Helen O'Hara

It’s cool and brutal, but with such impressive action credentials you almost wish there were fewer plot devices to distract you as Charlize gets up and at ’em.

Occasionally, like its characters, ragged around the edges, this nevertheless rings with all the emotion and power of the source and provides a new model for the movie musical.

Wheatley continues an unbroken run of quality, helped by a great cast and a startlingly effective premise. This is seriously cool, stuffed with great dialogue and riddled with bullets.

It may be too tame for horror fans, but the gothic twist works remarkably well — even if everything else is business as usual for the Belgian detective.

It’s long and sometimes gets swept astray by currents of family drama and period detail, but Ridley’s plucky determination and can-do energy carries the whole thing along. The result is an old-fashioned inspirational pleasure.

It is entirely predictable from moment to moment and frequently laughable in its portrayal of international relations and politics, but it’s also funnier than it needed to be, and, thanks chiefly to Zakhar Perez, often charming.

It falters in the middle and hesitates unnecessarily in setting up the love story, but Gru still has charm and kids will adore the Minions.

The result is overlong and rarely groundbreaking – there are hints of The Truman Show, Edge of Tomorrow and, visually, Inception – and suffers from some obnoxious filmmaking shorthand in its portrayal of other cultures late on.

It’s not as scary or as effective as the first film, but points for the performances, and for trying hard to do something different and fresh.

A perfectly serviceable biopic with good performances, which goes some way to explaining Franklin’s genius as a musician and a star, but one that isn’t nearly as transcendent as its subject deserves.

Nearly as good as the last film — the starrier cameos compensating somewhat for the more scattershot plot — this is fun but could have been more deeply felt.

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum make a sweet and spiky couple in this likeable caper. It’s never going to challenge The African Queen for quality, but it offers 
a consistently good time.

The stories are all individually charming, but overly familiar animation and underwhelming character-design blunt the effect. 

A history lesson with more fire in the belly than most. It turns out that a feminist angle really can revive the same old Tudor psychodramas, thanks in large part to Ronan and Robbie’s authoritative performance.

Somewhere between the pop-culture deconstruction of "Zombieland" and the skewed romance of "(500) Days Of Summer," this manages to make the apocalypse seem charming. Warm is the right word.

Everyone’s trying hard, but they can’t quite live up to the particularly gentle, warm tone of Pooh himself. Unlike the bear of very little brain, this is a film pulled in different directions with entirely too many thoughts in its head.

The blood and gore is all present and correct, but the focus on Kramer's vulnerability and human side sits at odds with his awful judgmentalism. Let monsters be monsters.

We know that this cast can produce magic together, and that this director can inject pace into unlikely topics. It’s just this one that seems to have feet of clay.

[Ridley Scott's] second film in as many months, after The Last Duel, is uneven, overlong and completely over the top, and has characters and plot turns that Marvel and Pixar would reject as ‘a bit much’. The good news is that it is undeniably a proper drama and, for the most part, wildly entertaining.

It feels real, and honest, in a way that too few romantic films manage.

The film doesn’t quite trust the magic of the garden, adding visual dazzle and, sometimes, artificiality, but when the film relies on the kids and their relationship it still finds the book’s magic.

Pine supplies gravitas in the lead, but he’s almost a lone voice of moderation. Bloody and brash and as subtle as a trebuchet, this is gleefully entertaining — unless you’re English, anyway.

A quiet and meditative portrait of the artist as a retiree, this lacks incident or high stakes but has an elegiac feeling of regret and reckoning that fits its subject’s twilight years.

A likeable cast and colourful depiction of Pakistani (and Pakistani-British) culture makes this look warm and inviting, but the central romance can’t hold our attention as it should.

There’s a good-hearted father and son tale at the heart of the madness here, but the surroundings are sometimes a little too silly for true greatness.

The plot is insubstantial in the extreme, but Rae and Nanjiani are so cool, and their loose, free-flowing improv so winning, that you probably won’t care.

It’s not a hugely innovative biopic, covering just a short period of Bader Ginsburg’s extraordinary career, but this is still a vastly inspiring account of the fight for equality.

It's scatty, scrappy and thoroughly OTT, but then that's like the characters themselves.