Catherine Shoard

There’s something grating about a film which insists on detailing its pseudo-science while also conceding you probably won’t have followed a thing. We’re clobbered with plot then comforted with tea-towel homilies about how what’s happened has happened.

For all its absurdity and the family friendly bloodlessness (despite the copious violence), it spins along very smoothly and efficiently.

Hidden Figures is a bouncy, almost garish feelgood girl pic. A movie that knows right from wrong and doesn’t see any use in complicating matters.

This film is conceived as a showcase for its performers, and, as that, it is immaculate.

For what is, in essence, a by-numbers Disney sports flick, there’s endless freshness and vivacity to Mira Nair’s picture – her best in years.

What we have here is an embedded report that sacrifices impartiality for access. But what access.

The peripheral interviews with the extended Spicer family are as compelling as the central quest; this is a film with rare honesty and nuance in a field that frequently feels queasy.

As high-class cheese goes, Truth slips down fine. It’s a noisy, one-note rally for the converted that gets your pulse racing even if you’re rolling your eyes.

Guggenheim largely dodges lodging her story within a greater political context; a choice, but a shame, for when he does, the movie gains tension.

It’s a fluid and nippy telling of a tale that still seems strangely urgent.

Saturation point when it comes to quirkily dysfunctional families in over-soundtracked dramedies was reached long ago.

Anomalisa is a movie with wit to burn (look out for the Sarah Brightman line and the meeting room pit) and enough incidental touches that the total achievement feels immense.

Director Sarah Gavron does well to galvanize her story with a degree of urgency: the result of swift, assured camerawork and a brilliantly understated performance by Carey Mulligan.

Ant-Man is a cut-and-shut muddle, haunted by a ghost, produced by a high-end hot dog factory, by turns giddying and stupefying. Watching it is like channel-surfing between "Hot Fuzz", a duff early 90s Michael Douglas drama and the very schlockiest bits of "Interstellar".

There’s something about the franchise’s earnest investment in its characters that’s quite unique. Its longevity is because it functions as much as a soap as an action flick.

Robin Campillo’s drama is sweet and neat, as ambitious as it is gripping.

It is half turkey, half triumph.

This is an effortlessly excellent film, about a horribly hard subject.

An almost perfect 90-minute hit of confident and inspired comedic commentary.

It's a film to leave you reeling but cheered, too. It's about battling love, as well as illness. A universal story, extracted from a unique one.

The Riot Club hands its audience a ticket, as well as a free pass to pour scorn over proceedings. That's a double-bill which should prove pretty irresistible.

Maguire flails around obligingly, happy to trade amiability for a decent fist at capturing the difficult, prickly Fischer. But he can’t quite carry it off, and the way the script dances around the edge of his illness, exploring the surface symptoms without trying for deeper psychology, leaves the actor exposed.

The presence of Sophie Barthes behind the camera does not amplify sympathy for our heroine. Rather, the opposite: if anything Barthes seems less in her allure, less tolerant of her tiffs, full-throttle with the vanity and the selfishness.

It has to be said, the performances are excellent. Winslet manages emotional honesty within anachronistic confines, and Schoenaerts escapes with dignity.

Aniston’s drab-act is diverting, but it’s not enough to sweeten a character who is one hell of a pill.

This is Where I Leave You is totally aimble, utterly unmoving filler given a major shot in the arm by its cast, people it’s simply a pleasure to watch, even with the creeping feeling they’re better than this.

What Cumberbatch delivers is an impressively rounded character study of someone variously kind, prickly, aggressive, awkward and supremely confident. But it's almost too nuanced. Accuracy isn't all, but fumbling in the dark isn't always fun.

There is a contrivance to both story and script that grates, rubs up against Murray’s appeal as a loose cannon.

The Judge is a timeless film, in that it could have been made at almost any point over the past 80 years: rote plot, functional support, well-signalled twists. It’s a two-seater star vehicle offering little legroom for other passengers.

Third Person is a work of staggering trash; an ensemble drama with the aesthetic of an in-flight magazine, but less classy writing.

The brilliance of Quillévéré's direction is in the performances she coaxes from her cast, and the clear-eyed, non-judgmental way she presents them.

Robert De Niro does further damage to a reputation much battered by "The Big Wedding."

The movie is strongest is when it strips away the facts and focuses on the emotional notes.

A remorselessly rousing attempt to do for the Scottish pub rock twins what Mamma Mia! did for Abba or Tommy for The Who.

For all its flaws - in fact, perhaps because of them - Le Week-End is a work borne from, and provoking, real feeling.

It gleams with a faintly-tacky, country club sheen, as if it'd been sheep-dipped in essence of 70s and come out feeling peachy.

With its frank approach to the basics of human desire, its steady, intense focus on a small-town story which could have come straight from Douglas Sirk, Reitman's fifth feature appears to bear little resemblance the four that went before.

The Invisible Woman shies from propaganda just as Nelly shies from impropriety. Fiennes has done the right and proper thing here. He has, at 50, made a mature movie, prudent in the best possible sense.

This is highly competent catnip for the watercooler crowd.

Turturro has given Allen his biggest and best on-screen turn in years: the part was written for him and it's full of scope for amiable kvetching and nimble slapstick.

It reduces a complex and extraordinary case to soap. It makes you care less, for all its heavy-breathing and cheapo coaxing.

It's bracing, but it does feel closer to panto than melodrama, more exhausting than illuminating.

From time to time, the script contextualises a little clumsily...but the playing and pacing are terrific.

Curtis's heart is in the right place. In fact, it's all over the place – front and centre and backlighting the whole thing with a benevolent glow. But it is hard not to watch this, read the news that it will probably be his last as a director, and look to the future.

The genius of Alpha Papa, then, is in remaining faithful to Partridge's small-screen soul while also managing the demands of a big-screen Alan.

Shame was erotic compulsion turned into opera, full of sombre vibrato. Thanks for Sharing is probably the more realistic, as well as more mainstream, and there's a generous pinch of very funny lines, mostly bestowed on Robbins.

Scenes have a habit of stopping at any second, with or without whopping soundtrack.

There's the frustrating sense of ideas bubbling too low beneath the surface, of mordant jokes serving as an end rather than a means.

The film functions as clammy thriller as well as poetic agitprop.

The final scene, a ravishing in a room, with a view, as the bells of Florence chime out, would leave only a stone unmoved.