Despite the pyrotechnics of McAvoy’s performances and Willis’s grounded conviction, there’s just not enough here past the high concept of “what if real people were superheroes?”.

Sequences depicting the Selma marches – the first of which led to violent police attacks that were seen on national TV and helped change the mood of the country – are fairly understated, when a more visceral approach might have given the film more emotional heft.

Story strands feel half developed; pacing seems erratic.

Even if The Hate U Give succumbs to cliché on occasion, it remains a surprisingly bold and thoughtful studio film about racism.

In addition to the obviously authentic rapport between the quietly compelling Hill and impressive first-timer Perham, populating the feature’s frames with as many non-actors as possible also adds detail and texture.

It’s the shocking disjunct between his religion and the rabid nationalism of his sermons, writings and declarations that powers Schroeder’s conventional but nevertheless effective long hard stare into the eyes of intolerance.

The film’s coming-of-age story might remain familiar, its emotional arc may be broad, and its messages about self-belief and taking chances fall into the tried-and-tested camp, but DeBlois still builds an engaging, sincere and tender world brimming with depth and detail.

A fascinating, sometimes frightening film which, like its subjects, is perhaps a little too ambitious for its own good.

A tender, intelligent imagining of the playwright in retirement.

This is a film that often feels more assembled than directed, crucially lacking the sheer verve that would enable it to transcend the influences that it proudly wears on its dusty sleeve.

For a movie that’s supposed to be about a modern-day Geppetto bringing his dolls to life, the wooden Welcome to Marwen never makes it out of the toy box.

Jackson’s film is more than a technical tribute: it’s a testament to the bravery and camaraderie of the soldiers, the memory of which has faded like the photographs he brings back to life. In a way, it helps arrest the fear that we are forgetting this futile obliteration of an entire generation.

There’s anger but no insight in Vice, a glib portrait of Dick Cheney that preaches to the choir but becomes less persuasive as it goes along.

Christopher Martin’s documentary adaptation of Conroy’s book is a powerful, humbling salute to a breed of fearless figures willing to risk their lives as they bear witness to history’s unfolding horrors.

Last Letter is snugly nestled at the sugarcoated end of the director’s tonal spectrum with its tale of a family tragedy which revives a high school love triangle decades after it had seemingly ended in heartbreaking fashion.

While this defiantly unflashy film may similarly feel out of step, long on mawkishness and short on dynamic, arresting moments, the purity of its gently mournful tone stays with you.

This is a big-hearted song and dance spectacle for the entire family in which everyone laughs at the same jokes.

A superhero movie with the scope of an epic but the spirit of a mischievous boy, Aquaman is a goofy, uneven adventure that proudly sticks to its loopy vision even if it doesn’t quite work.

Director Travis Knight does his best to balance clattering spectacle with a modest girl-and-her-robot tale. He’s assisted mightily by Hailee Steinfeld, who infuses this uneven action film with significant soul.

This latest in the ‘personal growth through gentle humiliation’ genre is amiable enough, but does suffer from the over-familiarity of themes and plot-points.

Ardalan Esmaili and Soho Rezanejad give the film a real sense of compassion and depth, with their scenes together brimming with depth and a sense of shared history.

The heady fusion of teenage romance, gothic fantasy and Mafia thriller becomes an immersive, atmospheric drama.

Never Look Away is an often moving, thoughtful drama about the correlations between personal experience, politics and art.

There is a mixture of styles in Dead In A Week that never quite gels.

It may be a touch overlong – perhaps because everyone has to stop running to sing songs at regular intervals – and the emotional beats familiar, with moments of poignance, tragedy, gruesome comedy (a decapitated zombie in a snowman suit) and absurdity.

A confident blend of comic-book élan and stirring sentiment, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse finds fresh ways to tell the familiar story of everyone’s favourite web-slinger.

A timely film, capable of sparking vigorous debate.

Grimly upbeat rather than merry, and relentless rather than frenetic, the film’s gritty zest is splashed across the screen with momentum, but also to the point of overuse. It serves a late heist set piece well, yet wears thin in a sea of training, thieving and fighting montages elsewhere.

Contradictory impulses dominate Creed II. This sequel to the 2015 smash hit is both emotional and formulaic, nuanced and shameless, determined to set its own course while slavishly loyal to franchise strictures.

The feature debut of Vladimir De Fontenay is an accomplished piece with a committed central performance from Imogen Poots, but the emotional impact is lessened by an air of predictability and the sense that every bit of fresh hope is destined to end in disappointment.

Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie are both superb in muted performances and, while the film’s palace intrigue gets a bit dense, the story never loses sight of its deep compassion for these characters and their shared plight of being held hostage by conniving, belittling, power-hungry men determined to usurp their authority.

As predictable as their tale may be, Chaplin, Tena and Verdaguer serve their characters well, with the former and latter particularly impressing with the material.

The wide ranging perspectives of painters, collectors, dealers and gallery owners makes for a thought-provoking and unexpectedly moving film.

This is a film which fizzes with originality, one which works both as a pacey thriller and a playfully surreal intellectual exercise.

The sequel to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph boasts a big heart and some clever comedic set pieces, and yet this follow-up fails to match the original’s balance of savvy pop-culture nostalgia and genuine emotional stakes. Ralph and Vanellope are still fun company, but their latest adventure is full of glitches.

Outside of its admiration for mothers, Bier’s film seems to only vaguely hint at other ephemeral ideas, and as a result Bird Box is a curiously hollow experience.

It’s raw religion, and it’s a treasure.

The storytelling in Sex is ho-hum, but the sincerity of the undertaking — and the issues at the film’s centre — make it hard to resist, no matter what objections might be raised.

There’s real magic here, and nothing fake about the emotions which guide it.

The debut feature from actress Lisa Brühlmann, Blue My Mind brings a surreal spin to the coming of age story, and is an effective showcase for a striking cast of young performers.

Featuring uncanny and hugely personable performances by Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel, and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy, and a smart script by Jeff Pope (Coogan’s co-writer on Philomena) that delivers laughs from both familiar and unexpected quarters, this is a fond, frequently very funny homage to an act that has lost none of its genius.

The filmmakers preserve Seuss’s narrative beats but strain to replicate his whimsical spirit.

The feature debut from music promo and commercials director Jaron Albertin is, as you would expect, a stylistically assured piece of work. But this tale of a father with mental health issues who finds himself suddenly responsible for a son he has never met is also unexpectedly restrained dramatically.

What it lacks in novelty, subtlety or character, it partially makes up in sheer abandon. This is a big, loud, violent, gleefully gory sledgehammer of a film with, crucially, a careful tongue in cheek.

Lacking the freshness of the original trilogy or the meticulous, insidious tone of Fincher’s film, Spider’s Web mostly feels like a holding action to ensure that more sequels can be made in the future. That timidity flies in the face of this series’ inherent edginess.

The result is that rare documentary that works equally effectively on the head and the heart, only making Murad’s heroism more remarkable in the process.

Both overstuffed and underwhelming, Disney’s spectacle-driven reimagining of the beloved holiday staple tries to serve many masters, and the result is a family film straining to be both timeless and timely, simultaneously old-fashioned yet cheekily irreverent.

Crucially, underneath the music and the soft-focus romance Been So Long makes some poignant observations about community, family and the importance of connection.

Margarethe Von Trotta’s many personal connections to Ingmar Bergman lend a fresh, distinctive flavour to Searching For Ingmar Bergman. The documentary explores and champions Bergman’s artistic legacy but also captures a very human portrait of a complex man.

Veteran Danish director August (1987’s Pelle The Conquerer) has presented a well-meaning, flat film which also feels somewhat unfinished - although there’s not much in here to suggest that a further reworking is merited.

The latest anime from Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) is a beguilingly sweet-natured little gem. The film balances spiralling flights of fancy with glinting observations on parenting and family dynamics.

Hunter Killer conjures up whiffs of entertainment value from its shameless but spirited derivativeness.

So compellingly directed and acted that for much of the time we could almost be watching a documentary, Life and Nothing More is an involving, quietly moving piece that eschews conventional narrative shape to offer a multi-layered depiction of exactly what the title promises.

Appropriately for a group known for its theatrical, crowd-pleasing tunes, this authorised-by-the-band biopic carries itself lightly, serving up familiar plot points with panache and a sense of humour, while at the same time investing in the story’s emotional through-line, building to a genuinely moving climax.

This laidback documentary portrait – directed by her son, Spanish actor Gustavo Salmerón – takes on a casual, boisterously wistful air, as the eccentric octogenarian reflects on her many years, while the extended clan buzzes excitedly around.

Whether Hill’s debut as a writer-director is drawn entirely, or partly, from personal experience seems a moot point: there’s a sufficient clear-eyed skill to the project to elevate it out of the memoir arena and mark the actor out as a directing talent to watch.

Though the film doesn’t scrounge too deeply, offbeat gags, ample emotion and parallels with human nature all go hand-in-hand.

For all its empathy, Haroun’s latest can be dramatically stiff. The dialogue of his script often sounds like exegesis, with key events bursting into the story like dramatic illustrations of what seems foreordained. Yet this stolid narrative approach feels appropriate for a film that is as much testimony as it is drama.

This sequel can’t compare to John Carpenter’s ingenious 1978 original, but director David Gordon Green delivers a crowd-pleasing chiller that doubles as an existential commentary on horror itself, both on the screen and in our lives.

While the film recounts events three decades ago, it couldn’t be more relevant today.

There’s a lot of love in ROMA, and, as is the way with love, it doesn’t always arrive in ways that are equal, or reciprocated, or even endure. His first film to be set in his homeland since Y Tu Mama Tambien in 2001 is Alfonso Cuarón’s most personal film, and his most honest. It may even be his best.

A Faithful Man seems to be content playfully ruminating on how matters of the heart consume people — and how, sometimes, pursuing someone can be more fulfilling than actually possessing them.

Distinctive 2D animation mixes graffiti-strewn, street-level realism with playful stylisation...for an aesthetically striking, instantly immersive and highly memorable end result.

Despite the film’s inherent shock value, Lords Of Chaos still manages to successfully mine the explosive psychology of adolescent angst - even if the horror movie aesthetics occasionally threatens to overwhelm proceedings.

Like his hungry symbiote latching onto Eddie, Fleischer cunningly fastens a malicious irreverence onto an otherwise lacklustre superhero movie. But the symbiosis doesn’t quite take.

Try as he might, Rowan Atkinson’s slapstick pratfalls and rubbery expressions can’t stretch over the feature’s brazen attempt to rehash past glories.

There’s ample amusement in the twists, betrayals and revelations that unspool. But Bad Times never really transcends the inherent limitations of its setup; it’s fun, but fleeting.

Silva is a shrewd storyteller, uninterested in genre conventions or shock value; rather, he’s using that tension to tease out the anxieties of ordinary life and interactions.

Israeli teacher-turned-filmmaker Matan Yair mines his own experiences for Scaffolding, bringing depth and poignancy to what could have otherwise been a familiar tale.

Using the Great Hunger as a backdrop for a revenge western is an interesting way to exorcise old ghosts, but the end result drains pathos from the tragedy while muting The Proposition-style genre elements.

It’s a playful inversion of the bigfoot legend, cautioning against unthinking compliance, championing curiosity and encouraging putting oneself in another’s shoes (or feet). Still, this all-ages affair is as blunt as it is busy; children will warm to the movie’s ceaseless energy, but parents might take longer to thaw.

Despite a fantastical premise and some truly eye-popping effects, The House With A Clock In Its Walls suffers from post-Potter fatigue; there’s simply nothing here, visual or thematic, that hasn’t been done before.

The screenplay seems a little thin, full of frayed threads which are never properly woven into the story.

Shot with grace and sensitivity in black and white using available and natural light, What You Gonna Do is a visual treat, the easiest on the eye of all the director’s films to date. It is also, for all its unevenness, a stirring, committed portrait of black lives at a crossroads in the American South.

Nimbly edited and directed with brio, this portrait of the legendary Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin represents a sure-footed leap for director Matthew Heineman from documentary to factually-based drama.

Slow, deliberate and often unexpectedly funny, Michael Tully’s (Ping Pong Summer) contribution to the ever-growing Irish horror catalogue is refreshingly original even if it lacks the jump scare pay off to its heavily-signposted creepiness.

It may take a while to acclimate to the film’s off-kilter rhythms and strange happenings — not unlike the film’s protagonist, an outsider entering the forbidding Alaskan wilderness — but Saulnier has crafted his most mature effort to date, mixing his love for pulp fiction with a sombre examination of the inexplicable evil all around us.

After the disappointing martial-monster mash-up of The Great Wall, this represents a return to the majesty and emotional finesse of Hero and House of Flying Daggers.

There are far too many secrets and lies for one film, to the extent that what could have been a simmering tale of political complicity, greed and family disorder becomes just winds up feeling a bit silly.

With its arch, Lynchian tropes and curiously mannered dialogue, which may be deliberately disengaged from reality or may just be out of tune with the voices of the characters, this film will not be for everyone.

A film of considerable visual poetry and, at times, grandeur, Our Time is unmistakably the work of the ambitious, visionary director behind Battle In Heaven and Stellet Licht, but as a Bergmanesque drama of emotional anguish, the solemn, militantly downbeat Our Time often makes oppressive viewing and at times struggles to justify its nearly three-hour length.

There’s a terrific film in here somewhere, with upmarket echoes of the exploitation thriller tradition of the 70s, but it gets lost in overstatement and a surfeit of plot reversals.

Unlike Entertainment, which had a cracked energy about it, this has such a somnolent pace, blandly desaturated palette and sombre tone that staying the course can be a challenge.

As much as her camera patiently and sensitively observes Gabriel and Maya, they still feel a bit distant, their unspoken hopes and fears just out of reach — for us and perhaps for them, too.

There’s nothing about this watchable but somewhat workmanlike dramatisation of the literary fraud behind author ‘JT LeRoy’ which is anywhere near as extreme as the story on which it is based. But Justin Kelly’s low key directing choices allow the two very fine central performances to take centre stage.

Writer/director Anthony Maras largely sticks to the dramatisation playbook, but does so in an effective, affecting and empathetic fashion.

Wildly uneven, sporadically brilliant, occasionally unbearable, Alex Ross Perry’s sprawling portrait of a self-destructive rock star is carried by a performance by Elisabeth Moss which is turned all the way up to eleven, and beyond.

Green Book is a thoroughly predictable and conventional true-life drama, but at least Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali make for decent company along the road.

Lipovsky and Stein’s first feature as collaborators exudes a grungy, second-hand feel, and the movie doesn’t have the confidence or vision to breathe new life into its narrative clichés. Instead, the pair lean on the sincerity of their storytelling, crafting a paean to broken families and exploring how children process unspeakable loss.

Filmmaker Tim Sutton elicits pitiless performances from Frank Grillo and Jamie Bell playing two very different criminals on a collision course, and the film exudes a grungy, B-movie ethos in keeping with its scrappy, resourceful characters.

John F. Donovan may revisit a lot of familiar territory for Dolan but on this form it is good to welcome him home.

Most of those who’ll see The Biggest Little Farm will be drawn by its ardent, gentle idealism, and less by its hard-headed look at the challenges of sustainable farming.

Julia Roberts blasts through this family reunion drama-turned-thriller with one of the most forceful performances of her career.

Redford has rarely been this commanding in his recent work, playing Tucker with a mischievousness in his eyes but also so much soul that his thieving feels more like an expression of some sad longing than a chronic criminal mind-set.

In its austere way, this is classic Wiseman, a film that takes us into the heart of a community and reveals its inner workings, comforts, fractures and traumas. It’s also a fine example of the way the director sculpts and moulds his material to create an arc that is both dramatic and poetic.

Some of the wit and emotion strikes home and the longer we spend with individual characters the more their story resonates.

One of the issues with Where Hands Touch is that whilst some of the details and specifics feel fresh, the drama often feels desperately hackneyed.

Too much of Kursk revolves around scenes of sodden sailors sitting around wondering why someone doesn’t just hurry up and rescue them. A sentiment likely to be shared by some audiences, as well.