The film is utterly gripping and endlessly disturbing.

It’s terrifically watchable, a high-octane automobile of a film with dodgy steering, but exciting in a world of dull and prissy hybrids.

This is a ferociously well-made film right through to the bitter end.

As comeback projects go, Blood Father is stellar. It’s a wonder Quentin Tarantino, the king of career resurrection, didn’t get to Gibson first. The actors completely tears into the role of Link, a battered and disgruntled ex-con. Richet matches him, delivering a muscular and deliriously entertaining B-movie that is sure to play like gangbusters with genre aficionados.

The Salesman is a well-crafted, valuable drama.

An incoherent, inconsequential picture which sometimes looks worryingly as if it is being made up as it goes along.

Ma Loute is a fascinatingly made film, theatrically extravagant and precise, although perhaps a little over-extended.

The proceedings are claustrophobic, intense and alienated – often brilliant, sometimes slightly redundant.

What we have here is an embedded report that sacrifices impartiality for access. But what access.

What a lovely film Paterson is.

Neruda takes a lot of wild chances and, like the poet whose life acts as inspiration, it’s unwilling to play by the rules. Dizzily constructed and full of more life and meaning than most “real” biopics, it’s a risk worth taking.

Nothing about the film comes close to authenticity and it’s largely down to Penn’s remarkably amateurish direction.

Ma’Rosa is made with control and clarity, a narrative purpose which is held on to despite an apparently aimless docu-style, and a clear sense of jeopardy. My reservation is that it doesn’t reveal much of what is going on in Rosa’s mind and heart.

The story is told with stark and fierce plainness: unadorned, unapologetic, even unevolved. Loach’s movie offends against the tacitly accepted rules of sophisticated good taste: subtlety, irony and indirection.

Given the nudity on show, some are already quick to criticise Park’s direction as gratuitous and to claim that his male gaze is affecting the depiction of lesbian romance. But the impotency of the male characters helps to counter this while the sex scenes themselves, as lovingly shot as they might be, feel vital to the narrative.

The film takes on Gabrielle’s listlessness, slumps into an opiated fug. The malady is mysterious and not easily treatable. It just exhausts you. It transforms from a story about release to just another jail. At times it felt like there was no escape.

It’s a richly detailed character study, immersing the audience in the life and mind of its imperious main character.

Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness – and yet a brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction.

It’s an action-thriller with punch; Bridges gives the characterisation ballast and heft and Pine and Foster bring a new, grizzled maturity to their performances.

It is actually Assayas’s best film for a long time, and Stewart’s best performance to date.

There is a great performance here from Sasha Lane and this is another step onwards and upwards for Andrea Arnold herself.

Here is a film with its heart in the right place, an anatomical correctness coexisting with heartfelt, forthright conviction and an admirable belief in the virtue of simplicity and underplaying.... But this restraint sometimes sags into a kind of absence, and means the film itself is a bit rhetorically underpowered.

When Fanning is off screen, we are marooned in a fashion shoot in a hell of silliness. Yet her star quality gives The Neon Demon what substance it has, and Refn’s film-making has self-belief and panache. Take it or leave it.

It’s a film tremendously out of step with current tastes, and while I doubt that was its goal, this peculiarity makes it strangely watchable – even enjoyable.

Margarita, With a Straw is a sturdily conceived, emotionally direct drama.

The Unknown Woman is an odd, dramatically stilted and passionless quasi-procedural concerning a mysterious death; it depends on a series of unconvincing, and in fact borderline-preposterous, encounters and features a bafflingly inert performance from Adèle Haenel, whose usual spark appears to have been doused by self-consciousness.

The film is very funny – but asks its audience to wonder if being funny, if wanting to make people laugh, and particularly if using comedy for family-bonding, really is the sign of being relaxed and life-affirming in the way people who are talented at comedy often assume.

What a delicate, elegant marvel these movies have been.

Considering this is the first biopic of one of the world’s most beloved athletes, it’s too bad such a predictable and ham-fisted kids’ flick was the goal.

You might argue that there is a kind of hubris in all this, and its very giganticism condemned it to marginal status and a kind of cultural smallness. But what excitement there is in these folies de grandeur.

This is not as richly compelling as other Almodóvar films, but it’s a fluent and engaging work.

It’s the same low-budget horror flick you’ve seen many times before, but it’s nice to see some local variants on a familiar theme.

His fly on the wall approach never feels exploitative – in instances, it yields surprising empathy. In spite of his characters’ actions, Minervini miraculously captures traces of profound humanity.

[Black] creates some outrageously contrived and protracted shootouts and one or two good old fashioned action explosions. But he also keeps the dialogue cracking along.

It seems pointless to say that the big friendly giant is the star of The BFG. But casting has never been more crucial. A typically distinctive, eccentric and seductive star performance from Mark Rylance absolutely makes this movie what it is.

Bacon, Mitchell and especially young Lucy Fry are all quite effective in these dramatic scenes. But this isn’t a drama. It’s a dumbass, inexpensive horror flick which means anything real is thrown away so that poorly rendered CG ghosts can hover about and smash up windows.

It’s a tight, slick polemic which doesn’t shy from the complexity surrounding the debate or the fact it wants you the viewer to get up and do something about it.

These films were always down on women – Armstrong squanders the peerless Krysten Ritter as eye candy – but this slovenly runaround only exposes the low opinion they’ve harboured of their target male demographic. We’re meant to identify with them?

This is no masterpiece, but it’s amiable slice of popcorn entertainment.

Woody Allen’s Café Society is a sweet, sad, insubstantial jeu d’ésprit, watchable, charming and beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro – yet always freighted by a pedantic nostalgia for the 1930s golden age in both Hollywood and New York, nostalgia which the title itself rather coercively announces.

The studio has managed to deliver a follow-up that’s even weaker than its predecessor. In crude terms: Alice’s second trip to Underland wasn’t worth the wait.

The idea of an apocalypse means every dial has to be turned up to 11 and this film certainly provides bangs for your buck, although there is less space for the surreal strangeness of the X-Men to breathe, less dialogue interest, and they do not have the looser, wittier joy of the Avengers. But the more playful episodes with Cyclops and Quicksilver are welcome and everything hangs together.

The pleasure in watching this documentary is derived from its countless twists.

The movie cleverly spins a meta-fictional "origin" myth for Captain America: explaining that he was in fact a propagandist comic-book superhero before becoming a real one. The final scene of the film, and Captain America's very last line, are rather brilliant – though admittedly less brilliant if their sole purpose is to set up sequels.

This pretty routine follow-up has some decent material and amiable bad taste, heavily diluted with gallons of very ordinary sequel product: more of the same.

It’s a bit silly maybe, with a plot that requires you to overlook the implausibility of a certain smartphone with no passcode protection. But there is a nifty premise.

We leave the documentary loving the films rather than the film-maker.

You’ll shed a tear or two, possibly more.

Special Correspondents shows that Gervais has a plausible Hollywood career, but there’s a baffling lack of real laughs and performance chemistry between the leads, and very little of the acid characterisation and cynical discomfort which is vital to his screen presence.

It’s a huge aspartame rush of a film: a giant irresistible snack, not nutritious, but very tasty.

Tom Tykwer’s adaptation is a meandering mess of half-baked storylines that amount to little. Hanks’s affable presence keeps it all afloat.

When you have two of today’s best working actors acting on a high-wire to do justice to two of the most recognisable figures of the 20th century, it’s best to keep the focus solely located on them.

It’s an engaging and garrulous film, and Hockney is now a cheerful, grandfatherly figure, and an object lesson in taking the boy out of Bradford, and not the other way around.

This feature is a very funny, if derivative panto-ish romp about the early life of Shakespeare.

A gentle and charming entertainment.

Barbershop: The Next Cut is hardly subtle, but it is more nuanced than you might expect.

A terrifically enjoyable piece of old-fashioned storytelling and a beautiful-looking film: spectacular, exciting, funny and fun.

While some viewers may complain that the action is too heavily weighted toward the ending, I’d argue that this is a strong example of destination-not-the-journey film-making.

Many of The Boss’s troubles stem from its constant, unpredictable shifts in tone.

There’s something inherently fishy about a movie that claims our facts are drawn from an inefficient data set which then turns around and uses the same methodology.

It really is a nuclear war of dullness.

Meet the Blacks is an asinine film (though with a kernel of seriousness) but whenever it feels like it is running out of steam, something strange and surreal will happen to elevate it above a typical spoof movie.

God’s Not Dead 2 is a much better movie than God’s Not Dead, but that’s a bit like saying a glass of milk left on the table hasn’t curdled and is merely sour.

This is a visually sumptuous kids’ film that will also charm adults.

It is a high-minded, often touching movie which replaces the nihilism and miserabilism often to be found in social realism, and replaces them with a positive vision of what the state can – and can’t – do to help.

It’s a film of remarkable idiocy, most notably in the portrayal of the local police who are so incredibly unhelpful that it borders on parody.

This movie doesn’t really follow through with its own ideas, either in the natural realm of the ageing couple’s relationship or the supernatural arena of an eerily possible apparition.

It forces viewers to take long looks at his most controversial imagery, proving that he still has the power to provoke, seduce and enrage.

It’s tough to take all the hardcore emoting seriously, particularly as the emotional heavy lifting is designed to be done by the occasional maudlin line in brief pauses between the explosions. For a film so concerned with its characters’ inner lives, there’s a fundamental disconnect going on here – enough to make you yearn for the lighter touch of the Marvel films.

The film plays like nirvana for Pee-wee fans.

In addition to being a funny, invigorating and inspirational ode to being the cleverest kid in the room, it’s a remarkable testament to the suspension of disbelief.

The first act of the film wins some laughs on surrealist shock humour, but at the expense of ever accepting this character and her world as real.

It is a bravura debut from a young film-maker, proving that one can still make a movie for no money at a family member’s house and come away with a work of art, not just a calling card.

While engaging, this Desierto is a little dry.

This is a thoroughly engrossing and densely textured drama, showing Farhadi's cool skill in dissecting the Iranian middle classes and the unhappiness of marriage.

Big but boring, expansive but cheap-looking, Allegiant spins in place, waiting for next year’s Ascendent to come along and offer resolution. In all candour: you can do without it.

If there was a strong enough story to latch the jokes on to, Keanu might have worked. As it stands, it reeks of a grossly underdeveloped sketch extended to feature length.

If the lads were insufferable misogynistic pricks, Everybody Wants Some!! would make for horrible viewing. Thankfully they’re all intensely lovable.

Now I understand why Jesus’s childhood remains such a mystery: the story is unbelievably boring.

What makes this such a striking film is how the larger scope works perfectly in tandem with the very specific time and setting.

When something is this engaging (and funny, did I mention funny?) it ceases to merely be about ideas and becomes, even in this borderline sci-fi context, a thoughtful movie about people.

All three actors are tremendous, and director Dan Trachtenberg, making his feature debut, must be commended for keeping things tightly focused.

Here is a scary movie that is so hammy and so clunkingly written it will reduce your brain to the consistency of muesli mixed with diesel.

The ultimate reason why so much of this works is down to Sarandon herself. She sells the comic side as well as hitting all of the emotional beats.

Even though The Wave is fiction, there comes a point where it ceases to be nail-biting fun and just an exercise in voyeuristic cruelty.

There are no prizes for guessing what happens, but it’s a smart scary movie that relies on atmosphere and characterisation – not just jump-scares – for its effect.

It’s somewhat heavy material for a film aimed at children, but perhaps very necessary in an age where a beer-stained uncle might have ruined Thanksgiving wearing a Make America Great Again baseball cap.

Although many of the stories told here are deeply harrowing and the film sometimes seems to be trying to bite off too much, at least there’s a happy ending of sorts.

Ficara and Requa have an irreverent streak, one that even might strike some as a little flippant against the gravity of the war.

The restrained performances and luscious location photography are enough to make this a film worth exploring, though it might not be a bad idea to down a few caffeine-rich drinks before settling in to watch.

There is some surreal fun at the beginning as everything collapses.... But then it’s the same thing over again.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny isn’t so much a continuation as a Xerox copy with cheap toner.

The film has an impeccable technical finish, but it is insipid, contrived, solemn, and ever so slightly preposterous.

It is Davies’ ability to invest even the most apparently-humdrum moments with some form of intense radiance that sustains his film.

Emma Thompson gives us a scene-stealing performance which is enjoyably macabre.

Richness, warmth and tenderness pulse from this lovely documentary.

Grimsby has the occasional laugh and a succession of finely wrought grossout spectaculars which are reasonably entertaining.... But with its cod-Bond and mock-action material it carries a weird overall feel, like kids’ TV but produced on a lavish scale with added filth.

It’s a bit derivative, with borrowings from a handful of other films, but there are some nasty moments.