It is nowhere near as creepy as the recent indie horror "V/H/S," but it is a full-bloodedly grisly and macabre film that zaps over a few scares.

It goes on for ever without getting properly started: an epic of depthless self-indulgence.

Brady Corbet is excellent as thoroughly unlikable Simon.

It is forthright, powerful, composed and directed with clarity and overwhelming force, yet capable of great subtlety and nuance.

A black-comic psychological drama with poise and self-possession. Featuring Fabrice Luchini and Kristin Scott Thomas, how could it have anything else?

The best reason to see this misconceived film is its location.

An irritating, baffling, fascinating film.

Marsh's movie is calm, level, downbeat. The tension is subtle – perhaps subtler than it really should be.

A fun, occasionally flabby romp that should find its audience.

Oblivion goes on for a long time, moving slowly and self-consciously, and it looks like a very expensive movie project that has been written and rewritten many times over. It is a shame: Cruise, Riseborough and Kurylenko as the last love triangle left on Planet Earth should have been quite interesting.

Crystal Fairy is an acid trip where the frequent bonhomie is doused by sobering introspection.

It is smart and surprisingly literate, its only downfall being in that, in riffing on the work of a very talented writer on the subject of men and women, its screenplay could have used a little more of Jane Austen's immaculate sense of storytelling.

Sightseers is funny and well made, but Wheatley could be suffering from difficult third album syndrome: this is not as mysterious and interesting as Kill List.

It's all a bit tame, predictable and muted; the inevitable revelation of German decency seems contrived and there's an outrageous plot cop-out towards the end. It's a reminder of how David Lean exploited this kind of drama with more potency in "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

This semi-efficient, Belgian-set timewaster fuses Taken with Unknown, and almost works.

Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome.

The movie's pace flags a good deal once Bangladesh has been born in 1971, and the adult characters are much less interesting than their child counterparts, but there's enough here to entertain – and to send audiences back to the book.

Is it a psychological thriller or a giddy horror of the evil-in-them-there-hills persuasion? This split-personality number can't quite decide.

Perhaps this tells us nothing new about life on the inside in the US (there are rapes, riots and suicides), but it at least handles its brief with pace and precision.

It's always a pleasure to see Collette, a performer who always cranks up the energy, and yet here, as so often, she gives the impression of a ferocious screen intelligence somehow not being used to the full.

It's amiable enough, but it makes "The Flintstones" look like it was scripted by Karl Popper.

Trance is a disappointment: a strident, chaotic, frantically overcooked film with an almost deafeningly intrusive ambient soundtrack. There is some embarrassing, eyeball-swivelling acting from the male leads, and the elegance of the film's premise is quite obliterated by its crude and misjudged violence.

The latest documentary to roll out of the Alex Gibney factory looks at the life and times of the crusading website and explores related themes such as freedom of information and the moral responsibility of activism, but is far less illuminating about its silver-haired standard-bearer.

This is far from the bomb some would have envisaged, but neither is it the character illumination one would wish for. Jobs appears so consumed by his work here that little else mattered in his life. That may be true, but we're left none the wiser as to what made the man tick, beyond what we already know.

For all the competence and strength of Trapero's direction, the film is not as powerful as it might have been.

It's an athletic, loose-limbed piece of movie-making, not perfect, but bursting with energy and adrenaline.

It is a gut-churning film: and a radical dive into history, grabbing the past in a way a conventional documentary would not.

This has to be the year's most pointless remake: a boring and badly acted reboot of John Milius's gung-ho red-scare actioner from 1984.

It runs out of steam, with plot revelations visible from a mile away and a bit of a plausibility gap.

As ever with comedies like this, all the really funny stuff is in the opening 20 minutes. But it's entertaining stuff, with a scene-stealer from Alan Arkin.

Between the kung fu, the gunplay, a gentle romantic subplot and the extreme gastronomy – there's something for everyone.

There are some gruesomely ingenious moments in this gleefully yucky horror-comedy from director Conor McMahon, starring the standup comic Ross Noble. But I have to say it somehow wasn't funny or scary enough – though I do have to admit it is always more than revolting enough.

Almost all the charm of the real story is lost through the contrivances and overacting.

Marc Evans's Hunky Dory is sentimental, sweet-natured and daft as a brush.

It's a likable film played with gusto and heart — though fundamentally a little sentimental and predictable.

Whether you like this movie may depend very materially on how you respond to Franco himself, but I found his casting very astute.

The adults' behaviour is almost as confusing for us as it is for her. It's a neat trick that reminds us these weighty adult issues are both life-changing and, in the moment, somewhat insignificant to someone Maisie's age.

But Whedon's key coup is in simply directing a very good version of the play. He's got a keen ear for comedy, a no-nonsense approach to ditching the gags that don't work, a deft hand for slapstick and an eagerness to use it.

Polley tackles painful issues with candour and tact. She has a gripping tale to tell. It's a film that raises questions about the ownership of memory and ownership of narrative.

The film is so singular, it's hard to place. At times, its elegiac visual quality evokes Terrence Malick, but Lowery's scripting is tighter and more accessible. His is truly a fresh voice, exhilarating to hear.

It is not a story of great depth or passion, but there are intriguing and unsettling moments on its well-crafted surface.

Gondry's argument – that pack mentality crushes individual expression – follows a similarly predictable route, but there's enough of his signature playfulness (especially in the use of mobile-phone footage to present flashbacks) to keep the journey entertaining.

Some of the acting isn't bad, but the story is messy and unsatisfying with a plot-hole you could drive a dozen combine harvesters through, the ending is an outrageous fudge and the lead performance from Dennis Quaid is strange to say the least.

The Place Beyond the Pines is ambitious and epic, perhaps to a fault.

It's an amiable film with some great musical moments and the classic "growing success" montage showing them on the road in south-east Asia. On music, identity and race, the film has a big beating heart in the right place.

At its best, Malick's cinematic rhapsody is glorious; during his uncertain moments, he appears to be repeating himself. But what delight there is in this film.

Ken Loach's latest collaboration with screenwriter Paul Laverty is warm, funny and good-natured. It's a freewheeling social-realist caper – unworldly and at times almost childlike.

This movie is a case in point. It's a film which is so demeaningly bad, so utterly without merit, that there is a kind of purity in its awfulness. There is a Zen mastery in producing a film which nullifies the concept of pleasure.

The most powerful thing about the film is the "audition" scene at the beginning in which the prisoners have to introduce themselves in two ways: sorrowingly, and then angrily. It is a brilliant sequence, and the rest of the film doesn't quite match it.

As ever with a Sparks story, the action takes place in a sugary vision of small-town America that does not correspond with the real world at any point.

You've seen it all before, but lead Richard Gere drenches the proceedings in the old razzle-dazzle.

Rebecca Thomas's gauzy debut about a 15-year-old Mormon who believes she's had an immaculate conception after hearing a cover of Blondie's Hanging on the Telephone is so deftly done it's three parts enchantment to one part irritation.

There's undoubtedly a good film to be made out of the scramble for oil in the Arabian desert in the 1920s – but this, for all its herculean efforts, is not it.

Ponsoldt elicits remarkably strong performances from his two young leads, who display a depth of feeling that's breathtaking in its simplicity and honest. There's an inherent chemistry here that's both disarming and refreshing.

There are plenty of comic moments...But The Way, Way Back is very rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Unfortunately, neither is it very involving.

Mud is an engaging and good-looking picture with two bright leading performances from Sheridan and Lofland.

This is a teenage movie that could in other hands have been precious; instead it has delicacy and intelligence.

Literary references and symbolism abound in Stoker. You can get tied up trying to figure out who is what. That is the idea. All the clues are there. You just have to look closely.

Australian director Cate Shortland's drama is overflowing with such poetic visual touches, conjuring up a fairytale landscape of long shadows, wafting curtains and waving fronds.

It has been converted into a proficient, machine-tooled horror flick, stuffed full of shocks and buttressed with back-story. Mama got so flabby the second time around.

Enthralling, mysterious and intimately upsetting – a terrible demonstration of how poverty creates a space which irrational fear must fill.

Gerwig's performance is full of depth and nuance; self-conscious without being mawkish, clever behind the kook.

Full credit to Korine, who sustains this act of creative vandalism right through to the finish. Spring Breakers unfolds as a fever dream of teenage kicks, a high-concept heist movie with mescal in the fuel tank.

The plot is wildly silly and shot full of holes, maundering endlessly on its slow trawl towards the climax. But the cast at least play it like they mean it, and keep it honest for a spell.

Quite a spectacle, and a nice family outing.

I don't think it knows where it's going. I'm not even sure it cares.

[Room 237] raises very interesting ideas about how we view a film, about what happens if we take the act of viewing down to a deeper, molecular level, and about how a movie's significance and effect need not be those intentionally willed by the director.

Zombie-ism in the movies is traditionally inspected for metaphorical qualities. Here it could simply be that we males are emotionally dead … until love revives us.

For me, it never came to life.

The film's depiction of the ugliness and strangeness of his self-hating LA celeb lifestyle is disturbing. Not just for Python fans.

Promised Land seems to lose its nerve a little politically: as it goes on, you realise it isn't about fracking at all, but a tract on machiavellian corporate behaviour and their employees' self-deception.

A disappointing excursion into movie history.

A fascinating case study in basic-level democracy.

Movie 43 is sketchy, in every sense. It's a collection of short comedy films in the manner of the 70s cult classic "Kentucky Fried Movie," each with a separate director, in which many very famous actors have been persuaded to take part.

A tedious, misjudged marriage of Olympic opening ceremony, Eurovision half-time show and most recorded nightmares, Worlds Away is set in a mysterious land of make-believe.

Even Stallone's rumbling voiceover possesses the drooping tone of a lullaby – like 45rpm vinyl played at 33. And if you think that reference is retro, you should see the actual movie.

It's a film full of tenderness, resting on a tremendous, sad performance from Knoller.

The Sessions can be sugary, but it's likable.

It is a beautifully shot, and very nicely acted beginning to something: but finally frustrating.

Devotees of Dumont's earlier films – particularly his 1999 film "Humanity" – will instantly recognise the style, the locale, the narrative, the bizarre quasi-realism, in which events take place in a world infinitesimally different from the one we inhabit. As ever, the visionary, radioactive glow is compelling.

For all the guns and gore, it's as breezy and uncritical as a tale from the True Detective magazine that the cops can't help reading.

The whole thing proves unexpectedly entertaining.

The soundtrack's ironic bent might dissuade older viewers (Simple Minds are venerated), but they'd be missing out on one of the best musical comedies since A Mighty Wind. The song's the same, but Pitch Perfect is a great cover version.

A gripping documentary.

It's not bad, exactly – but it is boring and very rarely funny. This is laboured. This is aimless. This Is 40. It's really quite a grind.

Outrageous but entertaining pulp-melodrama thriller.

The weird oppression and seediness of the times is elegantly captured, and Hoss coolly conveys Barbara's highly strung desperation.

It's a gem: gentle, eccentric, possessed of a distinctive sort of innocence – and also charming and funny.

Django Unchained also has the pure, almost meaningless excitement which I found sorely lacking in Tarantino's previous film, Inglourious Basterds, with its misfiring spaghetti-Nazi trope and boring plot. I can only say Django delivers, wholesale, that particular narcotic and delirious pleasure that Tarantino still knows how to confect in the cinema, something to do with the manipulation of surfaces. It's as unwholesome, deplorable and delicious as a forbidden cigarette.

It's leaden, boorish and dull.

After 170 minutes I felt that I had had enough of a pretty good thing. The trilogy will test the stamina of the non-believers, and many might feel, in their secret heart of hearts, that the traditional filmic look of Lord of the Rings was better.

Janney steals the movie in the scene in which she discovers the awful truth.

This film is justifiably celebratory and respectful, and it reaches out beyond the rock fanbase.

By the end, you feel like a piñata: in pieces, the victim of prolonged assault by killer pipes.

Hoffman has delivered a love letter to the elderly thesps of his adoptive country. We can forgive him its falsehoods.

On the Road does, ultimately, have a touching kind of sadness in showing how poor Dean is becoming just raw material for fiction, destined to be left behind as Sal becomes a New York big-shot. But this real sadness can't pierce or dissipate this movie's tiresome glow of self-congratulation.

Telling a nearly three-hour story with an ending everyone knows, Bigelow and Boal have managed to craft one of the most intense and intellectually challenging films of the year.

Stephen Frears is a supremely accomplished director, but perhaps there was little he could do with this garbled and unsatisfying story about gambling.