Ian Nathan

Get this — Matthew McConaughey is currently the most exciting acting talent at work in movies. Next up, the simple business of a Christopher Nolan.

Defying rote heroics and sidestepping those solemn Frodoisms lurking in the role, Lawrence seeks out the complex, human and earthy in Katniss, still the beating heart and total triumph of these movies.

With Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things, screenwriter Steven Knight has proved his ear for London's darker rhythms. Here, though, there's little to raise the pulse.

Pop quiz, hotshot: you’re cut loose 375 miles above the Earth, oxygen is running out, communication is lost, catastrophic satellite debris is heading your way and you have no hope of rescue. What do you do? What do you do? The answer is the film of the year.

Good intentions, vivid setting and TLJ on top form do not make up for a lack of anything truly compelling.

However exotic the locations and starry the stars, there’s no escaping this is The Devil’s Advocate of online gambling. Fold.

Already a hit in America, 42 is a well-told but square biopic doing justice to Jackie Robinson rather than exploring him.

The CG does its part of the bargain, but even more than the brighter, breezier original this is a pale imitation of Potter.

Del Toro is giving scope to a boyhood lust for mayhem, the multi-million-dollar equivalent of kicking over sandcastles and torturing insects. There is something infectiously juvenile in that.

Despite DiCaprio’s prize performance, purists will fume, but even as lit-crashing razzle-dazzle entertainment Luhrmann’s adaptation is a candelabrum too far.

Don’t let its commercial nosedive in the US tell the whole story. Cloud Atlas is a tough sell, but a rewarding journey all the same. It’s an adventure into the very concept of storytelling: magical, enthralling and thrilling as much as bewildering, pompous and potty. In other words, up in the clouds.

Hitchcock for dummies: brisk, jolly, well-played but oversimplified.

As unexpected as it is intelligent, thanks to virtuoso work from Spielberg and Kushner, Lincoln is landmark filmmaking, while Day-Lewis is so authentic he pulls off that stovepipe.

An uneven mix of impressively executed, violent clichés about good ol' boys defending the American right to flout the law.

No less lovely than former films, in many ways lovelier, but Brave is boutique Pixar: less ambitious, more succinct, excellence at a lower ebb.

As earnestly as they have tried to continue the formerly excellent spy series, everything Gilroy and crew concoct only serves to mock the excellence and passion with which Greengrass delivered his films.

Family dysfunction to make Jeremy Kyle blush, but thanks to McConaughey's oily power and Friedkin's unflinching purpose it's a compelling beast.

Buffeted by a lack of suspense, threadbare characters, and a very poor script, the stunning visuals, gloopy madness, and sterling Fassbenderiness can't prevent Prometheus feeling like Alien's poor relation.

With so many films adapted from novels, it's nice to see cinema paying homage to unheralded greats of literature like Sebald. While this one often struggles to do justice to his sense of grandeur and poetry, it'll be manna for fans of the German's work.

A sequel confident in what it's about - bigger, better, funnier, without stretching the joke.

Action-packed, gorgeous, and faithfully whimsical: Hergé thought Spielberg the only director capable of filming Tintin. He was onto something.

There's no question it's stunningly mounted, and Wasikowska makes a much stronger Jane than Alice, but the romance is overripe and the climax underdone.

It's nowhere close to "E. T." - what is? - but amongst the hullabaloo of summer, Super 8 is something to cherish: a beautifully made homage to better times, and better movies.

There is simply nothing like it out there: profound, idiosyncratic, complex, sincere and magical; a confirmation that cinema can aspire to art.

A diabolical treat with Rourke and De Niro in fine form.

Not one to let slow-building tension and mystery get in the way of wild flourishes of extremism and shock, Ken Russell hit upon a story that more or less handled his structural excesses and tendency toward blasphemy.

Unfortunately, half the time this feels more like an Omen parody than a chance to give it a great send off.

For much of its slowburn build there is a classy, intelligent thriller at work, something closer in tone to The Odessa File. Still, you must remain guarded to how over the top and quasi-horror events will finally turn.