Tom Huddleston

The supporting cast is flawless, with a special mention owed to Brad Dourif as poor, doomed Billy Bibbit. But the script lacks the woozy, otherworldly subtlety of Kesey’s book, relying instead on pop psychology and finger-pointing: once again, it turns out women are to blame for pretty much everything.

For all its humanistic warmth and undoubted charm, Short Term 12 just never quite rings true.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s at fault here: the performances are flawless – Carell fully justifies his unlikely casting, while Ruffalo is as dependable as ever – and the script is astute, intimate and at times shocking. But there’s just no real life in the film.

If Del Toro is pitching for an audience of 12-year-old boys (and we do mean boys: this is old-school macho), he’s done a bang-up job. Still, there are times when Pacific Rim could be the work of any jobbing Hollywood director – the warmth and idiosyncracy that characterises Del Toro’s finest work, from Pan’s Labyrinth to Hellboy 2, is absent.

It’s disappointing when Starred Up begins to lapse into soapy cliché.

Eddie the Eagle may suffice for a brainless Friday night, but an honest account would have been a lot more memorable.

Lifeforce is a near-impossible film to review, at once indescribably awful and hugely, brilliantly entertaining.

There’s only so many times an audience will fall for the same manipulative editing tricks. Still, with fine performances and a rich sense of place, this is a promising start.

What Welcome to Leith does very well is dig deep and expose Cobb – and by extension the entire American neo-Nazi movement – as weak, confused and desperate, using a dying ideology as a way to feel less alone in the world.

The result is a film that starts with a bang and ends with a shrug, but keeps us entertained throughout.

Writer-director Pablo Fendrik takes the whole thing terribly seriously, punctuating the action with ponderous slo-mo and laughably pompous discussions about Bernal’s spirit jaguar.

The ever-present air of madcap, goofball insanity carries it through. A seriously guilty pleasure.

A film that never feels remotely real, content to wallow in dead-rock-star mythology and tedious druggie indulgences.

There's a gripping, dark, truly monstrous film lurking in here somewhere, but Bayona seems hell-bent on keeping it at bay.

There are few surprises in Creepy. With the exception of a bleak, pointed ending, it all plays out as you’d expect. That’s not necessarily a criticism – it’s fun to watch the pieces click into place, and the film is never less than slick, well-acted and nice looking.

There’s nothing wildly original here, but it’s carried off with charm and wit, and two very enjoyable central performances.

In the plus column there’s a small handful of decent gags, a clutch of welcome cameos (Eddie Izzard, notably) and at 85 minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome. There’s also a fairly solid moral about free will and personal desire. But nothing else here really clicks.

This is a deeply silly, extremely noisy and sometimes impenetrable action movie that’s drowning in CGI, wild overacting and mullets. And it’s enormously entertaining.

As a procedural study, Night Moves is undeniably effective: The buildup is slow, painstaking and intense, the fallout inevitable but still shocking...But the soul is somehow missing.

Rogue Nation is an uneven film.

The photography is starkly lovely, the slow drip of information is smartly handled and the central performances are appealingly ambiguous.

There’s wit, integrity and insight here, but it cries out for a lighter touch.

Ghost Protocol plays it strictly by the book: the characters are bland, the plot is over-familiar and the action sequences are resolutely old school. But animator Bird relishes the chance to play with real people.

75 minutes isn’t really long enough to fully examine the Sky Ladder project, let alone an incident-packed artistic career. Still, as an introduction, this is entirely serviceable.

Kooler is a very likeable lead, and Michal’s battles – with loneliness, ageing, family, religious doubt and her own indecision – are smartly, sympathetically sketched by writer-director Rama Burshtein.

The film’s blanket refusal to question its subject feels not only cowardly, but antithetical.

There’s a lack of subtlety or surprise which serves the story poorly... That said, it’s a thoughtful, timely, often quietly captivating drama.

The film can feel truncated, as if only a longer film or TV series could do proper justice to the details of the story. But it’s a sensitive and moving tale nonetheless.

There are sequences in Doctor Strange that could burn the top layer off your eyeballs, crammed as they are with some of the most unashamedly drug-inspired imagery since the ‘The Simpsons’ episode where Homer takes peyote. But problems arise when Doctor Strange tries to tackle the everyday stuff, like telling a half-decent story.

22 Jump Street knows how to play to its strengths: Tatum’s performance here is even more puppy-dog lovable than last time, and his scenes with Hill possess a goofy, low-key warmth too often lacking in big-budget comedy.

There are a few lovely scenes: Mavis listening to a new mix of one of her father’s last recordings is heartbreaking. For old-soul fans, Mavis! is a must.

The visual style here is pleasingly simple, with round, Moomin-ish faces and washes of icy pastel colour. But the story is pretty flat, spending ages setting up a rivalry between aristocrats that turns out to have no bearing on the story at all.

For the first hour, this is masterful slow-burn melodrama, eking out the details of John’s crime and playing expertly with our sympathies. But as ambiguity is stripped away the film becomes less interesting, and the finale is weak.

Ascher’s aim isn’t simply to inform. The Nightmare wants to be the first properly scary documentary, employing time-honoured horror movie techniques in a concerted effort to spook the viewer. But it’s here that Ascher slightly oversteps himself.

It’s a remarkable story, but it’s undermined by some odd directorial choices.

This microbudget indie about a pair of brothers in small-town USA looks great, sports strong performances and doesn’t outstay its welcome. But it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’ve seen all this before, and better.

This is a solid take on the material, but it could have done with a little less narrative incident and a little more cinematic sparkle.

Accusations of tastelessness are bound to arrive, with some justification. If your priority is to respect the dead, why hire the director of Battleship?

The result is a fascinating – at times illuminating – tightrope act, but rarely an enjoyable one: for all its luminous outsider’s-eye photography and painstaking, perfectly pitched performances, both the film and its shivering heroine prove difficult to warm to.

A little too rough around the edges to fully engage.

No comedy classic, then, but a good natured and engaging slice of goonish self-mockery.

The sheer sense of ludicrous, punch-the-air joie de vivre is impossibly infectious.

The characters are still fun to be around, the one-liners are still sharp...and the soundtrack is, of course, terrific. But there are only so many times you can slap on a Fleetwood Mac toe-tapper and expect it to paper over the cracks.

The script is solid, the period recreation spectacular and the performances muscular, but The Connection suffers from a severe case of overfamiliarity.

Narrated entirely by its subject – no famous faces popping up to tell us what a ledge he is – the film is intimate and crisply told.

Much of the film's impact stems from a pair of remarkable lead performances.

Whedon has revealed that his first cut ran for well over three hours, and it shows: Ultron feels excessively nipped and tucked, barrelling from one explosive set-piece to the next, leaving ideas half-formed and character motivations murky.

Respect is due to Joe Johnston and his screenwriters for not only fashioning a nifty, highly entertaining slice of pulpy comic-book action, but for making this most divisive of costumed crusaders universally relatable.

The film has plenty to recommend it, thanks to a string of memorable one-liners and Coogan’s unmatched knack for skin-crawling physical comedy. But this is a long way from the back-of-the-net strike it should have been.

Like the product that inspired it, The Founder is tasty enough while it lasts but never quite fills you up.

Phantom Boy is frequently beautiful to look at, but the cops-and-robbers angle feels tired and the characters are thinly sketched.

Using home-video footage and talking-head interviews, Dinosaur 13 dramatically depicts the thrill of archaeological discovery. But the overbearing soundtrack and shots of weeping palaeontologists do feel a touch manipulative.

All three actors work hard... and when the melodrama hits fever pitch, Crimson Peak lurches into life. But overall this lacks weight and intensity: a Brontë-esque bauble smeared in twenty-first-century slickness.

Overall, there’s just not enough going on in Disorder: largely plotless and set almost entirely in a single, bland location, it doesn’t have enough atmosphere to compensate for the lack of action.

A potentially gripping study of the fallout from the JFK assassination as experienced by his doctors, secret service agents and the man who famously photographed the incident is rendered tame by a combination of flat writing and overly busy storytelling.

Extreme cinema aficionados will doubtless get major kicks from Moebius. For others, the cumulative shocks are likely to induce weariness and boredom.

Bloody, shallow and oh-so-smug, Deadpool is so eager to offend that it’d almost be sweet if it wasn’t so, well, relentlessly annoying.

If you’re a fan of the classic streets-to-stardom formula, this is a solid rendition.

First-time feature director Omid Nooshin makes the best of a minuscule budget, and his punchy script doesn’t brake for breath.

A United Kingdom is just a little too cosy and sentimental for its own good.

Origin of Evil takes a while to get going, and the demonic possession plot pretty much runs on rails. And yet there’s plenty to admire here: strong performances (‘ET’ legend Henry Thomas is a welcome sight as a kindly priest), top-notch jump-scares and some unexpectedly lovely, almost ‘Far From Heaven’-ish autumnal photography.

Director James Wan has his method down. The scares are effective and the camerawork is superb, all lurking long shots and short sharp shocks. Wan is fully aware of the austerity-era parallels in his story, and the period detail is surprisingly authentic.... But there’s little here we haven’t seen before.

Crisply photographed, thoughtfully plotted and sharply soundtracked, The Transfiguration is a solid slice of US indie horror.

Overall, this is an enjoyable, compelling small-scale shocker.

Zarafa never pauses for breath, rattling from one hasty, perfunctory sequence to another.

Greater conflict (or simply more probing interviews) might have made for a more gripping movie. But what’s here will delight anyone who dreams of living free, sleeping rough and scoffing beans around the campfire.

Give Northern Soul its due: this feisty, frequently amusing chronicle of one young man’s journey through the dancehalls of Lancashire nails its time and place.... A pity, then, that the story is so tiresomely familiar.

The absolute seriousness with which the band regard themselves – particularly drummer-songwriter Yoshiki, who’s so famous that Stan Lee turned him into a superhero – is never questioned by Kijak, resulting in a fitfully enjoyable but rather pompous fan film.

If Pedro Almodóvar was hired to direct another "Sex and the City" film, it might end up like Cupcakes. The sort of movie that adjectives like frothy and bubbly were invented for.

Good Kill is a dour, claustrophobic film, offering an acute and stunningly photographed exploration of middle-American banality and moral ambivalence.

Denial cries out for a little more subtlety.

Folman’s vision is just too personal and obtuse, and the result can feel rather like watching someone else drop acid, enjoying their giddy descriptions of all the pretty colours but unable to fully engage.

It’s ironic, but Keanu might be a better movie if it was more like TV: 90 plotless minutes of Key and Peele just goofing around on the mean streets might’ve been something really special.

The picture it paints of America’s frontline intelligence services – confused, internally quarrelsome and completely in hock to corporate interests – is fascinating.

It’s undeniably entertaining – and worth seeing for Kingsley alone – with the misfires never fully overshadowing the moments of glory.

It’s always fun to watch scaly, skyscraper-size behemoths lay waste to civilization, but a bit more human drama wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Willow Creek doesn’t take us anywhere new – the climax is abrupt and unsatisfying – but it’s a whole lot of jarring, juddering fun while it lasts.

There’s something rather bland about Veronica Mars – even the murderers have neat hair and nice clothes – and the largely forgettable cast don’t help. But the one-liners are sharp, the plot unpredictable and the whole thing ticks along with a minimum of fuss.

Overall, Bleed For This is difficult to dislike: the story may be hokey but it’s real, and so is the sentiment behind it.

As with all of West’s work this is a good-looking, well acted film shot through with moments of real power, but its conventionality is troubling.

With solid performances from all three leads and lovely twilight photography, the stage is set for a heartfelt coming-of-age drama – but the dire script has other ideas.

This is one of those romances where the woman only exists to be a figure of worship for a nerdy, socially awkward young man, whose side we’re meant to take unquestioningly. Sorry, Pif, but you’ll need to try a bit harder.

This ridiculous, highly watchable, at points startlingly psychedelic action thriller is probably Luc Besson’s best film since ‘Léon’ (which isn’t saying a great deal).

Breathlessly paced and surreally funny, ‘The Boxtrolls’ fizzes with visual invention and wild slapstick. But the grotesquerie is overbearing.

At just under two hours, the sheer relentlessness can become exhausting. But if you’re a fan of unfettered action, this will be a rare treat.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is not the disaster some feared it might be, but neither is it the endlessly quotable, deliciously idiotic follow-on so many of us were optimistically anticipating.

It takes a while to find its focus – and takes itself just a little too seriously – but as low-budget Ozploitation goes, it’s snappy and effective.

This is a messy, poorly structured film, riddled with plot holes and lacking any kind of satisfying conclusion.

Never less than slick, precision-tooled multiplex entertainment, Kingsman hews close to the formula Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman established in their superficially similar "Kick-Ass": hyperspeed action, pithy one-liners and grotesque ultraviolence.

An unbalanced but never less than entertaining film, enthralling and deflating in roughly equal measure, and studded with moments of true, old-school glory.

Bits of Allied really do work. There’s a clawing tension to the later scenes, as their marital bliss starts to turn sour. Pitt’s anguish is convincing, and even if some of his actions are ludicrous – endangering an entire Resistance cell for his own peace of mind, for instance – we still feel for him.

It’s all a bit heavy-handed at times, but this is a sweet story honestly told.

There’s no escaping the fact that this is a nasty, vicious little film – the climax is startlingly unpleasant. But with its sharp dialogue, beautifully streamlined story and fistful of surprises, the Mel haters are going to have to find another brickbat for now.

It all spins out of control in a final blowout of naff special effects and random shouting, but there’s just enough leftover goodwill to carry it through.

That Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi adore this music is not in question – it’s lovingly chosen and brilliantly performed – but the film sometimes feels like a work of cultural tourism, particularly in scenes set in a gospel church and a Chicago street market. These lively musical sequences also sit awkwardly with director John Landis’s bizarre predilection for wholesale destruction: sure, smashing up cop cars can be fun, but Landis takes things to a tiresome extreme.

Luckily, Jackson’s singular talent for massive-scale mayhem hasn’t deserted him, and the hour-long smackdown that crowns the film gives him ample opportunities to indulge it.

The first half of Magic Magic is greatly enjoyable... Sadly, director Sebastián Silva isn’t sure where to take his characters.

This feature-length Mr Peabody and Sherman is by no means unbearable: there are a few decent gags, and the episodic plot just about manages to hold the interest. But there’s little here for any but the most easy-to-please youngsters.