Catherine Shoard

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

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.

It's a film with jazz in its bones and rhythm to its beats.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

There is comfort and joy in the routine and delight in the details. Not just the thumb-smudges and dusty crockery (Wallace has become so reliant on smart tech that he keeps pressing the teapot lid, befuddled, in hope of a cuppa), but the more startling flights of fancy.

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

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.

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.

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.

This is highly competent catnip for the watercooler crowd.

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

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.

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’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.

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.