Liu Jian’s animation Have a Nice Day is at once a bloodthirsty genre thriller; a political statement about China, globalization and capitalism; and a vibrantly witty piece of postmodern pop art.

The message of doom is mitigated by the comraderie of men and women determined to do good, but more so by the wondrous species of coral under threat.

A trim, evenly-paced 80 minutes, XX is one of the more consistent contemporary horror anthologies.

The film is undoubtedly a tour de force, not least by the two actors, who essentially play several characters - or at least, multiple aspects of the two lovers - and who both audaciously shed inhibitions in a film that is at times as exposing sexually as it is psychologically.

A spry romp through the seven years leading up to the drafting of the Communist Manifesto, Raoul Peck’s biopic of Karl Marx’s early years feels like a mix between a prestige BBC drama and a Marx For Dummies primer.

Pondering imbalances of power is always timely, and here, it adds an extra layer of urgency and commentary to an already potent and perceptive offering.

The film’s most considerable achievement, however, is to sustain its drama on a finely poised level of emotional intimacy, while sometimes hitting us with intense imagistic charges, not least the graphic slaughterhouse scenes at the start.

Undemonstrative but at the same time oddly compelling - rather like its eponymous main character - Felicité is a challenging, perhaps overlong, but also quietly resonant slice of new African cinema.

The most enjoyable film yet from a director whose conceptual seriousness has often seemed daunting.

Unimpeachably honest intentions and a solid, laid-back lead performance by star Reda Kateb mean that at least the film won’t be derided as Django Untuned.

In Moverman’s hands, it becomes a contemporary American fable about savagery lurking behind civilised facades, about class and racial divisions in a country that calls itself united, and about ethical vacuums in a connected, online society. It’s also an unbalanced, uneven ride, a distracting hot and cold shower of intense scenes featuring four terrific actors and long, meandering passages of flashback filler.

The style is minimalist and meandering but does eventually add up to an unsettling portrait of three generations connected by blood if not affection.

Boasting a few nifty action sequences and the always-compelling Jackman, Logan self-consciously aspires to retire this iteration of the steel-clawed hero with epic grandeur, and the results are often rousingly bleak. And yet, the risks taken...only make the formulaic redemption story and clichéd emotional underpinnings increasingly frustrating.

As economical in his visual style as he is with his dialogue, Kaurismaki makes the most out of having his actors do the least.

Kim Min-hee, especially, gives another stellar performance.

Effectively a chamber piece spiked with musings on the difficulty of art, the piece is by nature a little stagey as well as talky.

Driven by a powerhouse performance by mesmerising transgender actress Vega, the fifth feature from Sebastián Lelio combines urgent naturalism with occasional flickers of fantasy to impressive, and wrenchingly emotional effect.

Sometimes sexy, sometimes campy, Fifty Shades Darker is a smorgasbord of silliness, its dopey pleasures indistinguishable from its many awkwardly melodramatic moments.

The film is visually arresting, but narratively stale.

A slight but ultimately moving drama.

While this spin-off to 2014’s more consistently inspired The Lego Movie is a decidedly hit-or-miss affair, it boasts enough giddy good humour and manic rambunctiousness to bludgeon the viewer into submission.

A film that, after its initial promise, descends, at times, into TV-historical-drama mannerisms.

Much like its Oscar-winning star, the film coasts along on charm and audience goodwill, although a little more edge might have helped.

The documentary, as it grieves for those losses, points to divisions in American society that are as glaring as ever.

War On Everyone is essentially a clothes hanger for smart one-liners, verbal and visual, and its success will depend partly on how folks like the look of the clothes hanger.

Some zinging dialogue and pungent photography are complemented by the two young leads and the late Anton Yelchin in support.

Debut director Geremy Jasper has said Patti is part-modelled on his own life, and there’s a real empathy on display here for her internal and external struggles, a gift which Mcdonald makes the most of in her own debut.

An initially captivating drama that loses steam once predictability starts to take hold.

Slow-paced but always absorbing, the film features a magnetic central performance by Ia Shugliashvili as one of the strongest, most quietly heroic introverts we’ve seen on screen in a while.

In a bittersweet film like this, you wouldn’t call that magical, but you could call it real, as if the Dardennes came to Brooklyn, only funnier. That mood succeeds thanks to understated performances by Weinstein’s cast of mostly non-professionals, who seem to be working according to a life-script that they know well.

A poetic, though admittedly esoteric piece of cinema.

Unavoidably uneven but fairly engaging throughout, Manifesto is a cavalcade of provocative ideas, arresting visuals and fabulous wigs.

Golden Exits is an idiosyncratic film about little moments of human pain and loneliness. There’s jealousy, sadness, unfulfilled loves and lives, all of it relayed in quiet conversations and glances, rather than big dramatic scenes.

Lee’s love for this hard land and the boy trapped in it – so fully embodied by young British actor Josh O’Connor – is unexpectedly moving and rich.

This is a well crafted and often stylish film but you suspect it could have had a greater impact with more room for the individual elements to breathe.

The mirror it holds up to its subjects — and perhaps the audience — is incredibly, sometimes painfully illuminating.

Chaotic lives can make for a muddled storyline, yet ultimately Hegemann allows her central character some kind of growth.

Sad, proud, loud, funny, energetic and affecting, Kiki the documentary reflects accurately the spirit of kiki, the scene.

Kelly’s film is a competent feature debut – elegantly filmed and paced to keep viewers with Franco on an improbable ride. Yet the script views Glatze from a distance, never really entering his head to penetrate beyond the character’s own apologia for a bizarre life change.

City of Ghosts shows us the power of media to bring the grim truth about life under ISIS to the world, even when under a death sentence. In keeping our eyes on Raqqa, it also reminds us of the limits of that power.

Offering predictably heartfelt messages about seizing the day, The Last Word can be very sweet and funny, but its lightness starts to feel cloying rather than ebullient.

The Polka King, and Jan’s plight, never quite reaches the level of palpable human drama of their previous effort. Black does his best to make Jan a vulnerable and sympathetic character, but neither the script nor the direction allows him to become fully dimensional.

Soft and sweet, Kirsten Tan’s bright and airy debut is also quietly eloquent, speaking of a loss and regret.

The Yellow Birds is a war movie whose outlines may be familiar — but its emotional clarity gives this drama an almost crushing sense of intimacy.

The film’s second act is near spot-on comedy of discomfort.

Fate is a blunt instrument here. Yet you still wind up asking for more depth from the characters for whom Hittman is asking you to feel something.

The film may be short on analysis, but it’s clear that systematic government failures at the local and state level have created a toxic climate, and Whose Streets? displays the seething emotions that resulted.

Some issues, Trophy powerfully conveys, are bigger and broader than they initially appear.

Unfortunately, a glib superficiality hangs heavy over the narrative. Rather than really explore these lost and angry souls who feel destined to be despondent, Wilson settles for simplistic quirkiness, which makes the characters merely bland misanthropic types instead of fleshed-out individuals.

Wind River can be thrilling and it owns the ability to surprise and shock throughout.

Mudbound is full of strong performances, singular moments, and a heavy heart, but it’s an over-ambitious affair that struggles to find the right balance between its many characters.

Australian director Cate Shortland (Somersault, Lore) takes a horror movie premise and imbues it with the knotty emotional complexity of a dysfunctional relationship psychodrama.

Deutch, who appeared in Beautiful Creatures as well as Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some, delivers a sympathetic lead performance, carrying the film with equal doses of sweetness and grace, strength and vulnerability.

As a satire about L.A. living, the movie delivers its fair share of zingers. With a script that recalls Whit Stillman and TV sitcoms, Morgan’s crisp dialogue sometimes hits its target.

It’s a beautiful, supremely touching performance from Chalamet which gives this surprisingly safe story its moving purity.

An amiable, average-at-best caper-like quest remains just that, even with recognisable talent, and even more so when its combination of elements is clearly stretched.

If you’re looking for more than laughs, this comedy aspiring to drama takes you only so far.

David Lowery’s beautifully conceived riff on the haunted-house movie emits an extra glow thanks to challenging but resonant performances from Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara.

While the movie overdoes the plot twists and existential musings, The Discovery is a diverting head-trip whose reach far exceeds its grasp.

All of The Big Sick’s power has gone into its script and performances.

This film is proof that, with the right protagonist, a documentary seems to tell its own story. Rodchenkov is one of those characters who, as they say, you couldn’t make up.

The Incredible Jessica James may be a slight romantic comedy, but there’s abundant pleasure in watching comedienne Jessica Williams in this star-making performance.

Though audiences may have heard this one before, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power preaches effectively to its choir, with a decade of fresh data and increasing cataclysms...to persuasively make its case.

A superpower movie with a premise absurd even by the far-fetched standards of the genre, iBoy misses out on the opportunity for entertaining mischief with a po-faced approach to the material and a lack of internal logic to the story.

The tonal shift in the sequel compared to the original means that, although there are plenty of moments of savage humour, the highs are just not quite so high any more. There’s a melancholy maturity, however, which is satisfying in its own way.

There are touching moments...that could only have come from real life, and the film is all the better for them.

This well-meaning debut feature about following your dreams just treads water.

Any hopes of smart social commentary or unsettling psychological underpinnings are quickly shattered by a clichéd screenplay and amateurish performances.

This low-budget combination of thriller, horror and satire flaunts a smartass tone that proves deadening, and as the body count starts rising, viewer interest quickly begins dropping.

Viewers are in good hands — if they’re not too demanding — as Zhang Yimou puts the easily distinguishable characters through their paces.

Open-minded audiences will discover a surprisingly refreshing, smart, intelligent and often entertaining, tongue-in-cheek take on the nature of family bonds, using references from the Old and the New Testament, with modern characters nicely fitting the mythical moulds without suspecting there is anything even remotely symbolical or divine about their existence.

A bravura performance from Matthew McConaughey as a schlubby, roguish mineral prospector in desperate pursuit of the American Dream is the seam that gives Gold its value.

These troubled, lovable, prickly, obsessive entertainers, supported by brother-son Todd, invite the viewer into their rackety lives – bright, lived fully in the spotlight, chin-up and completely unsinkable.

This Prohibition-era drama deals limply with themes of loyalty, love, power and redemption, but not in any unique way, its emotional punch as vague as its cipher of a main character.

Assassin’s Creed is nearly wall-to-wall violence, but Kurzel reveals an eye for widescreen composition that, paired with Christopher Tellefsen’s efficient, hyperactive editing, gives the film the tenor of a sophisticated graphic novel.

Part space romance, part space thriller and all space corn, Passengers is a messy and unconvincing mash-up that tries to get by on the not inconsiderable charm of stars Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.

Collateral Beauty never manages to shake off its all-too-deliberate air or willingness to follow the easiest path. Its life lessons are packaged with cloying, overt mawkishness which aren’t quite the feel-good home run Frankel seems to expect.

Perhaps the darkest, most action-packed Star Wars instalment, director Gareth Edwards’ standalone adventure establishes its own rhythm, balancing fan demands with grand, poetic moments unlike anything this cinematic galaxy has previously achieved.

A compact triumph of stop-motion animation in the service of a bittersweet tale, My Life As A Courgette (My Vie de Courgette) is as delightful as it is affecting.

Everything in Hidden Figures is smoothly efficient but also a little anticlimactic and frictionless — the story’s happy ending a little too easily achieved.

Uneven, sometimes repetitive but also powerfully moving and thought-provoking, Silence is an imperfect movie that’s very hard to shake.

Once past a first reel which deliberately sticks to torture porn conventions, Pet is redeemed by a series of developments that take the film into surprising story and character areas.

Abattoir gets past its clunky storytelling with a great look - dark, shadowed, with a 1940s hardboiled feel - along with some well-staged shocks and scares.

For all its attempts at inventive excess – and at slightly more sophisticated humour - this scattershot gross-out comedy ends up producing chuckles rather than real laughs.

A film directed by Katie Holmes (and produced by Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal) is a curiosity, and in this case a competent curiosity - no less competent than most of the independent films out there.

It has plenty of heart and lots of fighting, but could use a little more magic.

Despite some pacing issues and a slightly repetitive second act, this is a polished production which establishes writer/director Aleksei Mizgirev as a talent to watch

An old-fashioned, beautifully crafted nature documentary for family audiences.

A cinematic symphony more than a classic narrative film, Terrence Malick’s long-awaited The Tree Of Life has moments of breathtaking visual and aural beauty, but in the end it has us longing for the days of Badlands, Days Of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, when the Texan auteur also knew how to spin a good yarn.

Fences is a deeply affecting treatise on marriage, poverty and the struggles of sons to confront the long shadow of the man who brought them into this world.

The extent of Kroc’s greed is The Founder’s unique playing card, and John Lee Hancock delivers it with a depressingly special sauce.

Baden Baden is an intimate, at times seemingly whimsical narrative that appears to drift almost free-associatively from episode to episode. But it’s unified by a distinctive humour and intelligence, crisp visuals, and Richard’s intensely charismatic presence.

A World War II romance-thriller that starts off smartly but sputters to an underwhelming finale.

As with babymaking, the conception is more fun than the delivery, which comes perilously close to turning our knocked-up heroine’s kill list into a series of very dark alt-comedy sketches.

As exciting as the film may be, Berg too easily undercuts the human element of his story.

Split is a highly effective, nerve-shredding horror movie that makes the most of its claustrophobic setting, familiar setup and psychological gimmicks

This highly decorative mood piece pays more attention to getting the wafting drapery and soft furnishings just so than it does to the meat of the drama, and audiences may come away feeling a little undernourished.

An agonisingly strained attempt at misanthropic comedy, Bad Santa 2 is puerile when it should be shocking, calculating when it should be transgressive, and listless when it should be liberating.