Catherine Shoard

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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