If that wasn’t enough, there is something even more dispiriting about Doctor Strange beyond its halfhearted visual and narrative ambitions – an issue that made a brief blip on the cultural radar when the film was first announced but has distressingly gone unheard of since: This is a movie that revels in whitewashing.

Some of these passages, especially a visit to North Korea, are fascinating in their own right but the film does risk getting sidetracked by tangential stories. Nonetheless, this intersection of nature and culture is filled with insight.

Happily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has in Moonlight exactly the kind of small, smart film that the Awards should be recognizing more often. Whether it will actually win is another matter: Jenkins’s script and his direction are bracingly free of the sentimentality Oscar so loves.

Park’s Handmaiden is a great big chocolate box of a movie in which a rich and satisfying narrative is enlivened by some piquant erotica and the sharp tang of politics.

The film is as much about Hokusai as it is about the titular protagonist, and so she defers to her father here as she apparently did in real life.

Perhaps Howard’s dutiful obligation to Brown’s treasure-hunt oeuvre will end here, with the temperate Inferno sparking a resurgence to follow. Dante wrote that “The poets leave hell and again behold the stars.” Here’s hoping that Howard has some shine left in him.

By the time we make it to the present, oddly represented by a towering digitized city and a handful of white children playing in an idyllic American setting, it becomes clear Mallick has little space for the multifaceted human race in his gorgeous cosmos.

The movie’s moral centre, is the island’s doctor, who in one of the film’s most powerful moments reflects on all the autopsies he’s performed. “It’s the duty of every human being to help these people,” he says. That’s about as close as director Gianfranco Rosi gets to a political message.

But hey, at least Zwick and company carve out some time for Tom Cruise to run, with Reacher dashing across a busy avenue for about 18 seconds or so. It’ll make for a great supercut one day.

Mottola’s film is the unfortunate result of too much talent met with a clunky script – and the movie crumples under the weight of the cast’s star power.

This is a prequel superior to its predecessor – we’re not bored with board-game ghoulishness yet.

For the conquering Sacha, no pack ice can prove too crushing nor hardened sailor too obdurate: It’s only the unusual setting and subtle animation that raise this adventure above the formulaic.

Hall creates a fierce, uncompromising portrait of a woman who was prescient enough to see the dark places her culture was headed – the logical end game of our “if it bleeds, it leads” obsessions – but also damaged enough to succumb to them.

Complete Unknown is the perfect case study of what happens when bad movies rope in good actors. In this case, it’s Rachel Weisz and Michael Shannon, two of the most talented performers working today, who get sucked into writer-director Joshua Marston’s vortex of nothingness.

The documentarian Victor Kanefsky paints a vivid picture of an entertaining rogue, one who finally gets his due with this film. Then again, Cenedella might refuse to accept the recognition. There’s no bastard like a principled bastard.

Animation seems an odd means of addressing such a grim tragedy, but it gives Maitland the creative freedom to effectively tell a suspenseful, harrowing and moving story.

It’s bold, captivating cinema, with a soundtrack that threatens to never leave your head.

I won’t presume to understand what passes for popular taste. But seeing an audience in the tens of thousands lose their mind for Hart’s jokes about hating his family and the hypothetical perils of dating a woman with only one shoulder, I can’t help but feel skeptical.

The victory of The Accountant is in the tone. The title character isn’t presented as a superfreak – this isn’t "Rain Man," in which autistic gifts are presented as powers for parlour tricks – but as a prototype and a beautiful mutant, maybe even a superhero.

Like those who live up there, viewers have two choices: Give yourself over to the experience, and you’ll be transported; stand back, and you’ll feel nothing but chill.

As her adversary, the ghastly Irving, Timothy Spall is excellent, creating a man of great insecurities hidden behind blustering self-confidence. The actor is happily willing to manufacture a thoroughly oily and dislikeable figure as he and Jackson successfully balance their villain on the knife edge of caricature.

Whatever the locomotive power of the novel, this film adaptation only limps into the station.

The director’s pedestrian tactics are most evident in his command, or lack thereof, over his cast. While Parker knows how to expertly play to the camera – he all but winks at the audience, so confident is he in his admittedly captivating lead performance – he abandons his fellow actors, allowing them to exploit their worst instincts: hammy accents, wild gesticulating, uneasy line readings.

Ironically, Middle School’s message is about encouraging kids and grown-ups to think outside the box and yet, the filmmakers themselves do precisely the opposite.

The film never weaves together its various strands as tightly as the soundtrack does, and it’s unlikely that those unfamiliar with the cultures of the Caribbean will understand where everyone is coming from.

In short, his film asks that an audience listen to a fair amount of ugly racism without offering much enlightenment or even entertainment in exchange. Words may build bridges but people have to cross them: Imperium remains safely outside the unexplored region.

Based on the picture book co-authored by Power of Now superstar Eckhart Tolle, Milton’s Secret carries a powerful and important message, but the film feels ham-fisted, clichéd and overearnest at times, especially for adult viewers.

It’s a fantastically bonkers story told excitedly in The Lovers and the Despot, a stranger-than-fiction yarn that would make a hell of an opera.