It’s both wholly satisfying and ridiculously fun.

Robin Robin may be short, but it’s rich and satisfying – maybe one to serve alongside the pudding on Christmas Day.

H Is for Hawk concerns itself less with the healing of wounds, but rather with the prying open of them. Can we look so deep into the pulp that the fear of it eventually washes away?

Passages is smart and precise about other people’s messes. It’s a way to indulge in the most volatile parts of ourselves without ever feeling like we’re about to lose control.

David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult lead a movie that doesn’t just serve as a referendum for superhero films, but for the cinematic future of DC as a whole.

Park has a galvanising kind of curiosity behind the lens, pairing here with cinematographer Kim Woo Hyung. There’s always a new, unexpected angle to either watch Man Su or see his point of view.

Passing is as richly felt as it is carefully conceived.

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo and based on his cult cartoon, the film is a computer graphics showpiece: best at swooping round structures (skyscrapers) and rotating three- dimensional objects (lots of explosions). But it's the hallucinogenic sequences that tell you why it has become a cult. [03 Feb 1991, p.24]

As with Derrickson’s previous collaboration with Hawke, 2012’s Sinister, the director proves he can deliver an effective jumpscare – slick, and not too telegraphed. But there’s a thematic weight here that elevates The Black Phone above any of his previous work in the genre, a dark reminder of how often moral panics and bogeymen are conjured up in order to turn a society’s eyes away from the real and inescapable violence happening in people’s own homes.

The director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer.

I Swear is a crowdpleaser that doesn’t make a spectacle out of its subject, nor mines the darker chapters of their life for tearjerking sentimentality.

One of Them Days is funny as hell, but it also speaks to something sharply honest when Dreux sighs and mutters, “It shouldn’t have to be this hard.”

This film is nasty, funny, and cogent about the era it’s set in.

A moving, sentimental work that also chills to the bone, powered by the inevitability of tragedy when familial loyalty becomes tethered to self-destruction.

Its opening monologue speaks of music’s ability to “pierce the veil between life and death”. Sinners, in all its beauty and horror, proves the same can be true of film.

The Oompa Loompas are still problematic, but director Paul King’s follow-up to the Paddington movies can’t help but charm.

If the film results in stunt performers gaining a little more respect from the public, that’s the ideal. If it merely reminds them how likeable Gosling is, that’s good, too.

One of Ken Loach's more harrowing evocations of working-class British life, anchored by Crissy Rock's performance as a hard-knocked Liverpudlian battling for the right to raise her children. [23 Oct 2014, p.54]

There’s something oddly satisfying about the way McKay's film lets us laugh at our own doom.

Edwards presents himself as an ideas-on-his-sleeve kind of guy, who’s invested in readdressing the meaning behind some of the most commonplace sci-fi imagery.

Not many friendships are tested because somebody decides to dress up as a literary detective in public. But it’s refreshing, in a way, that Will & Harper doesn’t try so hard to trumpet relatability. It doesn’t need to. Its heart remains true.

Yasujiro Ozu's final film, re-released in a restored version, is a stately, slow-burning but very moving family drama.

The irony of being intimately connected while desperately lonely can be a hard one to digest. Yet director Mia Hansen-Løve prods at the concept with the same tenderness that she applies to all her films – each of them united by the pains and pleasures of interconnectivity.

Stone gives surely the boldest performance of her career so far, in a role that puts upon her heavy physical and psychological demands.

As its intricate hand-to-hand combat sequences play out, the crunch of bones seems to ricochet around the room you’re in – as does the satisfying thud of a throwing axe as it embeds itself into a tree trunk.

Madison takes a character trained by life to always pounce – on an opportunity or a threat – and subtly, but consistently, reveals to us her softness and her soul.

To the film’s credit, there’s also real style tucked into the periphery, as characters breeze past Richard Quinn florals and Lady Gaga, still in her Tim Burton demon era, performs on a runway of models in loose, patterned Seventies gowns and oversized hats. It’s a compromise. But, then, that’s what The Devil Wears Prada 2 has turned out to be all about – it’s artistry snuck in beneath the commerce.

Dashcam is pure chaos, headlined by a character with a maelstrom for a personality.