Cath Clarke

Jolie has assembled an A-list team – Roger Deakins behind the camera, the Coen brothers in charge of the script - but while her film is perfectly competent, it hardly dazzles.

It’s a mouth-puckeringly tart movie that’s tonally in a world of its own – darkly disturbing, absurd, brutal and silly, with a batsqueak of bonkers.

As the daughter of director Ron Howard, widely regarded as one of nicest men in Hollywood, Howard is herself blessed in the dad department; he is very likable here. His only parenting crime seems to have been to film the birth of all four of his kids. But the rest of the Hollywood contributions are irritatingly platitudinous.

In Firth’s every grimace and flinch you feel the torment of Lomax’s private world, but emotionally ‘The Railway Man’ feels trimmed and tidied up.

I’ve never liked Renée Zellweger more as a warmer and wiser Bridget Jones – but still capable of making a total prat of herself.

There are more than a few false notes here.... Still, the sight of Emma Thompson, wearing old-lady prosthetics and a leopard skin coat as Barney’s mum...is not to be missed.

The fish-out-of water moments are great fun, watching arthouse gods Depardieu and Huppert in tacky tourist hell.

The cleverness of Kingsley’s performance is the twinkle in his eye that leaves you wondering whether Dalí has disappeared entirely up his own myth. How much of the eccentricity is a put-on, brazen self-publicity to maximise sales? Disappointingly, the script invents a fictional art school dropout to be our guide to Dalí’s universe.

It’s a striking, ambitious film, but there is something about the tone – both glossy and grittily real, stylising everything to mythic proportions – that left me a bit cold.

Welcome to the Jungle is mostly great fun, with Jack Black outrageously entertaining as a teenage girl. But we need to talk about Karen. As Ruby Roundhouse, Gillan is stuck in less clothes than one of Rihanna’s backing dancers. It’s a dig at the hypersexualization of women in video games, apparently. If so, perhaps the male director (or one of the four male writers) can explain how fixing the camera on a skimpily dressed female character makes the point.

The trouble with Nick Frost’s knowingly cartoonish and silly comedy paying homage to folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar is that Frost has done this kind of movie before, and better.

Sisters is too strained for a comedy starring two of the funniest people alive.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism could perhaps do with one or two genuine scares. But for anyone old enough to remember Tiffany and advice columns in teenage girls’ magazines, this is going to deliver a pleasing shot of nostalgia.

It's très chic and charming but a bit disappointing when you see where it's headed.

When it’s playing for laughs, ‘A Royal Night Out’ is harmless good fun.

There’s a kind of blunt brute force to [Bloom's] performance – and he looks almost unrecognisable, as if he’s using certain muscles in his face for the first time.

This Neil Armstrong documentary feels like unrequired viewing coming so soon after two cracking moon landing movies.

The impossibility of ever really knowing our parents is a familiar storyline, but it’s told here with real generosity and warmth. Malik slyly pokes fun, but never meanly. This is satire with the thermostat turned up to 22 degrees.

It is something of a letdown: a funny but conventional glossy romcom. But there is no messing with Viswanathan, who is undoubtedly the main attraction.

Kevin Macdonald’s slightly drab adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s popular teen novel would be nothing without Saoirse Ronan.

Entertaining but never quite thrilling, this actually feels like the second film in a franchise, coasting along, but saving the best bits for the next episode.

What follows is a race against the clock, cleverly constructed by director Maximilian Erlenwein and co-writer Joachim Hedén. Their script throws in plenty of calamities to nobble the diver’s escape, but didn’t quite manage – for me at least – to spark a vertiginous clammy terror.

The performances are thoughtful, and like a pinch of chilli, heat things up from time to time. But director Oren Moverman’s portrait of smug, toxic privilege misses its mark – and at the end of two long hours, this feels about as fresh as last night’s chips.

Sting, black with a lethal red stripe, is never silly looking, though some of horror references feel a bit obvious and fanboy-ish.

Mélanie Thierry does her best in the lead as Duras, but her character is maddeningly flat and dull.

A perfectly acceptable family animation.

The history that emerges here is of a band yo-yoing between attempts to be taken seriously as artists, then coming back for more boyband fame and adulation. An air of collective self-loathing and regret hangs over them.

After Blue is a preposterous film, easy to ridicule. But it’s surely already halfway to cult classic status – destined to play midnight slots, watched by students smuggling bottles of red wine into the cinema under their coats.