Tim Robey

Part Heat, part Miami Vice, this sinewy thriller keeps motives hidden as a police unit weighs duty against dirty money.

Keanu is cool and breezy enough to live up to its title amply.

Kenneth Branagh returns as Poirot, but, rather than jazz things up, the film's many Danny-Boyle-esque stylings are a constant distraction.

There are snatches of fun to be had early on, before the teasing gimmickry about reality and fakery expires. But the second half is just a slavish rehash of all the series’ best-known tropes. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, crossing through this looking glass, we may simply wind up less and less curious.

Where Fassbinder crafted extraordinary tableaux of self-parodic misery, such as the drunken, prostrate Petra diving for the phone on her white shag carpet, Ozon breezes through this exercise instead with his usual snappy relish. He has plenty to say about the original’s magnificence, but perhaps not an awful lot to add.

The trouble begins with a seasick lurching between fantasy and reality, it’s redoubled by subject matter that can’t support that, and it hits a whole arpeggio of duff notes with the casting.

Love and Monsters is mercifully zombie-free, while serving up a refreshingly different vibe from the word go. It’s not mock-heroic in a winking way; it doesn’t seem so pleased with its own punchlines. It’s rueful and shrugging.

This defiantly blank canvas may strike you as a puzzling, even a dubious, heroine, but Ryder’s terrific. And at least she has the last laugh: no one can get their graffiti to stick.

Without giving in to bromides, the cha-cha, surprisingly feel-good rhythms of Nagy’s direction make this heroine's sudden sense of purpose rather exhilarating.

Joy adopts the most basic possible template for its fluffy history lesson, but still has an impressive habit of joining all the wrong dots.

There’s a kernel of philosophical intrigue in The Assessment, encased in a sleek shell of dystopian science fiction, and unfortunately flung a million miles away from audience engagement.

It’s a sturdy, straight tribute to an undertaking that feels wacky, quixotic and heroically mad – proving little that it set out to prove, but a great deal accidentally, about resourcefulness and survival in extremis.

Square, lacquered, and livelier than you’re expecting, Joachim Rønning’s film obviously adheres to all the formulae a doughty sports drama needs, starting crucially with the backdrop of adversity.

This chamber-horror oddity from the English actress-turned-auteur is too weird, too wonky; intermittently gross, and often gruelling.

It’s hard to decide if Black Sea is a good idea put over with sub-par execution, or an iffy idea handled as well as possible in the circumstances.

Middleweight, non-intelligence-insulting fare right to the core, Bleed For This keeps you squarely in your seat, but barely once excites you enough to leap up out of it.

Unashamedly rousing and immaculately crafted, The Swimmers is up there with Creed as a sports drama with more at stake than individual glory – a global-humanist purview to which it ascends without getting the slightest bit preachy.

With the best will in the world, Metz drags us through a labyrinth of intrigue but messes up the crumb trail. We’re left disorientated, and underwhelmed.

As a scratchy string quartet for the four actors, it continues to work surprisingly well – you might hand it back with a B+ in that department. But as a storytelling assignment, it droops little by little into the C zone.

The one inspired idea here is what happens to the minions when they’re injected with serum by the film’s mystery baddie, and this is enough to give us at least a reel’s worth of anarchic pleasure.

On a visual level, the film’s reportage is as tabloidy as its argument, and much more wilfully unpleasant.

Seydoux has unfakeable chemistry here with a perfect-as-usual Poupaud, the leading man in French cinema who seems most incapable of putting a foot wrong.

Nighy and Mortimer have just a couple of scenes together, but they’re easily the film’s best: both actors sink gratifyingly into the nuances of this incipient friendship, bond over books you actually believe they’ve read, and give the film its best hope of doing Fitzgerald justice.

It's all wickedly tendentious mischief, but when it's this gloriously funny, the points score themselves.

It’s a nostalgic exercise in burnishing the Stallone brand, with the star on screen half the time in new interviews, between a slew of clips and outtakes.

Una is a sparse, icy film fighting a little too hard against the fact that it used to be a play.

It’s hard to decide whether Annabelle: Creation gains or loses points for this immensely daft set of developments, but surprisingly little damage is done to the business of turning up the scare dial.

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.