Tim Robey

Causeway is an excellent, moving, determinedly low-key slice of US indie cinema.

The film has clout, vitriol and an impressive payload of blackly comic despair.

Quantum of Solace offers next to no solace, if we mean respite, but in plunging its hero into a revenge-displacement grudge mission, it has the compensation of a rock-solid dramatic idea, and the intelligence to run and run with it.

It’s one of his least crazy films in narrative terms, but you couldn’t call it subdued, because the colours and textures he’s coaxed from a new director of photography, Jean-Claude Larrieu, are even more intoxicating than ever – it’s like an unexpectedly dry martini in a dazzling Z-stem glass.

Without a doubt, it gives us the oddest couple of the year in Alexander Skarsgård’s Ray and Harry Melling’s Colin. For that, and many other reasons, this fresh, funny and poignant pairing is one to be cherished.

The whole climax is a delight

It’s addictive fantasy, satisfyingly snappy even in its absurdity, and something no Chastain fan can afford to miss.

It knows its audience and doesn’t waste time. It also heightens the fun with elaborate practical effects, rather than blitzing us with eye-tiring CGI any more than it must.

Allen’s ambitions with this taut, tart character study might not be stratospheric, but they’re at least moderate-to-high, and his degree of success is exciting.

The film’s craft, with its shivery wooded landscapes and deep focus, is consistently strong, and the acting – especially from State, but also many of the bickering village ensemble – spices up what might have been a route-one polemic.

The film could have been an indulgent memoir, a scrapbook of a major (if stunted) leading-man career. But seeing so much of it through Kilmer’s own viewfinder gives it both focus and poignancy.

The film is inescapably hilarious too, though – such is the weird power of swearing when the swearer can’t keep a lid on it.

Encounter is bugged-out science fiction paranoia, stylish and sinewy, with an opening sequence that may have you bolting for the door, or at least the remote control.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s epic drama springs off the success of Black Panther and roars into action: it’s every bit as propulsive, as detailed, as richly imagined. It’s fast, and it’s loose, and it totally works.

Both actors, unfazed by the sheer oddity of their task, rise energetically to the occasion.

An acutely compassionate account of unshakeable guilt.

Seyfried reads the tone of this hokum better than anyone, and knows restraint is hardly called for, using every excuse in the book to go completely bananas.

Writer-director Jeremy Lovering, in his feature debut, keeps a skilful handle on technique — his film is a calling card that could give you paper cuts.

It would be near-impossible to love Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women more than Greta Gerwig does.

Hawaiian waves crash over a high-calibre Hollywood prestige drama, sharp and sobering, with top-drawer work from Lancaster, Clift and Sinatra.

For all its baroque pomp, though, McQueen intuits the one unspoken terror – loneliness – which nudged this fascinating artist into the void.

Audiard’s trick is to make the overblown mélange into something amazingly confident – it’s clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful and absolutely bonkers. It’s hard to believe he pulls it off, but he does.

If Diao’s intent on confounding us, he has the courtesy to do it with frequently astonishing style and verve.

This film leaves you itching to read a meaty biography, even as it solidly maps out Hepburn’s emotional life, and explains the relationship with trauma which cut her out so well to be a UNICEF ambassador, raising millions for Bosnian war orphans and Somalian famine relief.

From its unshowy script on down, Mississippi Grind is content to rumble along as a character piece, keeping its storytelling loose and unpredictable, like a repeat flick of the dice.

Taken as a speculative romance, and in the right matinee spirit, it’s lushly engaging, with a star pairing that – appropriately – rivets.

Cleaving hard to its road-trip formula, it works out less of an honest-to-goodness plot than Magic Mike, but goes even beyond that wonderfully loose, dexterous movie in feeling sexually liberated. It’s more glammed-up, rising above any element of tawdry exploitation, and is more of an outright comedy.

Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has followed up one big, awardsy film from last year (Dallas Buyers Club) with another at lightning speed. That was a braver film, but it's the spaciousness of this one that distinguishes it from being just another mechanically pre-ordained adversity narrative.