Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting is everything I could reasonably have hoped for - scary, funny, desperately sad, with many a bold visual flourish.

Vin, great ridiculous beefcake lunk that he is, does provide us with some fun.

The film has its own specific vibe, thanks in part to the writer-directors’ unique, immersive sense of the milieu and the leads’ tender chemistry.

The film makes clear that being fearless and bold is a luxury megastars can enjoy, but the rest of us end up having to make compromises.

[A] brilliant documentary.

The Founder is an absorbing and unexpectedly subtle movie about the genesis of the McDonald’s burger empire.

As well as its plot being eerily similar to that of Demolition, it’s just as misguided.

The acting is wooden and the special effects aren’t all that special, but it’s a spirited effort and doesn’t drag during its 78 minutes. You’ll never approach après-ski in the same way again.

Filmed with competence rather than actual verve, Alone in Berlin works – just about. There’s enough of a thriller about it to hold the interest, even if it’s a bit on the stodgy side.

It’s not exactly hard-hitting stuff, and isn’t meant to be, but it spins an entertaining yarn.

The Portuguese Nun (2009) was a gem of gentle comedy, and his new drama, The Son of Joseph, has the same droll innocence and lovability. With its carefully controlled, decelerated dialogue, it is weirdly moving in just the same way.

Not so much a documentary, more a sleek two-hour commercial for itself, Reset is a glossily produced non-look behind the scenes at the Paris Opera Ballet.

It won’t be remembered as Zhang’s best film, but the director’s artistic touch is on display in his long panoramic sweeps and artful use of colour. Simultaneously futuristic and historic, the visual spectacle carries the film.

These were two women who reached a state of balance thanks to an almost aggressive honesty.

By the end of a long two hours, there’s not much life left.

There are substantial talents involved in this film, but it doesn’t come together.

There’s not much that glitters in Gold, a lackluster caper that proves that even the priciest ore can bore.

It has tentacles and hot wheels, yes, but not the legs or bright ideas to sustain itself.

Very solid, very sound entertainment, with thumpingly good Pritam songs that make Eye of the Tiger seem like pipsqueakery.

A disappointment.

The film is a bit stagey sometimes, but ambitious and insightful. Tovey is excellent as he shows someone progressing from innocence to fear and then to loneliness.

In the hands of director Christopher N Rowley and an assortment of screenwriters (including Byng), the result is a rebarbative mess – mirthless and shoddy like a disposable Christmas stocking novelty.

It’s rare to see a film quite so lacking in animus. It exists only to gouge money out of gamers. They might well want to stick to the game.

What this exceptionally lucid film-survey reveals is what has to go on at ground level, and beneath the surface, in order to power a powerhouse.

Stalking tactics bolstering romantic comedies are by no means new, and over the decades, film-makers have proved adept at somehow planing down real-world nastiness, but here it’s gruesomely inescapable.

This is another really entertaining fantasy with fan-fiction energy and attack.

This horrifyingly yucky, toxically cutesy ensemble dramedy creates a Chernobyl atmosphere of manipulative sentimentality, topped off with an ending which M Night Shyamalan might reject as too ridiculous.

Hidden Figures is a bouncy, almost garish feelgood girl pic. A movie that knows right from wrong and doesn’t see any use in complicating matters.

With ambition and reach, and often a real dramatic grandeur, Scorsese’s film has addressed the imperial crisis of Christian evangelists with stamina, seriousness and a gusto comparable to David Lean’s.

It’s a film destined for iTunes rental status, but kept from flatlining with a pretty dependable string of stupid yet funny one-liners, and a nice turn from TJ Miller as Aniston’s slacker brother.

It’s Holmes brazen performance that remains the chief drawing point in seeking out All We Had. She burrows deep under the skin of Rita, a woman firmly aware of her many flaws and tragically unable to address them.

Raised up on the big screen, the victories look even easier and more jaw-droppingly elemental: flashes of lightning, allowing us to share in the pleasure of watching a fellow human doing something simple preternaturally well.

Mark Waters wrings occasional snickers from a patchy script, but the whole feels tamely conventional: misanthropy passed through the usual Hollywood motions.

Even though director Benjamin Ree has accessed the family archive of footage showing young Magnus as a socially awkward prodigy through the years and interviewed him directly many times, the film barely dents his inviolate wall of polite reticence.

This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.

This film is conceived as a showcase for its performers, and, as that, it is immaculate.

It is such a beguiling performance from Richard, natural, unaffected, unselfconscious, you find herself rooting for Ana, although what form success might take for her is a mystery. Very impressive work from Lang.

The complete jigsaw doesn’t fit together, hampered by plot implausibilities and unrealities.

Director Robert Zemeckis is usually known for his zestiness and zippiness; but this is arduous. Screenwriter Steven Knight scripted smart movies such as Locke, Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, and there are some nice touches, but it resembles an unconvincing and sluggish pastiche of a war movie.

This thoroughly emo body-swap fantasia, a sizable hit on home turf, demonstrates that [Makoto Shinkai] inherited much of his [Hayao Miyazaki's] artistry and charm, but not yet his narrative mastery – nor, crucially, that magic that distinguishes lasting artworks from well-drawn ’toons for teens.

It is a well made, well controlled film, and its sullenly monomaniac quality – perhaps partly a function of the star doing the writing and directing – is entirely appropriate for the subject matter.

There’s little doubt who the hero of Peter Berg’s retelling of the 2013 Boston marathon bombings is: the city itself.

Maybe the final five minutes are a little too over the top, but the overwhelming impression is that Dounia has ambition and vision, a conviction that she might still be able shape her own future. It’s an exhilarating film.

Here is a sensitive, intelligent portrait of film director Howard Brookner.

It is a thoroughly absorbing and moving film, especially when Hull has a dream about recovering his sight and seeing his children. The tone is sober, unflashy, and Hull’s reflections on God are presented without any hectoring or special pleading. Affecting and profoundly intelligent.

That entertainment enchanter JK Rowling has come storming back to the world of magic in a shower of supernatural sparks - and created a glorious fantasy-romance adventure.

The storyline does get frayed towards the end...but that’s not really the point; as long as you’re here for the dick jokes.

Chastain single handedly prevents it all from veering off the rails by dominating Miss Sloane with her forceful presence. She grounds her heroine to ensure you’re with her.

It doesn’t make sense as a comedy, it doesn’t quite work as a drama, and it doesn’t follow the typical roadmap of a biopic, but Rules Don’t Apply is strangely compelling nonetheless.

It's an intriguing movie, in some ways, but its contrived and even bizarre final revelation depends on coincidences of almost Hardyesque proportions. It is not really believable, and yet if it is not taken literally, but as a cinematic prose-poem, it has undoubted force.

More meme than movie.

It is a picture of something inexpressibly gentle and sad, something heartbreaking and absolutely normal, but something stirred up by a violent, alien incursion. Something lands with an almighty splash in this calm millpond of melancholy regret.

Its cultural setting is fresh; its storytelling, less so. It navigates the reefs but it doesn’t discover a whole new world.

Even if Aisholpan’s training – which includes hoodwinking, responding to calls, dragging dead foxes and other hallmarks of falconry – is for the camera, it doesn’t make it any less extraordinary. Especially in this remarkable environment, captured in breathtakingly crisp digital video.

Brings a new urgency to an old subject: the ivory trade, which is threatening the world’s elephants. This threat has not been cancelled or brought under control, as I had assumed. The film persuasively argues that it is all but out of control: so much so that elephants are in danger of being wiped out in the wild in just a matter of years.

What’s odd is that the movie itself turns out not to be some incendiary provocation, but squarely Bollywood trad, a globetrotting weepie unlikely to offend anyone but the most entrenched.

It’s commendable that Perkins seems wholly uninterested in the tropes of the genre: there’s only one jump scare, hardly any gore and no final girl. The elusiveness of the narrative, however, grows weary fast.

It’s a tremendously engaging and likeable superhero ride, in which the classiest of casts show they know exactly where to take it seriously – and where to inject the fun.

Trash Fire is too quick to burn through its ideas.

Into the Inferno is an intriguing, unnerving documentary.

Sprinkled among the desultory morass are occasional firecrackers of brilliant schtick-based comedy.

The public and private Rachel are, at first, quite different, until her eventual decision to be an out-of-the-closet believer. Even with this rancid script and amateurish direction, McLain sells this inherently undramatic turn as an emotional triumph.

It is a striking work of storytelling. By assembling the scattered images and historical clips suggested by Baldwin’s writing, I Am Not Your Negro is a cinematic séance, and one of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made.

With stealth and elegance, Kennebeck brings these alarming truths into the light.

Moore doesn’t want to tear Trump down so much as he wants to build Clinton up, and however much of a dingus he may be (some of his jokes really don’t work), he is sincere in his optimism and empathy. That’s something that you just can’t fake.

There is no juicy high-concept baddie this time around, but there is a lot of enjoyable hokum and cheerful ridiculousness.

It’s still no scarier than any branded content, and perhaps only the most lukewarm slumber party would truly need it. Yet if you were to ask whether Origin of Evil offers a better quality of timewasting than its predecessor, my finger would hover inexorably over YES.

Much will be said about Gray’s cinematic craft (as is often the case when a director works with cinematographer Darius Khondji) but beneath the slow roll down the river pierced by arrows from unseen, defensive natives, there’s a fascinating, mercurial screenplay that offers just enough to keep you journeying for more insight.

It’s just a film that never really finds its footing, a problem that would have been noticeable with or without the increased frame rate. It’s just that at 120 frames a second, it’s so much more noticeable.

As a bit of anthropology offering a glimpse into Tibetan life today, it’s perfectly serviceable.

The Accountant uses a cliched and misleading presentation of disability to produce a cliched Hollywood action lead in a cliched action plot, and then babbles cliches about the importance of embracing difference. Despite its protestations to the contrary, the only thing that sets The Accountant apart from its peers is its irritating, clueless hypocrisy, and its lousy title.

Once upon a time, this wackiness had some novelty value. Now it’s tedious.

For all of Mills’s cinematic tricks, he’s emerging as a great realist film-maker.

Pure uncompromising yuckiness is what this comedy delivers. A grossout smack in the face. Deplorable. Unspeakable. Often funny.

Blinky’s cranked-to-11 embrace of Australianisms feels a little tacky, like looking inside one of those city shops that flog kangaroo keyrings and green and gold bucket hats. But it’s nevertheless refreshing to see an Australian movie so heart-on-sleeve about expressing national character.

There’s a soothing Altmanesque drift about this French drama.

The complicated web of narrator-switches, flashbacks and POV-shifts seems clotted and Emily Blunt – usually so witty and stylish – is landed with a whingy, relentlessly weepy role in which her nose hardly ever resumes its natural colour.

Clinton, Inc.’s director, Bill Baber, can’t even slander a dead woman without coming off like an idiot.

A few small hiccups aside, 13th is very much not a Michael Moore film. It is organised, detailed and powerful.

Masterminds is a bit of an interesting case study, as it is basically a Coen brothers film but put through a mechanism that removes all the wit, visual style or excitement. In its place are tortuously dull set-pieces, rambling dialogue and banal stagings.

Macdonald grants us insight into the process and, as expected, it’s hardly as haphazard as sceptics might think.

Split goes all-in on McAvoy slipping from persona to persona, and luckily he’s got the acting chops to sell it.

Fire at Sea is masterly film-making.

We get the playfulness of seeing quirky magic powers mixed with the familiarity of how a time loop plays out. Add in Burton’s authorial visual stamp and what we’ve got is an extremely pleasing formula. It gels as Tim Burton’s best (non-musical) live-action movie for 20 years.

A cinematic Jägerbomb: definitely not good for you, but gets the job done.

Pesce asks viewers to go along with the absurdity while offering nothing to justify any of it. It’s a murder ballad gone out of tune.

Everything about this picture is at such a deliberate arm’s length that it is hard to know what is meant to be whimsical and what is serious melodrama.

It’s a carefully balanced and frightening film with Knox a terrifyingly unknowable character at the grisly centre.

Some critics have expressed reservations about melodrama and overworked symbolism, but I found it gripping, with an edge of delirium.

In all honesty The Untamed doesn’t seem to go anywhere special. But connoisseurs of oddness may cherish it.

Maybe any biopic risks naïveté in suggesting the agony of postwar Africa can be soothed by a love story about a handsome prince. But this movie has candour, heartfelt self-belief, and an unfashionable conviction that love conquers all - though not immediately.

At its core, it’s really just a workplace love story that grows increasingly uninterested in its plucky heroine’s journey in favour of hitting familiar rom-com notes – and to give audiences another reason to love Bill Nighy.

Sheridan’s take on the material is solidly made but sorely lacking in subtlety.

For what is, in essence, a by-numbers Disney sports flick, there’s endless freshness and vivacity to Mira Nair’s picture – her best in years.

There’s something rather dusty about The Promise as George pushes his characters through a string of soapy machinations that feel incredibly familiar.

At a tight 72 minutes, the film is a quick and dazzling burst of pleasure, pulling together so many opposing visuals, ideas and genres and coming up with something dazzling as a result.

Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Morgan isn’t just the greatest jazz documentary since Let’s Get Lost, it’s a documentary-as-jazz.