It’s a CGI-heavy fantasia that will pop your eyeballs, but giddy as it is, it never quite sells its characters or gets much purchase on your emotions.

As ever with this filmmaker, symmetry is a hallmark, though both visually and narratively, this busy film lacks the serenity and jaw-dropping beauty of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Nor is Isle of Dogs as well-rounded and satisfying as Fantastic Mr. Fox. But as its curious canine cousin, it’s a movie that Anderson fans won't want to miss—as if they could anyway.

There’s a directness and swift pace to the first hour or so that works on an elemental level, and the final act is a delirious sugar rush of city-smashing spectacle (in Tokyo, of course, which has been evacuated to avoid any pesky collateral damage), delivering precisely the goods the movie promises.

Alicia Vikander makes for a scrappy, spunky Lara Croft, even if the overall concept remains less a movie and more of an exercise routine.

Love, Simon feels lived-in and self-assured, two traits its fans will want to adopt as well.

No Hollywood film can ever solve the central problem of adapting this book, in that it inevitably does too much of the imagining for you. DuVernay makes a big-hearted go of it, even if she seems slightly dazzled by her own magical mystery tour.

Still coasting on once being the director of the first The Fast and the Furious a full 17 years ago, Rob Cohen is unable to muster true engagement with the banal plot and characters, or deliver the kind of inspired ridiculousness that makes for a guilty pleasure.

Thoroughbreds plunges you into an ice-cold bath of amorality, but debuting writer-director Cory Finley has such a command of details—the perfectly soigné clothes and hairdos, the lavish Connecticut living rooms and attentive gardening staffs—that you’ll laugh your way through the shivers.

This moving, surprising documentary offers a tale of Hollywood pigeonholing that feels particularly timely.

Whether he’s delivering a monologue about anal beads or singing ‘The Hokey Cokey’ while sledgehammering a pool table, Cage’s performance is wildly in sync with Brian Taylor’s over-caffeinated direction.

It is a simple, touching story that is sweetly, undemandingly entertaining. It would be very easy to pick holes in it but it doesn’t give you much reason to want to.

Garland’s creeping pace lulls you on an almost molecular level; he’s made something akin to an end-of-the-world film, but one in which the changes afoot might not be wholly bad, title be damned.

Pfeiffer is nothing short of heartbreaking in a part that requires her to be completely unvarnished.

The movie’s only vaguely human presence is Sharon Horgan (the gifted writer and star of TV’s Catastrophe), who gazes upon the manufactured gags with an air of chagrin. If the movie had risen even an inch to her level, Game Night might've had some game.

The movie’s most shocking feature isn’t any of its twisty plot reveals—mainly involving Dominika getting romantically mixed up with a CIA operative (Joel Edgerton)—but the exploitative brutality it rains down on Lawrence.

Handsomely mounted by Creed director Ryan Coogler and starring an enviable slate of black actors that makes cameoing comics godhead Stan Lee almost seem lost, the film is provocative and satisfying in ways that are long overdue, like its ornate, culturally dense production design and the deeper subtexts of honor, compassion and destiny.

There’s pleasure to be had in seeing Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens expertly used as a backdrop for bougie romantic frustrations. If you miss the JakeWalk, here’s your opportunity to see the bar revived as the perfect place for neurotic conversations; if you ever ambled down Smith Street in your own mess of emotions, you may be feeling this one.

The sex scenes are, save the occasional bit of exposed flesh or brandished toy, fairly mild—Freed is probably the least provocative film of the trilogy.

Dramatically inert and flatter than a buzz cut, the movie ends up diminishing their moment of heroism by turning it into a defiantly amateurish piece of junior-high-grade theatrics.

It’s certainly a new spin, but those who make the leap will do so vigorously.

A gripping, chastening study in what it’s like to spend your entire life behind enemy lines, A Fantastic Woman offers uplift, too – as well as the odd surreal touch.

It’s well performed and a periodically fascinating study of Bradford’s seedy underbelly that’s rarely seen on film

If it lacks the originality and sheer muscle of the best horror fare, this does offer an astute take on fragile thirtysomething machismo, and Spall treads a convincingly anguished path towards potential redemption.

It’s brimming with fascinating insights into the skill, conviction and sheer slog that went into tackling several rogue states, climate change and the odd dead cockroach on the West Wing floor without losing optimism, sanity or custody of the kids.

Kalashnikov eschews submerging us in twisted metal and carnage. Instead, The Road Movie is a study of human nature under unusual circumstances, revealing the often stoic and nonchalant nature of the Russian character

Clapton has led a fascinating life, and is a contradictory and inspiring figure. Save for a few moments, this film just doesn’t serve him well enough.

Don’t expect Austen-style humour, though: ultimately, you may be frustrated by a narrative that punishes its pleasant protagonist so thoroughly. But credit to Brizé and crew for an impressive piece of filmmaking with a refreshingly contemporary approach.

It seems a strange thing to say about a film featuring a giant man-eating mallard, but a bit more eccentricity wouldn’t have gone amiss.