Sweet Country is tough, spare and lyrical right down to the bone.... It is also a work of moral conscience that rules out easy answers, with acridly funny moments of black comedy and a sense of awesome natural spectacle that is inseparable from its dramatic impact. It has a power that makes the cinema shake.

The film’s messaging, heavy-handed as it can be, has some firework moments that might really spark the imagination.

The film is unquestionably a curio for converts rather than the meatier exploration it will leave many sceptics (including this one) hankering after, but it leaves you with plenty to chew on – along with that Satanic cadence echoing in your bones.

Once the initial thrill wears off, it’s a hollow kind of fun, which is almost certainly the point.

More than the sets or spectacle, Vikander pulls you into her picture, as if we’ve signed up for a special edition of the game where Lara Croft has only one life to spare, one go to get it right. It’s not rocket science, just an elementary way to make us sit up and care.

Perhaps the play’s overfamiliarity is the one thing holding this back in the end: you’re expecting it to cross the barrier from solid to gut-wrenching, and that never quite happens.

The movie achieves a take-it-or-leave-it watchability without being much to look at, and as a nominal thrill ride, it’s underpowered.

It all feels grindingly perfunctory – gloopy with jargon and lore, and with no concessions made to newcomers, the film feels less like a worthwhile film in its own right than an invitation to existing fans to buy a ticket, just to see how things turned out.

It’s not all bad: no film with this cast could ever fail entirely. Staunton makes you root for Sandra even at her worst, and Imrie offers an impish, joyous counterbalance to her pursed-lip disapproval.

It’s rough, to say the least, and that’s not just a matter of hasty visuals: the whole thing feels provisional and half-hearted, like a scrunched-up charcoal sketch.

Jones conjured intimacy on the surface of the moon, but in the crowded streets of futuristic Berlin, there’s no real feeling.

It’s unlikely to change anyone’s life, exactly, but it’s genial, funny, and invigorating.

This is by some measure Anderson’s weirdest concoction ever, in all sorts of good ways. And it probably counts as his most daring, too.

This is a film in which one of the more emotionally detailed performances is given by a product-placement Audi.

As with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or Coogler’s 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed, Black Panther isn’t a novelty, but a fresh perspective on a well-worn format. Not to get all Rosa Parks about it, but the film walks into the multiplex like it’s insane that it hasn’t been allowed in there all along. And it is.

As 2017’s gripping and confidently philosophical Life proved, it’s possible to weave an original action movie from the smelly-people-trapped-in-space cliche. Yet The Cloverfield Paradox’s take on the genre is ham-fisted, with deafening bursts of exposition strewn between endless, talky, tedium.

The film has about five sets and they never feel like they connect together, but this is less an attempt at disorienting the viewer than simply cutting corners; the grisly, overdone lighting, meanwhile, makes you want to hide behind your fingers for all the wrong reasons.

It’s the character dynamics here, more than the dark and stormy set-pieces, that get things off the ground.

For all its seeming modesty, this is a mature, contemplative and mostly rewarding experiment: no awards-season bruiser, but a worthwhile B-side for Ashby’s venerable American classic.

The Banishment may lack the surprise factor of The Return but it's more mature and less wedded to virtuosic technique.

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.

The film passes the time with breezy good cheer and the odd well-wrangled cringe, but fades from memory in much the same way. There’s just nothing about this guy that gives you cause to remember him.

And there’s a hidden triumph in the supporting cast from the always-reliable character actor Bill Camp (Black Mass, Midnight Special), whose spectacular, hideously convincing wipe-out as a guy called Harlan Eustice, in the course of a single night, sets much of the plot in motion.

All in all, a hugely enjoyable, sumptuous adaptation that, while never attempting to break the Christie mould, imbued the story with a pleasingly contemporary feel.

In its present form – hyperactive, dopey, and hammered into shape like a Hollywood sitcom – it’s a passable school holiday jaunt.

Like most aspects of the film’s mythology, the whole Bright business feels like the non-brainwave of a random plot generator – a will-this-do device Landis barely integrates into his wider story. As a choice for the film’s title, it’s singular, but silly.

But the only sense of wonder the film instils is this: if we have to wait so long between movie musicals, who on earth thought it would be a good idea to wait for this one?

There’s nothing you could call an actual emotion in store, just an awful lot of face-pulling.

As ever with Scott, the film unfolds in a richly realised world and moves with an addictive, free-wheeling swagger. And his four main actors – Williams, Wahlberg and the Plummers old and young – have all been astutely cast.

The backdrop to this very English marriage – soot and grit and survival, and that basenote of touching bafflement – means all the tears are earned.

It’s less Star Wars as you’ve never seen it than Star Wars as you’ve never felt it.

Blade is arguably too much of a good thing. But hey, that’s immortality for you.

The odd scenarios keep coming, fast and thick. Phantom Thread is built along the theoretically familiar lines of gothic romance – if you had to pick a predecessor, it would probably be Hitchcock’s Rebecca – but it’s very hard in the moment to work out where on earth it’s going, or even how conventionally romantic Reynolds and Alma’s relationship actually is.

Shot and edited by Spielberg and his team in less than six months, The Post is very evidently a strike-while-the-story’s-hot kind of project, and it finds the master filmmaker at his most thrillingly supple and intuitive.

Mudbound’s brutal climax is a shock and an affront in all the ways it must be – and though the film is a little wobbly up front, it’s fully worth wading through.

It’s here to burnish one performer’s legend while laying the foundations of another’s. But there’s still lots of fun to be had in its twisting, telescoping hall of mirrors.

It feels like a sheepish feature-length retraction of the franchise to date. It’s consistently embarrassing to watch, and features plot holes so yawningly vast they have a kind of Grand Canyon-like splendour: part of you wants to hang around to see what they look like at sunset.

Nodding in that direction without going for broke, the film becomes an open-ended saga about rejecting family to pursue your own independent path, and keeps us wondering just how much scorched earth – or flesh, for that matter – Thelma intends to leave behind.

A shade more playfulness would have gone a long way. This Orient Express clatters handsomely along, but I left the cinema wishing it had had the nerve to jump the rails.

Paddington was uncommonly charming and Paddington 2 is very nearly as good.

Stuhlbarg, who’s a treasure throughout, gets a fatherly monologue towards the film’s end that’s so observantly and tenderly performed, you can barely catch your breath. It’s one beautiful moment in a film that’s filled with them – gone in a heartbeat, but leaving the kind of ripples that reach across a lifetime.

Director Christopher Landon, a veteran of the Paranormal Activity series, keeps the energy levels so peppy and the twists coming so unflaggingly, you barely have time to lodge any complaints.

Overegged is the word – there was enough conviction in Radcliffe alone to pull the story through these straits.

Geostorm’s disasters are just barrages of drab, anonymous digi-porridge, with a very occasional unhinged flourish thrown in, such as a stadium that’s struck by lightning and immediately explodes.

The greatest trick this studio wants to pull, at this point, is to make more of the same feel either exhilaratingly fresh, or sufficiently retro-inflected to qualify as a nostalgia trip. As both, Thor: Ragnarok counts as some kind of double peak.

The Snowman goes wrong quickly, permanently, and in a spiral, turning into a nonsensical nightmare of Scandi-noir howlers from which you sometimes feel you may never awaken.

Una is a sparse, icy film fighting a little too hard against the fact that it used to be a play.

That Blade Runner 2049 is a more than worthy sequel to Scott’s first film means it crosses the highest bar anyone could have reasonably set for it, and it distinguishes Villeneuve – who’s masterminded all of this, somehow, since making Arrival – as the most exciting filmmaker working at his level today.

The whole thing reads as an indictment of the sort of upper class upbringing that Milne's children's books idealised, with only paid employees offering worthwhile parental affection.

This crazily overlong and tiresome follow-up...doesn’t seem to have the first idea what to do with itself – not least when it comes to its much-vaunted all-star cast, the majority of whom are barely even in it.

The whole package is still charming on its own cosy terms – the film equivalent of a loveable old hound that fetches your favourite slippers, rolls over for a tickle, curls up on your feet, contentedly passes wind, then nods off.

The canon of Alzheimer’s films doesn’t lack for performances piled up with compassion and fine-grained observation, from Iris all the way to Still Alice. But as their faded Winnebago wends its way to the coast, Ella and John show there’s room for two more.

Frears’ film is all nostalgia and inertia – a tale ablaze with historical import and contemporary resonance, reduced to commemorative biscuit tin proportions.

Scrambling to keep up is part of the fun, but nowhere near as much fun as the parts where the film settles on a good idea for a set-piece and just gallops with it.

American Assassin seems to have a certain target audience in mind, and it’s probably not one you’d want to be considered a part of.

It all makes for soaringly satisfying viewing, yet the satisfaction comes from blistering performances and virtuosic screenwriting, and absolutely nothing else.

Human Flow makes a virtue of its vastness, creating an epic tapestry of souls that stretch from as far away as Syria, Kenya and Burma to the Calais ‘Jungle’ encampment on Britain’s doorstep.

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

As a rattling ghost-train ride through sewers and derelict houses even David Lynch would think twice before exploring, the film toot-toots its way around at often deafening volume, but settles for doing only partial justice to King’s epic ambitions. Perhaps Muschietti has more of these stored up for the sequel, once an audience has gained faith that the scary stuff – petrifying, when it peaks – is well and truly in hand.

A sick joke, an urgent warning and a roar into the abyss, Mother! earns its exclamation mark three times over and more.

It’s a hectic, sour and muddled film – a flailing counterfeit of satire that keeps slipping on its own banana skin supply, and never remotely gets to grips with what it thinks it’s sending up.

Parts of it tingle with a creepy, curtain-parting intimacy.

Like the best bath you’ve ever had, it sends tingles coursing through every part of you that other films don’t reach.

“A person’s a person, no matter how small,” Dr. Seuss once memorably counselled – and that’s as good a binding philosophy as any for Alexander Payne’s exhilaratingly odd new film.

Substance-wise, there might be enough going on here to sustain a five-minute short.

It’s hard to decide whether Annabelle: Creation gains or loses points for this immensely daft set of developments, but surprisingly little damage is done to the business of turning up the scare dial.

It exists in an eerie cinematic in-between, and is completely unlike anything else you’ll see this year.

Its star isn’t exactly overburdened with Hollywood charisma, and its various argumentative manoeuvres are pulled off with the grace of a reversing bin lorry. But it still politely seizes you by the lapels, makes its case with range and precision, and sends you home with a carbon-neutral fire in your chest.

It’s a sad waste, not a wilful one – a misfire you wish was better in virtually every shot.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard simply doesn’t put in the effort, with the result that almost every aspect of the film proves wildly irritating, from its central odd couple to the dubious green-screen work that regularly has them pulling nonchalant faces in front of exploding buildings.

The film’s comedy is loose and generous, and its esprit de corps sneaks up on you with a soft tread.

The film is much too anxious – desperately so – for us to feel that Barry is a fundamentally decent guy.

Once the significant shock of the film fades, what stays with you are its implications – the way it shows division digging in and self-perpetuating like cancer in bone, with each flare-up making the next more grimly probable. This is history retold in the blistering present tense.

It’s not the premise that’s the problem. It’s everything else.

The film has scads of charm and only token gestures at redeeming moral value. That’s why – kind of in the Beano spirit – it’s such a delight.

The film is street-hawking its thesis all over the parish. Had it tried a softer sell, it would have been much more tempting to stop and listen.

While the camaraderie of the Flossy Posse might be raucously imperfect, at least it’s real.

Booth is simply outstanding, weighing up with deep shading the oppressive circumstances that have made Evelyn both torturer and captive, nemesis and potential lifeline.

The film bears its real-world resonance as lightly as a button, thanks both to the steady supply of well-turned one-liners and the rippling chemistry between Nanjiani and a never-better Kazan, who’s so disarmingly funny here that I kept catching myself pulling puppy-dog faces whenever she was on screen.

Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here.... But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.

As dismal to contemplate as it is persistently horrendous to even look at, there aren’t enough Patrick Stewart-voiced emojis in the world to express what an ugly, artless exercise this is.

Valerian is a film to wallow in, not follow, and if you’re tuned to its extra-terrestrial wavelength, you wouldn’t cut a second.

Art was a labour of love for Maud Lewis: that much Lewis’s film makes clear. But by zeroing in on both the love and labour of it, the art itself – and the point of Maud’s life story, by extension – gets exasperatingly short shrift.

The crazy surfeit of style can only go so far to compensate for the story, which is well-nigh impossible to care about.

It’s Deneuve who musses up the formula and makes the film worth seeing, by generously bringing out her inner vulgarian.

Christopher Nolan’s astonishing new film...is a work of heart-hammering intensity and grandeur that demands to be seen on the best and biggest screen within reach. But its spectacle doesn’t stop at the recreations of Second World War combat. Like all great war films, it’s every bit as transfixing up close.

The Art Life shows us a lot about Lynch’s process, just in a different medium from the one that made him famous. His paintings are terrifying. One day, he just had the sudden urge to watch them move.

What’s impressionistic on the page has to be re-sculpted and honed to a point on screen, but the result is that the novel’s tenderly hidden secrets become rather blatant twists.

A little of the new Spider-Man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade, spun off from an initially intriguing premise that deflates around you with a low whine as you watch, like a punctured bouncy castle.

Endless Poetry may not quite live up to its interminable billing, but there’s certainly lots of it, and a little goes a long way indeed. But a long way is the distance Jodorowsky wants to take you.

Willis himself could not appear less enthusiastic in the role, and doesn’t phone in his performance here so much as clip it to a nearby pigeon and hope for the best. Yet perversely, his apparent lack of interest works rather well: McClane, after all, is now a grizzled back-number who has bumbled his way into a younger man’s action movie.

The brothers' mission is like a Spy vs. Spy strip crossed with a Friz Freleng Pink Panther cartoon.... It’s consistently funny, with the kind of well-orchestrated slapstick moments where you can actually feel the stick slap.

Reeves marshals more than his fair share of battle scenes and sweeping set-pieces, but never forgets the flicker of a face can provide all the spectacle that cinema requires.

If you’re not staggered by the technique on display here – the stuff that sets Bay’s work miles above the Fast & Furiouses, X-Men: Apocalypses and Tom Cruise-chasing Mummies of this world – you’re not paying attention.

Confronting the horrors of history head-on can make for cinema that’s impossible to shake, but Katabuchi’s painterly, introspective film proves a sideways approach can be just as indelible.

There’s only so much in this desperately involved historical saga that Chadha and her screenwriters are able to grapple with.

Its fusion of maudlin social commentary and banana-slipping pratfalls is graceless in the extreme: picture an episode of Chucklevision directed by Ken Loach.

This isn’t just good writing, it’s humane and honourable.