What Cumberbatch delivers is an impressively rounded character study of someone variously kind, prickly, aggressive, awkward and supremely confident. But it's almost too nuanced. Accuracy isn't all, but fumbling in the dark isn't always fun.

London Road was a mighty success on stage. Now it is a unique triumph on the movie screen.

The story almost comes off the rails, but Beetlejuice’s charm lies more in the execution. The movie is crammed with visual invention and snappy comedy. The afterlife is richly imagined as a macabre bureaucracy. The living world is no less outlandish, especially with those eye-popping interiors and costumes.

The Raid 2's faults are not in Evans's technique – he's unusually adept at capturing the art of violence. Instead, the film suffers from too much potential.

It’s an entertaining romp, although the formulaic quality is becoming a little obvious.

It’s string-pulling Pixar formula but done with just about enough effectiveness to work (do their films ever truly fail?). It doesn’t have that emotional kicker of an ending we might expect and hope for, it’s far too slight to evoke an ugly cry, but it’s breezily watchable, low stakes stuff, handsomely animated (on dry land, in water less so) and, like Disney’s spring adventure Raya and the Last Dragon, refreshingly free of romantic diversion, prioritising friendship and self-discovery over getting the boy, girl or sea monster.

We didn’t need a Predator prequel (have we ever really needed any prequel?) but Prey is a nimble beast, far nimbler than it could have been and while it’s not quite enough to make us crave more from a franchise that’s already given us too much, it’s enough to justify the journey way back.

The directors' intimate domestic images only occasionally match the humour and ruminative poetry of their subject's own, blog-published words, but ghoulishness and undue sentimentality are kept at bay.

Afterwards, everyone smiles reassuringly – then one man pipes up: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but …” and a begins a pretentious intellectual takedown. Like the film it’s a funny-smart moment, witty and grownup.

Chaganty’s tab-toggling is pacy enough, but he gets pedantic about tying up unfinished digital business, and Unfriended’s pulse-raising wildness is beyond him.

It is well-acted and well directed by Mylod with tasty side plates of droll humour.

The resulting documentary is anything but conventional.

It’s a great performance from Bridges, and he seems weirdly young in this film, certainly compared to the brilliant craggy oldsters that later became his acting birthright. You can still see the boyish, vulnerable figure that he was in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. One of a kind. [20th Anniversary]

Homemade is a diverting but indulgent collection, and the experiences of genuine hardship don’t shine through very much.

It takes proper acting talent, boosted by strong direction from Wladyka, to pull the film along the way Reis does. She’s vulnerable, frightening and relentlessly physical.

Heretic might not be good clean fun but Grant makes it worth us getting dirty.

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

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.

It’s a study in anger and emotional hurt that feels like a work in progress, an unfinished script the director has put before the camera before its complete development. Yet it is absorbing and challenging, as everything from this film-maker always is.

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.

Bloody, action-packed and tragicomic all at once, this dazzling coming-of-age tale masterfully contemplates the knotty process of coming to terms with past traumas through a horror-fantasy lens.

The result comes across like a cross between a buddy movie and a horror movie – a war movie without the war. Ultimately, it all comes down to the core relationships, so it’s just as well that Hoffman and Jonsson are both terrific; their stars are certain to rise further off the back of this.

The work is the most important thing and Addario’s speaks for itself.

It’s flawed for sure but still moves with more deftness than most (arriving after Eternals is a blessing for any Marvel film) and there’s an ending that suggests an awareness of its roots (post-credits scene aside), hinting at a promising way forward rather than back. Consider the curse of sorts sort of broken.

The incessant and eerily unsatirical product placement is enough to give you a migraine: especially the complacent Disney cross-promotion.

The Ring is a showcase for the young Hitchcock's editing panache: the experimental, Soviet-influenced montage that would surface so violently in Psycho. [04 Jul 2012]

By keeping its characters at such a far remove, the film doesn’t condemn them nor cheer them on. At least, not on paper. In actuality, with all the crafty editing moves, slick music cues and stylish production design, Nocturama does the one thing it shouldn’t: it makes domestic terrorism look cool.

What an intimate, thoughtful film. I can’t remember the last time I watched a documentary so desperately wanting a happy ending for everyone – human and ocelot.