The film moves like a pyjama case full of angry weasels, and finds ingenious ways to cram every scene with just one more loopy, disposable gag or slapstick thwack. It may not be the year’s best animated film, but it’s almost certainly the most.

This chamber-horror oddity from the English actress-turned-auteur is too weird, too wonky; intermittently gross, and often gruelling.

The baseline for these things should be a little higher than ‘doesn’t retroactively sour you on its predecessor’. Even today – never mind in another 36 years – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the option of watching the source plumping for thi

It’s a witty and affectionate if rather slight archive documentary.

It’s hard to decide if Black Sea is a good idea put over with sub-par execution, or an iffy idea handled as well as possible in the circumstances.

It is a drama in which, like the constituent parts of a Michelin-star-wannabe dish, every component feels painstakingly tweezered into place.

A large part of the enjoyment comes down to the sheer earth-shaking lunacy of Kong’s daily grind, even before the human intruders are factored in.

This is one of the best mad scientist movies from the Fifties unforgettable moments include the absurd yet horrific image of a fly with a tiny human head, screaming "Help meeee!" [27 Apr 2013, p.32]

Drag is what it is, and drag is what it does.

Mawkishness is kept at bay by the lightness of touch in Ashby's direction and Gordon and Cort's wonderful performances. Only the most miserable cynic could resist its unique charm and ultimate hopefulness.

Middleweight, non-intelligence-insulting fare right to the core, Bleed For This keeps you squarely in your seat, but barely once excites you enough to leap up out of it.

Unashamedly rousing and immaculately crafted, The Swimmers is up there with Creed as a sports drama with more at stake than individual glory – a global-humanist purview to which it ascends without getting the slightest bit preachy.

With the best will in the world, Metz drags us through a labyrinth of intrigue but messes up the crumb trail. We’re left disorientated, and underwhelmed.

As a scratchy string quartet for the four actors, it continues to work surprisingly well – you might hand it back with a B+ in that department. But as a storytelling assignment, it droops little by little into the C zone.

The one inspired idea here is what happens to the minions when they’re injected with serum by the film’s mystery baddie, and this is enough to give us at least a reel’s worth of anarchic pleasure.

On a visual level, the film’s reportage is as tabloidy as its argument, and much more wilfully unpleasant.

Nighy and Mortimer have just a couple of scenes together, but they’re easily the film’s best: both actors sink gratifyingly into the nuances of this incipient friendship, bond over books you actually believe they’ve read, and give the film its best hope of doing Fitzgerald justice.

It's all wickedly tendentious mischief, but when it's this gloriously funny, the points score themselves.

The demented brilliance of Miike’s film lies in the director’s ability to craft ideas that are simultaneously sublime and ridiculous.

Levy ultimately wants to yank the heart-strings more than poke the grey matter. And as Free Guy breaks free from his programming and explores the world on its own terms, the film has lots to say about loyalty, friendship and love.

It’s a nostalgic exercise in burnishing the Stallone brand, with the star on screen half the time in new interviews, between a slew of clips and outtakes.

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

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

This adaptation of Leonard Wibberley's novel, and sequel to The Mouse That Roared satirises the space war, Cold War and politics to varied effect. [07 Dec 2013, p.40]

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.

Historical epics are rarely light on their feet, but The King sets new standards in the field of galumphing: the film moves like a rhinoceros through porridge.

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.

Think of Destroyer as film noir with the brightness turned up. Karyn Kusama’s Los Angeles-set thriller has the bleary, beer-dank air of an overlong house party at which the host has just snapped on the lights: fun’s done folks, now check out the mess.

On Chesil Beach is a non-disaster, essentially, until it falls off a cliff.

It’s an egghead exercise, both scrambled and undercooked.

Exuding more uncertainty than discipline, this wackadoo horror-thriller from German writer-director Tilman Singer can’t decide if wearing a smirk will see it through a sloppily developed plot, which keeps promising more than it delivers.

To everyone’s complaints that Longlegs’ plot turned daft, I can only shrug: it was easily assured enough to sustain a deadly undertow, while dancing about with a diabolical sense of mischief. I also point them to The Monkey as Exhibit A for what misfiring daftness looks like.

Its salvaged parts combine into an internally incongruous but crazily unique whole.

Admirable cause, amateurish film.

For all Neville's undoubted slickness and poise as a filmmaker, Under The Influence displays a fundamental lack of curiosity about the cackling enigma at its heart.

It’s the blockbuster of the summer.

Reflecting the mood of Nixon's America, the film plays on the anxieties of surveillance. [27 Oct 2012, p.36]

Will it enrapture its target audience regardless? It should certainly keep them occupied for a couple of hours, though perhaps more with nodding recognition rather than delight.

Copshop has a certain sub-Tarantino appeal, which is very much the way director Joe Carnahan (Narc, Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team, The Grey) wants to play it.

At a glance, A Boy Called Christmas looks delightful enough, with its snowy landscapes, cosy knitwear, and scenes of Jim Broadbent larking around in a periwig and frock coat. But beneath its Paddington-meets-Potter storybook exterior, its bloodstream runs with purest gloop.

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

It’s far less endearing than we’re presumably meant to think.

Land will give you a craving to be in the great outdoors, maybe before it’s even over.

Does it add up to much? Not really. Not finally. But it’s a suggestive puzzle-box of a picture, worth turning over in your palm.

Vanishing Point is a fantastic chase film, which despite its heavy-handed symbolism, is an absolute must for any movie lover – whether you're a petrol head or not.

Blue might be the warmest colour elsewhere, but here it’s just a bit tepid.

The film has bite without a lot of nuance.

Some of us saw a while ago that turning Avatar into a franchise would prove to be a creative cul-de-sac. Having reached the top of the street three years ago, Cameron spends all of Fire and Ash trying to turn his enormous articulated lorry around. The back-up beeper is beeping, the spinning yellow lights are spinning, and he’s just knocked over his third wheelie bin. I do hope he eventually gets out.

The Informer is one of the year’s more pleasant genre surprises: a clenched fist of a crime thriller in the mode of The Departed or The Town, in which every element is just a notch smarter than you’d expect. Generic though the film may look, it holds together absorbingly, thanks to a sturdy script which ups stakes and adds characters with cunning and intelligence.

This is at the very least a beautifully designed failure, marrying crepuscular photography with faultless art direction, and blessed by a gorgeous, otherworldly score by Augustin Viard, a specialist in the ondes Martenot. It looks and sounds so darkly inviting – but sends you home unsated.

To borrow a screenwriting buzz-phrase, "fun and games" is all you get, and the lack of meaningful connective tissue between the antics means the film begins to flag far earlier than it should.

The legend loses something in the retelling, but what’s new here is mostly worth the trip.

The film is thrillingly reckless enough to make you genuinely dread what’s coming next.

Vogt-Roberts manages the neat trick of making his film feel both nostalgic and current.

It might end up being the most beautiful, moving and all-around-loveliest children’s film of the year.

Elephant is set in a world without poachers, developers or tourists: the picture it paints is beautiful and educative, but doesn’t feel quite complete

Maggie Carey, the writer and director, has plenty to say about life on the cusp of womanhood, but never quite works out a way to make her points without getting her characters to recite them verbatim.

The new film Dog is essentially an hour and three quarters of Channing Tatum rolling around with a dog – and quite frankly, for many of us, that’s enough.

Hunt, who served as editor on the first three Connery films, gives Lazenby’s fist fights a whipcrack intensity and the ski-jumping, stock car-racing, bobsled-sliding finale is one of the series’ best.

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.

A serious-minded, often beautiful, utterly heartfelt character study that nevertheless lacks its astonishing protagonist’s fleet-footedness and only partly captures what made him tick.

It is a head-spinning shock-and-awe satire that comes in hot then cranks up the thermostat to infernal – a Molotov cocktail of biopic, documentary and black comedy, with a thrillingly short fuse.

This is cinema as decathlon – a string of tribulations to sap your stamina and make your ligaments burn.

There’s nothing at all wrong with Respect, which is colourful and pretty well played, other than an overall air of caution – and the thing about Aretha Franklin’s voice is that it really swung for the rafters.

A documentary that couldn't fail to entertain.

The point is that you could watch these films for four hours, then spend 14 arguing about them – about whether sex, for vor Trier, is an eternal human mystery, or a cosmic joke at our expense.

Before, after, and between these (action) sequences, even by the paltry standard of previous scripts, it’s slow-witted and won’t shut up.

The film is awfully methodical, almost mathematical, in working through the various emotional steps every character must take in reaching an end point we readily guess. You appreciate the effort, even as you sense it.

Muppet film number eight is a resounding disappointment: it’s uneven and often grating, with only a few moments of authentic delight, and almost none of the sticky-sweet, toast-and-honey crunch of its vastly enjoyable 2011 forerunner.

Onward may be middle-of-the-pack Pixar but it’s still a real pleasure.

If Lopez’s screen career has often tended towards the unsurprising, well, here is the antidote: perhaps the least predictable film ever made. What’s most exciting about it, though, is that behind the lunacy, so much of it works.

Despite its great cast, this is certainly not one of Hitchcock's triumphs. [28 Sep 2013, p.40]

There is an odd sombreness at the heart of what is effectively a slick, flashy, highly entertaining and otherwise quite superficial career celebration, a quality of unease imparted by Elton himself.

As cautionary tales go, The Front Runner is of an unusually cautious bent. It presents the evidence, then sits back and folds its arms.

If the film had been tightened to two hours of Crowe and Shannon ruthlessly going at it, we might have been mesmerised.

In practical terms, this just means he’s Iron Man with a spray-paint job. The film’s draggy middle act has to confine Jaime in Victoria’s secret lab, or there would be nothing for the non-superpowered rest of his family to do: at long last, he’s pitted against the grievance-harbouring Indestructible Man (Raoul Trujillo) in one of those climactic clashes we know all too well, which is just a slam-bam VFX-off.

Their fans will love the efficient, well-shot concert scenes: but its woeful parallel story suggests bands like Metallica are rarely more than one remove from Spinal Tap.

This is hardly the sound of artistic burnout. No mean videographer either, Hoon departed with a great deal left to say.

The showdown (in the usual abandoned auditorium) is perhaps the campiest yet to be unveiled, proving that a generally-clapped-out franchise is capable of some fairly fun death throes.

In lesser hands, Elysium might have played like a Lib Dem manifesto with extra spaceships, but the South African filmmaker wants to explore ideas, not wave placards, and whether or not you agree with the film’s politics, the fire in its belly is catching.

Scary Stories hits with the scares as much as it misses with the storytelling, levelling out to a glass half full.

The previous X-Men film, First Class, was secure enough in its own skin to embrace its comic side. Mangold’s picture affects a pubescent snarl instead: that’s the difference between comic and daft.

Perhaps a Sicario series would make sense after this, though part of me wants to keep this story for cinema: if the market wants franchises, let’s have more like this, please.

Fennell has a sharp eye for outrage, and an even sharper one for hotness, crafting any number of scenarios and images here that may elicit sotto voce phwoars against your better judgement.

[Burton] never thought acting was a manly profession, and seemed to be involved in a tug-of-war against himself, tangled up by his roots. To have half explored these themes, as Evans’ film does, means we’re left wanting more, but there’s a pleasing ache to the experience as a platonic love story.

As an occasional source of broad and undemanding chuckles, the film doubtless serves its purpose. But the mystery itself unfolds with such plodding expediency that there’s little suspense to speak of.

The more calculated Vaughn’s films are to appeal to his surprisingly rabid fan-base, the more they seem custom-built to repel everyone else.

It’s a candy-coated underworld romp, and pleasingly weird at times – when we’re invited inside Harley’s cutely tattered parlour, no explanation’s given for why she has a stuffed beaver in a pink tutu on her kitchen table. It’s just… the kind of thing she would have. Yan’s film converts her from livid to likeable, and doesn’t give a hoot if you mind.

Finally, a scary fillum that you genuinely, genuinely should watch. It's part werewolf, part Agatha Christie, part blaxploitation. [31 Oct 2013]

Both Fassbender and Vikander explore their characters’ various thorny moral quandaries and shifting states of mind in breath-catching depth, drilling down through the plot’s melodramatic crust to the swirling ethical magma underneath.

Even when the heist gets underway, the film takes its time about everything: what Zahler has essentially done is put a 15-minute mid-blockbuster set-piece on the rack and stretched it out until its cartilage pops. The duration is part of the point – you can’t do gnawing fatalism in a hurry – but the repetitions and languors here can feel presumptuous.

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 Lost City is what could be described as knowingly dated: it’s a film designed to make you regret they don’t make ’em like this any more, even when “this” means escapist Hollywood fluff.

The Commune doesn’t openly stumble so much as constrict itself awkwardly inside its main love triangle, short-changing the terrific supporting cast, and nearly forgetting what we thought it was all about.

It uses some hoary devices to twist your arm, but resistance, eventually, is futile.

It’s a feat of pure cinematic necromancy.

Fortunately, the writing’s sentimental and/or smirky longueurs are remedied by the animation itself, whose cosy charm has a distinctly British sensibility – from the architecture to the landscape and even the colour palettes, everything is satisfyingly just right.

Its jokes, effects and sparkler-bright cast chemistry need nothing to fall back on.