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.

Director Ron Howard does a solid job of getting the smell of salt off the page and into the picture. The first half works quite well simply as a procedural, but when the action comes we run into trouble. The well-earned seriousness is washed away as we’re broadsided by B-movie tropes.

The Good Dinosaur looks great, of course, but it’s not in the league we’ve come to expect.

Too often it’s just silly.

Tamasha keeps shapeshifting, in ways both intriguing and self-defeating.

While we open with dazed individuals in a crashed limousine as it begins to take on water, Submerged’s frequent flashbacks eventually reveal a tiresome crime plot rife with soporific acting and unremarkable dialogue.

While formally quite different from his more universally-respected early work, Chi-Raq has the exuberance and wit you’ll find in Do The Right Thing and Crooklyn. It’s the best film he’s made in a very long time.

It’s a thin, trickledown sort of fun.

It’s a minor work that knows its place in the margins, but is thought-provoking and surreptitiously insightful – and very funny.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, one of our top-tier film actors right now, is on good form throughout, and the others act their hearts out, too. But they are somewhat left out to dry in a production that feels more like syndicated television than a feature film.

The script may feature numerous wobbly passages in which everyone eerily states precisely what they are thinking (an unfortunate tradition that runs throughout the series) but if anyone can sell it, it’s Stallone and Jordan.

Surprisingly, for a movie this ephemeral, the closing sequences, which consist of flashbacks and confrontations, are actually quite touching.

Without stridency but with a clear sense of purpose, director Tonje Hessen Schei compiles a mix of original interviews and footage and archive material and simulations to explore the history of drones.

If the plot’s familiar, no imagination or expense has been spared in mapping the kingdom it winds through.

There’s real energy.

Amid all this holiday melancholia, Wilde bursts into the film with an intensity that feels held over from another, better movie.