Jamie Graham

With few words and the odd squint, Cruise hard boils all of his charisma into a clenched fist, but is more than happy to let a dynamic Smulders take the lead in many scenes.

OK, so the ‘Nam firefights are more routine than we’d expect from Lee and the treasure hunt element almost feels it belongs to a different film, but this is a frequently fierce, fascinating picture. The world needs it right now.

Gosling and Cooper use their star currency to power a slow-burn, heartsick drama. "Blue Valentine" director Cianfrance is a serious talent.

Be sure to make family time for Bird’s flawed but dazzling sequel. “Superheroes suck,” says Violet. No, they most certainly don’t.

Kenneth Branagh finds interesting ways to grease the wheels of this new take on the oft-filmed novel.

Not quite magnificent but certainly Fuqua’s best since "Training Day" and a rare remake that actually delivers. Yee-haw!

Hail, Caesar! is a love letter inked in arsenic, at once celebrating the artistry of Hollywood and cringing at the crass commercialism and rampant phoniness of it all.

Far better than we had any right to expect. Thrilling set-pieces, spine-tingling iconography and a Han/Chewie bromance to savour.

This is the anti-Heat: no sheen, no shimmer, no obsessing over highly grandiose themes and precise compositions; just grime and desperation.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation might have its hi-tech gadgets, but it's a pleasingly old-fashioned affair.

It’s flawed, yes – Frances is frustratingly underwritten, her psychological fault lines spoken of but never shown – but it’s also swaggeringly cinematic. And it has Tom Hardy vs Tom Hardy.

Tiny Furniture announces Dunham as a talent to watch.

Scorsese blends his twin religions of Catholicism and cinema to considerable effect.

The plotting is tangled, the emotional undertow slight, but the action keeps on coming, including a blistering multi-player sword fight on speeding bikes.

This funny, touching adap of Shrabani Basu’s 2010 biography has its own chemistry, withering wit and unsentimental message of acceptance. A royal treat.

Peele is three for three. You’ll spill out into the night jawing with your friends and gazing at the stars.

Strickland’s nuanced, atmospheric, ambiguous movie transcends genre.

An intergenerational family drama, a search for self, and a big, bouncy comedy sure to entertain.

Is Furiosa as magnificent as Fury Road? No, though not because it’s the first Mad Max movie without Max, whose absence barely registers. At 140 minutes minus credits, it’s a touch unwieldy, while its lament for the inevitability of war and the emptiness of revenge feels hollow given the giddy excitement it stirs from just these things. But what can’t be disputed is that Miller, the Mad genius, has done it again, once more refusing to simply repeat himself and instead choosing to kick up dust rather than gather it as he forges a new path through the Wasteland in often spectacular fashion.

Bigger and better – 22 Jump Street joins the exclusive list of sequels that out-gun their originals. We’re already knocking at the door of no.23.

A cunning, suspenseful thriller that bears comparison to the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, Blue Ruin is an impossible-to-ignore calling card from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier. Hollywood awaits.

Most alluring are the crumbling neon cityscapes, real world/cyberspace fusion and the musings on identity.

No Badlands, but the best of the recent minor Malicks. And it features Val Kilmer with a chainsaw.

Neeson’s knees hold up in an oddball thriller that’s more interested in smirks than smashing things to smithereens.

Thrilling and haunting, pitching the power of adventure and friendship against the day-to-day horrors of childhood and a chilling Pennywise. An absolute scream.

Taken as a throwback to the thrillers of Carpenter and Spielberg’s cinema of wonder, it is special indeed. Not least because it honours its influences and yet remains, first and foremost, a Jeff Nichols film.

The Hateful Eight brands the western with a big ‘QT’. All you’d expect from a Tarantino movie and more besides. Saddle up.

Not without glitches but an energetic study of one woman’s refusal to settle for anything less than her share of the American Dream.