Dave Calhoun

This is a whale of a movie, grotesque and a little bloated but impossible to ignore. Its power and its horrors sneak up on you.

Burton lets Waltz run wild, sucking the air out of every scene with his hysterics, and the always-endearing Adams is left looking like a rabbit in the headlights.

It’s charmingly simple. But it also offers a sharp modern spin on Michael Bond’s London-set stories without being cynical.

The writing and direction lean towards the obvious, but there’s much to chew on regarding tradition, progress and the power of the white lie.

The original footage – devastatingly intimate; familiar yet alien – still stops us in our tracks more than six decades later.

The cast fail to gel and the tone of the film sways uneasily between melodrama and something more gentle. It’s too twee and theatrical to take seriously.

It’s a bold, beautiful cosmic adventure story with a touch of the surreal and the dreamlike, and yet it always feels grounded in its own deadly serious reality.

There are no great upsets or fireworks here, just a tender sketch of what it means to (probably) be gay as a school kid. The storytelling style is as inoffensive as the music (Arvo Pärt, Belle and Sebastian), and the performances are amiable and relaxed.

Citizenfour is at its most eye-opening and essential simply as a portrait of the then 29-year-old Snowden at a point of absolute no-return in his life as he spends almost a week hiding out in Hong Kong before disappearing into an entirely new existence.

Demange is a strong storyteller and masks the script’s tendency to nod to every opinion and social division by offering a masterclass in tension as soon as his dramatic bomb starts ticking.

The film conceals as much as it reveals, and its beauty is that it pretends to do nothing else. It embraces a mystery and protects it, and it’s thrilling to behold.

Its various riffs on codes, whether moral, sexual, societal or German, are plain to see rather than enigmatic or enlightening. Luckily it’s all anchored in a storming performance from Cumberbatch: you’ll be deciphering his work long after the credits roll.

Sentimental and shallow, although just passable as a kids’ movie.

It’s a joyous film, full of love and warmth but unafraid to admit that with sticking out your neck comes struggle and sorrow. Truly lovely.

A charismatic performance from Downey Jr and the growling presence of Duvall makes up for a multitude of sins in this big and brash family drama that puts the heavy emphasis on drama over family.

Dunst handles her sidekick role with a mature ease that’s new to her, but it’s the men you remember: Mortensen in psychological freefall and Isaac always tough to read and hiding something behind a handsome, controlled exterior. It’s a gentle and smart blast from the past.

There are times when it feels underpowered or unfocused... but this is an intelligent, sensitive debut.

It’s a film that moves to the convincing rhythm of real life.

Hats off to Dreamworks for offering some bold surprises in a respectable sequel filled with moments of humour and emotion among its ample noise and movement.

Archipelago confirms Hogg as a daring and mischievous artist, and a major British talent whose next move will be intriguing.

Hogg displays a welcome desire to draw on global film influences and ignore the unwritten rules of what British cinema should or should not seek to achieve, especially in the realm of films about the monied and unsympathetic.

Exhibition succeeds in making us feel deeply uncomfortable for peering into other people’s lives.

Sometimes you find yourself wishing for an alternative version of the film unfolding before your eyes. ‘Belle’ is a good-looking and exceedingly polite film where perhaps a more complex one with less good manners would have been better.

Grace of Monaco could have been a camp delight, but it feels too much like a stodgy, outdated television movie to work even as kitsch.

Politics and entertainment are never an easy mix, and Jimmy’s Hall is a familiar, slightly unsurprising coming together of the two from Loach and his writer Paul Laverty. Sometimes you can see the joins, but there’s also great warmth, charm and humour among the ideas, and the sense of time and place is especially strong.

As the actors move fluidly between various states, shedding one skin while assuming another, Polanski makes this subversive parlour game matter.

Most importantly, the film involves us: it draws us into the debate, makes us complicit, demands that we have an opinion, and then upends that same opinion a few minutes later. It's engaging and rousing.

Beneath the well-tuned atmospherics lurks a schlocky, fairly ludicrous and pretty distasteful yarn that ultimately puts the stress in all the wrong places.

What stops David Cronenberg’s grotesque noir Maps to the Stars, written by LA insider Bruce Wagner, from feeling tired is that it’s deliciously odd.

As ever with Leigh, Mr Turner addresses the big questions with small moments. It's an extraordinary film, all at once strange, entertaining, thoughtful and exciting.

With Dolan, you feel you're in the company of a truly original voice and one unafraid to make his mistakes right up there on the screen.

When the film gets outdoors, it soars, and Ceylan continues to dig with acute intelligence into the dark corners of everyday human behaviour.

Ayoade tips his hat to so many other filmmakers and writers that he leaves little room to consider anything other than what a good job he’s doing of distilling all his references into an effective Pinterest board of paranoia and alienation.

Only Lovers Left Alive drags its feet and shows serious signs of anaemia as a story.

Full of Anderson’s visual signatures – cameras that swerve, quick zooms, speedy montages – it’s familiar in style, refreshing in tone and one of Anderson’s very best films.

The Invisible Woman is only partly a romance; it’s the tragedy of Nelly’s life that makes itself more powerfully heard.

If you’ve never been to a burlesque show, now you know what you’re missing. The dedication and warmth of the performers are infectious.

Cloying at times – but always good-natured.

There’s plenty of flesh (much of it belonging to porn doubles), although the film is rarely, if ever, what most people would call erotic or pornographic. It’s neither deeply serious nor totally insincere; hovering somewhere between the two, it creates its own mesmerising power.

We’re never far from Von Trier, and both Skarsgård and Gainsbourg appear to offer different versions of the author himself.

There are no interviews, characters nor narration, and after an hour it can feel like a chore. Yet the images are staggering.

The unusually extended shooting period and Winterbottom’s decision to cast siblings as the kids make for a strangely intimate and powerful depiction of time passing and the peaks and troughs of childhood.

There are only so many scenes anyone can take of Law (never suited to the geezer role) strutting down streets shooting his gob off. If it was all in service of a smart story, so be it. But it isn’t.

Baldwin and Toback make a snappy comic duo, and half of their talks with a line-up of luminaries focus on the art of filmmaking rather than the business.

There’s a pleasing no-frills tone to the whole enterprise as well as a convincing grasp of the rituals and beliefs of the age.

It has a rigorous, even unrelenting, grey, green and brown palette and, narratively, it’s tough to penetrate.

It’s not a pretty story, but its warmth lies in its fondness – love, even – for the two boys at its heart.

It’s lightly played, often very funny and shot all over Paris with energy and wit, and boosted by superb, inquiring turns from Broadbent and Duncan.

It’s adequate and often fun, but no match for Cumberbatch’s talents: physically, his Assange is far more complex and intriguing than most of the things we hear him say or see him do.

This punky adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Filth is a glossary of grimness, a dictionary of darkness. But it also dishes up humour that’s blacker than a winter’s night in the Highlands and unpolished anarchy that’s true to Welsh’s out-there, frighteningly frank prose.

One of the most pleasing things about Blue Jasmine is that it feels truly knotty and never obvious in how it unfolds.

A masterclass in how the most local, most hemmed-in stories can reverberate with the power of big, universal themes.

It’s an intoxicating marvel, strange and sublime: it combines sci-fi ideas, gloriously unusual special effects and a sharp atmosphere of horror.

It’s anarchic, sometimes amusing, intermittently tedious, with ideas about digital alienation and the corruption of technology that too often feel blunt and tired.

It's a terrifically moving film that has a fitting earthbound feel to it.

Rush is fast, slippery, stormy and dangerous.

There’s nothing groundbreaking about the animation or script. That said, the characters and story still offer low-key charms.

If its script is a little unwieldy and overwrought at times, Broken is still a work of delightful moments and strong promise for many of those involved. Norris works hard to inject some joy and wonder into what could easily be a much more dark and miserable experience.

Luckily, Hawke and Delpy remain as charming as ever, and their combined goofiness is more endearing than annoying. Winning, too, is the sense that this peculiar project, though imperfect, could grow old with its audience and its cast.

Feels both modern and traditional – a halfway house between the broodier Nolan way of shaking things up and the louder, bone-crunching style that director Zack Snyder established with films such as ‘300’ and ‘Sucker Punch’. Man of Steel is punchy, engaging and fun, even if it slips into a final 45 minutes of explosions and fights during which reason starts to vanish and the science gets muddy.

This is a portrait of cycles and change. But the mood of the film suggests that we should be impressed that this ever-growing, ever-changing city of ours is still chasing after new versions of the modern.

What Luhrmann makes intoxicating is a sense of place – the houses, the rooms, the city, the roads – and the sense that all this is unfolding in a bubble like some mad fable. Where he falters is in persuading us that these are real, breathing folk whose experiences and destinies can move us.

From this simple, not especially unique love story, Kechiche has fashioned an intimate epic.

It's to Ozon's credit that he never serves up easy answers.

It’s intricate and often mature as drama, but it’s also meandering and at times heavy-handed, even melodramatic, and the tight control of time, place and action which made ‘A Separation’ so gripping is just not there.

The Immigrant promises rich territory to explore, but in the execution it’s overly stately, dreary and unconvincing.

It’s an exploration of all things surface, yes, but it has soul too.

Beyond the shocks and games, there's not a great deal to take away in the form of meaty ideas or lingering themes, and its catchy premise doesn't really deliver in the end.

More than ever Payne allows the humour to rise up gently from his story rather than burst through it.

[A] baggy revenge thriller consisting of short violent set pieces interspersed with far too many talky debates about the morality of protecting a killer.

If Heli lacks enough focus and thematic clarity to make it properly special, it's still winningly provocative and always compelling.

Style over substance doesn’t really tell the half of it: you can bathe a corpse in groovy light and dress it in an expensive suit, but in the end that rotting smell just won’t go away.

The Coens have given us a melancholic, sometimes cruel, often hilarious counterfactual version of music history. It's a what-if imagining of a cultural also-ran that maybe tells us more about the truth than the facts themselves ever could.

A stop-gap tale that’s modest, fun and briefly amusing rather than one that breaks new ground or offers hugely memorable set pieces.