Indeed, in a genre infamous for feints and teases, Gunn’s kitchen-sink approach feels refreshingly generous, and his excitement for the character shines through.

Without a doubt, it gives us the oddest couple of the year in Alexander Skarsgård’s Ray and Harry Melling’s Colin. For that, and many other reasons, this fresh, funny and poignant pairing is one to be cherished.

The film is immaculately cast, and the chemistry between its four heroes holds your eye with its firework fizz.

Keeps playing its two winning cards over and over again, and is smart enough to realise they are more than enough. The first is the giant animal carnage itself, which crackles with fun ideas and flourishes throughout. The second is the comic chemistry of a superbly picked cast who bring everyone in on the joke.

What we’ve seen since the beginnings of the Marvel serial in 2008 is an ongoing stretching: bigger casts, grander set-pieces and more intricate interplay between characters, with no clear end in sight. Ant-Man scuttles off in the other direction. Brisk humour, keenly felt dramatic stakes, and invention over scale. You know: small pleasures.

Stars at Noon is at its best when it has Trish and Daniel suspended in horny limbo, with Denis building an atmosphere of sultry languor that makes the film feel as if it’s constantly stretching and circling, like a sleepy cat.

Frantz is the work of a rascal, but a rascal in an unusually reflective frame of mind. Even with its mysteries solved, you can’t help but keep turning it over.

The whole climax is a delight

It’s addictive fantasy, satisfyingly snappy even in its absurdity, and something no Chastain fan can afford to miss.

It is first and foremost a picture of her, but it is also a picture of us; and just as Jennings did in his wartime documentaries, it reminds us not just of her profound decency but also, oddly enough, of ours.

Seligman’s command of the flow and swell of comic tension is thrillingly intuitive – she knows exactly when to let it well up, and when to pop it for maximum effect.

The film has the heft of Shakespearean tragedy, but a more generous cosmic outlook. Maternal love goes a long way. [14 Mar 2015, p.10]

Wright’s inkily beautiful, imaginatively structured picture - drama bleeds into newsreel and archive footage - is another excellent new film about the strange ways British landscapes (and here, seascapes) work on British minds.

The film doesn’t stint on emotional complexity, but it might be Baumbach’s most accessible to date.

A welcome reissue of the 1984 creature feature in which a Capra-esque idyll is besieged by ravening beasties.

It knows its audience and doesn’t waste time. It also heightens the fun with elaborate practical effects, rather than blitzing us with eye-tiring CGI any more than it must.

Allen’s ambitions with this taut, tart character study might not be stratospheric, but they’re at least moderate-to-high, and his degree of success is exciting.

The film’s craft, with its shivery wooded landscapes and deep focus, is consistently strong, and the acting – especially from State, but also many of the bickering village ensemble – spices up what might have been a route-one polemic.

For all the contrivances, it’s hard to deny the Colour Room’s charms. Ceramics are cold to the touch and shatter easily – but this film is gooey and generous and sure to impart a warm glow.

Beneath the mousy indie stylings of Rachel Lambert’s new film, adapted from a 2013 play by Kevin Armento, beats a proudly mushy romantic-comedy heart.

This cherishable Irish B-picture is one of those rare horror films with an unimprovable premise.

This is a skewer-sharp and scabrously funny film, stuffed with quotable deadpan exchanges, often punctuated by that now-trademark Lanthimos camera manoeuvre, the wide-angle whip pan that seems to ask “now what?”

In every shot, the mix of gritty local colour and artful digital augmentations is riveting: you’re always vaguely aware that what you’re looking at can’t all be real, but the line which splits reality from fantasy is impossible to spot.

The film could have been an indulgent memoir, a scrapbook of a major (if stunted) leading-man career. But seeing so much of it through Kilmer’s own viewfinder gives it both focus and poignancy.

The Butler might bite off more history than it can chew, but it packs a sustained emotional punch, more than a pinch of wit, and a superb performance from Whitaker as a man burning with passion beneath his immaculate, repressed exterior.

Johnson and co-writer Mark Heyman may be exploring familiar territory but they do so with a warmth, subtlety and honesty that marks it out.

The comically impish and frankly outspoken instincts that have served Capaldi so well in the social media age prove a gift for a documentarian. This film is not so much warts and all as twitches, farts, curses and everything else.

The film is inescapably hilarious too, though – such is the weird power of swearing when the swearer can’t keep a lid on it.

This is a complex, bewitching and melancholy drama, another fearlessly intelligent film from Assayas.

Its sombre sincerity and hypnotic, treasure-box beauty make Crimson Peak feel like a film out of time – but Del Toro, his cast and his crew carry it off without a single postmodern prod or smirk. The film wears its heart on its sleeve, along with its soul and most of its intestines.

Southside With You all but begs you to unpick every line and gesture for shivery echoes of the future, and it’s to first-time writer-director Tanne’s credit – and, equally, that of his perfectly chosen leads, Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter – that the film not only withstands but thrives under such scrutiny.

Beatty’s casting of Collins and Ehrenreich is inspired: it’s easy to imagine both of these beautiful young things thriving in the Hollywood of the 1950s and 60s, in much the same way Beatty himself did.

Encounter is bugged-out science fiction paranoia, stylish and sinewy, with an opening sequence that may have you bolting for the door, or at least the remote control.

While the plot is straightforward, characters are well-drawn, many defined by ironic delusions.

It’s the kind of handsome, rousing, rigorous entertainment you can’t help but play along with.

The Velvet Underground is not the kind of music documentary that dutifully walks the viewer through the greatest hits and bitterest feuds. Instead, it re-conjures the moment that made the hits possible and the feuds inevitable, via a whirl of archive footage and interviews new and old.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s epic drama springs off the success of Black Panther and roars into action: it’s every bit as propulsive, as detailed, as richly imagined. It’s fast, and it’s loose, and it totally works.

Both actors, unfazed by the sheer oddity of their task, rise energetically to the occasion.

An acutely compassionate account of unshakeable guilt.

Garrone knows exactly where he’s leaving both his heroes and his audience: on the agonising cusp of a happily-ever-after his film makes you want to will into existence.

Seyfried reads the tone of this hokum better than anyone, and knows restraint is hardly called for, using every excuse in the book to go completely bananas.

There is something about the cast’s doughy physiques that has allowed Park’s flair for caricature to run completely berserk, with every character model pushed right to its expressive limits.

Writer-director Jeremy Lovering, in his feature debut, keeps a skilful handle on technique — his film is a calling card that could give you paper cuts.

There is also a wonderful range of archive materials apparently dug out from Sievey’s cellar, including footage of Frank’s transfixingly odd appearances on Saturday morning children’s television, skulking around behind Andy Crane on Motormouth and riffing with Andrea Arnold on No. 73.

Çatak’s film turns out to be less intrigued by where the missing money actually goes than how the school reacts to its disappearance: as a sort of loose organism purging itself of impurities as its collective survival instinct kicks in. It’s a sound lesson in politics – or is it biology? – but more importantly, it’s a chalk-snappingly tense watch.

It would be near-impossible to love Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women more than Greta Gerwig does.

Hawaiian waves crash over a high-calibre Hollywood prestige drama, sharp and sobering, with top-drawer work from Lancaster, Clift and Sinatra.

Coppola’s uproarious and bitingly timely film feels every inch a necessary artwork.

The mood flits between solemn and rascally, and the pacing is measured: this is storytelling at a mosey rather than a trot.

For all its baroque pomp, though, McQueen intuits the one unspoken terror – loneliness – which nudged this fascinating artist into the void.

Audiard’s trick is to make the overblown mélange into something amazingly confident – it’s clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful and absolutely bonkers. It’s hard to believe he pulls it off, but he does.

The World’s End is a fitting end to the trilogy: it is by turns trashy, poignant and gut-bustingly funny, and often all three at once.

At a time when the corporation’s live-action output keeps doubling down on the franchise grind, here from just over the garden fence is a lesson in storytelling that feels at once elegantly classical and zingily fresh.

It’s an absorbing blend of comedy and tragedy.

A heady hybrid of comedy, polemic and period crime drama, it could have been scattergun stuff, and there are patches of preachy overkill. Much more often, though, there’s a rollicking drive and focus to it.

Packed to the rafters with musical numbers, this cheerful documentary features moments from films such as Gone with the Wind, Meet Me in St Louis, and Singin' in the Rain - a fun watch, even though it was not as commercially successful as Part I. [01 Nov 2014, p.32]

If Diao’s intent on confounding us, he has the courtesy to do it with frequently astonishing style and verve.

The Limehouse Golem may be hokum, but it’s glorious hokum that brings something fresh to the stale old cadaver of Victorian melodrama.

This film leaves you itching to read a meaty biography, even as it solidly maps out Hepburn’s emotional life, and explains the relationship with trauma which cut her out so well to be a UNICEF ambassador, raising millions for Bosnian war orphans and Somalian famine relief.

What gives the film its lip-smacking, chilli-pepper kick is that we are never entirely certain who is conning whom, or even if what we are watching has any truth to it at all.

The first full run-through of the crisis, in the White House Situation Room, is perhaps a little dry. But as things replay from various angles, the steady build-up of context effectively compounds the tension, and soon we’re every bit as lost as President Elba, desperately searching for clarity in a chain of events that necessarily precludes it.

The first film’s very specific pleasures are comprehensively encored.

Even with the steady supply of clichés and occasional leaps of logic, the dramatic scenes smoulder away nicely.

It serves as a handsome homage while persuasively making the case as its own discrete entity.

From its unshowy script on down, Mississippi Grind is content to rumble along as a character piece, keeping its storytelling loose and unpredictable, like a repeat flick of the dice.

Taken as a speculative romance, and in the right matinee spirit, it’s lushly engaging, with a star pairing that – appropriately – rivets.

For shoestring charm, One Cut of the Dead remains unbeaten, but Final Cut brings off the same hugely satisfying Tetris symphony of emotional and narrative blocks falling into place.

Small-town America is portrayed with gentle, affectionate humour.

There’s lots to enjoy in this aviation disaster thriller slash tropical shoot-em-up, with its uproariously blunt title high on the list.

Where the film moves from compelling to revelatory is in its use of archive footage of Fox – from his films and shows, but also televised personal appearances – to reveal a join-the-dots picture of what was actually going on behind the hot-young-star facade.

Cleaving hard to its road-trip formula, it works out less of an honest-to-goodness plot than Magic Mike, but goes even beyond that wonderfully loose, dexterous movie in feeling sexually liberated. It’s more glammed-up, rising above any element of tawdry exploitation, and is more of an outright comedy.

Like its absurdly named hero, Extraction gets a serious and deeply silly job done in style.

Favreau’s film is a sincere and full-hearted adaptation that returns to Kipling for fresh inspiration, but also knows which elements of the animation are basically now gospel, and comes up with a respectful reconciliation of the two.

First Reformed doesn’t come off as pastiche, or a raking-up of old ideas – largely because Schrader and his cast commit to the project with sharpened and unblinking seriousness, even when the going gets mesmerically weird.

Hit Man trips along on great writing, Linklater’s witty, light-touch direction and a rich sense of place, but what makes it especially pleasurable is Powell and Arjona’s naturally steamy rapport.

Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has followed up one big, awardsy film from last year (Dallas Buyers Club) with another at lightning speed. That was a braver film, but it's the spaciousness of this one that distinguishes it from being just another mechanically pre-ordained adversity narrative.

This uneven but fascinating thriller from Alfred Hitchcock is good - how could it be otherwise - but it is not the director's best. [07 Aug 2010, p.31]

On a first viewing, I wasn’t quite convinced by some of the glitchy japes Bonello deploys here and there . . . But perhaps he wants us to think of the film itself like its torn heroine: a strange machine whose ghost refuses to give up.

Forget computer-generated spandex: that top must be the single most psychologically precise piece of costuming in the entire Marvel project. That it also looks completely at home beside Hemsworth’s scarlet cape and induction-hob breastplate might be the neatest encapsulation to date of the franchise’s charms.

The action always feels rooted in the greater story of the city of Shiraz itself: even a scene as simple as Rahim walking through a shopping centre becomes naturally soundtracked by a musical instrument salesman tuning a dulcimer in his booth.

This Ireland-set fantasy adventure, starring Albert Sharpe and Janet Munro as a father and daughter vying with a local clan of leprechauns is benign and deeply genial stuff. [25 Mar 2020]

The acting, most of it by non-professionals, is at times a little shaky and the sound is patchy. But it's great to see again this bolt of ghetto joy, a kind of updated West Side Story, that shows hip-hop as a living, breathing expression of cultural resistance rather than a crunky, cheerless set of cruddy grunts and boasts from which to make money. [10 Aug 2007, p.29]

The plot, directed by Michael Curtiz, is thin but warm-hearted. [22 Dec 2014]

Demonstrating that cheesy low-budget sci-fi can sometimes be more fun than the blockbuster variety is this spiffing deep-space pastiche of The Magnificent Seven, written by John Sayles and exec-produced by Roger Corman. [11 Nov 2012, p.47]

Plays entertainingly like an Asian version of a Michael Mann film, albeit with the plot of Mean Streets. It's not quite essential, but the deeply felt ending looks like a jumping-off point for all that Wong has made since. [22 Jan 2005]

While the film has a deadly end, Lawman exchanges the typical good vs. evil narrative of Western films for one of moral ambiguity and humanity, and ultimately presents the question of whether murder can ever be justified.

It's loud-mouthed, colourful fun. [18 Apr 2020, p.21]

A hazily enjoyable stoner classic. [02 Feb 2012, p.25]

There's not much in the way of plot, but it's a fun musical, blending live action and animation to great effect, as Jerry from Tom and Jerry joins Kelly for a dance sequence. [01 Feb 2014, p.36]

The shock of seeing tough guy De Niro as suburban dad Frank, falling in love with suburban mum Meryl Streep after a chance encounter, was insurmountable for some film goers. But time and distance lend this modern Brief Encounter (with added adultery) a certain glow and De Niro and Streep repeat the chemistry they first showed in the Deer Hunter. They were born to act together.

It's bawdy, sexy, gory, schlocky, and rollicks along at a cracking pace. [28 Feb 2014]

Centered on Mara Wilson's extraordinary young girl Matilda, the kooky fantasy is comprised of charm, warmth and screwball comedy.

This Prohibition-set noir, directed by Byron Haskin, stars Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth Scott, ably supported by Kirk Douglas, in the first of seven films he made with Haskin. Rumrunners Douglas and Lancaster run a thriving racket until one night they approach a police roadblock while carrying a fresh supply of hooch. They double their luck by splitting it up and rip-roaring chase kicks off. [03 Jun 2020, p.31]

Taken on its entertainingly trashy terms, Espinosa’s film does most of the things you want from it quite well, at least until a gotcha ending which doesn’t getcha.

Benedict Cumberbatch is inspiredly cast, serving up a technically ingenious performance which may be his juiciest ever.

This defiantly blank canvas may strike you as a puzzling, even a dubious, heroine, but Ryder’s terrific. And at least she has the last laugh: no one can get their graffiti to stick.

It’s a chewy watch, heavy on the socio-political carbs, and its method can be a little exhausting. But its determination to do right by its subject – and Gitai’s own country too – is soberly compelling.

Midway will never be mistaken for a classic, and even box office success for the $100 independent production looks dicey. Stretches of the film work beautifully, though, and the sinking feeling for Japan’s forces is painted with sympathy, not schadenfreude.