Dave Calhoun

The animation itself might not be the most inventive out there (this isn’t Pixar), but where Sing soars is in its one-by-one attention to its ensemble of beasts and its obvious passion for music: It’s nearly impossible to watch this film and not be humming the Beatles’ "Golden Slumbers" for days afterward.

It’s just impossible to get past the core ridiculousness and arm-twisting manipulation of the plot.

The relentless gloom can feel oppressive, but there’s plenty of ambition here, especially in the layered storytelling and woozy sense of time and place, with plenty of soaring aerial shots that nod quietly to the all-seeing eye of a computer game.

It’s a sad project, a testament to lives cut short and stories half-told.

This is an imperfect film, bold but occasionally baffling, and one that in its final act grows into something much more exciting than you might initially expect.

Along with the film’s hippy-ish musings on the relationship between humans and the elements, it gives the film a moving, supernatural touch.

While it fascinates as much as it frustrates, the film’s saving grace is that it always feels honest and never cynical. It seems both relevant to us and personal to the filmmaker.

It's a spare film, muted in colour and unflashy – and it's all the more powerful and urgent for it.

Fitfully entertaining, with some grabby trial scenes, the film struggles to find a proper, engaging focus.

It’s a small, successful sketch of now-great lives.

The Lovers and the Despot is compelling as a Cold War-era thriller, but it also offers a small window on life in the higher echelons of power in North Korea at that time.

There’s plenty of warmth and compassion here, and the true story is a belter, but this ‘Lion’ doesn’t quite roar.

The Clan shouldn’t be as enjoyable as it is. But it’s a delight to be in the hands of a storyteller who can impress you with his stylistic bravado (one sequence cuts together a nasty death with ecstatic sex) while never losing sight of the suffering at the story’s heart.

The absence of George and John is felt keenly, but Paul and Ringo are a pleasure to listen to as ageing raconteurs.

Overall, there aren’t many shades of gray in Hacksaw Ridge, but it’s a movie that fulfills its purpose with vigor, confidence and swagger, and those battle scenes are impossible to take your eyes off.

What Dominik gives us is a portrait of an artist and a man and a family at a low. He doesn’t try to understand, but he does find some beauty and truth among the chaos and despair.

It's the fashion designer's second movie after his 2009 debut A Single Man, and this is a far more ambitious film, with its sprawling cast, various periods, layered storytelling and musings on life and art. But it's also far less endearing and coherent, and feels almost unbearably cruel and cynical.

The film’s no-nonsense, visually plain documentary-style of shooting feels utterly appropriate to its sly evocation of the absurdities and banalities of modern life. Just brilliant.

[Chazelle's] soaring, romantic, extremely stylish and endlessly inventive La La Land is that rare beast: a grown-up movie musical that's not kitschy, a joke or a Bollywood film. Instead, it's a swooning, beautifully crafted ode to the likes of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain.

Cat lovers (and possibly fans of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’) will appreciate the role of an ageing black feline as a symbol of the sudden changes in Nathalie’s life. Everyone else should warm to the way that Hansen-Løve distils the chaos of life and the life of the mind into such a warm, thoughtful, surprising drama.

To enjoy the film's arresting musings on language, time and how much we can ever understand others, you'll have to close your eyes and ears to the wealth of schlocky hokum surrounding them.

War Dogs simply doesn’t dig deeply enough into the duo’s personalities to be more than a fitfully entertaining escapist spin on a ripped-from-the-headlines yarn.

‘Childhood’ is not always a subtle film, and some of the writing and acting feel like a bit of a slog. But its very spooky mood leaves a strong impression.

The film’s pleasures are simple – soaring landscapes, old-school DIY adventure and some sweet performances by the child actors. It makes for a charmingly old-fashioned family adventure.

In the end, the characters are more lasting than the story, which is a standard save-the-city-from-destruction yarn. But this crew is a riot, and their world is intriguing and even a little meaningful.

It’s not a happy watch – but it’s an essential one if you want better to understand the city and people around you.

It’s enthralling and haunting.

Just the name ‘George Galloway’ – this doc’s presenter and co-writer – will have some vowing to go nowhere near this lively character assassination of Tony Blair. But anyone expecting wall-to-wall ranting and raving might be surprised by it’s relative sobriety.

Hull clearly had a profound and lucid response to his blindness, and this thoughtful, illuminating film goes some way to inhabiting his thoughts.

An intimate, warm embrace of a film, it radiates joy and harmony despite playing out entirely in the shadow of a difficult father's death.

Skarsgård himself is fairly bland as Greystoke, delivering a po-faced Byronic spin on the character, all velvet coats and dreamy romantic stares at his belle while sitting barefooted in the boughs of trees. But at least the animals are memorable – best of all is a pack of scene-stopping silverback gorillas digitally created for the movie. This Tarzan isn’t quite the jungle VIP – but it’s got a little swing.

The film's quietly angry plea is for compassion, understanding and more than one eye open on this modern horror.

As a storyteller, Farr is bold enough to keep us guessing until the film’s final moments, but a late need to explain lets the film down a little.

The film’s pace barely leaves you time to think – blink and you’ll lose the plot. But there’s plenty of imagination here to honour the spirit of Carroll’s topsy-turvy tales, even if the emotional resolutions are of a distinctly twenty-first-century sort.

Wears its heart a little too much on its sleeve. But it also manages to pack a punch, and the lead performances from Bercot and Cassel are strong.

There's no escaping it: Money Monster is a basic, silly movie. But it has on its side a top-notch cast and an entire absence of self-seriousness.

The word exploitation comes to mind.

It’s not a despairing movie – Mungiu even suggests that a new generation might put things right – but it’s a brutally honest one.

Sean Penn's pompous, ethically bankrupt humanitarian aid drama The Last Face would surely have worked better as a charity single.... Instead, we get this vain mess, a vacuous romance with real human pain as background noise and where the only honest pleasure is waiting to see what misstep it will take next.

It's a bold film, full of energy and spunk, but a patchy, half-formed, rambling one too.

This is a thoughtful film, but one that's slightly limited by its own careful restraint.

There's little humour, and strip away the styling and what it has to say about fashion has been said a thousand times before. But there's a mesmerising strangeness to Refn's vision that can't be denied, and Fanning does an especially good job of portraying innocence lost in the belly of the fashion beast.

Some clunky coincidences and unlikely events confuse the film's mission, and it lacks the clarity and parable-like meaning of the brothers' best films.

It might be familiar territory for Almodóvar, but only a master of his art could make it look so easy.

Flaws aside, this is a superior, inventive kids' film, and one that's bound to make Rylance's giant a favourite with younger audiences.

Once you get past some bumps in the road of believability, Our Kind of Traitor turns into a brisk, energetic drama, with Anthony Dod Mantle’s photography adding interesting layers to a fairly straightforward plot.

It's a heady brew, awkwardly told, but smartly provocative.

There are some genuine laughs, and the air of deep-frozen cynicism reminds you that Niven’s book was on to something behind the violence and farce.

What’s most winning about ‘The Club’ is how Larrain manages to allude to the wider structures, behaviour and corruption of the church without ever making this claustrophobic, moody and very local story feel anything but crucial, thrilling and disturbing.

The connections might be a little more strained and diffuse than in "Nostalgia for the Light", but their cumulative power is strong nonetheless.

This is sombre, artful and winningly ambiguous.

The world that Zootropolis creates is intelligent and fascinatingly detailed – it feels more like a movie by Disney-owned Pixar than a straight Disney film.

Nobby is hardly a character for the ages. He's a basic fool. The movie, too, is chaotic and crude. But its lack of sophistication, like its odd mix of souped-up action and base comedy, ultimately feels like a badge of honour.

Writer-director Billy Ray (the writer of Captain Phillips and the first The Hunger Games) honours the Argentine original with keynote scenes set in a mirrored lift and a crowded sports stadium, but the mood is too often sluggish and pedestrian.

As the determined but fragile son, Reynor has a strong presence, but Collette’s character is too thinly sketched to make much sense.

Visually, it’s never less than arresting. Gently amusing, too, is the relationship between Keitel and Caine, even if the dialogue Sorrentino writes for them often displays a fondness for empty epigrams.

Daddy’s Home raises the occasional smile, but it’s not exactly Wahlberg or Ferrell’s finest hour.

Brand is a winning – cuddly even – bridge between his film’s ideology and the wider world.

What makes this more than just a punishing, fearful, expertly crafted thriller focused on one man’s endurance is heavily down to Emmanuel Lubezki’s attractive, thoughtful photography.

It’s a winning yarn, but Osmond has to crack the whip to get it over the finishing line.

This is a simple, sweet tale about the basic pleasures of home and hearth, rendered unflashily in a delightful style of hand-drawn animation that employs a beautiful array of warm pastel colours.

The list of co-stars – Jane Fonda, Octavia Spencer, Aaron Paul – is so impressive that it’s hard to know what attracted everyone to such a soapy, cloying script.

David Sington (In the Shadow of the Moon) shows extreme confidence in his subject by revealing the deeper truth in fragments, essentially allowing Nick to deliver a monologue or one man show, drawing us deeper and deeper into his story.

Skyfall is a highly distinctive Bond movie. It has some stunning visual touches.... Also, it mostly manages to convince us that there’s something at stake by giving a hint of Bond’s emotional life beyond this story.

It’s not all doom, gloom and personal disasters — the film also offers lucid insights on the links between the man and his movies.

Timoner refuses to run fully with Brand’s elevated idea of himself, preferring to offer glimpses of a vulnerability and ruthlessness behind the clownish bluster.

Loushy’s project can feel repetitive, a bit too in awe of his admittedly significant sources. Perhaps most striking are their prophecies that this was only the beginning of an intractable conflict that could only get worse, not better.

The Program offers no obvious new revelations and Armstrong remains elusive – but it has an unsettling air that carries us through its more pedestrian patches.

This Pan is loud, colourful, busy and full of ideas. Not all those ideas work in sync – but most are bold and some are winningly eccentric.

Everything about this film makes you look with fresh eyes at the familiar.

It’s a more subtle, damning film for implicating the media – as much as the church, the courts, the legal profession and other Boston institutions – in the systematic, wider cultural cover-up it describes.

It's an endearingly loopy, occasionally half-cooked but always ambitious film.

It’s both soaringly romantic and truly sad.

There’s something sloppy and sluggish about ‘Irrational Man’, even by Allen’s patchy standards.

What Hooper fails to do is get to grips with sexual identity in any way that's intellectually or emotionally provocative or surprising. That makes for a cold, pretty, delicate movie – one that too often relies on scene-stealing production design or the overwhelmingly insipid score for its otherwise strikingly absent emotional power.

It’s Bulger whose grim appearance and even grimmer behaviour ‘Black Mass’ indulges. But it’s the quieter, more complicated Connolly who offers the film’s subtler pleasures.

In what is surely his finest hour, Tom Hardy plays both brothers. Much more than a gimmick, it’s like watching one side of a mind wrestle with the other – literally, in one explosive, fun-to-unpick fight scene.

Kormákur creates such a convincing world – the craft of this film is astonishing – that you’re willing to forgive its less delicate touches in favour of its totally compelling depiction of what it must be like to ascend into a place that’s heaven one moment and hell the very next.

Writer-director Anna Muylaert’s observations on family relations and invisible-but-firm class barriers are always acute.

Director and co-writer Diego Quemada-Díez condenses many acute observations about life as an emigrant into a sure-footed, credible story.

U.N.C.L.E. has enough style and smarts to make it an amusingly louche summer movie: a cultivated mix of action and wit, suits and cities, that feels refreshingly analogue in a digital world.

As filmmaking, X+Y is unassuming and not entirely remarkable, but the relationships play so sweetly and memorably.

Rohrwacher draws us into this unusual world with the ease of someone who knows exactly what they’re talking about, neither judging nor celebrating and, at her best, just looking with tenderness and a winning sense of humour.

The Assassin is a beautiful, beguiling film; it's impossible not to get fully lost in its rarefied world.

In the end, Love is more silly than sordid, and even a little soppy in its late – too late – love-filled moments. Many teens will love it; most adults will roll their eyes.

Tale of Tales might lack magic in the immediate, flashy sense, but its strange spell is altogether seductive and special.

Gestures, looks and touches carry enormous weight, and Blanchett and Mara, both excellent, invite micropscopic readings of their every glance and movement.

At times, you ache to put the brakes on the chaos, but still Pixar manages to do with all this what they do best, turning the everyday rough and smooth of childhood experience into a thoughtful, inventive adventure, full of totally appropriate lurid and strange imagery.

Anyone with a beating heart will be forgiven for allowing it to break during this unflinching and thoughtful account of the life and death of the soul singer Amy Winehouse.

Yes, The Lobster is arch: this is cinema in quotemarks, tongue-in-cheek storytelling that uses absurdity to hold a mirror to how we live and love. At its best, it has incisive things to say about how we shape ourselves and others just to banish the fear of being alone, unloved and friendless.

It’s a film of small moments and tiny gestures that leaves a very, very big impression.

This slapdash but endearing doc about the rise, fall and resurrection of '80s pop outfit Spandau Ballet is an inside job, packed with strong archive footage yet lacking anything you'd call truly incisive.

The thriller tendencies here are as half-cocked as its compassion for the struggles of parenthood, even if there are some admirable, if hard-to-watch, moments when Bier refuses to turn away from horror and pain.

The film is not without its problems – Michelle Williams is an elusive lead, and a wide array of characters come at the expense of depth – but it’s a knotty, thoughtful piece of work nonetheless.

This limp, sometimes lifeless business-trip comedy can’t decide whether to aim for teenage boys or their fathers. So it plumps for – and misses – both.

Catch Me Daddy feels authentic and informed, but wears its research lightly and prefers to thrust us into the atmosphere of the moment rather than offer too much background or tie things up neatly.

Luckily, there are just enough truths about ageing beneath its corny, farcical surface. Also, it’s hard not to enjoy two hours in the company of this cast.

It’s an uneven work, mysterious in its refusal to tell us much at all about Daniel, but it has a ring a truth to it even when it slips into less enigmatic thriller territory.