Clarisse Loughrey

Downton Abbey: A New Era is whatever the opposite of a French Exit might look like. Rather than a party guest slipping out quietly, it’s the bumptious visitor making their final, sluggish turn around the room.

For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience.

As light as McAvoy’s touch might be – this is a film, after all, that features a James Corden cameo – there’s more to do here than simply cheer the boys on and hope they get one over on the Oxbridge elite. There are bigger questions to ask, and California Schemin’ is willing to ask them.

With barely a twist to speak of (at least in the traditional sense), his latest film Knock at the Cabin feels like a repudiation of the past.

H Is for Hawk concerns itself less with the healing of wounds, but rather with the prying open of them. Can we look so deep into the pulp that the fear of it eventually washes away?

That one already notorious sequence aside, Triangle of Sadness feels a little like gnashing at air.

Maria is a tragedy, but not because of one of life’s piteous events. Instead it’s the tragedy of a woman’s failure to heal her wounds with her art.

In Christopher Andrews’s stark, haunted debut – anchored by two soulfully frayed performances by Abbott and Keoghan – violence becomes the only language left to speak when shame, resentment, and desperation have stripped the words right out of these people’s mouths.

Affleck and Damon, at least, try to pump a little crotchety humanity into their characters. But any hope of suspense, any genuine mystery over who (if anyone) is on the path of betrayal, is swiftly dashed by how poorly defined these suspects are.

To the film’s credit, there’s also real style tucked into the periphery, as characters breeze past Richard Quinn florals and Lady Gaga, still in her Tim Burton demon era, performs on a runway of models in loose, patterned Seventies gowns and oversized hats. It’s a compromise. But, then, that’s what The Devil Wears Prada 2 has turned out to be all about – it’s artistry snuck in beneath the commerce.

Beau Is Afraid is an Oedipal farce hysterically outsized in its execution.

Michelle Yeoh comfortably steals the show in this starry adaptation of lesser-known mystery ‘The Hallowe’en Party’.

The fourth ‘Matrix’ film offers a volcanic cluster of ideas with ambition – and a reminder that long black coats and tiny sunglasses are, indeed, very cool.

Despite the drip-fed reminders of contemporary history (the Cuban Missile Crisis! the Kennedy assassination! Weren’t the Sixties wild, man!), A Complete Unknown struggles to fully engage with Dylan’s relationship to that intersection between politics and music.

Whatever the genre, Aronofsky tends to oscillate between two modes: the savagely harrowing or the savagely sentimental. And it’s all there in Caught Stealing, but at such a low simmer that the film feels almost vacant.

Young Woman and the Sea is pure Hollywood fluff – but it’s hearty, wholesome fluff, of a kind that makes immediate sense once Jerry Bruckheimer’s name pops up in the credits as a producer.

While the newer Bad Boys films have delicately sidestepped the contemporary conversations around law enforcement, Axel F seems happy to offer up its protagonist as a figurehead for the active endorsement of police misconduct. I’d argue you could just let Harold Faltermeyer’s earworm of a theme song drown out that noise – but, alas, for a certain generation, that’s also been ruined by the crazy frog on the invisible motorcycle.

The irony of being intimately connected while desperately lonely can be a hard one to digest. Yet director Mia Hansen-Løve prods at the concept with the same tenderness that she applies to all her films – each of them united by the pains and pleasures of interconnectivity.

Plane is stifled by just how ordinary it is, and how closely it hews to the standard tropes of action films with longer, more descriptive – yet less ridiculous – titles.

Cuckoo isn’t a horror movie for people who dislike unanswered questions, since Singer, who also wrote its script, is far more interested in emotional logic than the literal kind.

It’s a busy catalogue of gruesome absurdities that’s more consciously surrealist than the Final Destination series’s Mouse Trap-style executions, akin instead to the bizarro corpses crowding the afterlife’s waiting room in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), with a splash of Peter Jackson’s early, gore-splattered horror-comedies.

Scrapper is a solar system of a film, with Campbell’s playful and defiant Georgie shining bright at its centre. You’ll not find many characters this year quite as likeable.

All that’s really changed is that How to Train Your Dragon is now distinctly less charming and less playful than before, with even its pièce de résistance Toothless losing some of the cute factor (he looks real mean when he growls).

Run Rabbit Run is certainly fluent in the visual language of eerie, effective horror. Its metaphors, though, are all mumbled.

It’s surprising how much the film can flit between clangingly obvious bits of exposition – aha! The source of the floppy red hat! A reindeer that happens to be named Blitzen! – and more mature perspectives on the holidays.

The problem with this brand of Hollywood tale is that, by excessively romanticising their subjects, they diminish their humanity.

Fire and Ash, I’m sure, will find its place in the canon. But that doesn’t excuse its flaws.

The film’s vision of the Twenties may be propelled to the very border of believability, but it’s rarely inauthentic. This is a work of studious imagination.