Project Hail Mary

Like the best crowd-pleasers, Project Hail Mary makes you laugh, it makes you weep a little, it keeps you riveted and then leaves you with a big smile by the end. At its core, Project Hail Mary is a deeply human story wrapped in a science fiction setting, featuring a very likeable Ryan Gosling in the lead.

Ryan Gosling leads a warm and emotional sci-fi film that blends humour and hope but plays it a little too safe at times

Project Hail Mary is an easygoing science-fiction movie about a heavyweight subject - the end of the world. Ryan Gosling shines in this unserious space mission, with his unlikely friendship with an alien Rocky becoming the core of the movie.

Gosling is enormous fun in his first solo starring role on this scale, and his character's plight is made all the more tangible because the film itself is so extraordinarily tactile. Excellent practical and optical effects are used in lieu of flashy computer graphics – there must also be plenty of CG in the mix, but you can't tell where – while gorgeous visual textures are everywhere.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have made another bright, buoyant, summer blockbuster that relishes in its nerdy delights and reminds us why going to the movies will always slap. Gosling understands this calibration instinctively, shaping Grace as a man devoid of any semblance of heroic resolve, defined instead by a series of small, often reluctant choices that accumulate into something resembling courage.

Gosling is an effortlessly charming screen player, and he keeps it watchable, though the film itself has moments of dullness and a sort of puppyish silliness. This is a Hail Mary pass that Gosling just about manages to catch.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's lone-astronaut saga wants to be "Interstellar" meets "E.T.," but it's too long and too cutely formulaic.