Cath Clarke

A beautifully acted but disappointingly stiff period drama.

Newcomer Florence Pugh is like a lightning bolt, totally electric as Katherine, who’s up there with Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina in the literary heroine stakes.

With her funny, light-hearted documentary, Penny Lane lets the sunshine in, focusing on the Temple’s message of open-mindedness and inclusivity – LGBTQ followers speak of a sense of belonging.

There is surely a sly attack here on the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin’s suppression of liberal values and demonisation of the LGBT community. As the tension escalates, there are some poking between the ribs questions too about free speech and facts in the post-truth era.

This really is Wonder Woman coming to the rescue of the DC Comics universe.

The focus is on his star quality and the qualities that made him a pioneer: sunniness, grit, passion for his sport, the unconditional love and support of his mother, and his unbreakable confidence to be himself. It’s undeniably heartwarming.

This isn’t much more than a series of ridiculously dotty sketches, and might have worked better as a sitcom, but it’s surprisingly hilarious.

Catching Fire looks and feels epic. Hands down it’s one of the most entertaining films of the year.

Every emotion is bang-on; every scene unfolds grippingly and naturally; and by the end, these characters feel like people you know.

A difficult, depressing watch.

Sigurðsson is no misanthrope and his humane message – that everyone is muddling along as best they can – makes all the feuding and bile easier to stomach. Some may prefer a little more bite.

It’s intense but not unwatchably painful, and so much more than an issue film or portrait of a victim. I really hope Knight finds a place in the film industry; with her terrific performance here she’s earned it.

This is a lavish pull-out-all-the-stops musical.

A candid, often shocking documentary portrait of the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Each new sentence adds more: more complexity, more woman.

There are some gorgeous comic touches.

You forget how limited so many movies’ ideas of women are until Amy Schumer launches into an extended tampon joke: nothing is off-limits as she kapows through expectations of female characters.

The film is fun, but, for all its inventiveness, it’s a bit tame, with its nice-but-dim hero. But Diamantino is never dull.

The movie is full of wackiness but contains only traces of comedy.

This tense New York drama from the co-directors of Bee Season and The Deep End is sensitive and almost unwatchably perceptive about dysfunctional families – and it’s acted with knife-sharp precision.

Virtually laugh-free, so-so looking with a seriously drippy musical number, it feels like a film slipped into cinemas over summer to sucker parents desperate to do something, anything, to fill a couple of hours.

The two women’s scenes together give the film its most interesting moments.

Even just watching this impressive documentary, you feel a little unhinged by the scale of suffering.

What will take your breath away is how viciously Armstrong crushed and humiliated anyone who dared to make allegations against him, and that includes former teammates he’d doped with.

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.

‘Bodies’ gets under your skin and stays there. And the gospel handclapping soundtrack feels like it’s drawing you into a dream.

What makes The New Girlfriend special is that is has something to say about sexuality (feminine, masculine, gay, straight, and everything in between – it’s complicated).

Far from Men is a character study — a two-hander expertly acted by Mortensen and Kateb (best known for the terrific French cop show Spiral).