Anyone who has pushed things a bit too far, and woken up with one too many “wtf” mornings, will appreciate how close Belgica has got to replicating hedonism going off the rails.

It’s written to a machine-tooled formula, with two more episodes naturally planned to gouge cash out of the fanbase, and whatever interest this film has dies about five minutes before the closing credits.

Jon Cassar’s film rejects the recent revisionism that’s flooded the genre. His take – a straight rip-off of the classics – is weirdly refreshing as a result.

It’s worth mentioning again that, somehow, this movie, with all its full-frontal historical horror, is still loaded with laughs.

There is something interestingly non-argumentative and personal about this documentary. It is gentle and reflective, a paean to his own youth and idealism that have been preserved in the ice.

Unassuming, likable entertainment.

Abhorrent politics aside, it’s also a terrible movie. The dialogue is atrocious, the performances rote. One could make the case that its incoherence is a grand meta-narrative statement about the fluidity of combat, but I don’t think that’s the case.

This laid-back amusement should not be misinterpreted as competent storytelling. Though some of the jokes land, that’s entirely due to the performances; there’s not one example of clever writing in the entire picture.

This could be one of those rare and terrifying serial killer cases where the psychotic culprit apparently intends to bore and embarrass everyone to death with bad acting.

The movie gets completely lost, unsure if it wants to be a serious exploration of repressed memories or a work of giddy, spooky trash.

A Simple Life is a tear-jerker, but thoughtful and intelligent, with an anti-sentimental dimension.

It’s by-numbers filmmaking that rarely adds up to anything worth the price of admission.

The Road Chip isn't exactly what I'd call a good film and has almost nothing going on in the visual department, but for those saddled with kids for an afternoon, you could do a lot worse.

First with the telephone, then early cinema, the magic of wireless radio and, finally, television, Dreams Rewired bombards the senses with a thorough and clever montage of found footage from the 1890s to the pre-war era.

The Force Awakens is ridiculous and melodramatic and sentimental of course, but exciting and brimming with energy and its own kind of generosity. What a Christmas present.

Tarantino has created another breathtakingly stylish and clever film, a Jacobean western, intimate yet somehow weirdly colossal, once again releasing his own kind of unwholesome crazy-funny-violent nitrous oxide into the cinema auditorium for us all to inhale.

Hard to Be a God creates its own uncanny world: it is beautiful, brilliant and bizarre.

It’s silly and poignant and funny.

A very valuable film.

The Club sees the film-maker at his most masterful, steering the picture through complex tonal shifts without letting it capsize into hysteria, even when the characters do.

The Brand New Testament is a peppy, original and (importantly) very sweet story.

What I like about Among the Believers, a portrait of radical Islam in Pakistan, is how the first two-thirds of the movie strives to remain as balanced as possible.

David O Russell’s Joy is an intriguing but weirdly subdued and stylised film.

What is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control and he unspools great meandering, bravura travelling shots to tell it: not dissimilar, in some ways, to his previous picture, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin.

With its sheer warmth and likability, this good-natured documentary won my heart.

Jimmy Ellis’s story really is stranger than fiction.

The tone is gently mischievous rather than exhaustingly wacky.

It's nowhere near as good as many of the films it so wants to be positioned next to, but it's nasty enough to leave an impression.