Like its distraught protagonist, Amber Tamblyn’s Paint It Black is unforgiving, flawed and ferocious.

Baahubali demonstrates the pleasing, straight-ahead simplicity of certain videogames: whenever our hero accomplishes a task, some new challenge presents itself.

This production’s triumph is the room it’s granted Rajamouli to head into the fields and dream up endlessly expressive ways to frame bodies in motion.

It is superbly directed and shot with great scenes.

It is every bit as beautifully made and intelligently acted as you might expect, with some wonderful visual imagery at the very beginning. Yet I was disappointed.

Cleverly, it gives us enigmatic backstory hints that may or may not help explain the sudden direction change the film takes in its third act, leading to a denouement of toxic ingenuity. And of all it driven by the sensuality and rage of Pugh’s performance.

Rather like its central relationship, the film is messy and flawed yet painfully familiar.

The performance is austere and challenging, it takes us through the grim events, their aftermath and the long endgame of King’s life, but without the emollient or lenient notes that a Hollywood treatment might attempt. It is a requiem of a sort, and a sombre indication of all that has not yet healed, or been fixed.

The Circle is all foreplay, playfully prodding without providing a satisfying payoff.

A mixed bag, but one that comes good in its closing stretch, working its way towards a place of quiet power.

It’s fun, though GOTG2 doesn’t have the same sense of weird urgency and point that the first film had. They’re still guarding, although the galaxy never seems in much danger.

It’s an endlessly charming film focused on a woman whose view of life is one to be envied.

The physical suspense is all but unbearable: a sexualised hunger, fear and need. Fingleton writes and directs with gusto and flair.

Cranston acts the hell out of the role, like he’s performing Macbeth in a room. Unfortunately his commitment isn’t enough to sell Wakefield as anything more than a hollow character study, with an unappealing tool at its core.

It is a film of immense humanity and charm: the very best kind of date movie.

LA 92’s reliance on news and eyewitness footage leaves it vulnerable to the same limitations as that footage – namely the prioritising of sensationalism over insight.

If The Student lacks the searing moral exactness of the Russian literature on which it draws, it’s an often hypnotic warning against dogma’s eternal allure.

For all its absurdity and the family friendly bloodlessness (despite the copious violence), it spins along very smoothly and efficiently.

There is something so authentic in this film that once you get past the annoying voice and some of the dreadfully unfunny side characters, it is disarmingly sweet and even occasionally clever.

In the end, it’s Lowden’s fresh-faced enthusiasm and Mullan’s gravitas – operating at about a quarter of the level we know he’s capable of – keeping things afloat.

This is a big dumb action movie in its purest, most honourable sense: fast, furious and frequently fun.

Too often City of Tiny Lights is let down by an overeagerness to play up its source material, and hampered by unnecessarily showy direction and inadvisable attempts at gumshoe dialogue.

A decent, heartfelt, robustly presented drama.

[An] affecting and sincere documentary.

Last Men in Aleppo is one of the most difficult documentaries you’ll see this year.

Admirably cynical until it loses its way in the final stretch, The Ticket nevertheless maintains a provocative allure, bolstered by a fiercely committed performance from Dan Stevens.

It’d be easy to dismiss as jaded hipsterism but the film isn’t scared to laugh at itself and the unsustainable lifestyle its protagonists are clinging to.

This is a two-dimensional piece of work.

Fans of smurfiness may well like it, and Gargamel gets some nice lines, but I have to say that both script and animation are entirely predictable, as if generated by some computer software.

It’s a beguiling film: subtle, sensuous and delicate.

The frozen landscapes are undeniably gorgeous and the empty school halls are chilling. There are crafty moments here and there, glimpses of the midnight movie that could have been. February’s big villain is precisely what the film is lacking: a devilish spirit.

For all his faults as a narrative film-maker, Herzog can at least be counted on to keep his non-documentary excursions unpredictable.

Camara and Darin contribute outstanding work here, a beautifully meshed pair of performances that reveals nearly everything you need to know about the characters and their inner lives through exchanged looks, shrugs and the odd arched eyebrow.

It’s a spectacular movie, watchable in its way, but one which – quite apart from the “whitewashing” debate – sacrifices that aspect from the original which over 20 years has won it its hardcore of fans: the opaque cult mystery, which this film is determined to solve and to develop into a resolution, closed yet franchisable.

It features laborious acting and directing, and a screenplay whose revelations are uninteresting, even were they not guessable long in advance.

Gage’s remarkably intimate portrait of female youth on the verge leaves you with a largely hopeful feeling that this particular group of women will make good on that advice.

Even if you go into this film knowing absolutely nothing about the true story on which it’s based...you’ll sense something dreadful is going to happen because so much of it is crushingly dull.

It’s a serviceable, watchable, determinedly unoriginal film.

The film achieves a functioning mediocrity we perhaps might have thought beyond this franchise, offering a modicum of diversion in return for the cash disappeared from your wallet.

All told The Zookeeper’s Wife is a story worth telling, even if there are a good number of not-so-hot spots along the way.

Get Out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.

There is a creeping and depressing awfulness to this sentimental silver-years comedy.

It’s the deeply felt affection for metal that really makes The Devil’s Candy sing.

This is a conversation starter, not especially distinguished as film-making but vital and deeply felt.

We can debate if Burn Your Maps merely fetishises a different culture or holds it in true reverence, but I’d like to give it the benefit of the doubt. If nothing else, the performances are terrific all around.

The Transfiguration is a character study first and foremost, spending all of its time with Milo. Problem is, he’s so opaque that as a protagonist, he’s completely impenetrable.

Song to Song is, once you root around for a story, the best of a recent trilogy.

What is very impressive about Raw is that absolutely everything about it is disquieting, not just the obvious moments of revulsion: there is no let up in the ambient background buzz of fear.

The whole movie is lit in that fascinatingly artificial honeyglow light, and it runs smoothly on rails – the kind of rails that bring in and out the stage sets for the lucrative Broadway touring version.

This is a sympathetic, serviceable but respectfully unintrusive documentary about the Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin.

There are some nice touches, but it unwinds into dullness and silliness and the hi-tech conceit is basically abandoned in favour of low-tech analogue violence and punch-ups.

LA film-maker Anna Biller achieves an ecstasy of artificiality in this amazing retro fantasy horror, delivered with absolute conviction.

There’s no clumsy exposition here to explain motivations but delicately scattered crumbs involving status, family and the crippling strain of competitive masculinity.

Uncertain is a vivid, pungent ode into a world that is fast disappearing.

Post-Slumdog, Hollywood and Bollywood have repeatedly attempted to collaborate, with mixed results: here, they’ve produced a properly expansive and enthralling afternoon matinee.

Brimstone is hampered somewhat by its ponderous, doom-laden pace, and resultant bloated running time, but remains an intriguing slant on the spaghetti western.

Some will be disappointed by the lack of firm conclusions in this film, but if it reveals anything, it’s the intensely personal nature of what people find funny.

It’s a very good iteration of the genre, with moody lighting, razor sharp editing and great fight sequences, but be advised that only the strongest of stomachs need apply: it is excessively gory and amoral, even by the standards of such fare.

This fantastically muddled and exasperatingly dull quasi-update of the King Kong story looks like a zestless mashup of Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now and a few exotic visual borrowings from Miss Saigon. It gets nowhere near the elemental power of the original King Kong or indeed Peter Jackson’s game remake; it’s something Ed Wood Jr might have made with a trillion dollars to do what he liked if he’d been given a trillion dollars – but minus the fun.

After the unnatural way it plops this gruesome group in their social Siberia, it goes from (alleged) comedy to serious drama with all the subtlety of a 10-year-old playing Mario Kart.

It’s low-key and modestly budgeted, but perfectly well made, and Watts maintains a cool and steady presence.

Holmer draws confident, luminous performances from the cast that rise to the occasion but never seem over-coached or phony.

The dialogue is at times embarrassingly bad.... On the other hand, the period details are impressive and must have cost a pretty kopiyka or two, and the film benefits visually from being shot on location.

It shouldn’t work, but it does, due to the intelligence of the acting and the stamina and concentration of the writing and directing.

The film is watchable in its quirky and wayward way, with some funny moments – though shallower than it thinks.

Unassuming and old-fashioned funny entertainment isn’t exactly what we associate with this film-maker, but that’s what she has very satisfyingly served up here. It’s not especially resonant or profound but it is observant and smart, with some big laughs in the dialogue. The whole thing is enjoyably absurd though not precisely absurdist.

There is something frustratingly subdued and constrained dramatically about this slow and unsyncopated film, which indulges in quite a few cliches about wartime Paris.

The sclerotic staginess of The Dinner means this is one to miss.

It’s an anticlimactic oddity of a film, and a slightly wasted opportunity – but with curiosity value.

The heart of the movie is the unexpectedly poignant relationship between Xavier and Logan: I’d be tempted to call them the Steptoe and Son of the mutant world, although in fact Logan goes into Basil Fawlty mode at one stage with his own pickup truck, attempting to trash it – perhaps to teach it a lesson. Logan is a forthright, muscular movie which preserves the X-Men’s strange, exotic idealism.

There aren’t really any surprises in The Other Side of Hope; it’s more like witnessing the ongoing cultivation of a humane philosophy. But the film is devilishly funny, economically constructed (the demise of Wikström’s marriage is shown in wordless images) and decked out in the director’s dismal palette of cobalt blue, moss green and burnt-marmalade orange.

It’s a highly entertaining portrait of the two men, and Tucci’s own directorial brush strokes are bold and invigorating.]

It may be a timely film, but it is its timelessness, as well as its depths of compassion, that qualify it as a great one.

Franco deserves points for attempting something with idealism. But the execution falls flat.

This has been a regular payday for Beckinsale and she certainly gives it her all, but you have to wonder why she bothers, certainly now that we know what she can do with more interesting material.

A decently acted, heartfelt film.

The movie’s operatic claustrophobia makes its mark. Cult status beckons.

Deeply strange and politically incorrect, ­baffling, and often funny.

It doesn’t have the heart, the depth or the novelty of the first Lego movie, but it is relentlessly, consistently funny – which excuses everything.

This offshoot is essentially a well-produced, easily accessed B-movie. Still, it wouldn’t kill you to watch it, and it does more than expected to reinvent its particular wheel.

As must be obvious to real connoisseurs, I am hardly a natural consumer fit with this franchise. It may well play with fans, but will in all probability make no converts.

Keough and Malone convey a palpable sense of yearning for one another during these sequences, but Kim and Bradley Rust Gray’s barebones script doesn’t match their efforts.

You can’t let your heroes be truly, purely horrible. But McDonagh’s moral twist comes in way too late and much too hard. It leaves you dizzy.

Surely there is a good movie to be made about caring polyamorous relationships, but as with any romantic story the audience needs to fall in love with the idea of these characters being in love.

This debut feature from Yorkshire-born actor and first-time director Francis Lee is tough, sensual, unsentimental, with excellent lead performances from Josh O’Connor and Alec Secareanu.

The film is about more than simply personal loss and Heineman’s admiration of journalist activists. It’s a guide to the media war being fought between Isis’s video team and RBSS.

This isn’t really a film in search of a definitive truth – it’s a deliberate provocation to the conventional notion of truth in the age of media frenzies over salacious crime.

What’s key is that even though this is a movie about a scoundrel, it’s all very optimistic. Forbes and Wolodarsky keep the frame bright and the filmmaking calls attention to itself only when necessary.

Yellow Birds goes heavy on the brooding, and even though a lot of it looks gorgeous and carries the whiff of great importance it is ultimately stunted by a central event that isn’t worth the mystery that surrounds it.

Beach Rats is a captivating character study and one that feels vital.

Directors and activists Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’s outstanding and incendiary documentary about Ferguson does a tremendous end run around mainstream news outlets and the agenda-driven narratives that emerge, particularly on television.

For me the superpower idea can only work with humour and lightness of touch: and there is a persistent and disconcerting joylessness about this.

As things go bad for Wilson, the movie, unfortunately, loses a considerable amount of steam as well.

A hundred well-placed plot breadcrumbs lead us to our perfect ending, but apart from scriptwriting craft Rees gets in some bravura scenes of high tension.

Call Me By Your Name is a masterful work because of the specificity of its details.

Harrelson is an affectionate director, finding memorable bits for performers all across the cast list, and his writing is peppered with arresting phrases.

Not all is explained in A Ghost Story, but enough is there for vibrant discussion to break out the minute the credits rolled.

The movie itself is a retread of indie story beats we’ve all seen time and again. Slate’s tornado of a central character doesn’t quite overcome the rote aspects of this production.