Tom Huddleston

A valuable document.

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.

The blend of humor, pathos and wall-crawling antics is perfectly judged. After a handful of overblown misfires, Marvel appears to have rediscovered its heart.

There’s nothing here that works.

As a portrait of power gained and lost, of unchecked self-absorption and what drives people like Assange to do what they do, it’s absolutely fascinating. Watching it feels like history unfolding in close-up.

The filmmaking is solid, the performances strong and the tunes are pretty terrific. But this is too wary of controversy – and too ‘respectful’ of the fans – to treat its subject to the hard-headed analysis Tupac’s legacy deserves.

Despicable Me 3 suffers both from a lack of new ideas – there are no memorable gags or action set-pieces, just a lot of flying about and yelling – and from an assumption that the audience is already invested enough to care about what happens.

All in all, a most unlikeable film.

This is a provocative, intelligent movie for those with a strong emotional constitution.

There’s nothing to really hate about Rock Dog, just a creeping sense that – from the writers to the animators to the voice cast – no one’s really put much effort in.

Cox is rudely magnificent, capturing not just the wilfulness of the man but the nagging self-doubt at his inner core. But the film is just too bloodless to be fully convincing.

The result is just a bit cringey.

Kore-eda’s insight is so unflinching, his affection for his characters so intimate and sure, that not a moment here feels wasted.

A messy, troubling and strangely enjoyable film.

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.

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

So the cast is talented, the director has a decent track record and of course ‘The Secret Scripture’ looks pretty, in a picture-postcard sort of way. But the script is painful, not just horribly clichéd but trite, directionless and unaccountably pleased with itself.

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.

Too much of the humour derives from Emily’s insatiable appetite for booze, food and sex, while the central mother-daughter relationship is predictable.

This low-rent ‘Bourne’ clone has been sitting on the shelf for two years now, which explains why there’s a photo of Barack Obama still hanging above the CIA director’s desk. It might also explain why Unlocked feels so choppy and uneven, like it needed a lot of knocking about in the editing room.

The crude good-girl/bad-girl dynamic between its young leads is just one of many crass elements in this woolly, well-meaning but fatally unconvincing melodrama.

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.

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

But while she's thoroughly committed to serving both the rom and the com (the film is genuinely sweet, and at times very funny) Scherfig somehow never falls into any of the obvious traps.

City of Tiny Lights is always entertaining, and proves a great excuse for Ahmed to confirm his newly minted matinee-idol status. If only it had the confidence to shrug off its influences and do its own thing.

Overall, there’s a sense that ‘Fast and Furious 8’ knows exactly where it wants to go and won’t bust a gasket getting there: you might ask for a little more character work here, a few more plot surprises there, but on the whole this rattles along just fine.

The Boss Baby is one of those snarky, post ‘Shrek’ cartoons that desperately wants to appeal to parents as well as kids, but its snappy, pop-culture-referencing script feels workshopped to death.

This intimate documentary about the leftfield American filmmaker David Lynch is insightful and absorbing.

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

For lovers of old-fashioned horror, this is your bloody Christmas.

It doesn’t entirely hold together; the relentless din and repetition flips from thrilling to exhausting and back again more than once. But in those moments when everything clicks...this is absolutely joyous.

Soul-crushingly unfunny...It’s a movie that assumes that if you repeat ad nauseam an unfunny joke about ass-licking, it’ll magically become hilarious. It’s so grotesquely misogynistic, it makes The Hangover look like Thelma & Louise.

A handful of tense moments and some neat Gravity style effects just about keep Life ticking along. But the direction by Daniel Espinosa (he of the dire Child 44) is seriously shoddy – there's a moment towards the end when everything seems suddenly to happen at once, and not in a good way – and the total lack of originality is disappointing.

As an insight into the way families cope with adversity this is both razor-sharp and completely heartbreaking.

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.

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.

Overall, Logan is something rather special: a moving and mournful story of life at the end of the line, and the perfect blockbuster for these embittered times.

The Great Wall is not exactly a good movie – but it’s a pretty enjoyable one.

The Space Between Us is mostly harmless. But it won’t come close to troubling your heartstrings, let alone the space between your ears.

What a stupendously entertaining ride it is. Director and former stuntman Chad Stahelski is back in the director’s chair, and he knows his craft inside out: every punch lands hard, every gunshot roars like thunder.

A ferociously paced, wildly silly pastiche of those comic-book blockbusters we’re all getting a bit sick of.

Imagine simultaneously eating wallpaper paste, listening to Coldplay and watching the entire ‘Da Vinci Code’ trilogy back to back and you’ll have some idea how grindingly tedious the experience of watching Rings becomes.

After the bruising honesty of ‘Calvary’, it’s probably not surprising that McDonagh felt the urge to cut loose a little and make a movie with few ambitions beyond cheap violence and filthy laughs. Let’s just hope he’s got it out of his system.

The script can’t find the right tone, torn between hard-hitting satire on the pitfalls of capitalism and goofy, upbeat we’re-in-the-money clichés. It’s a fine line that ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ walked with ease – but Gaghan, sadly, is no Scorsese.

Danny Says doesn’t break the rock-doc mould, but it’s a must for fans of noise and nostalgia.

Denial cries out for a little more subtlety.

These young women have already witnessed enough horror to last a lifetime, and in this unforgiving society their lot seems unlikely to improve. A grim but necessary watch.

Director Amber Fares strikes a perfect balance, telling a righteous, uplifting story of triumph against the odds without ever losing sight of the bigger political picture.

While Monster Trucks may be bizarre, haphazard and deeply silly, hey, it’s a movie about monsters that live in trucks. It was never going to be Citizen Kane.

Packed with warmth and wit, this is a lovely lo-fi charmer.

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

There are a handful of really interesting scenes.... But for the most part Passengers is so anodyne, so frightened of the ethically troubling opportunities inherent in the setup that it just ends up feeling forgettable and silly.

Overall this is a terrifically watchable, heartfelt documentary and a valuable glimpse into a singular life.

Overall this is a stupendously entertaining movie, crammed with delights.

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.

Allied attempts to balance joy with heartbreak, and never fully manages either. But fans of old-school entertainment are unlikely to leave disappointed

Director Alexandra-Therese Keining clearly loves the book and tries to squeeze a little too much of it into her overcrowded film. But it is visually lovely – the transformation scenes are magical – and the young cast are terrific.

Into the Inferno may be relatively minor Herzog — it’s sweet and rambling rather than laser-bolt intense like "Fitzcarraldo" or "Grizzly Man." But it is enormously satisfying, filled with wisdom, insight and molten lava.

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.

It doesn’t all work: The pace can feel a little slow, and there are points where Park tries to have his tasty feminist cake and eat it too. But mostly, this is smart, sumptuous and wonderfully indulgent.

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

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.

Smartly cutting off before the long decline, this is an epic story, beautifully told.

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.

By the end, even Hanks looks a bit bored.

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

Like four or five Harry Potter books squeezed into a single movie: it makes precious little sense.

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

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

By the climax all concerns have gone out the window, as Vigalondo delivers an operatic finale that feels both earned and genuinely cathartic. For better and worse, you won't have seen a movie like Colossal before, and you won't again. And that, in itself, is a strong recommendation.

Certain Women moves, as all Reichardt’s films do, at a languid pace, and a handful of characters – notably Williams’s – could have been a little more developed. But it's hard to recall a movie with such a precise, immersive sense of place, and the very specific mood that comes with it.

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

Overall this is an absolute pleasure. There are times when Waititi’s script borders on genius.

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

Fans of the Stath and his inimitable oeuvre may find just enough shooting, punching and snarling to keep them satisfied. But those who enjoy proper movies are urged to steer clear.

It’s in contextualising Sands’s struggle that ‘66 Days’ is most effective.

If self-aware, ultra-arch arthousery isn’t your bag, give it a miss. If you’re looking for a good, weird, often very funny time, don’t miss it.

Being stuck in a cinema with David Brent for 96 minutes can be trying (the lazy ending doesn’t help). But when Gervais is on an improvisational roll, Brent digging himself deeper and deeper into some awful pit of social awkwardness, we can’t help but remember why we love to hate them both.

A film with a fistful of memorable moments—most of them involving Bridges hurling insults at people—but not a great deal new to say.

The plotting may be a little ropey, especially towards the end. But ‘ID2’ has smart things to say about identity and social class, and strides confidently through the minefield of British racial politics.

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

It’s most fascinating when dealing with the fallout from her divorce from first husband Petter Lindstrom and very public affair with director Roberto Rosselini – a reminder of how much gossip, scandal and public opinion were at the heart of Hollywood long before Twitter.

When the talking stops the film takes off, with a pair of bone-rattling chases set in Athens and Las Vegas that cause maximum damage to people, property and the audience’s eardrums. A bracing reminder of how fiercely efficient Greengrass can be, these scenes just about justify the existence of Jason Bourne. But, please, no more.

The Commune may veer towards sentimentality in the final act...but overall this is a warm, sharply characterised and absorbing melodrama.

An empathetic, often heartbreaking piece of work, at times tough to watch – one party scene is particularly grim and confrontational – at others calm and contemplative.

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.

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.

This is bland, shallow and totally unconvincing, veering between cartoonish overstatement and outright tedium.

A fascinating true tale of animal welfare becomes an annoyingly pretentious doc.

Director Athina Rachel Tsangari keeps things brisk, maintaining an almost nature-doc distance from her subjects. Her affection for them is plain, but that doesn’t mean she lets them off the hook.

What emerges is a sympathetic portrait of a genuinely idiosyncratic, outrageous individual whose towering musical talent never stood a chance against his rampaging personal demons.

This is all fun all the time, a dizzying carnival of wisecracks, fisticuffs, explosions, chases and truly eye-popping effects.

Precious Cargo isn’t actually as objectionable as your average petrol-station-bargain-bin thriller, thanks to one or two half-decent lines, a plot that vaguely makes sense and an unexpected dearth of outright misogyny. It’s still pretty rubbish, though.

The visuals are painstaking and horribly beautiful – shades of Hitchcock, Carpenter, even Spielberg – while the gore scenes are truly outrageous, knocking cheap imitators (hey, Nicolas Winding Refn, this is how it’s done) into a cocked hat.

It’s time to put this franchise on ice for good.