Luxuriating in a wealth of archival material that encompasses radio and TV interviews, privately recorded conversations from reel-to-reel tapes (Armstrong could swear like a sailor), and good old-fashioned newspaper clippings (remember them?), this documentary about the great Louis Armstrong is a real keeper.

It’s difficult to fault a film for being over-ambitious given the low-effort nature of so many genre films but the sheer, two-joints-in bizarreness of Run Sweetheart Run needed a surer hand to guide us through. As it is, that run to the finish line ends up feeling like a crawl.

This is a wonderfully sympathetic, deeply felt and tenderly funny family drama with a novelistic attention to details and episodes – a little like Alfonso Cuáron’s Roma, about growing up in a similar era in Mexico City. Cámara thoroughly inhabits the figure of Gómez: unselfconsciously inspiring and lovable.

Terrifier 2 is not for everyone, but this tasteless wonder meets nauseating expectations.

The treasure in this story is not a sunk vessel, as the interviews with its more literal-minded subjects might suggest, but a sense of justice and equilibrium that has been denied to a people that have been passing down their trauma from one generation to the next.

In contrast to lesser horrors that attempt to be socially conscious, Piggy is much more specific and detailed in how it builds moods and atmosphere, especially the gossipy dynamics that run rampant in a tight-knit community.

Vesper plays like a cult film waiting to be discovered. It adeptly fuses a compelling YA-friendly story about a teenage girl’s survival in a hostile environment with dense, thoughtful world-building, the sort required to draw in nerdy-minded viewers. That savvy combination creates a narrative that breathes and expands, like one of the freaky mycelium-like life forms that populate the story.

The Good Nurse remains a good, if not ultimately great, attempt to tell the story of a very bad person.

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.

The stinging tragedy of being gay at the wrong time in history is something that will always prove ripe for emotive, painful drama but director Michael Grandage struggles to pull our heart-strings, an easy target easily missed.

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.

She Said delivers on the dopamine hits of a journalism movie: proficient pace (the film runs just over two hours but feels shorter), tactile work, the thrill of pavement pounded into revelation.

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.

Emily is a sensitive and passionate portrait of the author.

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.