The problem with Shyamalan’s spin on dissociative identity disorder is that for all the dissociation, why are all 23 identities cool with locking terrified girls in a basement?

Naturally, Brooklyn is the setting for the type of old-fashioned brand of fairy-tale film this stinker aspires to be, but each time the inspirational Brooklyn Bridge is shown the desire to jump off it is doubled.

As limp and cold as The Founder is as a movie, it contains one of the finest Keaton performances of his entire career, maybe the one he’s been working his whole life toward.

It goes without saying that the American public’s relationship to the NSA has changed dramatically since the first xXx movie in 2002 – a sea change that this film seeks to play up – but the script, written by F. Scott Frazier, doesn’t quite know what to do with its critique of the NSA’s unchecked power.

Berg also creates one scene that should stand as an all-time classic: a residential street standoff between the Tsarnaevs and members of the Boston and neighbouring Watertown police departments.

With this complex characterization, Bening looks like a shoo-in for a best-actress nomination come Oscar time, but she is also amply supported here with two performances that nicely capture the insecurities of earlier stages of womanhood.

What we learn from the enjoyable punditry of siblings, art-world associates and former lovers is that the gorgeous provocateur was consumed with fame, and that everything and everybody was a means to that end.

Centred on an uxorious guy who is building a gambling palace, Live by Night invites unfortunate comparisons with Martin Scorsese’s 1995 classic "Casino," in which the hero is tortured by his dishonest business and his unstable wife. Of course, Affleck isn’t Robert De Niro – delivering what was probably the last great dramatic role of his career – and Chris Messina as Coughlin’s rather bland sidekick most definitely isn’t Joe Pesci.

It may not have the easy, feel-good family flick sheen to win over the box office, but it’s clever and compassionate enough to pay down a few big-ticket karmic debts.

This half-throttle documentary might better be called The Fast and the Uneventful.

Reset is remarkably undramatic – to both good and bad effect.

For all that Silence is a gorgeous film filled with imagery that is sometimes startling and often compelling, the director sadly fails in a passion project decades in the making: This is a long and dull costume drama that seems to think a contemporary audience can picture faith as easily as it does a cassock, cross or kimono.

Dealing with such heavy matters as death, faith and forgiveness, the film wants to be a classic-in-the-making, but it just doesn’t hit the emotional and narrative cues necessary for such a weighty job.

It is a busy narrative machine that raises expectations of a tidy ending; instead Almodóvar offers an artfully mysterious conclusion that seems unearned by the movie that preceded it – except, of course, for that lonely stag.

Franco’s outlandish Laird dude is fascinatingly unfiltered, either when it comes to his non-stop F-bombs or his love-seeking shenanigans. It’s all a bit rompy, with a touch of the-world-is-a-changin’ commentary.

For all that it tells a highly unusual story, Hidden Figures is a classic Hollywood feel-good movie. This has been a year of notable achievement for African-American performers and stories, from the surprising observations about masculinity in Moonlight to the gently told civil-rights saga of Loving. In that sober-sided company, Hidden Figures is a face-licking puppy dog of a film.

In Fences, every time a character opens their mouth is an opportunity to savour the playwright’s impeccable ear for language – for capturing the joys and frustrations that come when someone simply tries to say something – anything – about the daily struggle that is life. It’s as much workaday poetry as it is dialogue and Washington knows better than to dilute it or make it his own.

Never before have such acting heavyweights been so misused on screen.

The main attraction here are the characters: well-observed animals of the zoo or the barnyard.

Utterly magnificent and intoxicating.

What's worse than the actual movie itself, though, is how indicative it is of modern group-think studio production.

Film, not film, whatever it is, Cameraperson plays like a study not only of cinema itself, but a warm, welcome reminder that there is (ideally) an intelligence, and maybe even a bit of grace, behind the moving images that wedge themselves in our memory; that they are the handiwork of a living, thinking, feeling, sneezing human being, someone who is both camera and person.

When the filmmakers fix the lens on his face and laud his work, Benson looks genuinely embarrassed, mumbling that he’s “shit.” As any seasoned charmer knows, this will only endear you further.

The Eyes of My Mother is not for the easily queasy. It is a stark, dreadful vision – but one that is fascinatingly executed, with a compelling central performance from Kika Magalhaes as a matter-of-fact monster.

Is Neruda a cinematic play, a poem, a biopic? In this near-perfect homage to a literary giant, it’s all open to interpretation.

Scriptwriter Allan Loeb, the man behind more than one Kevin James vehicle, attempts Christmastime magic à la "Miracle on 34th Street," but ends up conjuring Maudlin on Madison Avenue instead.

Only Tudyk’s dry humour in the role of the tactless droid K-2S0 makes Edwards’s darkly reductivist approach occasionally seem smarter rather than lesser. In the end, this hardening of the franchise seems likely to alienate both the fans and the uninitiated.

Office Christmas Party is a hopeless muddle. A joyless, laughless – that’s right, not even one laugh – affair that proves how indulgent and (worse) boring ensemble comedies such as this become when the ensemble has next to no natural chemistry and even less of a script to riff off of.