Cath Clarke

While it definitely takes its foot off the action, Mockingjay – Part 1 goes deeper and darker.

This is a shameless heartstring plucker. But it’s charming and sometimes very funny.

The archive clips suggest Halston is a role Richard E Grant was born to play: the designer had a long-limbed loucheness, grandiose affectations and put-on accent, along with a fierce perfectionism.

This is Tarantino for ankle-biters with a bit of Ocean’s 11 thrown in: funny, energetic and just smart enough.

This is not social realism in the style of Ken Loach, but it is a film with a strong sense of outrage. Some might find it relentlessly bleak.

It’s propulsively watchable if a tad light on reflection. And you may feel hoodwinked by one late reveal.

This is a fresh and un-stuffy period drama mostly, but it could have done with a pinch more danger.

Even now at 50, Jarvis is a man who remains head-on crushable while dry humping an amp like your geography teacher on the Bacardi Breezers.

Bale is as good as it gets, Harrelson shows us why he is Hollywood’s favourite psycho and Willem Dafoe is terrific as a sleazy drug dealer. The rest of the film is without a bat squeak of authenticity.

Pitch Perfect 2 is totally goofy but very sweet.

Del Toro is the Ernest Hemingway of screen badasses: the less he says the better he is – he does his most convincing work while looking like he’s about to nod off. ‘Sicario 2’ sets up a future instalment centred on him: that sequel will be a must.

It’s a throwaway film that perhaps I shouldn’t have enjoyed as much as I did, but Mandy is such a deliciously sour character.

Where biopics often end up with a cardboard-tasting blandness, the focus on Jansson’s interior world gives this film moments that really come to life.

Though she might have turned the dial up, Burkovska conveys Lilya’s depression and anxiety, and finally her resilience, with a muted, powerful performance. This might be one to file away for the future, when the current conflict has ended.

It’s entertaining enough and you never know where the story is headed, but it doesn’t quite hold together.

What makes it special is that it’s not another romance about finding a man. It’s about finding your people, about being a bit lost in your twenties and not knowing who you are or what you want to be. And it’s got bucketfuls of charm.

Few films make you care about the characters like this one does.

In the end the story is told rather blandly, the edges sentimentally smoothed down.

It’s written and directed by Liam O Mochain with the kind of inoffensive hot-water-bottle-laughs you wouldn’t think possible after Father Ted. Well, I say inoffensive, but one of the vignettes – about an uptight bridezilla whose sole character trait is her desperation to get married – is depressingly unfeminist.

It feels kid-gloves at times: big-hearted and entertaining, but possibly lacking a little fun or oomph. A lovely warming film, though.

Ben Hozie makes his feature debut with this semi-insightful, uncomfortably funny indie drama about a man who becomes obsessed with an online sex worker. It’s a film with a slackerish mumblecore vibe, and Hozie is refreshingly grown up about sex. But it’s hard to see how his film adds much to the conversation about intimacy in the internet age.

There are some funny-sweet observations about pets and our projections on to them. And the animation is expressive.... But the manic pace, piling on the action sequences, is exhausting.

Ego, money, drugs: Lavelle’s story has the makings of an entertaining account of the music business. But this film feels too much like a promo for a comeback attempt.

A smart and satisfying movie, although the crashy-bashy deafening score is so loud you can probably hear it in space.

It’s full of plot holes but compulsively watchable for the first hour, before the whole thing falls to pieces as Mortimer chucks in a load of well-worn horror-movie tropes.

Missing – and missed – are Matthew McConaughey as snake-hipped strip club owner Dallas and director Soderbergh, who gave the original its lived-in feel.

The documentary’s director, Oscar Harding, explains that his grandfather was a neighbour of Carson’s in the wonderfully named village of Huish Champflower, and he was first shown A Life on the Farm age six. Stretching this curiosity of a man and his work into a full-length documentary is perhaps pushing it.

The Persian Version feels a bit soft focus some of the time, but it takes on real depth and force when the action hops further back, to 1960s Iran, where Shireen is a 13-year-old girl (now played by Kamand Shafieisabet).