Andrew Pulver

This is a documentary about Australian motor sports legend Jack Brabham that aims to finesse the usual greatest-hits highlights by including some darker material: family strife, on-track bad behaviour, behind-the-scenes fallouts.

Despicable Me 3 will certainly keep the younger elements of its audience happy, with its dose of aspartame-rush hyperactivity. But for everyone else it may prove decent rather than captivating.

The 1954 film version of Oscar Hammerstein's all-black Broadway musical now feels like a relic from the gruesome social straitjacket that was segregation; every frame, you feel, is freighted with the tension imposed by the never-appearing white folks. It was, however, laudable in its desire to showcase the talents of African-American performers who were denied opportunities in Hollywood.

She's entertaining enough, and like most fashion documentaries, it's a mine of pop-cultural history, but the unswervingly generous assessment of her achievements and permanently arch vocal style become a little wearying.

For Cash devotees who want a hitherto-hidden perspective on their man, though, this is invaluable viewing.

Thomas and Pilcher are determined to avoid making a flashy war epic, and stress the sacrifices of everyone involved; the downside of this is that A Call to Spy has a stolid pacing that makes you feel every minute of its two-hours-plus running time. But it’s still an interesting story that’s yet to fully come into the light.

Though high-minded and well-intentioned – as well as being conceived on an epic scale – there’s something faintly stodgy and safety-first about the endeavour.

It's a slight, attractive tale: a childlike fable of a little girl and her preternaturally intelligent cat that swiftly devolves into a very old-school cops and robbers yarn.

Margarita, With a Straw is a sturdily conceived, emotionally direct drama.

An illuminating, affecting piece of work.

It’s not exactly hard-hitting stuff, and isn’t meant to be, but it spins an entertaining yarn.

In all honesty The Untamed doesn’t seem to go anywhere special. But connoisseurs of oddness may cherish it.

An interesting, grown-up musical profile.

In the end, it’s Lowden’s fresh-faced enthusiasm and Mullan’s gravitas – operating at about a quarter of the level we know he’s capable of – keeping things afloat.

A genial, lightweight farce, which largely approximates Hornby's distinctively bittersweet tone.

This is a charming and thoroughly likable film.

Director-producer team David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky are past masters at putting this kind of film together, and Sunflowers has the usual mix of smoothly impressive visuals and authoritatively informed comment.

It’s tough to take all the hardcore emoting seriously, particularly as the emotional heavy lifting is designed to be done by the occasional maudlin line in brief pauses between the explosions. For a film so concerned with its characters’ inner lives, there’s a fundamental disconnect going on here – enough to make you yearn for the lighter touch of the Marvel films.

Crispian Mills directs with zip, throwing things together with a breathlessness that largely distracts from the fact that, for a horror-comedy, Slaughterhouse Rulez is neither particularly scary nor especially funny. But it does have an amiable sort of charm.

Pacific Rim's wafer-thin psychodrama and plot-generator dialogue provides little for the human component to get their teeth into.

Promised Land seems to lose its nerve a little politically: as it goes on, you realise it isn't about fracking at all, but a tract on machiavellian corporate behaviour and their employees' self-deception.

This Anchorman sequel knows who its fans are, and does its best to keep them happy. No one will be complaining.

This fantastically depressing film ought to be shown in school assemblies, or wherever impressionable pre-teens gather to discuss their dreams of media stardom.

Like Agatha Christie’s detective novels, there would appear little in the way of aesthetic – as opposed to technological – progression; having set the tone so definitively at the outset, each film delivered exactly what it promised.

Inevitably, perhaps, it pulls its punches, and soft-pedals on any authentic misery that its scenarios might evoke. But its essential amiability and decency comes through.

Brimstone is hampered somewhat by its ponderous, doom-laden pace, and resultant bloated running time, but remains an intriguing slant on the spaghetti western.

Here is a sensitive, intelligent portrait of film director Howard Brookner.

Impressive as much of his film is, however, Aronofsky never quite solves the main challenge of the semi-literal biblical adaptation: what is so economical, and beautifully expressed, on the page can become a heavy, lumbering beast when translated into conventional narrative.