But in its best moments, there’s a yarn-spinning intimacy to it too – an old war story told around a spectacular campfire.

It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.

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.

In the annual way of these things, Office Christmas Party is something you might regret not dropping in on, but you could cut your losses after an hour or so, and only miss sordid carnage and a sore head.

The level of not very funny things this entails, even by the standards of barely-awaited sequels to lowbrow Yuletide comedies, is kind of impressive.

It’s considerably too polite to do Philip Roth justice. Only in that single tête-à-tête does it truly crackle with the cold, white heat required.

There’s half an argument that this schlocky lowlife caper energises its director’s visual imagination more than we’ve seen lately – hey, at least he’s trying something – but it’s not a juggling feat he can keep up all day.

Intertwining, Altman-esque social tapestries are all well and good, but the connections between characters should ideally run a little deeper than having them occasionally stroll past each other in the street.

Allied, swathed in larger-than-life, luxurious imposture, is the real heart-racing deal.

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

Incendies is no one’s idea of a joyful ride, but it’s a remarkable work, and its complex story etches itself on the memory.

It's just a shame the whole thing is so steeped in honkingly signposted feelgood sentiment.

It’s almost certain to be the most existentially probing talking animal cartoon of the year.

As a thriller, it’s lethargically paced, uninspiringly edited, and hardly raises your pulse even during life-or-death mano-a-mano.

For a comedy about a tribe of manic homunculi with nylon faux-hawks, it’s really got to be counted a pleasant surprise.

Put simply, you care about the Katwe kids because he does, and in the same way, too – not with high-strung melodramatic concern, but a warm glow of empathy in your gut. That’s stoked up in part by the film’s keen eye for telling, truthful-feeling detail.

It’s Herzog’s uncertainty as a tourist in the field that gives the film its enticing charge, as surely as his wanderings in the Antarctic, or gropings in the dark to find the world’s oldest cave paintings.

The one thing there’s no accounting for in The Accountant is taste.

The only way to understand it is to swim in it for yourself, feel your own heart braid around these two interwoven lives, and gaze up in awe at the silvery arc those falling stars trace across the sky.

An emotional pounding this brutal leaves you yearning for a little softness, and by the time the film’s ending rolls around, a scene which by rights should be overly sentimental...feels not only allowable, but blissfully, cathartically welcome.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Doctor Strange, within the lockstep rubric of these things, is how non-Marvelly it manages to feel.

Far more than his previous films, which tend to unfold in a dream-like daze, Free Fire is a mad contraption, bristling with bravado and black, sardonic wit.

A densely funny, lovingly orchestrated hour and a half of amiable chaos.

The script never lunges for cheap drama by forcing Saroo into a binary choice between mothers, and the most complex beats are about tip-toeing around, often counter-productively, to avoid hurt or betrayal.

Both the sweetest and the funniest performer is Love and Friendship’s Tom Bennett, endearingly innocent and dreadfully coiffed as a third-generation British hedgehog gently upgrading from his dad’s tired routines.

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

While the plot’s endless lurches and jinks are designed to hold you in a constant state of pleasurable bafflement, the cumulative effect is desensitisation: no single thread holds long enough to give you anything to cheer for or believe in.

Theoretically, getting to see Peña and Skarsgård goof around with these leading roles is the film’s headline draw; but the script is so misguidedly pleased with itself, all you’re doing is watching two amiable stars mug strenuously and try their best.

In the grizzled spectacle Gibson willingly makes of himself, it has a B-movie equivalent of that A-plus Mickey Rourke comeback, delivered with just enough clout to count as a step in the right direction.

There’s only so much lovable bad behaviour you really want to indulge them in now.

Moonlight, the new film from Barry Jenkins, is a nuclear-fission-strength heartbreaker. It’s made up of moments so slight and incidental they’re sub-molecular – but they release enough heat and light to swallow whole cities at a stroke.

It’s as if the book has been given a full-body massage en route to the screen, teasing away some of the spinal kinks that actually made it interesting.

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

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.

The film ends exactly one scene too late, lessening the brutal statement its ending might have made. But these really aren’t deal-breakers in a crisp bullseye of a debut feature which has guts and brains to spare.

It’s another flick through a familiar and by-now bulging scrapbook, but it leaves you craving less – and more.

Berg’s favourite subject...is heroism at the brink, but the rescue efforts here aren’t pushed to the outsize or sentimental extremes they might have been.

Struggling with tone and urgency during its recruiting phase, the film clomps along to a pedestrian drum-roll, summoning a stark, brooding edge without quite enough lift-off.

Though the movie offers no new bombshells the filmmakers have nonetheless wrought a spare and unflinching feature that offers a fresh perspective on Knox without descending into the sensationalism that attended original coverage of the trial.

[Zlotowski] creates a situation, casts it perfectly, and backs out of a fully achieved story. As drama, it’s coitus interruptus, with a Geiger counter doing the interrupting.

This is a fascinating and outrageous next step for Escalante, with a strong central concept and some oozily plausible special effects. It’s just a pity that its human side doesn’t measure up to its inhuman one.

Pike and Oyelowo have a hearty, wholemeal chemistry together, and play their small moments with sincerity and a light elegance.

Blair Witch styles itself as a love-letter, but it’s pure transcription.

Its conclusions rarely make your head spin, but it meticulously shows its working out. (If it was an exam paper, it’d be impossible to dock it any marks.)

Everything that works in Nocturnal Animals is intoxicating, provocative, delicious – and happily, so is everything that doesn’t.

Hacksaw Ridge is a fantastically moving and bruising war film that hits you like a raw topside of beef in the face – a kind of primary-coloured Guernica that flourishes on a big screen with a crowd.

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

It's a comeback you root for, then, even while it’s wobbling and occasionally falling in the mud. But goodwill gets it home.

The problem with Sausage Party is that, for all the silliness, it so desperately wants to be taken seriously. What should have been a shamelessly filthy stoner movie has been watered down with ill-judged, undergraduate musings on religion, philosophy and race.

Hansen-Løve and Huppert cup a single life in their hands and ponder the mixed blessing of freedom from a philosophical position: the trade-off between self-sufficiency and aloneness that Nathalie finds herself negotiating.

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.

This is riveting, dizzying stuff from Villeneuve.

La La Land wants to remind us how beautiful the half-forgotten dreams of the old days can be – the ones made up of nothing more than faces, music, romance and movement. It has its head in the stars, and for a little over two wonderstruck hours, it lifts you up there too.

Nothing here looks like a genuine interaction between real human beings: Spacey may be the first actor to give a comedic performance in which his own smile looks like it had to be green-screened in at a later date.

For the usually irrepressible Miike, it’s remarkably controlled, even restrained. And yet it involves 200 bodyguards being annihilated every which way, in a sustained frenzy of blistering choreographic skill that Hollywood won’t top all year.

Byrne’s film is concerned with the process and practice of myth-making: the way the right person, or action, or face, can capture a moment, or galvanise a movement – and, for both good and ill, transform politics into something like art.

This is high adventure in safe hands.

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.

As a film, Tallulah has a bedrock of grounded, believable performances to latch onto, but makes the mistake of grasping after crude types and abstract themes instead.

This prodding, acidic, bumpy-but-worthwhile movie is about even the world’s consenting creatures winding up with nothing they really wanted, while a dog submits to human will just to make us feel like we’re the ones in charge.

Nerve zips along, looks really smashing and has the mental wiring of a hyperactive squirrel. You may well risk it anyway.

Collet-Serra’s rigorous craftsmanship and Lively’s muscular-in-every-sense movie-star performance – the film takes Olympic-level pleasure in watching her swimming, leaping, fighting, scrambling, enduring – ensure every attack and counterattack convulses and grips.

Give the film this much: it’s egalitarian in its imbecility.

Happily, what’s in no short supply is the same mix of uproarious failure and sledgehammer pathos that Brent at his best was always all about.

When you compare Suicide Squad to what James Gunn and Marvel Studios achieved in Guardians of the Galaxy – low-profile property, oddball characters, make-it-fun brief – the film makes you cringe so hard your teeth come loose. But it’s a slog even on its own crushingly puerile terms.

Hunting Bourne is more than ever a business now, with a bottom line to worry about, a crowd to please, and presumably hasty deadlines to meet. It’s not that there’s no pause for thought in this still-good-fun episode. There’s just not enough thought in the pauses.

An artistic spin on tragedy that’s deft, witty, very well-acted, and more diverting than it is profound.

In fairness to Beyond, it makes very few promises it can't keep, but also goes halfway out on every limb it can find, risking next to nothing.

Robbie lights up her scenes with the much more special effect of raw personality.

Constructed to fool the viewer with layer upon layer of lame cheats and moth-eaten devices, the film has nothing on its mind but sinking you gently into an in-flight stupor.

Don’t underestimate the knitwear in Maggie’s Plan. This comedy from Rebecca Miller says more about the human condition through its cardigans than most films this summer have managed in their scripts.

Keanu is cool and breezy enough to live up to its title amply.

A seamless patchwork of reminiscences, tracing John’s voyage into darkness with an astute and sensitive cinematic imagination.

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

You’ve seen almost everything here before, but never within the same film.

While you can’t imagine the film ever making it to Cannes under anything other than its own steam, the jaunt proves to be a surprisingly worthwhile one.

There may not have been such an awkwardly homoerotic bromance-seduction on film since Jim Carrey molested Matthew Broderick in The Cable Guy, but it’s one of Central Intelligence’s redeeming features that it’s generously forgiving, rather than nastily phobic, of Bob’s quirks.

We may not be convinced by Ben’s backstory, but we believe in his tense, uneasy friendship with Trevor.

Arriving under the radar, The Meddler is a surprise treat. Go see it with your mother.

It’s utterly ridiculous – and impossible to resist.

Perhaps this meeting of suspicious minds really was an unsung crux of modern American history, but Elvis & Nixon feels like a trifle about a trifle.

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.

This isn’t just lazy, it’s borderline nonsensical. Resurgence inflates the scale of the alien threat to such a preposterous degree – the mothership takes up roughly an eighth of the Earth’s total surface – that the queues of honking traffic and rooftop helicopter rescues we’re supposed to invest in can’t help but feel like microscopic trifles.

The level of psychological nuance in Desch’s script, not to mention feminist enlightenment, makes EL James look like Virginia Woolf.

It’s a film whose final shape feels dwindled by compromise – not unappealing, but stymied, like a luxury jet which spends two hours taxiing on the runway.

Navigates tricky emotional territory with a perceptiveness and tact that isn’t just great storytelling, but could be a real comfort to parents and children alike who unexpectedly see themselves in Dory’s plight.

There’s gentle manipulation, and then there’s having your arms manacled to a freight train of weepy catharsis, which is roughly the experience awaiting viewers of Me Before You.

Would The Do-Over be a spectacular triumph if it’s two stars had played the material relatively straight? Probably not. But the terrible jokes wouldn’t have got in the way of all that plot.

The whole business, this time, is passable eye candy without being any kind of brain candy.

The pristine setting never meshes with Jones’s efforts to give emotional reality to his army of characters, who cannot escape their tropes: leader, hero, warrior woman, mystic.

The intergenerational debate underlying Graduation does throw novel wrinkles into the mix.

On this present occasion, Farhadi may hardly be reinventing himself, but his old tools serve him just fine.

The Ones Below is a creepy genre exercise by a craftsman finding his groove.

Gibney’s problem here, in a way, is his main point: the very lack of transparency about these missions, which operate in ill-defined spheres of international law, obstructs informed public discussion.

Elle forces you to critically confront every myth it indulges, every cliché it embraces and subverts.

No director working today observes family life with such delicacy and care, or is so unstintingly generous with what they find.

Staying Vertical is a script by a hot talent never quite getting round to being fully written, and instead disappearing down a series of suggestive dead ends.

Slack Bay is half as long as Quinquin, but still feels too long. Major ensemble scenes (a family banquet, a service on the beach) dawdle indulgently, as if waiting for the joke to start.