Perhaps the film could have got under Charlie’s bland surface more. A creepily watchable drama nonetheless.

Here is a terribly meagre experience from writer-director Rodrigo García, a silly, pointless movie which never delivers on its promises of drama and comedy and contains not a single funny or believable moment. As a filmic meal, it is pretty much entirely without nutritional or calorific value.

Michael Grandage’s new film has been coolly received by some, but I found it an interestingly fragile and Rattiganesque melodrama of repression and regret.

The Stranger avoids both neat explanations and contrived ambiguity, when narrative pieces are shuffling around to confuse audiences.

This is a dark reminder that even childbirth, that most universal human experience, can be clouded by sectarianism and suspicion.

As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw.

Droll, witty, and proportioned like the proverbial outdoor brick-built convenience, Johnson is well placed to realise the superhero movie’s potential as surrealist action comedy. It’s a shame that all these other DC-ensemble heroes crowding into the action are frankly not really in his class, although Viola Davis’s brief cameo as Task Force X chief Amanda Waller brings the menace.

The film is expertly bolted together from archive newsreels, snippets of classic war movies and interviews with surviving airmen.

Sadly, this fatally self-conscious and self-aware movie fizzles out– a process that seems to start with the opening credits.

Stingily is relaxed and amiable, but in acting terms there may be nothing else there and the film doesn’t develop in any interesting direction.

Brainwashed is a bracing blast of critical rigour, taking a clear, cool look at the unexamined assumptions behind what we see on the screen.

The will-they-won’t-they succeed in carrying out the poisoning plot makes for pretty flat drama, and for a film about people who have suffered so much, this really fails to make us care about the characters.

It can’t end well. In fact, it ends badly. In every sense. The mystery of Myers has long since become deflated and inert, and when he is unmasked, the camera can’t quite be bothered to show us his pointless old face (unlike the unhelmeting of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which did at least show us what the great villain looked like). The only thing that’s scary is the thought of how long this has all been going on.

Imagine Game of Thrones crossed with Gladiator and you’ll have something like this entertainingly old fashioned action movie with epic levels of throat slashing, spectacular scenery and a fair bit of camp.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus and with battlefield scenes whose digital fabrications are expertly melded into the action. It never fails to do justice to its subject matter, though is perhaps conscious of its own classic status.

The film’s good-natured warmth wins the day, just.

This is a sensually imaginative dive into the life of the Wuthering Heights author: it is a real passion project for O’Connor, with some wonderfully arresting insights.

Aided by its physical clout, Summit Fever does hit a kind of rhythm near the end – but last year’s The Summit of the Gods is a more substantial look at this kind of obsession.

Shaunak Sen’s documentary is a complex, thoughtful, quietly beautiful film about the ecosystem and human community.

Rosaline . . . understands what makes a good adaptation: a sense of humor at least on par with if not exceeding the original, lighthearted lines with serious delivery, crackling romantic chemistry. And in the case of Rosaline, an unmissable lead in Kaitlyn Dever as a lovelorn medieval schemer left on read.

Preposterous though it may be, this is a terrific family movie in a style audiences may not have seen since Mary Poppins.

Some Like It Rare is a tasty treat for herbivores and carnivores alike.

It doesn’t always work, and at times it really really doesn’t, but it feels confident and unfettered in a way that so many horror films don’t these days.

There are pieces of Luckiest Girl Alive that seem interested in a life splintered by trauma, in the relief of unburdening, the hunger for certainty over what happened, the thrill of playing on cultural expectations for women. But the story it ultimately tells is an empty, self-serving fantasy.

Although the whole concept is quite daft, Winter’s energetic and committed performance adds a bit of heft without ever forfeiting the comedy entirely.

It’s solidly acted by Martell and Sutherland, although the latter seems as desperate as we are to let loose and have a bit more fun, and has a confident sense of place as King adaptations often do but it’s all rather unforgivably dull, a call to be swiftly ignored.

This is a bracing guide to a brilliant individual who declined to conform.

Matilda is a tangy bit of entertainment, served up with gusto.