The worst scene in the Coen brothers’ 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis is vastly superior to the best scene in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, an icky, fawning screen bio of Ebbing, Minnesota’s own barrowboy-capped minstrel, Robert Zimmerman. I state this for the simple reason that the Coens’ film is about something, and Mangold’s film isn’t. It’s been made for the sole purpose of visualising a short stretch of pop history and creating a glossy, unnecessary record of fact. There’s no ark; few compelling characters; no coherent drama or sense of lessons being learned, wisdom imparted and difficult emotions grappled with.

The screenplay seems tactically averse to any kind of antagonism, always on Dylan’s side of things and often satisfied with saying that those who were angry with him eventually saw the error of their ways. It doesn’t shy away from saying that Dylan had the potential to be a wretched human being, but always within the context of, well wouldn’t you be a total ass if you were surrounded by backward-looking dolts?

The women in his life blow in and out on the wind, with Mangold keeping their own inner lives and artistic merits at bay so as not to dilute his worship of the central god-king. Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is framed as a populist stick-in-the-mud who leapfrogged on Dylan’s songwriting, while Sylvie Russo (a name-swapped version of paramour Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning) seems to be reacting to situations and behaviour that the audience aren’t party to.

There’s no point where you’re listening to Timothée Chalamet do his exemplary Dylan cosplay where you feel you’re being better served than had you stayed home and whacked on ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’. Indeed, the film has little interest in the music, instead it’s more intent to assure the audience that it’s good and important via an omnipresent phalanx of grotesque, beaming reaction shots.

It’s a hot-waxed shrine to its subject, an official version which drips with hollow trivia and is happy to namecheck that thing it knows you like rather than reveal something that you didn’t. It’s strange, also, how a film can paint a picture of a rebel poet who is so declassé, so boorish, so completely stripped of vulnerability. It leans too heavily on the idea that history revealed that Bob was right rather than to search for reasons why he might have been wrong. Dylan too often comes across as petulant and irritating, and his decision to amp-up for the militantly acoustic-only Newport Folk Festival in 1965 is very much not the epochal, sock-it-to-the-man type victory that it’s clearly intended to be.

Ed Norton’s aggressively avuncular take on folkways legend Pete Seger plays like a character from a gothic horror movie, where you’re waiting for him to switch into beast mode and give everyone what for with his long-necked banjo. Worst of all, it lazily stages the famous “Judas!” heckle at Newport rather than the Manchester Free Trade Hall where it actually happened. Sure, Bob Dylan was no stickler for the truth when it came to concocting his own mythos, but at least through his sublime poetry he was able to revel essential, obscure truths about the world. James Mangold has yet to earn that right.

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There’s something naggingly “not quite” about this retro-vibed piece of animated Tolkien arcana, an attempt to fill in some contextual gaps for the author’s celebrated later work while also straining to feel dramatic and relevant in its own right. One positive thing that must be said of Kenji Kamiyama’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is that, as a female-fronted Rings spin-off, it is superior in its simplicity and passion to the recent TV serial, The Rings of Power, almost mocking that show’s convoluted desire to plug into and enhance the expansive lore of this world.

Yet it is inferior to another work with which it shares much DNA (in story, tone and aesthetic), and that is Hayao Miyazaki’s 1984 opus, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in which a warrior maiden princess must saddle the pressures of a war instigated by men in a world on the precipice of destruction. The animation style might be best described as faux-Ghibli, and while there are certainly a few shots, sequences and characters that look like they may have been plucked out of the Ghibliverse, there’s a certain finesse and fluidity that’s lacking – almost like it’s been taken out of the oven a tad too early, or there are a few extra frames that went astray.

Set some two centuries before the events that unfurl in the Peter Jackson films, it is the story of Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), a spirited, tomboyish minor royal of the Rohan region who is introduced attempting to tame a giant-sized bird of prey having galloped her horse to the top of a snow-capped mountain. Back home, her gruff papa, Helm Hammerhand, king of Rohan (Brian Cox), causes a bit of a diplomatic foul-up when resorting to a round of old school fisticuffs to settle a fairly mundane familial dispute. Under-estimating his own physical clout, he accidentally one-hits his opponent to death, courting the ire of the deceased’s son – emo tearaway Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), who at one point was a potential marriage match for Héra.

The incident is swept under the rug and Wulf is banished from the kingdom, but left to fester alone, he gathers his marbles and hatches a catastrophic, scorched-earth retribution plan to not only get back at the fast-fisted Helm, but also put an end to his entire bloodline. And, if possible, destroy all those over which he lorded. Following a fairly sedate set-up, the film leans into action/warfare mode pretty swiftly, and Kamiyama and his team do well to choreograph the battles and make sure an audience retains a certain level of geographical and spatial awareness.

The characters are certainly likable, and it’s easy to invest in the extremely binary good vs evil story, but it’s all a little too straight and risk averse, rarely opting to push the boat out with side-characters, subplots or even production design detail. The most interesting and unique character is Miranda Otto’s Éowyn (she reprises her role from the original trilogy), who has a single short scene to demonstrate her prowess with a little tiny shield. It’s predictably rousing, and Tolkien heads will probably enjoy many of the callbacks to the original trilogy, but as a film in its own right, it’s all a little overblown and unnecessary.

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The view from outside of St Peters in Vatican City is just a humble little chimney that juts out from the roof. The world’s eyes are trained on this chimney during the rare occasion of a papal conclave – that is, the closed democratic process of electing a new Pope when the previous one either stands down or snuffs it.

Edward Berger’s Conclave, his follow-up to surprise Oscar darling, All Quiet on the Western Front, proposes two things: that the majority of those men vying for the papacy are self-serving scumbags who are very happy to skim over spiritual doctrine if it means they’ll have a better chance of snatching the top prize; and also, that conclaves are actually not so dissimilar to a vapid, Love Island-type popularity contest in which a fickle electorate can have the mind swayed with the gentlest of prods. Whether either of those things have any foundation in reality is moot, as the film is not interested in questioning the details of this antiquated process, but it is very interested in being a slick, robust thriller with a hot new twist dropping at every ten minute mark.

At the centre of the furore is Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence, a canny backroom operator and papal diplomat whose reluctance to coordinate the conclave stems from recent doubts he’s been having about his faith. These doubts are compounded further when he starts to receive votes to be the guy who wears the big hat. He is known to be one of the more liberal cardinals, and so in his position, he feels it his duty to make sure all the assembled spiritual leaders have all the facts, especially when it comes to the more conservative candidates.

You’ve got vaping hipster Cardinal Tedescso (Sergio Castellitto) who’d welcome a war against Islam; you’ve got Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) whose cool exterior is shattered upon the noting the presence of a particular nun; you’ve got Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) who may have been asked to stand down as the previous Pope’s final request. But then you’ve also got Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), the ultra-liberal’s choice but who’s reluctant to accept the gig. And then there’s Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) representing Kabul, whose presence is discovered mere hours before the conclave is set to begin.

The story is adapted from a 2016 Thomas Harris potboiler, and while it delivers on awkward set-tos and inspiring monologues, it sadly has very little to say about the state of the modern church. Complex doctrinal thought is watered down to east-on-the-ear soundbites, and the Lawrence character ends up being closer to a lovable TV sleuth than a member of the holy order.

It’s all competently performed and executed, with loud booms of sound cued to each scene change as an attempt to ramp up the tension, and lots of behind-the-head tracking shots of cardinals anxiously pacing through corridors and stairways. There’s a point about half-way in where things get quite silly, and it’s fairly easy to spot where things are headed.

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A lot of the best art acts as a conduit for artists to unselfconsciously reveal vulnerabilities about themselves. And it’s not just a case of narcissistic oversharing, or being allowed to flout social and ethical boundaries with impunity – it’s about accepting your own fragility and employing your chosen art form to ask pertinent questions about yourself, ones which may not have direct answers.

I will admit: I approached the new work by filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey with a smug sense of knowing what I was going to get. With her previous films, 2019’s Romantic Comedy and the 2022 TV doc Boobs, she set out her stall as a maker of witty, perspicacious essay collages which employed archival material to present a thesis tapping into ideas of representation, nostalgia and pop social history. But my preconceptions in this case were entirely false.

From the outset, Witches appears to follow a similar path to its forebears, bringing in snippets from all manner of visual media to reclaim hackneyed and misogynistic depictions of witches through the ages. These women have often been cast as tragic figures, and their outcast status is such that they can easily become the locus of all society’s various ills. Ritualistically burning them at the stake would seem like the only logical course of action.

Following a prologue in which Sankey provides a voiceover atop various melodically-edited clips, she then emerges from the safety of the recording booth to take her place in front of camera and then proceeds to relay a traumatic episode in her life which, initially, seems to take the theme and tone of the film to a very different place.

As Sankey’s harrowing anecdote unfolds – and in her poetic recall of detail, it’s an anecdote that you instantly feel she has spoken aloud many times and to many people – it is revealed that following the birth of her son, Bertie, she began to suffer extreme bouts of depression and confusion. Following various kind dismissals from medical professionals essentially telling her to “calm down dear”, she was eventually diagnosed with postpartum psychosis and placed into a secure unit with her newborn.

Though Sankey now has the gift of hindsight and reflection, she seems haunted by the fact that if one link in the chain of events had snapped, then there’s a chance she might not be with us right now, such were the uncharacteristic impulses she was experiencing at the time. The archive clips are still there, but slink into the backdrop for a bit as various fellow travellers are invited to tell their own stories, painting a vivid and hopeful picture of the care available to women who find themselves in this sorry situation.

So the film mutates a little bit from playful essay to necessary advocacy doc, yet in its final passages Sankey also manages to ingeniously thread the needle between her two subjects. She does so by expanding her purview to draw in feminist thinkers and historians to make the point that the tenets of witchcraft in ancient times had much in common with the behavioural tropes of postpartum psychosis, suggesting that that this isn’t just some new-fangled “problem” that’s been invented by modern women as some kind of dereliction of maternal duties, but something that has been at best misunderstood and at worst entirely ignored.

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One of the supreme highlights of my 2024 Cannes experience was discovering the films of New York filmmaker Tyler Taormina. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is presented through its marketing as a cheesetastic holiday movie, but is in fact a wide-eyed paean to the dynamics of family and the suburbs as a place of ecstatic joy. It’s his feature follow-up to 2019’s Ham on Rye, a strange coming of age movie in which the suburbs is not painted in such a dewy-eyed light.

Your first feature, Ham on Rye, was a film that was critical of life in the suburbs. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, is almost the opposite, framing it as this rapturous place.

I would say that there are thorns presented to that particular rose. Ham on Rye is for me the story of staying in the womb too long and not cutting the cord. I think that Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is the story of how tempting it is to stay in the suburbs. The bosom of childhood is what the suburbs becomes in this film. But I think we present a little bit of darkness and some of the limitations. But also, I wanted to make a Christmas film in a way that was warm and inviting and not written with cynicism.

Where did that impulse come from?

Well, the germinating seed of the film really is my writing partner and I sort of waxing poetic about our memories with family members and these little details that have become sort of characterised in our minds. It really was with an affection for those memories that started the whole thing.

How were you able to select and assemble the soundtrack of wall-to-wall Christmas tunes?

Well, so the first thing I’ll say, and I always take this sort of compliment, but none of the songs in the movie are Christmas songs, but they feel like it. They’re all just pop songs from the ’60s, or at least that sound like the ’60s. The soundtrack is really one of the germinating seeds of the work, and it came to us from listening to the Scorpio Rising soundtrack. We wrote the script listening to that soundtrack, and it’s pretty obvious. It was very difficult to get all the licensing for the songs. And in the end, there’s a lot of songs that sort of just sound like the period so that we can play the bigger, more expensive songs that are really important.

Rather than use the act structure, your films – including this one – are more like passing through a moment of time, and seeing that time from many different perspectives.

The shape is everything. Yeah, I definitely am aware that I am not working in a sort of traditional dramaturgical way. And I think that the way in which Eric Berger and I approach a script, we’re really studying a sort of milieu and what it’s like to be there and what it’s like for a camera curiously going from person to person.

What did the initial script for the film look like?

The way in which I understand these films is actually through drawing out the space. What I mean is we drew a house on the top left corner of a piece of paper, and we populated all the scenes we wanted to be there, sort of left to right in order you’re going to see them.

It’s like you’re trying to trap a moment in amber with this film.

Well, the first Christmas ornaments were made of amber. Yeah, this was a big thought of ours, day one of writing. And I kind of regret not naming the main character Amber.

Barry Keoghan is someone who has built a cottage industry around making sure that when he’s on the screen, we’re watching intently to see exactly what he’ll do next. His ascent through the industry came from a place of small supporting turns, but it wasn’t long before he made a name for himself as a professional scene-stealer in films such as Yorgos Lanthimos’ Killing of a Sacred Deer and David Lowery’s The Green Knight. It’s no great shakes to be typecast because of the intensity you bring to a role, and it seemed only natural that he’d end up playing The Joker in an upcoming Batman movie. Yet Andrea Arnold is someone he’s always wanted to work with, and he accepted his part in Bird without even seeing a script. He plays Bug, a scatterbrained young father who’s trying to collect hallucinogenic slime from a toad in a bizarre get-rich-quick scheme, but Keoghan makes sure his character is anything but a novelty comic relief.

When you prepare for a new role, I understand you have these little Moleskine notebooks – what goes in them?

Yeah. So it all started when I would give me granny my Moleskine about three or four weeks before starting a project. And I’d say to her, granny, while you’re sitting there watching the telly bingo, or whatever, could just write some questions down that you would ask this person. The question can be as silly as, do you prefer red sauce or brown sauce? Or do you like feckin’ mustard? Whatever. So she’d hand the book back and, I’m not even messing, there would be like 80 questions, and I’d elaborate on all of them. As part of that process, I’d go back to the script and find out what’s factual, what I know about the character. And the rest would be pure imagination and just shaping this person. It all started from that. I started to make more books and go a bit deeper, writing about the physicality of the characters, and accent and things like that. Then I started to do drawings and image walls of people and locations. Just creating that world for myself, and then throwing it all away before you going to set.

You throw them away?

Yeah, because you’ve got to be open for collaboration and finding new things. So chucking the books away, but not too far away. So’s I can still see them.

Your future biographers will have so much great material.

It’s the stuff that you don’t get paid for that, ironically, I enjoy the most. That’s just getting to do stuff that I loved to do as a kid: drawing; inventing characters. I’m doing that all right now as I’m stepping forward into Peaky Blinders, which is my next one. I’m not gonna give yous all this spiel about being a method actor, but it’s my own method and it’s what gets me by. And I’m always looking to learn new methods. Even the likes of Nykiya [Adams, who plays his daughter, Bailey, in Bird] on set, seeing what she brings. There’s an unorthodox aspect to her approach because she comes from a background where she hasn’t had training – so like me. I’m curious to see why she chose this rather than that; some is instinct but some is just really clever and thought-out. I’m always looking for stuff like that, and maybe take that and use it for me going forward.

Did you take Nykiya under your wing?

Yeah, but that wasn’t in front of the camera at all. She was out here in Toronto with me, bless ’er, and she was incredible. She handled it like a pro. But I just wanted to be by her side and help her get through things. That’s the kind of stuff that’s been passed on to me. No-one ever really gives tips on acting. I don’t think you really can. It’s expressive and it comes from within. All I did was try and make her feel equal to everyone. She brought a lot more to this than anyone.

Do you feel you ever had anyone who took you under their wing when you were first starting out?

Yeah, Colin [Farrell] has always been there for me. There’s a bunch of lads who have been there for me. Always supporting and checking in on me. Colin and Cillian [Murphy] actually. They’ve always checked in. You learn from watching them. No one actually tells you anything, ‘You should do this,’ or, ‘You should do that.’ It’s an unspoken thing. You learn from the best. You see how Colin engages with people on set and how he has time for everyone and treats everyone with the exact same amount of respect. Watching that as a younger actor, that’s the stuff I want to take in and pass down.

You’ve talked about how you jumped on this opportunity to work with Andrea Arnold. Do you recall your first encounter with her work?

Fish Tank. I remember seeing that and thinking… cos I grew up in flats similar to that. I just remember feeling like it was all filmed down the balcony from me. I knew that world so well. I wanted to do that, and I wanted to be on camera for that. I wanted to have someone like Andrea with me – and if you look back over past interviews, I’ve always talked about wanting to work with her, so this isn’t just me saying this. I love her documentary-like approach. We stepped into this, and you’d have to look around to find the camera. You’d have to remind yourself that you were on set. That to me is a privilege, rather than every 10 seconds having people come over and fix everything. People have their own jobs to do, but selfishly speaking, I just loved being in her world. She has this talent and this energy, and people just trust her. She gets these younger kids, and she draws out these performances from them… That’s incredible.

You’ve got Robbie Ryan’s camera moving constantly in this film. Are you less conscious of the camera?

Unless they have to get a specific thing, like you picking up a cup, that’s when I’ll have to look for the camera. Other than that, I’ve always wanted to be on the side of, let the camera chase me, let the camera try and figure out what I’m doing. Film acting for me isn’t a show and tell. I want people asking questions. I don’t wanna give it away. Someone actually said to me, or maybe I read it, but it was like, treat the camera like it’s someone you’re dating, then play really hard to get. And that involves lots of looking away and not making eye contact. Flirting. Even the mumbling side of it, refusing to project, is all part of that.

Projecting in that very traditional way is something that’s more vital for theatre. Have you ever considered doing that?

I never took to the stage because – not to speak ill of it – I don’t get that feeling I get when the camera’s there. You start and you finish on the same night – I don’t get it. Film is a way to immerse yourself in a world, and with someone like Andrea, you don’t know what’s going to happen next. I love that.

You mentioned your method, and I remember seeing you in Killing of a Sacred Deer and thinking that you’d embraced some form of very immersive and intense prep to get into that role.

I think method is sometimes a thing that people use in the wrong way. They use it as an excuse to be just silly. I’m not going call myself a method actor and get myself on a list with other actors. I have my own method; I’m still learning and discovering. I like to work on the accent, listen to the music, tuck myself away, be offline, all of that. I doesn’t mean that I’m a method actor. It’s whatever you’re comfy with.

Were you an avid film watcher when you were growing up? Were there types of films you were into?

Yeah, there was. I always watched films with Paul Newman and James Dean. Just men back then. I don’t know what I was searching for? Maybe it was the absence of a father for me. Just trying to get a sense of how men behaved. But it was always old movies. My granny would constantly be asking why I was putting all these old movies on, but I was fascinated with them. The Marlon Brando movies… I went and named my boy Brando. I used to go to place called the IFI in Dublin, and they’d show lots of European movies.

Sounds like you were more a cinema guy rather than a DVD-watcher.

When they let me in. I remember being barred from one cinema because I used to run up the exit stairs and they caught me. I was just being a little brat. I actually went back to that same cinema for the premiere of Eternals and was like, ‘Oh, guess I’m allowed back in?’

Did they have a Polaroid of your face behind the tills? Do not let this guy in.

I did run up the exit stairs again, just for the craic. One last time. But I love the cinema. Just being lost in a world for 90 minutes. I remember going to see [Céline Sciamma’s] Girlhood as well, and that’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

With your character, Bug, did Andrea have a very specific vision of how he was going to look and dress?

She did. She really knew what she wanted. This is all coming from her mind. It’s a collaboration to some extent, but everything she brought to it I never had a problem with. The hat – such a genius touch. Having the little paddy hat. The tattoos were amazing. Everything was very deliberate.

I imagine the tattoo-applying process was quite arduous.

I mean… as someone with ADHD, it’s hard to sit still for two-and-a-half hours. But it does give you a chance to get into it. If you’ve just got the scenes a day or two days before, it gives you a chance to settle in before you get on. It wasn’t that trailer make-up thing of going from a massive trailer to a set. It was all compact.

Did you go in public with your big face tattoos on?

Not really. You really wanna take them off. The reason is quite practical actually. It was really sunny while we were shooting, so I didn’t really want tan-lines of a big centipede on my face. Just stuff like that. All the tattoos all represented something quite specific. My brother has rosary beads on him in real life, and that was on me. These things are all a touch of home.

How did you find the e-scooter?

The e-scooter was fun. It’s not my favourite thing to go to. I prefer motocross, I do a lot of motocross. I’m familiar with being on two wheels.

The Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is into motocross. You can chat bikes if you bump into him at a festival.

Is it about motocross?

No, but he has made films touching on that world in the past.

When I was in LA, I found a great place out there. I was with Axel Hodges, who’s a pro rider and he’s brilliant. Only 28. In San Diego, just getting back on the bike for prep for something else, it’s just really great fun. I’ve not seen of any motocross movies ever. Only two weeks ago, I asked Axel if there are any movies on it, or any movies he thinks should be made on it.

Feels like there’s a gap in the market there.

Totally. But you want the motocross to be the backdrop, not the subject.

I understand you’re a bit of a gamer. What are you playing at the moment?

Yeah, I am. When I can hold attention for more than 20 minutes, then yeah, I am. I get bored before you get to press the start button. I love to play Pokémon: Violet on Nintendo Switch. And what else? I play Football Manager. And I just bought Elden Ring. I got freaked out on the start mission. It’s quite scary. You know when you’re in caves and chattin’ to ghosts. I’m like, ‘Oh Jaysus, I don’t wanna be playing this.’ I think being alone in the game is tough. You need company, like a little doggie or something. Or a dragon.

It’s one of those games where you have to die a thousand times before it clicks.

I think I’ve died so many times it now won’t come back on.

Box fresh from [checks notes] masterminding a bunch of John Lewis Christmas ads, debut boy Dougal Wislon makes for a strangely apt choice to direct the third instalment of the Paddington franchise in the absence of Paul King (who directed parts one and two and then nicked off to do Wonka). Premium seasonal television advertising offers a perfectly-primped package of whimsical humour, 110 per cent proof sentimentalism and an easy-on-the-eye message espousing a love that transcends family class and race. Which is just like the Paddington movies.

In all seriousness, parts one and two have for some reason been elevated to the level of canonical modern masterworks, even providing a zen punchline to 2022’s meta Nic Cage comedy, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – a lofty achievement in and of itself. And while I’m not denying that both are fine pictures, it may be down to a lack of decent competition that they are held in such rabidly high esteem.

Where parts one and two were tales of a plucky immigrant conserve addict finding his feet among the raffish rapscallions of olde London town, this new one sees the furry red-hatted one suddenly forced to scarper back to his homeland of Peru – his adoptive human family, the Browns, in tow – to search for his ageing Aunt Lucy who has gone AWOL from her bear nursing home. All that remains is her cracked John Lennon eyeglasses, and a strange wristband containing a bear-shaped pendant.

Fair play to screenwriters Mark Burton, Jon Foster and James Lamont for trying something a little different this time around, mounting a madcap jungle escapade that plays like an Ealing riff on Heart of Darkness. Olivia Colman was born to play a toothsome singing nun whose violently rictus grin suggests that The Lord may not be her true paymaster, and she duly dings every line reading out of the park. Antonio Banderas, meanwhile, rolls up as Hunter Cabot, a swarthy sea captain whose schooner is tricked out with an old fashioned gramophone a la Herzog’s own opera fiend, Fitzcarraldo.

Yet Cabot is in fact another Herzog/Kinski creation, the glory-seeking adventurer Lope de Aguirre, as both are obsessed with the prospect of discovering and then looting the mythical land of El Dorado. Very stealthily, Banderas has set his stall as one of the finest comic performers in modern film, and his detailed, physically-dexterous work here continues down the path he laid with 2021’s Official Competition and 2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.

I sometimes have nightmares about the fact that we almost had Colin Firth as the voice of Paddington. No disrespect to the Firthmeister, but that would’ve been a casting foul-up of franchise-damning proportions. Thankfully, Ben Whishaw is on hand to deliver some of the strongest voicework for an animated character out there, channelling our hero’s adorable sense of uncorrupted sincerity with the perfect mix of humour and compassion. Frankly, I would pay good money to have Whishaw read the audiobook versions of Henry James novels in his Paddington voice.

As the gang wend their way down river towards an ancient gateway, they must contend with the local flora and fauna, plus the fact that their local tour guides might just have some ulterior motives – Cabot himself is a confused, multi-generational manifestation of the D’Ascoyne clan from Kind Hearts and Coronets. Yet where parts one and two tapped into the specific culture and diverse social make-up of London (and, by extension, most European cities), the depiction of Peru here is rather thin, relegated to one stock footage-esque crowd scene of some people wearing chullos, and then just endless green, unpopulated jungle.

This is more of an action movie than its predecessors, and Wilson executes the set-pieces well, but perhaps without that added layer of eccentricity that gave Paul King his name. While there are passages of uncertainty and twists that take their good sweet time to arrive, things come together beautifully, and a finale that combines a series of clever emotional call-backs and another heartening plea for human empathy that’s worthy of only the finest John Lewis ad.

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The vast, complex spectrum of the Human Comedy, its attendant emotions, physiological sticking points and ethical grey areas, can never be fully understood, much less legislated for by Big Government or underfunded state institutions. So says Clint Eastwood who, with his 40th picture as director, proves once more that he remains one of a small coterie of American conservative artists whose work handily transcends the creative doldrums of the alienating polemic or the hectoring advocacy yarn to couch its challenging philosophical ideas within the knotty tangle of everyday lives.

Were this to be the indefatigable Eastwood’s cinematic swansong – he’ll be sparking up 95 candles come next May – it would be a very fine and memorable one, a work which wrangles with enough pet themes to keep armchair Clint scholars purring while also serving up a goofy and contrived courtroom drama that keeps you guessing right up until a supremely haunting final shot which signals the cold, inexorable march of modern justice.

It sits at a perfect mid-point between a spry satire of America’s creaking legal system and an “old man yells at cloud” laundry list of civic grievances which plays like a right wing tabloid op-ed written in light. Even the character names are loaded and hilarious: Toni Collette plays a Bourbon-swilling prosecutor with the DA’s seat in her sights named Faith Killebrew (pronounced “Kill-brew”); meanwhile, the neck-tatted defendant in the case at the film’s centre, played by Gabriel Basso, is given the unfortunately portentous name of James Sythe.

Our hero, meanwhile, is named to represent the cargo pant/polo shirt-wearing anonymous everyman: Justin Kemp. He is perfectly essayed by a perma-perspiring Nicholas Hoult in a way that recalls one of Alfred Hitchcock’s jittery “wrong men” (Montomery Clift in I Confess! or Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man come to mind). And the mad set-up is something that only Hitch could’ve amply pulled off, with Kemp assigned jury duty in his home state of Georgia as his heavily pregnant wife is about to give birth, only to quickly realise that he is actually (accidentally) guilty for the extremely serious crimes being levelled at the defendant.

If he chooses to fess up, then his own petty infractions will come back to haunt him and he’ll likely to do some serious time and miss out on the chance to bring up his child. Similarly, if Killebrew doesn’t lock down a conviction, then she can wave ta-ta to that promotion. He knows that the only way to come out of the other side of this unscathed is to go full 12 Angry Men on his fellow jurors and slowly, methodically, win over hearts and minds and make sure that Sythe is found innocent while keeping his own powder dry.

Visually, the film is commendably unfussy and practical, immersing the viewer inside the case as it flits back and forth between courthouse and crime scene, emphasising the locked-in/closed-off thought patterns that come with being a juror. Images of Blind Lady Justice wielding her scales feature prominently in a film which sets out to prove how utterly redundant they are when those working under their vast shadow refuse to fully embrace her stoic symbolism. It’s not so much a study of corruption as it is lethargy and the difficulty of feeling compassion towards someone who just looks like he makes mischief.

In this as in all cases, bad things have happened and someone has to pay. But Eastwood and debutant screenwriter Jonathan Abrams refuse to accept such binary delineations when it comes to their characters and the future they deserve, especially when no-one in the film is squeaky clean in the morality stakes, save for Justin’s angelic wife Ally (Zoey Deutch). One juror refuses to be convinced of Sythe’s possible innocence, not down to bald ignorance, but because of the completely valid trauma he has suffered that has been re-triggered by the case. Everyone has their demons, their backstory, their reasons.

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One of life’s small pleasures involves following writer/ director Sean Baker on the social media platform Letterboxd and tracking his highly esoteric viewing habits. Indeed, in the end credits to his latest, Palme d’Or-winning feature, Anora, he extends special thanks to the disreputable Spanish genre hack, Jesús Franco, whose films are reliably awash with female nudity and human entrails. This interest in what you might term the economic fringes of cinema – ie, the directors who were really making sure that every diñero counted – extends to Baker’s interest in those members of the labour market whose occupations might be seen by some as disreputable (porn-stars in Starlet and Red Rocket, sex workers in Tangerine) but are also doing what they need to do to keep to get the job done, and make it count.

In Anora, the central protagonist (Mikey Madison’s Ani) is a stripper by trade, yet she is someone whose strength of character allows her to retain a vice-like control over her throngs of clients. That is until the gawky Russian expat bro, Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), drops by for a dance and, with Ani aware of his super-rich oligarch connections back home, deets are duly swapped and soon the pair are hooking up outside the club for other (paid-for) liaisons. Ivan’s obscene wealth means that decision-making for him comes within a vacuum of responsibility; he’s able to live a life of instinctual one-touch pleasure seeking.

Ani, meanwhile, is forced to play the angles, quickly weighing-up the pros and cons of every micro social interaction, knowing that if she’s able to put in a good enough performance, she’ll likely roll out with a healthy cut of the loot. A whirlwind trip to Las Vegas ends in the way that most such trips do, and Ani is then counting down the days before she gets to meet her new in-laws. Yet Ivan the Terrible has been a very naughty boy, and his parents go to extreme lengths to annul the union.

It’s an amazing, hypermodern concept for a film, one which operates as a brutal critique of the class system, while also acting as a metaphor for geopolitical relationships and the moral and ethical lapses we sometimes overlook in the name of making rent. Yet it also says that accumulation of wealth is anathema to the accumulation of character, of wit, of self-preservation, and so as much as upper class people want to keep lower class people out, they also want to keep their own people in and safe.

Baker shoots and choreographs like a punk Cassavetes, toying with dynamics, colours and textures while always creating chunky knots of overlapping dialogue in a bid to heighten tensions to breaking point and beyond. The film loses its way a little during its latter half, when we’re treated to a lengthy tour of New York’s Russian-American cultural haunts, all overlaid with much high-pitched shrieking. Yet unlike a Jesús Franco movie, where everyone dies horribly in the end, here, Ani is eventually imbued with a new, revitalising force without having to fundamentally change who she is.

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The Hollywood truism that, sometimes, people like to have unfiltered trash fired into their eyes is doubly, triply, quadruply true in the case of the surreally chaotic Venom franchise, headed up by Tom Hardy as the most pitiful investigative reporter on the planet, Eddie Brock. Hardy plays Brock as if, in each new scene, he’s just been released from solitary confinement and is confused about his future prospects; he doesn’t know where he is, what he’s doing, and is leaning on his senses for quick answers. As a character Brock is completely incoherent and extremely unlikable (which is not to say he’s dislikable, more that Hardy makes it near-impossible to extend any genuine warmth towards him).

In this hashed-together third instalment, Brock and the smack-talking, Tom Waits-sound-alike alien symbiote that nests inside him known as Venom are signing things off in a haphazard blaze of glory, attempting to elude both the authorities and a race of time-hopping alien hellbeasts with mouths that double as wood chippers. For Venom/Brock have implanted within them a “codex” that will unlock the shackles of a really angry lank-haired dude who professes to be able to destroy everyone and everything, and of course wants to do just that.

The directorial reigns of this third and (hopefully!) final film have been ceded to series scribe Kelly Marcel, who dutifully drags things across the finish line. The film trades on groan-worthy wisecracks and the buddy-buddy schtick between our hero and his parasitic pal, and Hardy is clearly very open for being the butt of sundry humiliations in an attempt to curry favour with an audience. Yet for all his talents as a uniquely committed dramatic performer, a comic entertainer he is not, and so in order to arrive at the start of the story proper, we have to endure painful montages of, say, Brock going full Looney Tunes while riding a Venom-ised nag, all (badly) synched to Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’.

The film is, for the most part, a litany of bad, embarrassing or lowest-common-denominator choices, and it’s unsurprising that the love interest from previous films, Michelle Williams, has opted to cut and run with this new one. Dog-lover Hardy gets to kick things off by uncovering an illegal dog fighting ring and giving the perpetrators a taste of their own medicine, and his escapades take him through the Nevada wilderness and on to Area 55 (the “real” Area 51) via a penthouse suite on the Sunset Strip.

This being a Marvel-adjacent title (based on their comics but not part of the official MCU canon), there’s the usual thing of action occurring in completely depopulated areas and aesthetically unlovely computer graphics used to paste over many of the plot holes. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple turn up as side players representing the clash between unchecked militaristic might and ethically-shaky scientific endeavour, but they’re not given enough screen time to really blossom.

As slipshot and lazy as it all is, it passes the time as air-headed escapism, and does manage to save all its vaguely-original moves for a bulky final act that delivers some decent spectacle. Part two of the franchise delivered on its ritual promise that “There Will be Carnage”, yet it will ultimately be the sound of the box office bells that will determine whether this is truly The Last Dance.

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