Dave Calhoun

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.

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

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.

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.

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 result is a soil-under-the-fingernails, forest-bound mindmelter – with bonus pagan chills.

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.

Much of the challenging discomfort of the play is replaced with the easier, quicker wins of revenge, sex and redemption. It remains a daring project ­– but you’re better off reading the play.

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

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

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.

The mix of fact and fiction is a little confusing, but a strong sense of warm enquiry pulls it through.

As history, I’d take this account with a pinch of salt – it feels too enamoured by certain elements of its antihero’s story and blinkered to others – but as an exercise in capturing the man’s self-engineered legend, it’s energetic and engrossing.

It’s no heroic tale; ‘The Mercy’ is thoughtful, uncomfortable viewing.

Although Binoche is the film’s star, her presence is smartly muted, allowing us time and space to discover the world as she does, and providing room for complexity in considering the ethics of his character’s work and of Carrère’s film itself.

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.

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.

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

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.

The elements are all in place – superb acting (lead actor Konstantin Lavronenko won the best actor prize at Cannes in 2007), masterly camerawork, an ethereal score, ghostly locations – but the problem is that the story never really connects.

This good-natured hagiography isn’t anywhere near free of pomposity, but even Bono seems to know when it’s best just to keep quiet and move on.

Even Dench, while adeptly highlighting the vulnerabilities of age and the loneliness of power, can’t distract from the soft treatment, which leaves little room for the harsh realities of prejudice which must have made this a more painful and ugly chapter for many involved than this film ever dares suggest.

Oddly, the comedy of this partnership is dialled down, and the film’s few wisecracks don’t really land. It’s adventure, though, that everyone really wants from an Indiana Jones movie, and on that front it delivers and then some by prising open the old box of tricks and performing them one-by-one with care and respect. Add to that the rousing familiarity of John Williams’s score, and it all amounts to a comforting if not especially challenging reboot.

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.

The word exploitation comes to mind.

It’s not wildly original, but it’s steely and stylish, and as a story it has a ruthless streak to it that’s weirdly appealing.

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.

Some prior interest in Berger would help, but even newcomers should find this an infectious portrait of independent thought and living.