Tom Huddleston

A title like that needs balls of brass to back it up. Luckily, this fiery college comedy from feature-debuting writer-director Justin Simien, loosely inspired by a series of scandalous black-face parties at all-white fraternities, is full of punchy intelligence and barely concealed anger.

Drab, silly and mind-numbing, this Dracula is strictly for the suckers.

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.

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.

Pawlikowski’s film may be bleak and unforgiving, but it’s also richly sympathetic and deeply moving.

A Walk Among the Tombstones is well paced and fairly watchable, but it does take itself desperately seriously.

Dante plays the early scenes perfectly, racking up the clammy dread without tipping over into outright nastiness. But somewhere along the way, the tension dissipates.

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

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).

That a film in 2014 can still get away with depicting all women as either dumb, hapless sluts or ball-busting harridans is frankly unbelievable.

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.

The soundtrack is crammed with ’60s and ’70s pop gems – several of them instantly familiar from Scorsese’s movies – while the colour palette is all muted corduroy brown and rainy urban grey. The result is less a homage than a slavish, overproduced cover version, lacking all the spark and integrity of the original.

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.

Thank the gods of war for Antonio Banderas, who single-handedly steals (and almost saves) the show as a loquacious assassin.

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

Overall this is giddy, ridiculous fun, a witty, wacky and wonderfully generous sugary gift of a film.

Strap on your swordbelt, buckle your sandals and oil up your rippling six-pack, because here comes yet another interminable, CGI-drenched mythic mish-mash with far more money than brain cells.

It may lack its predecessor’s lofty ambitions, but once the bullets, spears and hairy fists start flying you’ll be too wrapped up to care.

Psychologists would doubtless have a field day with the film’s lumpy brew of semi-incestuous paternal angst, midlife machismo, all-American dick-swinging and moderate racism, but we imagine most of them are too busy to waste two hours on this sludge.

There’s too much story to cram into one film, with the result that the three surly teenagers themselves – who would have made far more compelling central characters – are pushed to the side. And with their own legal team surely keeping a close watch, Egoyan and his scriptwriters are unable to point fingers in any meaningful way. A missed opportunity.

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.

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

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.

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.

Any film that teams up gruffer-than-thou icons Shepard and Johnson is bound to go heavy on the testosterone, but Mickle undercuts all this strident manliness with a rich vein of self-mocking wit and paternal angst.

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

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.

There’s plenty to enjoy – a handful of smart one-liners, a few nifty shocks and one truly unsettling confrontation in a cemetery – but nothing to give Joss Whedon a run for his money.

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.

This is the director’s most vivid, most emotional and humane film, and perhaps his best.

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

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

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

An overlong, at times almost plot-free soap opera that introduces a wealth of characters and dips into a wide variety of subplots but never comes together as a story.

We Are the Best! is a joyous celebration of youth, friendship and rebellion, and if there’s a nagging note of regret and bitterness it never manages to undermine the overwhelmingly compassionate tone.

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

The characterisation is feisty and memorable, the song-and-dance sequences intricate and colourful, and it’ll charm the socks off little people.

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.

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

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.

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

A startling examination of how artistic principles translate into real-world actions, and a moving portrait of a genuinely, unexpectedly brave man.

When the best one can say about a movie is that it’s pyrotechnically impressive, something important is missing. In this case it’s tension, originality and memorable characters.

This is a slicker, shinier, admittedly inferior affair. But with a strong cast, a roaring pace and at least one genuinely unforgettable scene, it’s by no means a write-off.

The LEGO Movie is sheer joy: the script is witty, the satire surprisingly pointed and the animation tactile and imaginative.

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.

A little too rough around the edges to fully engage.

If you enjoy improbable plot twists, overcooked dialogue and Hollywood legends champing on scenery, this adaptation is a highly entertaining slice of American Gothic.

As ever with this series, the shocks are cheap but effective, and the shaky-cam aesthetic adds an unsettling layer of realism (if you’re willing to overlook the innate ridiculousness of the film-everything concept).

It’s a shame, because there’s a good, solid documentary to be made about this fascinating, enormously talented, slightly self-congratulatory little man and his unmistakeable ouevre.

The result is entertaining and insightful, balancing cold statistics with real-life stories of success and tragedy, presenting a broad, clear-eyed view of an increasingly complex issue.

Scorsese never digs too deeply under the skin of these reprehensible playboy douchebags, and there are times where the swooping photography, smash-and-grab editing and toe-tapping soundtrack conspire to almost – almost – make us like them. But when the film’s cylinders are firing, it’s impossible not to be dragged along.

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.

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.

Low key and occasionally frustrating it may be, but Computer Chess is a supremely intelligent, beautifully constructed film, interweaving comedy and character, satire and subtext, and loaded with more ideas than some filmmakers manage in a lifetime.

This is a woman who has been through hell and come out kicking, and the result is as much a celebration of her life as it is a documentary.

This is tame, lifeless stuff.

The film does approach Milius with a certain reverence, but it can’t disguise the fact that he’s a troubling, divisive figure: bull-headed, almost cartoonishly macho, staunchly right-wing and dangerously self-obsessed.

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

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.

How Knight and Crowley managed to persuade such upstanding actors – not to mention Jim Broadbent, Anne-Marie Duff, Ciaran Hinds and Riz Ahmed – to take part in this fiasco is destined to remain a mystery. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trite.

It falters once the actual war begins: Ben Kingsley shows up as a Maori warrior with the weirdest imaginable accent, the final battle is uninvolving, and there’s an unconvincing upbeat coda. Ender’s Game ends up being fitfully engaging and endearingly odd.

What 12 Years a Slave is really interested in is creating an honest, believable experience: in culture and context, place and people, soil and skin. The result can, at times, be alienating.

With gorgeously crisp photography and pitch-perfect performances from the two leads, this is one of the most intriguing and thoughtful American films of the year.

Escape Pla’ would have made a perfect vehicle for, say, a Chuck Norris or even a Jean-Claude Van Damme. But these two redoubtable, enormously watchable old-school heroes deserve better.

This sequel suffers from the same lack of quality control that plagued the first film.

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

The outcome may be pre-ordained, but Emmerich’s knack for a witty pop-culture reference, a pulse-pounding gun battle or a sneaky political undercurrent (the film has drawn fire in the US for being leftie propaganda) hasn’t deserted him.

This isn’t just the best-looking film of the year, it’s one of the most awe-inspiring achievements in the history of special-effects cinema. So it’s a shame that – as is so often the case with groundbreaking effects movies – the emotional content can’t quite match up to the visual.

The aliens are unscary and easily despatched, Vin’s too silent to be interesting, and the other characters – a gang of bounty hunters on Riddick’s trail – are either dull or offensive.

The film overdoes it with the awkward, unconvincing re-enactments, many starring the director himself. The result will amuse hardcore Cash fans, but few others.

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