Robbie Collin

Incoherent two-hour fantasy epic isn’t quite accurate: it’s more of an incoherent one-and-a-quarter-hour fantasy epic, plus an all-star warm-up.

To watch it is to be waterboarded by joy. In terms of both visual dazzle and invention and sheer comedic stamina and pep, it handily surpasses the original Trolls from 2016, which itself set an impressive new standard for films based on novelty keyrings and pencil toppers.

Elephant is set in a world without poachers, developers or tourists: the picture it paints is beautiful and educative, but doesn’t feel quite complete

If you want to watch an elaborate metaphor being wrung out like a bathing suit for an hour and a half, The Platform might be the film for you.

If Hollywood really is an elite liberal bubble, Damon Lindelof might just be the prick it needs.

A wild and righteous provocation.

Thanks to one of the most indestructible poster campaigns ever designed, the words Les Misérables can’t help but call a child’s face to mind.

Leigh Whannell’s film – one of the smartest and scariest yet to roll off the production line at horror specialists Blumhouse.

Children encountering the faux-ET format for the first time may enjoy it well enough, but signs of life, extra or otherwise, are low to nil.

While writers Lena Waithe and James Frey make Queen and Slim’s initial decision to flee convincing, and dramatically spiky – it’s striking that even a lawyer doesn’t fancy her chances on the legal route – their screenplay is rather less good at coming up with excuses for the string of colourful and picturesque pit-stops the two keep making afterwards.

Showy and ambitious, desperately sincere and self-absorbed, and bursting at the seams with potential, Waves isn’t merely a film about teenagers, it’s virtually a teenager in film form. It’s also the kind of cinema that keeps you young.

I can’t recall the last time I was so staggered by a film’s craftsmanship while feeling almost nothing else about it at all – little fear, less sadness, and barely a spark of actual excitement at anything beyond the high-wire nature of the filmmaking enterprise itself.

Why are they are so relentlessly endearing and funny? Comic timing is a big part of it: every skit and pratfall is staged to split-second perfection.

The Gentlemen is a valiant, often raucous bid to drag the tried-and-true old Ritchie formula into the present, and while the result feels like he got about as far as 2005 – with lip-service acknowledgements of grime music and YouTube – for the purposes of this film, it’s close enough.

The Rise of Skywalker completes a saga no one sane screenwriter would have dreamt up from scratch, but does so with such pluck and showmanship that the result feels strangely precious: a busked epic whose every individual move comes straight from the heart.

Though Weathering With You tells a story of a makeshift family enduring uncertain times, its dominant emotion is amazement – at the power and persistence of first love, and the everyday wonders of the world in which it flourishes against the odds.

The whole package is so sleekly watchable, if risk-averse to a fault, that I can’t recall a recent time at the cinema where I learned more by thinking less.

The themes of mob justice and socialised misogyny could have hit a little harder if they’d been explored rather than simply harped on about.

For all its feints and innovations, Frozen II knows its audience inside out, and wants to ensure every last subdivision leaves feeling both seen and satisfied. That’s obviously good business. But it’s also generous, deeply charming filmmaking.

The film is nearly two hours long and passes in what feels like 45 seconds. It is wildly entertaining and blaringly ridiculous, and I want to watch it every night for a week.

Slaloming between Hoffman’s testimony at DeLorean’s trial and the caper that got both men there for no obvious reason beyond it being the way these things are usually done, the film obediently pads through the shaggy-dog motions.

It’s a pleasure to see Hamilton and Schwarzenegger back in action as leathery veterans, though the script shunts the cast onto some unexpectedly topical terrain, including a heroic escape from a US-Mexico border prison camp, with detainees’ cages flung open in triumph. Yet it’s Davis’s brusque and androgynous Grace who turns out to be Dark Fate’s most stonily compelling asset.

It is the most arrhythmia-inducingly tense film I have seen in years: by the end, I felt as if I’d spent the last two hours being dangled by my ankles over a crocodile pit.

Robert De Niro is sensational in Scorsese's history-making mob masterpiece.

The 22-year-old Van Patten is a more than capable solo lead: the breakout star of Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, she has an invaluable knack for making her characters’ worst traits their most compelling features.

If Blackbird shows us anything it’s that no matter how carefully we plan, life resists perfection, right up to the end.

As satire it’s a dismal dereliction of duty; as comedy, a one-note joke that wears out fast.

This is a sober, stiff-collared procedural, handsomely shot but also oddly bloodless until the more conventional paranoid-thriller rhythms of its final act kick in.