Crowds will be pleased, tears will be shed and audiences should rally to the passion and drama onscreen. The stakes are high in Step.

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.