Benjamin Lee

It is a finely constructed drama, avoiding stuffiness without slipping into camp territory and while diehard historians might disapprove, everyone else will be supremely entertained.

On the Basis of Sex is a solid, often impassioned film, but too often its worst instincts take over, and cliches stack up faster than legal documents.

It’s watchable enough but let down by a strange lack of interest in presenting Salander as anything but an engine to propel a plot. More female action heroes is by no means a bad thing but forcing Salander into Bond’s shoes feels like a misstep, her intellect and survivalism suited to far more interesting pursuits.

It’s a curiously underwhelming, muted, often plodding two hours that fails to reach the emotional highs and devastating lows one would expect from the material.

While the shifts in genre, plot and location do prove intriguing for much of the film, they ultimately result in a feeling of mild dissatisfaction, the whole never quite the sum of its parts.

There’s clearly a more nuanced drama to be made from this story but given the scale, there’s still a lot here to praise.

It’s a pulpy slab of exploitation masquerading as an important treatise on the struggles faced by the working class in rural America, thumping us in the face with its shallow viewpoint until we beg for mercy. Or at least the credits.

None of it rings remotely true and his insistence on playing out so many scenes at such a high level can make it an excruciating watch.

There are good intentions and good performances here, but they’re squandered in a movie that isn’t quite sure what it should be and how far it should go.

Kidman fearlessly commits to the filth of it all, whether it’s drunkenly fighting off her daughter’s sleazy boyfriend or jerking off a bed-ridden informant, but her radical transformation and some timeframe trickery can’t mask a plot that feels rather empty.

It’s a film entirely devoid of subtlety yet one that also fails to provide the grand emotion it yearns to deliver, despite the use of a sledgehammer.

It’s a heartbreaking, troubling film about men whose lives were cruelly deprioritised and whose families remain ever altered as a result. It ends on a note of melancholy but the burning anger also remains, the final scenes tinged with a painful awareness of wounds that may never heal.

Sometimes the shagginess of the film can make it feel a bit slight and at times it does work better as a concentrated character study, but it’s such a joy to spend this time with McCarthy, drunkenly scheming and grumbling, that it’s hard to complain.

It’s everything and nothing, a familiar regurgitation of a formula with precious little to add.

It’s a film with love at its root, both familial and romantic, and Jenkins fills so much of it with a radiating warmth.

There are so many characters at play here and McQueen and Flynn’s script manages to let them all breathe, giving each actor small defining moments and given the exceptional cast involved, it makes for a richly rewarding experience.

There are some effectively nasty kills (this is no PG-13 reboot) and Green’s visual eye often results in some impressive imagery but both the look of the film and the script feel confused. Green can’t seem to decide whether he wants it to be gritty and lo-fi or slick and cinematic and so ends up awkwardly between the two, anything resembling an atmosphere sorely missing.

There are moments of crushing emotional weight but as the film progresses, they start to carry less power.

There’s an authenticity underpinning the portrayal of events in The Front Runner that lifts it above the less-than-groundbreaking set-up.

There’s definite fun to be had here and franchise fans will surely appreciate both Black’s nods to the past and his plan for the future but there’s something forgettable about its freneticism, and I struggle to imagine in 31 years if it will be thought of at all.

The pair share an easy, spiky chemistry and Reeves in particular shows himself to be surprisingly skilled at delivering such bile-filled dialogue.

It’s an undemanding watch, easily digestible while on in the background, but even easier to forget.

Even if some of the late-stage plotting seems sloppy and increasingly preposterous, there’s a callousness to the brutal last act that, together with the far patchier, yet similarly hard-edged First Purge, feels like a definite product of the time we’re in, as war on terror-era torture porn did in the mid-2000s.

This is stupid but it’s also mostly entertaining, thanks to Johnson and a plot that moves fast enough to retain our attention yet without enough, ahem, the originality to ensure it lingers in our minds once the fire has been extinguished.

Clumsy attempts at comedy are weaved in to try and alleviate the remarkable grimness but all it really does it add to an uneven tone.

For all of its faults, there’s still plenty here to praise, the result of so much being thrown at the wall is that some of it will stick. Pearce has a sharp creative flair and a head full of ideas but he feels somewhat hemmed in by the constraints of a short running time and a high profile release date.

The lifeless direction, the unrefined script, the underwhelming cameos, the distinct lack of fizz – there’s a slapdash nature to the assembly of Ocean’s 8 that makes it feel like the result of a rushed, often careless process. It’s made watchable thanks to the cast but star power alone cannot mask creative inadequacy. Stealing a diamond necklace is bad but wasting an opportunity like this is unforgivable.

The three leads are so strong that one wishes Netflix had granted them a whole series to live in, their everyday lives worthy of a deeper dive. Ibiza is a fun, far-fetched frippery but I’d rather see what happened to them if they’d stayed at home.