Oliver Lyttelton

It’s as successful as it is ambitious.

It’s dizzying stuff, and virtually everything that Gomes tries his hand to works: it’s a film that’s moving, sad, exciting, fiery, and funny.

There are elements of The Boy And The Beast that undoubtedly reinforce the promise that Hosoda holds: it’s a treat to look at, is inventive in spots, and will probably be eaten up by younger viewers. But it ultimately proves both narratively unsatisfying and emotionally lacking.

Without patronizing or condescending, it’s an examination of how fame can change us and haunt us, and of the complicated relationships that survivors of something like “Star Wars” can have with it.

In general, this feels like a film patched together out of endless hastily-drafted script rewrites rather than a cohesive vision.

Bone Tomahawk is a proper Western, a proper horror movie, and by combining the two, becomes something else entirely, and proves hugely enjoyable for it.

It’s worth the price of admission just to see Hardy’s Reggie performance, which is up among his best work. Still, the story could have perhaps used a more inspired hand at the helm.

Every time the picture opens a fascinating door, you're held back from going through by a naff filmmaking choice or a rote story move.

It's a stinker of an ending tacked on to a disappointing third act (which is at least lifted up by Bartlett's performance), and it's a shame because so much of what went on before was so good: a tender, unsentimental, unexploitative look at an existence that all too many people have, and what it is to be someone who looks after them.

Though it has a few elements of its construction that might be questionable, it's mostly a powerful, thoughtful, and visually striking picture.

Zhangke's always had a throughline regarding economic inequality and the 21st century-style Chinese capitalism in his work, but Mountains May Depart might be the director's defining statement on the way that his nation has changed over the past few decades. If only he were a touch subtler about it.

The film doesn't reinvent the wheel: it is, ultimately, a middle-class-white-boy coming-of-age tale of the kind that the cinema of France, and elsewhere, has never been lacking. But it's written, shot, cut and performed with such palpable joy, intelligence and warmth that it ends up feeling entirely fresh.

As ever, Moretti creates a rich and incredibly detailed world, one where every character has a life that stretches far beyond their on-screen scenes.

From the cloying, ever-present score to the complete lack of narrative momentum, it all adds up to a film that's easily Van Sant's worst, and is a sad black mark on McConaughey's mostly excellent recent run. Ultimately, Sea Of Trees feels like an entirely appropriate title: it makes you feel like you're drowning, and it's full of sap.

This really is Audiard operating at the top of his game, mostly dropping the contrivances of "Rust & Bone" for incisive character studies and a deeply humane, almost warm, worldview.

The book is so counter to our contemporary narrative demands that liberties would need to be taken for a movie version, and for the most part Osborne takes the right liberties, ending up with an extremely beautiful, very charming, thematically rich take that’s sure to be one of the better animated movies this year.

The humor is there on paper, but it ends up emptily quippy and gag-filled rather deriving the jokes from situations and character, and only one in three end up landing, mostly thanks to Robbins.

Trier’s sensibility for the dynamics of family, for the depiction of nebulous memory, and for the detail of life (the film’s full of beautiful, complex scenes), means that I’m already eager to take a second look and see what else there is to unpack.

An exciting, splattery, funny genre movie that somehow never once feels disposable.

In the end, all the strangeness adds up towards something genuinely significant: an atypically rich and substantial comedy that's stuffed with great scenes and performances even before you start to chew on its bigger questions.

There is genuine warmth and heart to the central relationship, and the script is occasionally funny, though it draws smiles more than laughs. But it's hard to see, beyond the gender swap, what LaBruce is saying here that Hal Ashby didn't cover more definitively four decades ago.

Lafleur maintains a bouncy, consistently funny tone that you'd describe as featherlight, were there not real weight grounding it all. It's a near-miraculous trick, and evidence of the immense talent on display here: he has a real talent for making comedy work visually, and as you might expect from a former editor, a sense not just for landing a joke, but for creating a unique and distinctive rhythm.

A sour, tedious and derivative film that doesn't just prove disappointing in its own right, it actively makes us resent the first film retroactively for inspiring it.

It's an ambitious attempt to meld the kind of social realism that made the names of Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard with a stripped-down genre thriller, an attempt that's only moderately successful, though it suggests Wolfe is a filmmaker of real promise.

Queen & Country is hardly reinventing the wheel, but it's charming, evocative and (mostly) well-performed, and were Boorman to continue with his autobiographical cycle, we'd certainly welcome further installments.

The picture is a triumph: it's arguably Garland’s tightest and most fascinating screenplay to date, brought to life with meticulous filmmaking and sensational performances. It's the first great film of 2015.

Never, for one second, is Vikander anything less than entirely truthful.

It'll pass a couple of hours on a rainy afternoon without too much trouble. But whether as an adventure tale, a thriller, or a morality play, Black Sea never quite makes a compelling enough case for its existence when better examples of the submarine genre are already out there.