Most of the story’s credibility goes out the door with the big plot twist.

Like the wizarding movies to which it’s connected, Fantastic Beasts is better the darker it gets, especially in a robust final reel where the film fully hits its stride.

Miss Sloane is a shallow but lively thriller which becomes undermined by its makers’ misplaced belief in the profundity of their topical tale.

This is a muscular story about the fight for freedom which is rich and vibrant and authentic. However, Bilal’s beefy approach also extends to scenes of torture and bloodthirsty battle sequences.

The romantic comedy-drama Rules Don’t Apply is, by turns, fizzy and melancholy, nostalgic and clear-eyed, but it never builds to anything especially substantial.

An impressive US debut for French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, dramatic thriller Prisoners is a potent mix of suspense, emotion and intrigue that draws intense performances from leads Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal.

While Bob does slink around some predictable narrative beats, this is still a slyly subversive film with a social point to make as it highlights James’s isolation in a cold, hard-faced London which responds better to animals than its hopeless humans.

The perfectly pleasurable Moana boasts vivid animation, a handful of catchy songs and a sweetly sunny disposition — all suitable compensation for a story which is not particularly inspired or original.

Muylaert handles an atmosphere charged with intensely conflicting expectations with a light touch, and sparks of humour.

A stunning location and a winning character are cannily deployed to create a likeable film in which audiences will need little persuasion to cheer the triumph of the underdog.

Going in guns blazing and attempting to set pulses racing might not feel wholly appropriate given the facts at the heart of the film, but it does suit Lam’s usual style — not to mention audiences looking for non-stop thrill ride of a movie.

This is a film which handles its high concept with confidence, and a winning balance of comedy and emotional punch.

The broader approach to storytelling on McQueen’s part robs 12 Years A Slave of some of the precise, up-close vibrancy that was the hallmark of his earlier films. As a consequence, this new film feels a little less personal, although that criticism should not dismiss the intelligence and feeling on display.

A meandering, sluggish tale that offers moments of great beauty but ultimately feels like a ragbag, take-your-pick bundle of poetic and spiritual suggestions inspired by China’s great Yangtze River.

Entertaining in its grand flourishes but spottier when it comes to character work and thematic coherence, the film boasts a slightly darker and more mystical air than its peers, accentuated by some of the most arresting set pieces in the MCU canon.

Baldwin’s insights originate from 1979, but they still speak volumes, and Peck makes their observations sting.

National Bird shows that there is indeed a horrible reckoning, but it mostly comes from within. This is a personal film about guilt.

A sober, thoughtful documentary that combines a lament for a lost Eden with a rousing call to action.

Herzog’s typically dry narration is a particular delight in Into The Inferno.

Ultimately, the film makes a case that perhaps it’s better not to know everything about the person you love. And sometimes you just need to shed the baggage and start the relationship again from the beginning.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is always faintly diverting but never particularly engrossing, putting the venerable movie star through his paces without really asking much of him.

Keeping Up with the Joneses may have twice the talent of other outings in the spy-couple sub-genre...but its laugh quotient is pretty low. And that’s a real problem for a romantic action comedy that’s always going more for humour, with a touch of sweet-natured romance, than thrills.

When the film shifts into territory less Hitchcockian than Lynchian – with a touch of Park Chan-wook’s Asian Gothic – the quiet confidence of Kurosawa’s approach has paid off, allowing him to vault into this more intense register. It’s not all just ghoulish fun, though: there’s a serious subtext here involving everyday evil.

Origin of Evil doesn’t stretch the conventions of teen-appeal spookiness too far, but is solidly put together, mounted with a pleasant conviction and runs to several fine performances and some decent scares.

It’s a radiant debut for young newcomer Joe Alwyn, who plays a Texan war hero uneasy in his own land. It’s a shakier curtain-raising for Lee’s ambitious weaponising of new technologies.

Lost City is the acme of a 21st century prestige picture. Sadly, however, it is one that is also deeply flawed. Gray’s most ambitious movie yet is marred by a story arc that fails to rise or reach a climax, unnatural-sounding expository dialogue, and an unforgivable lack of thrills.

For the most part, this is a beautifully judged picture from a director to note.

The latest from director Gavin O’Connor (Warrior) is part character study and part airport-novel nonsense, and the film’s utter chutzpah gives the proceedings an agreeable kick. But The Accountant can’t balance its B-movie instincts with its more artistic aspirations, ultimately hamstringing a potentially juicy, escapist shoot-‘em-up.

Koepp has managed a brisk adaptation, although some of the dialogue can feel very forced, particularly when it comes to the clue-solving set-ups. Still, Howard keeps the viewer constantly occupied, Felicity Jones is an engaging sidekick, and there’s clearly a lot more mileage left for Tom Hanks in this franchise’s tank.

There’s more texture than might be expected from characters based on plastic dolls.

Although a touch too precious and slight, 20th Century Women is lit from within by its endless curiosity about its evolving characters.

Rather than bring anything new to the genre, director Ben Younger settles for adding a distinctive bracing energy to the somewhat timeworn tropes.

Flying off the rails at an alarming speed, The Girl On The Train fails as a compelling character study, struggles to satisfy as a psychological thriller and ultimately settles as an overheated potboiler that doesn’t have the courage to go full camp.

The film’s look is as striking as Fan’s performance.

There’s enough cinema in Among the Believers to set it a step above solid respectable investigation.

Like Cai, the doc is a crowd-pleaser which reveals its complexities in a careful viewing.

For a movie that’s meant to have some magic in it, Peculiar Children displays little buoyancy, the proceedings weighed down by tedious world-building and perfunctory thematic lip-service about the need for community and the power that comes from finding one’s voice.

Despite the sense of fatalism and some clumsy turns in Zandvliet’s script, Land Of Mine achieves moments of chilling suspense.

Although Blue Jay is a warm, likable film, it doesn’t offer anything new to say about nostalgia, the passage of time or living with regret.

Dynamic storytelling and powerful performances bring out the pathos in an unusual tale of conflicting loyalties set on the criminal edges of a travelling community.

The documentary is very good at raising reasonable doubts, planting seeds of confusion and demanding a more sensible examination of the facts.

Even if The Untamed comes perilously close to sabotaging itself at times, this generic tightrope walk is a ferociously individual, highly intelligent piece and a superb, very affecting cast ensure that the human factor remains dominant, however creepily inhuman things may become at times.

A workmanlike and sometimes clumsy screenplay is not enough to extinguish the spark from this real-life fairytale romance, which delivers both a heartfelt emotional story and a grim lesson in 20th-century British foreign policy.

Director Lone Scherfig’s sentimental approach favours easy laughs and warm romance but the film starts to cut a little deeper in its closing stages.

It is an elegantly crafted, expertly acted old-fashioned weepie that manages to sell a whopper of a plot that would bring a blush to the cheeks of Nicholas Sparks.

Perhaps it’s simplistic to say that director Mira Nair has fashioned a good-looking but Disney-fied version of actual events, and yet the studio’s predictably uplifting-at-all-costs blandness slowly but methodically drains the material of its richness.

Terry George buries a worthy subject in a stuffy story of unrequited love and selfless heroism that gives off a strong scent of mustiness.

Rebecca Zlotowski’s third feature packs in so many ideas and themes, and boasts so many ravishing and enigmatic images, that it seems choked with riches.

Amalric, these days persuasively settling into scuffed middle-aged roles, is effective as ever, but still maintains an anxious look; while Roy’s sometimes ethereal presence strikes a forceful but delicate note as a woman who is at once facing a mystery and who is at the same time a mystery herself.

My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea is slight and uneven, but its quirky, handmade aesthetic nicely conveys its characters’ adolescent vulnerability and restless spirit.

There are plenty of solid laughs in Mascots — everything from jokes about furries to throwaway bits involving obscure cable channels — but what’s disappointing is that there’s not a great overr-iding idea that ties all the gags together.

Superbly acted and executed, this spare piece of storytelling marks an assertive feature debut for theatre and opera director William Oldroyd.

At once over-repetitive and less surprisingly digressive than some of his other films, The Woman Who Left may not represent Diaz at his absolute peak, but it’s a powerful, thoughtful melodrama that pulls you into its world and delivers a number of irresistible emotional coups.

Fremon Craig doesn’t radically alter the conventions of the coming-of-age narrative, and so a general predictability settles over the proceedings pretty quickly. With that said, though, she does a good job observing the relationships between her central characters.

Collin attempts to do more than recount facts; if he can’t always wholly capture the figures at the film’s centre, he can convey a sense of the time and place that Lee and Helen inhabited.

Frantz is arguably one of the straightest films Ozon has made – in both the dramatic and the sexual senses – but his complex sensibilities and fine-tuned irony are very evident in a mature work that transcends genre pastiche to be intellectually stimulating and emotionally satisfying.

Jackson’s film is best enjoyed for the quality of the performances and the typical richness of Hare’s screenplay.

For all its originality, the film fails to leave much of an impression.

This is not a film which challenges the stereotypes of teen coming of age movies. However the dialogue is sharp, and Powley’s comic timing is well-tuned.

If Saroo’s story seems out-of-this world, the team behind this film have risen to meet the challenge it sets. There may be a sense of inevitability about Saroo’s ultimate destination, but what counts here is the journey.

Larraín’s highly varied visual invention and command of complex structure serve as a reminder of how vitally an imaginative director can skew what otherwise might have emerged in more mainstream colours.

What’s best about the film is how Cedar and Gere have dreamed up a character who’s equally desperate and preternaturally ingratiating.

With Spurlock and Takal throwing every horror trope on the screen, Rats is a delectably awful experience which, grimly fun though it may be to watch, hopefully won’t lead to a Cockroach sequel.

A Family Affair is by turns fascinating and futile, running the risk that by exposing the heartbreak of one family it will repel all those with their own unresolvable family sadness.

It’s a beautiful odyssey with strong spiritual undertones.

The ‘I could have been a contender’ brand of sports movie gets a twist in this tasty, if minor-key, biopic.

Some moments of poetry and emotional truth lurk in among the pretentious high grass. But the sometimes baffling dialogue is a serious subtitle endurance test ­for non French-speaking audiences.

If nothing else, Deepwater Horizon makes a case for going back to basics with action films. It’s classically framed, executed, and feels like the real deal, and while it clearly boasts some fine effects work, it manages to lose the cartoonish aspect of so many recent tentpoles.

In presenting its story as a portrait of a budding great statesman discovering his destiny, Barry is neither insightful nor poetic enough to justify its increasingly didactic approach.

Ewan McGregor’s directorial debut eventually finds its own emotional core, zeroing in on the tragedy that befalls a seemingly perfect life once a man’s wilful daughter torpedoes it.

Marc Forster’s meandering, slow-burning tale has elements that might have attracted Polanski or Almodovar but eventually settles for a psychological thriller that is a little too enigmatic for its own good.

The first half of Age of Shadows feels muddy as momentum builds; the latter stages boast a cinetic energy - cutting a violent melee to classical music (in this case Ravel’s Bolero), may be a tribute to John Woo, but it’s stunning nonetheless.

This is a film which doesn’t take itself very seriously, and it will work best with an audience which takes the same approach.

Sing is colourful, yet at almost two hours, it is also long. Still, if kids aren’t drawn to one singing animal (or familiar voice), there’s always another around the corner, holding up the tentpole.

It’s an intense, imaginative piece of work – which treads over familiar ground but modestly ventures a bit further in the climax.

The abutting of Conor’s conscious and unconscious states justifies the pullulating images, but the film’s overwrought tone can grate.

Stone’s mixture of paranoid thriller, political commentary and romantic drama keeps Snowden feeling busy without ever being particularly engrossing or enlightening. Frustratingly, Snowden remains a ghost in the machine.

A terrifying disaster thriller.

It’s a bruisingly effective piece of entertainment carried by comedy, which hits its targets rather more successfully than the wildly strafing bullets.

Like the film, the soundtrack doesn’t quite know where it’s going, but it takes us on a curious and often engaging stroll.

Because the roles are underwritten and the players struggle to establish a rapport, The Magnificent Seven never lets the audience feel like its along for the ride with a dynamic group of death-or-glory hombres.

The protagonists are pathetic yet see themselves as bold and daring and in this Bonello has captured something about the present moment that rings absolutely true.

Though a little too languid at two hours, The Love Witch is appropriately seductive.

Kim successfully captures the loneliness and entrapment underneath the debris and the chaos outside.

Mendelsohn makes Ray plausibly remorseful, yet the suspicion remains that he’s as creepily self-serving as Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita. Mara, meanwhile, is like a seared, broken Alice groping for a way out of a psychic labyrinth - hers is a fearsome performance.

If ultimately Maudie doesn’t have much new to say about love or art, at least its two misfits provide an insight into something deeply true about long-term commitment.

It is, in essence, the celebrated ‘cosmic’ sequence from the Tree of Life expanded into a full-length feature, and many of the audio-visual tableaux it weaves are astonishing, mesmerising, delightful. The problem is that they are not also informative.

After the tense opening, coherent drama goes by the board.

In its own deja vu way, Bridget Jones Baby is intermittently entertaining, mainly thanks to Zellweger’s performance.

To say that Dominik’s film touches on a raw nerve is an understatement, but the film, dedicated to the memory of Arthur, is revealing both about these musicians’ creative processes, and about questions of mourning, trauma and emotional survival

Hacksaw Ridge returns to the themes which have professionally and personally motivated 60-year-old Gibson for his entire life; he’s never been subtle, but he’s certainly effective when it comes to delivering his heart-felt message.

Ambitious in scope but precise in its execution, this deceptively small-scale character piece reverberates with compassion and insight.

Though not always as confident outside of the cockpit, Sully mostly earns its crowd-pleasing, lump-in-your-throat sentiment.

As a screenwriter, Ford has made some brave choices in a difficult, complex adaptation. As a director, though, he veers between delivering far too much, and yet not quite enough.

Arrivals becomes an unexpectedly moving rumination on life’s bigger questions by its end. While it looks to other worlds, its main pleasure turns out to be the most intimate of questions.

As a drama, this is less nourishing than the heritage it pays tribute to. But for Chazelle, the story is just a slight rib around which he builds a modern rhapsody.

Poignant and frustrating in equal measure, The Light Between Oceans aspires to be an elegant melodrama, but the intelligence that director Derek Cianfrance and his capable cast bring to bear eventually becomes overwhelmed by the story’s emotional manipulations.

As more information is dispensed - much of it in a rush in the final shots – the strength of Owen’s screenplay becomes clear but the issues it raises are largely left un-examined.