A banal and credulity-stretching finale that feels like a bad Twilight Zone episode, but the first hour or so is terrific.

Salvo is a strange, involving, if flawed movie.

Ultimately, it's mostly a mood piece where not much really happens apart from the inciting incident, but as a study of childhood and adolescence (it makes a great companion piece to Richard Linklater's Boyhood) it's ripe with telling details and atmosphere.

It’s not as focused as its predecessor, but its best sequences rehydrate the mind.

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

The script unsettles, but never scares, so it doesn't work as a horror film. It's also not a convincing chronicle of deteriorating mental illness.

If only the transitions in and out of the dollops of broad sex comedy weren't such a bumpy ride.

Byrkit’s parable about choices and how they make us who we are has an eerie potency.

Nooshin holds on to a strain of logic that doesn't often survive at this level of filmmaking.

One or two set pieces don't quite have the requisite heft, yet the movie clicks whenever co-writer/director John Butler stops to admire the scenery.

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.

We get one or two outrageous sight gags and massive "getting progressively drunk" montages, and some neatly managed comedy on the laugh-with/laugh-at borderline.

Ricki and the Flash’s emotional intensity creeps up on you, and it’s all due to the performances. Everyone’s sympathetic, everyone’s got depth.

It is an uncompromising and exasperating 70-minute cine-collage placed before us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, composed of fragments of ideas, shards of disillusionment.

It is a strange, clenched movie: weirdly compelling, with an undertone of absurdity worthy of Woody Allen’s Love and Death.

Amalric's handling is cool, studied and perhaps a little self-conscious. But he does a good job of showing how adultery is a noose that tightens at the throat even before an actual crime is committed - at which point the film grows altogether less interesting.

There’s a lingering sense of familiarity that persists and what felt fresh in the first film, and tweaked in The Lego Batman Movie, is at risk of feeling tired here.

Kawase's film is sometimes beautiful and moving but I couldn't help occasionally finding it a little contrived and self-conscious.

A sweet yet suspect romantic drama.

It isn’t just the sheer density of jokes that is impressive, but the diversity.

It's certainly atmospheric and cool in a new-New Wave way, but really, what's the point?

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

The first half of Straight Outta Compton, F Gary Gray’s two-and-a-half hour opus about the birth of west coast gangsta rap, is bursting with energy, exuberance and inspiration. The second half is immobilised by bloat and sanctification.

Unimpeachably important, ambitious in its scope and handsomely presented, it has all the hallmarks of a trophy winner, for better and worse.

It's a testament to the film-making that, despite the fact that we know the outcome, there's a great sense of relief when they finally reach the summit.

A slight but engaging two-hander.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus isn't entirely successful – and certainly offers few new insights into the nature of addiction – but it remains a welcome change of pace.

It's as if the film-makers felt they couldn't deliver the didactic lesson unless they wrapped this up in pulpy, thriller trappings.