It stretches character credibility, and resorts too much to criminal-underworld cliché and the driving pace of its own perpetual motion, which curiously does nothing to paper over the longueurs in certain over-stretched sequences. You come out on a high of sorts – but it soon fades.

Richards is such a fun interviewee that there’s no point kvetching about the film’s superficial treatment.

It’s no discredit to Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s propulsive and iconoclastic biopic of the digital-revolution visionary who democratised personal computing, that it’s a dispiriting study of capitalistic self-aggrandisement – one that leaves a sense of unease despite its ironically upbeat ending.

Jack Black’s mildly theatrical, knowingly hammy performance is but one of this horror-comedy’s overdone elements, and the film fails to rise above the level of perfunctory effects-driven spectacle.

Unusually for a Spielberg movie, Bridge of Spies is tonally uncertain.

Sherpa swiftly proves as grippingly human and political as it does visually spectacular.

Hitchcock Truffaut is of undeniable appeal to those with even a passing interest in the history of cinema. There’s nothing rarified about the air the project breathes, either – this features passionate people who have made their own iconic cinema talking about two giants of our film age with an enthusiasm which is infectious.

John McKenna and Gabriel Clarke have been assiduous in tracking down the participants and their descendants, and deserve recognition for the effort they have put in to raising Le Mans for a new generation of fast car enthusiasts and Hollywood buffs.

Tools associated with fiction are used to tell the truth, and an elegant tone is deployed to disguise a righteous fury.

Despite its rich visual evocation of the eponymous port city as a simmering cauldron of vice, corruption, and barbarity, director Mikael Håfström’s film is undone by its tortuous plot, wooden characterisation, absence of narrative tension, and emotional nullity. It simply lacks conviction.

Zemeckis reminds us that it’s in the service of reality, rather than fantasy, that digital technology is often most potent.

If some of this loud horror material looks frankly absurd, that’s only, Amenabar would no doubt argue, because it reflects the hackneyed, trick-or-treats way in which we give form and body to our night fears. Fine, but for a thriller to thrill, such didactic admonishments are not enough.

What begins as a playful look at five young women’s rebellion against their strict upbringing soon becomes something far more stirring and emotional.

As a dreamy yet concrete evocation of lives beset by unseen anxieties and dwindling resources, Western has a mythic quality in keeping with its totemic title.

Chris Rossi built Meadowland’s screenplay on short, punchy scenes, and he deserves credit for crafting moments of quotidian ordinariness... that are also charged with tension.

When the film gets more serious it produces some affecting moments between the two leads.

Danny’s story isn’t dramatic or affecting enough to carry the film and other characters never develop into anything more than colourful ciphers. Irvine is appealing and relatable, but his performance isn’t always convincing and he’s handicapped by some clunky dialogue.

Deftly made and diverting for young audiences but unlikely to linger, with any vibrancy tempered by the familiarity of the tune.

A stripped-down drama built around a powerful and sometimes troubling performance by Christopher Plummer.

Some intricately choreographed long takes - Eric Gautier’s photography is superb throughout - enhance a project which is both vivid in its evocation of the recent past, and razor-sharp in the light it sheds on the way that religious and nationalistic fanaticism continue to exert a dangerous sway.

London Fields overflows with interesting ideas but they are frequently buried under lurid fantasy sequences, blunt-edged satire and the sense that it is much more amused by its own wild daring than we are.

Julie Delpy’s latest directorial effort juggles some potentially delicious ideas, but Lolo proves to be an exasperating romantic comedy that flirts with darker terrain it never has the guts or wit to really explore.

A tour de force of drama, composition and colour.

It’s an inspiring story, acted with heart and grit by Paige and Wood, and film directed with adroitness by Rozema in a ruin of a set in the woods.

It’s above all a character study, as well as an elegant technical achievement that puts a distinctive stylistic slant on its realist subject matter.

Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia is rich, complex, challenging.

The Forbidden Room is a tour de force that takes Maddin’s ambition through a maze of magical melodrama.

The only thing that’s clear from start to finish is that Hadžihalilovic is in absolute command of her unsettling cinematic realm.

The Childhood Of A Leader is as relentlessly sombre and compelling as the film’s remarkable, full-volume orchestral soundtrack by musician’s musician Scott Walker.

Through both parts, and this is Bellocchio’s admirable achievement, he has life itself impetuously claiming its rights.

Office is first and foremost about enjoying cinema’s capacity to entertain and have fun, which Johnnie To certainly seems to have had himself in making it.

Convincing performances from David Oyelowo and Kate Mara – as an escaped killer and his drug addicted hostage – are the saving grace of Captive, a decent dramatic thriller somewhat weighed down by its mildly religious message.

This tender, gently funny depiction of female friendship benefits from nicely committed work from lead actresses Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore plus distinctive locations in London and Yorkshire, but suffers from unconvincing moments and struggles to convert diverse story elements into an especially compelling whole.

All three leads get stronger as the movie goes along, in part because Miller’s full intention isn’t clear until about halfway through. These characters are foolish without being idiots, which produces a more sophisticated type of comedy.

Bryan Cranston creates a potent sense of Trumbo as a reasonable man, full of charm, eloquence and principle and he is surrounded by a string of performances to savour.

Working with writer (and co-editor) Amy Jump again, Wheatley wades into the prescient 1975 text, delivering a complex, fluid interpretation which is respectful and almost-faithful while still being its own beautiful, crazed beast.

In the slim but powerful documentary He Named Me Malala Davis Guggenheim attempts to colour in a shy, yet deceptively stout-hearted schoolgirl and her symbiotically-close relationship with her father, indicated by the film’s title.

Hester’s goal was to convince politicians that gay people are like everyone else. In its ultra-mainstream style, and now in its argument for equality (which most of America endorses today), this solidly acted drama drives that point home.

For all that it promises the thrill of high-speed racing, the crush of the peloton, and the drama of disgrace, The Program works best when it deals with this fascinating case of investigative journalism which saw Walsh doggedly pursue his target through 13 years and the temporary loss of his own reputation.

Films about dysfunctional families are as common as families themselves. But for most of its running time, The Family Fang impressively negotiates around the familiar trappings, finding a relatively new way to discuss familiar themes.

Ethan Hawke delivers an intense, committed performance as the hopelessly drug-addicted trumpeter Chet Baker in the odd, erratic Born To Be Blue, written and directed by Robert Budreau as a bumpy free-form improvisation on the hopeless-wreck-makes-musical-comeback biopic.

Filled with feeling and led by heartfelt performances from Elle Fanning and Naomi Watts, the latest from director Gaby Dellal (Angels Crest) is a warm, rich film in many regards — and yet, there’s a nagging suspicion that, in the attempt to de-emphasise the hot-button topicality, About Ray isn’t ultimately about that much.

Prophet’s Prey is more effective at presenting the enigmatic figure of the Prophet himself. His drawling somnolent voice hovers over the movie like a menacing ghost.

Hiddleston’s intense performance lends a little frisson to an otherwise familiar, if gorgeously-mounted tale about a troubled musical genius who is inevitably, gruellingly, felled by his demons.

While Eye In The Sky is effective in building suspense and making a talk-y drama compelling, these techniques are in service to high-minded, heavy-handed filmmaking that buries troubling wartime questions in simplistic rhetoric.

Equals just about passes muster as a solid vignette of love against the odds, but when it comes to futurism, its vision is dustily archaic.

A very basic formula, executed in bare-bones fashion, works a treat because this set of interviews with Brian De Palma on his life and films is so revealing, and entertaining, that little is needed here other than the man, his opinions and some telling illustrations.

A slight story that aspires to be a thriller but ends up as a rather flat melodrama about a rock-star generation struggling to deal with its twilight years.

Charlie Kaufman is back – with a wistful, resonant film, a bracing, wry, honest dose of cinematic melancholy.

Politics is a dirty business, but Our Brand Is Crisis doesn’t stick its hands into the muck sufficiently to be as entertaining or stinging as it could be.

Visually spectacular and consistently entertaining, Ridley Scott’s space rescue procedural The Martian suffers only from a failure to hit its emotional beats with the amount of force and feeling usually required to make this kind of life-and-death adventure really take off.

It is a more stimulating, thought-provoking and entertaining call to arms than anything we are likely to hear from an aspiring President over the next year.

Though it’s laudable that Vallée and his cast tried not to make just another story about someone wallowing in his grief, their alternative coddles Davis’s mourning with a rampant colourfulness that’s suffocating.

Ultimately, Prince is unwilling to follow through on its darker impulses, while equally reluctant to go the whole nine yards in its lighter comedy register. Even so, its stylistic brio makes Prince enough of a live wire to bode well for de Jong’s future.

A marketable slice of hit-and-miss mischief that doesn’t suggest a career rebirth so much as a larky side project that will yield more in the way of nervous laughter than quickened pulses.

With more action and less mystery, a returning director and main cast and a handful of sketchy new characters, The Scorch Trials makes for an efficient yet uninspiring sequel.

Corin Hardy makes a slick, confident debut with supernatural horror The Hallow. Demonstrating a facility with storytelling almost as skilful as his nimble orchestration of animatronics and visual effects.

Suffragette’s strength lies in the fact that, even though some of the characters and events depicted seem archetypal, and they’re certainly composites, they turn out to be more than that.

Johnny Depp’s broodingly psychotic turn as convicted Boston crime lord James ‘Whitey’ Bulger is not the only tasty thing about Scott Cooper’s tale of the unholy alliance between a South Boston Irish mobster and the FBI.

It’s easy to buy Hardy’s dual performance, and it doesn’t get in the way of the film – although some actor-ly exuberance in the delivery of Ronnie can sound an off-note, with Hardy using some facial prosthetics around the jaw line which aren’t particularly subtle.

A polished, engrossing procedural, Spotlight offers plenty of old-fashioned pleasures — chiefly, the sight of smart, scrappy muckraking journalists stopping at nothing to uncover systematic corruption.

The first Transporter film in seven years is moderately entertaining and reliably ludicrous in all the predictable ways, but the film’s new sharp-dressed driver doesn’t possess the effortless stoic wit of the original trilogy’s Jason Statham, which ends up making all the difference.

Full of committed performances, particularly from Elba and the impressive young actor Abraham Attah, Beasts Of No Nation is a project of considerable integrity which makes for a consistently-engrossing, if over-long, viewing experience.

While it’s impossible not to be somewhat caught up in these climbers’ life-or-death struggle, Everest is oddly uninvolving — it depicts a horrific scenario in an underwhelming, distancing way.

One wouldn’t expect A Walk In The Woods to be a rat-a-tat-tat 1930s comedy, but between the stars’ rusty comic timing and the script’s stale setups, the movie simply isn’t that funny, more likely to produce a smile than even a chuckle.

An engaging documentary that’s perhaps too enchanted by its own “stranger than fiction” oddness to delve deeply enough into the human drama on display.

Despite great efforts to develop the three central characters, the confusing early sequences mean it is hard to feel empathy for any of them.

Turbo Kid is a wild enough burlesque that the audience can ignore a few things that don’t seem quite right.... Harder to ignore is that Turbo Kid, which was first made as a short, struggles to sustain its energy for 89 minutes of evisceration.

The feature debut of director Max Joseph can occasionally be as entrancing and euphoric as the pulsating dance songs on the soundtrack. But even an empathetic performance from Zac Efron (and an impressive, nuanced turn from Wes Bentley) can’t distract from a movie that mistakes surface flash for probing, zeitgeist-y insights.

A Taken-style no-holds-barred family survival action film, with an inevitable side order of xenophobia undimmed by the indictment of faceless corporate chicanery.

[A] delicately calibrated portrait of dissolution which points to the versatility of writer/director Alex Ross Perry.

This is a delightful surprise, and though it is even more minimalistic than his last two illegal exports, This Is Not A film and Closed Curtains, it is also more mature, and better calibrated and - at the risk of annoying art house patrons who often hate this term - more entertaining than the other two.

Consistently off by a beat, Hitman: Agent 47 fails to ever click into gear.

Touching, funny, perceptive and simple enough to carry large audiences, The Second Mother is carried throughout by a hilarious, intelligent and soulful performance from veteran Brazilian actress, comedian and TV host Regina Case, surrounded by a solid supporting cast.

This is a moody comedy about unconscious marital discord, but it’s also about that ineffable discontent that envelops most of us. Digging For Fire is funny because it rings true — and because it stings a little.

Part stoner comedy, midnight movie, outsiders’ love story and ultraviolent B-movie, this intriguing film is given real soul by stars Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, even if director Nima Nourizadeh’s ambitions end up being more laudable than the results.

This latest collaboration with star and co-writer Greta Gerwig radiates indomitable wit. And Gerwig is a hoot as a woman whose unflappable, unearned confidence lands somewhere between inspiring and horrifying.

In the end, for all the plot tension and genre tastiness –underlined by some acidic colour photography and lighting that plays up sickly yellows and purples – there’s just something a little too mannered about the exercise.

[A] depressingly inept comedy.

The film is nothing but a sensuous rush of snappy period costumes, elegant beauties, dapper men, kinetic action and so-so quips, and because Ritchie seems even less concerned with story than usual, that blinkered approach very nearly works.

With so much focus on spectacle, the film fails to explore this part of Korean history in any meaningful way. Assassination plays more to Choi’s strengths - witty dialogue and entertaining storytelling accompanied by strong visuals and cast.

A good cast led by Miles Teller gets swallowed up in a narrative that grows progressively more muddled and tedious.

A breezy but touching dysfunctional family dramedy, with real heart and some genuine musical soul.

It’s this adoption not only of Minnie’s point of view but the voice and narrative style of her half girlish, half womanly outlook on life that makes The Diary of a Teenage Girl such a vibrant, hopeful film.

Z For Zachariah’s beauty is its simplicity, Zobel telling the story with a minimum of fuss and resisting easy explanations for his characters’ actions.

Despite a twisty, juicy and compelling story, there remains a staid conventionality that keeps the political and thematic undercurrents from being explored as satisfyingly as one might hope.

It is sophisticated yet innocent, and while always accessible for young fans it never suffers from a lack of dialogue, with the straightforward and breezy story easy to follow and fun to enjoy.

The action scenes are predictably magnificent, and an excellent supporting turn from fetching new cast member Rebecca Ferguson helps make this a sexy, propulsive, top-notch thriller.

Initially, it plays like an atmospheric but predictable stalker thriller with not much more than style – and maybe the casting of the always watchable Jason Bateman – to recommend it. Later, though, it turns into a considerably more intriguing and twisty psychological drama.

Sporting a flowing mullet and aviator shades, Dinklage perks things up considerably as the story’s comically arrogant bad-boy-turned-good-guy.

The Gallows offers up few new ideas and very few genuine scares.

Before it starts to lose steam in its third act, Trainwreck is a deft blend of laughs, romance and poignancy — not to mention one of Apatow’s most polished, mature works.

Jokey rather than funny, and a bit forced when it’s trying to be sincere, Ant-Man has plenty of enthusiasm but not a lot of inspiration.

Tangerine paints a portrait of transgender sex workers and their clients that pulses with raunchy energy and compassionate humour. It’s a bracing slice of American indie film-making.

There are enough twists and turns in Self/less to keep things interesting

This likeable, emotionally precise film has a big heart and a genre-shifting construction that keeps the proceedings from feeling like just another young-adult meander. But despite an agreeably earnest performance from rising star Nat Wolff, Paper Towns covers familiar coming-of-age terrain and suffers from an opaque turn by newcomer Cara Delevingne that’s not quite as captivating as the story requires.

This sequel to the unlikely 2012 male-stripper sensation has an agreeably ramshackle spirit and another winning turn from star and producer Channing Tatum. As for the dancing, it’s as deliciously spirited as ever.

Committed performances, a hefty budget and assured hands behind the camera ensure that Dragon Blade delivers on its promise of sprawling battle scenes, intriguing culture clashes and budding bromances, where its giddily high concept and unlikely casting may so easily have seen it fail.