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.

Ozon is often at his best when working with women, and he has a fabulous talent in Paula Beer to bring his protagonist, Anna, to vivid life. She’s stunning in the role.

Under the workmanlike direction of Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard), what should have been a rousing and ragingly topical crowdpleaser, instead feels more like a Lifetime movie.

Given the bizarro conceit, there’s something surprisingly, and frustratingly, safe about the film.

This odd, nasty yet rather funny little film tears apart ideas of sisterhood and female friendship and replaces them with burning hate and gratuitous violence.

Carrie Pilby the film is 100% Carrie Pilby the character, a living quirk machine that in a lesser actor’s hands might be insufferable.

Thanks largely to an affecting performance from newcomer Sunny Pawar, the first act is horribly effective.

It’s a singular vision from an uncompromising director that happens to be about one of the most famous women in American history. Jackie is not Oscar bait – it’s great cinema.

Mara and Mendelsohn have a compellingly toxic chemistry together and their initial confrontation is intriguingly tense. But once we’re locked into the meat of the story, the film has nowhere else to go, at least anywhere that’s of interest and the pace becomes laborious as their discussions turn repetitive.

Gere’s commitment to the role almost makes up for the film’s flaws.

As Jonathan Demme’s concert documentary Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids indisputably shows, Timberlake is only truly in his element when on stage being a showman.

The movie is rich on its own as a character piece about the difficulties of being bi-racial, especially at the very specific location of Columbia University.

Tanna has a warm, shimmering vitality. Like the trees and the birds, the frame feels alive.

Falardeau draws exceptional character work from his cast.

When all hell breaks loose, Berg stages the action horribly well, capturing the panic and gruesome mayhem without the film ever feeling exploitative. It’s spectacularly constructed, yet it doesn’t forget about the loss of life, ensuring that, despite thin characterisation, the impact is felt.

What we have on our hands is a dud, but there are a few grace notes that save it from being an unmitigated disaster.

Even as All I See Is You descends into soapy nonsense, it remains visually engaging.

Every single decision made by Hill is bad.

God, it’s so obnoxious. And the worst thing is that it works. I was smiling and applauding at the end, then I had to take a long walk alone to wonder what was wrong with me.

If The Blair Witch Project signalled a new dawn of horror, Blair Witch is the loud death rattle of a once exciting sub-genre, disappearing into the darkness.

Ultimately, it tries a little too hard to wring those tears.

Cillian Murphy is excellent as the fiercely committed Josef Gabčík; Jamie Dornan does very well in the slightly more reticent role of his co-conspirator Jan Kubiš. An intelligent, tough, and gripping movie.

There’s something lacking, a touch of the bizarre or the perverse, with just one particularly nasty death to serve as a reminder that you’re watching a Ben Wheatley film.

If anyone other than Hawkins were in this film, it would be very hard to recommend. With her in virtually every scene, it is a lovely, tiny character study.

In his dry and uninvolving dramatic take, Stone has made a film aimed at breaking out Snowden’s story to the masses but it’s made with such limpness that a swift read of his Wikipedia page will prove far more exciting.