might, survive the horror. Chernov has nothing as optimistic as that for us, just a fly-on-the-wall account of an unfolding atrocity. And it’s devastating.

Washington, the best he’s been since BlacKkKlansman, is a convincing leading man here: strong in deed and, eventually, ethics. Hardcore genre buffs will moan that the questioning of what it means to be human isn’t as developed as it is in, say, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, but this is still a spectacular blockbuster.

Rather than a simple story of underdogs vs The Man, director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) has made a complicated, sometimes funny story that is not a comedy, and sometimes feels like a horror.

Luna Carmoon’s debut feature about the daughter of a hoarder comes home bearing prizes, after premiering at the Venice Film Festival, announcing a young British talent capable of blending realism with surrealism to create a vivid personal language that defies simple interpretations.

Society of the Snow is careful to memorialise the dead in a moving, meaningful way.

Despite its thorough classiness and pristine presentation, it is not a film you can really warm to – much like its characters.

As an exploration of what motivates people at work – and what doesn’t – it’s smartly and subtly observed.

A gripping, visceral human drama that occasionally turns shakycam thriller to excellent effect, it’s a small victory for empathy over coarseness. Like Michael Winterbottom’s prescient 2003 docudrama In This World, it demands that you witness the treatment of refugees with your own eyes.

The horror-lite element gives it a boost, with Branagh’s direction conjuring up a few jumps, but this gently entertaining mystery could have used far more scares. If he’d gone the full leering Hammer Horror, rather than tastefully occult, this could have been a scream.

Like the musical style it’s named after, it plays slowly. But hang in there and you’ll find an enthralling requiem mass to a dying breed of hardscrabble gangsters and dirty cops that boasts a clutch of juicy performances.

Did we really need this Dracula footnote to set sail at all? Perhaps not, but while Øvredal’s expansion on the world isn’t as fun as the grim fables from which it draws blood, it still has some bite.

Although he retains the sweep of the novel, Virgo struggles to replicate its observational texture and the tension is undone by an atmospheric vagueness, full of pregnant pauses that only stretch out the run-time.

Comfortably Linklater’s best movie since Boyhood, Hit Man stands alongside School of Rock for big laughs and good vibes – albeit with a darker streak that slowly kicks in.

Empathetic rather than judgy, Coppola’s relationship drama hands agency back to its young heroine.

It’s a film for cinephiles as well as musos and romantics, with its discrete ‘movements’ mirroring the movie making style of its time frame.

Like a hollow-point shell, David Fincher’s slickly enjoyable assassin thriller is explosive but empty.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s feminist Frankenstein comedy is scabrous, smart and obscenely funny.

Unfortunately, its 39 minutes unfold in such motor-mouthed haste, it feels like a dad belting through a bedtime story while the football’s on downstairs.

The First Slam Dunk’s nimble storytelling and canny editing makes it work as both a sports movie, where you’re invested in the result, and a coming-of-age drama, where you care about the characters.

The result, if you can get past some of its absurdities, is a slight, enjoyable, lightweight jaunt. Just don’t expect anything more.

It’s not one of this summer’s strongest entries, but it’s fun to spend 90 minutes in this dog-eat-dick world.

A mockumentary as sparky, big-hearted and entertaining as its cast of bright-eyed kids and the wannabe thesps who coach them in the ways of ‘turning cardboard into gold’. The affection for musical theatre is so sincere, it’ll win over even the most Sondheim-averse.