It takes a little while to adjust to the film’s strong and deliberately oppressive stylistic approach, but Hinterland successfully avoids being swallowed up by its own aesthetic via the narrative’s propulsive momentum and the magnetic central performance by Muslu.

Frauke Finsterwalder’s take on the Empress is a lavish production favouring an accessibly middlebrow, at times almost soapy, approach.

Director Jon Watts’ self-penned script possesses a faultless sense of timing, and it becomes the gift that keeps on giving in the hands of Clooney, Pitt and a fine supporting cast.

It’s a trip, and then some.

The clichés start to arrive in rapid succession. Even the most moving performances cannot disguise their obviousness.

At its core, The Kill Team has one great performance, and some important things to say – about the dangerous appeal of the strong, and the easy malleability of the young. It’s well worth watching, and thinking on. It’s just a shame that that great performance isn’t matched by all the others – and that what the film has to say is said in such a dutifully by-the-book way.

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.

It’s a story with a brilliant conceptual framework that never quite coalesces into a satisfying drama.

This deviously constructed puzzle film plays cat and mouse (or to be exact, pet rat) with the viewer, yields subtly disconcerting insights into the fault lines of bourgeois life, and features terrific lead performances from Sabine Timoteo and Mark Waschke.

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.

Franco manages to maintain credibility as he ramps up the emotional stakes, creating situations in which the viewer longs to jump into the screen and change the course of events.

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

Whether Medusa Deluxe quite convinces us that it needed to be a one-shot exercise, it’s carried off niftily — the electric performances, from a super-alert, bristling cast, giving a feel of live event to the action, framed in Academy ratio.

This clever, heavily meta picture has fun both mocking its own existence and trying to find enough twists to justify itself. The result is a film which is superficially appealing even if it is ultimately undone by the contortions necessary to keep the irreverent sleight-of-hand going.

One of Pixar’s most beloved characters gets an origin story with Lightyear, a lacklustre sci-fi adventure which misses the wit and wonder that have been the studio’s hallmarks for decades.

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.

For all his shame, and the shuttered windows and disconnected webcams that block out the world outside, there’s a magnetism to Charlie and his big, overburdened heart which draws others – and us, as an audience – to him.

The later stretches, which are forced to become oblique and symbolic in the absence of any hard evidence about what really happened to the sailor, showcase some of Firth’s best screen work.

On occasion, the sincerity and unabashed emotion can be bracing, but more often this rambunctiously enthusiastic writer-director overestimates how compelling his protagonists’ plight is, giving us a florid melodrama without enough grit underneath the operatics.

There’s real feeling in this story — and a genuine desire to challenge audience expectations — which is laudable but only takes Stillwater so far.

The humanity of the enterprise, hovering between sympathy and ironic detachment, keeps the script on course, delivering a story that for all its motley-band-of-brothers clichés feels as authentic as many more pious takes on the Bosnian conflict.

Moshe is not the first filmmaker to grapple with theories surrounding the manipulation of the fabric of time but his intimate approach, coupled with strong performances, make this an intelligent homespun take on a familiar subject.

The film’s main triumph is the way that the toy characters are evoked.

Wiig is terrific, but there’s just not enough of her. It truly is a wonder to see an A-lister like Chris Pine embrace the traditional female support role of the pretty sidekick so winningly, while Gadot is as smooth as silk and never less than watchable. The team is there, but this is most definitely a sequel.

The film also has plenty of faults. One of the main problems is that Ophelia is still under-written.

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.

The Choral is a narratively jumbled film whose unrestrained sweetness and adept ensemble tie up some of the film’s looser ends.

George Clooney and newcomer Britt Robertson are solidly compelling, but Tomorrowland remains only a moderate success, its ingenuity, wit and enormous heart too often at odds with a ho-hum story and tentpole conventionality that the film tries so hard to transcend.