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.

I’ve always enjoyed the idea of the Fast & Furious films more than their execution, but this feels like the series’ strongest, even though some of its action sequences are so muddled they can barely walk straight.

For all its flashes of ingenuity, The Voices is secretly more scared than scary, lacking the truly disturbing ambition to get real.

Wild Card, which keeps giving the Stath too much mannered hard-boiled dialogue for his own good, is a promising blend of components that don’t quite end up gelling.

A garbled mélange of arbitrary, unsatisfying action and token remorse.

This tale, more mechanical than human, is finally beyond [Bier's] skillset: it required ruthless tinkering, not the softly-softly approach.

This underdeveloped offering barely lifts itself off the drawing board.

The film’s secret isn’t much of a secret at all. It just remembers why Neeson was such an oddly inspired choice for a grimy revenge thriller back in 2008 and does its best to repeat the trick.

It plays like a listless mash-up of every Young Adult franchise movie you’ve ever seen – domineering rulers, anguished, system-smashing teens, and all the purposeful striding through rubble you can handle.

Well-played and divertingly handsome, it’s one of those pedigreed visions of love and war which backs away from specifics, reassuring us almost to death with its lavish craft. It’s thoroughly easy to sit through, when it should probably have been harder.

Hyena doesn’t stint on creating a grubbily repellent universe, but it never gives us one solid reason to stick around.

It’s Akhavan’s presence that elevates it above a crowded field. Her film’s a little bit different from the norm, and that – for now – is promising enough.

Longinotto and editor Ollie Huddleston stitch it, with lightness and dexterity, into a wholly edifying, often stirring tapestry of survivors’ stories.

Woodley is the teen angst poster girl de nos jours, but this performance is subtler and richer than any other she’s given to date.

Jeremy Renner is superb as a reporter ruined by his biggest story, but The Parallax View this isn't.

Mawkishness, gay panic, and lazy jokes make Vince Vaughn's workplace comedy considerably less fun than work itself.

It’s a brawny, inventive action romp that’s as happy firing rockets at helicopters as it is contemplating the Cartesian model of mind-body dualism, which gives it a satisfying, sweet-and-sour tang of its own.

The film goes for broke with such a careening lack of inhibition, it definitely ends up in the fun zone.

Smith makes Nicky too obviously insincere, with a grating, gloomy edge – which means he never suckers you in, and the fun dries up before it ever starts.

A social conscience movie with real cinematic bite.

In this wildly promising debut feature from the 36-year-old British filmmaker Daniel Wolfe, the landscape becomes a kind of holy sanctuary for two young lovers fleeing a murderous plot.

Considering these characters are bounced round like pinballs, it’s amazing Hawke and the hitherto unknown Snook gain the emotional traction they do: even those struggling to keep up can’t fail to notice how these two are burnt, figuratively and literally, by their experiences.

The Wedding Ringer is offensive, insincere and far, far too long. Oh, and there is not a single funny moment. In short, it has all the charm of a catastrophic best man’s speech.

Only Michael Mann could have made it. And thank goodness he did.

Strange as it sounds – and is – Kumiko comprises a lingering display of empathy for its heroine, marching stridently on through her own peculiar headspace.

[Aniston's] the one element keeping this unexceptional dramedy halfway watchable.

Its success may depend on how alert you’re feeling, but for once you can’t complain that a movie hasn’t given your synapses a thorough workout.

[Sachs'] subtle, often quite special film shows us a shared life as a series of impositions: sometimes we’re imposed upon, and sometimes we do the imposing, and love is the net result.

For long periods, it is just Tipton and Teller on screen together and it is testament to the fizzing chemistry between them that their evolving relationship remains compelling.

The trouble with Dean Israelite’s film is that it’s far more excited about the shallow possibilities of cheating the fourth dimension than the infinitely scarier ones of messing it all up.

We all know Smith can deliver barbs like blow-darts, but Parker’s screenplay gives her a too-rare chance to do something more – and when she delivers a bittersweet, profound monologue towards the end of the film, it feels like you’re watching a classic Ferrari reach the end of an average speed check zone and whistle off into the distance.

Very little is out of place in Branagh’s do-over, but that’s almost a problem: there’s a feeling, throughout, of going perfectly through the motions. The film is all smoothly-operated crane shots, excellent hair, gleaming teeth. Originality is the glass slipper it never even tries on.

Great art it's not – but it's frisky, in charge of itself, and about as keenly felt a vision of this S&M power game we could realistically have expected to see.

Cinema-goers desperately need a fresh, unusual and franchise-free blockbuster to rally behind, but Jupiter Ascending isn’t it.

The film seems to think the mere presence of Mirren as a wisecracking widow will be enough for us to forgive it a multitude of sins.

This is Holmes intentionally slowed down to a hobbling, reflective, end-of-life pace: dare we call it refreshing? It’s a film to rummage around in, picking up old clues, considering their meaning, and turning them in your palm.

Whatever Muse drives Malick, whose best work feels both found – in the sense of discovered in the shoot and edit – and profound, he could be accused of cheating on her in Knight of Cups, leapfrogging between unsatisfactory short-term conquests. His career is quite a journey, but this episode has an empty tank.

]Herzog's] film has the distinction, and also the disadvantage, of being probably the least severe Herzog has yet made: it’s pretty and watchable, with Kidman trying her heartfelt best, but it can’t make its Gertrude Bell, as lover, cultural pioneer and feminist icon, add up to more than a series of voguish poster-girl poses.

It bombards you with overwritten monologues and try-hard music cues in an attempt to drown out its dramatic shortcomings.

Having your heart in the right place isn’t much use, if you’ve forgotten your head somewhere up Sugarloaf Mountain.

The wonder of stop-motion is the mountain of effort required to achieve even the smallest movement. The charm of Shaun the Sheep is that you don’t notice it for a moment.

Admittedly modest, but the epitome of jolly, this is like the companionable second volume of an autobiography in film form – you'll whip through it in no time, and come out wanting more.

Hoffman's performance has a sadness, an unexplained loneliness, which gives this slightly diffident piece a centre of sorts, and there's a pleasing air of melancholy all round.

A psychotically unfunny art-heist romp.

This is bewitchingly smart science fiction of a type that’s all too rare. Its intelligence is anything but artificial.

It tests our presumptions, makes us squirm.

The vignettes of rule-breaking and social exclusion have a funny and stinging force.

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.

Eastwood doesn’t care about the legend. Instead, he shows us Kyle much as he saw his targets: with that strange combination of extreme intimacy and extreme remove that a long-range sight confers.

As a film, Testament of Youth glimmers with sadness, but also the apprehension of sadness: we know not all of these boys are coming back.

There are clever and sensitive touches right through, and a moving ending. But Fanning seems wholly uncomfortable, and not always intentionally.

Each individual moment in the film barely seems to be on speaking terms with the rest.

It’s murky and unsatisfying.

Every punchline is followed by a quiet pause for audience laughter, the lengths of which might kindly be described as optimistic.

It’s a sturdy, straight tribute to an undertaking that feels wacky, quixotic and heroically mad – proving little that it set out to prove, but a great deal accidentally, about resourcefulness and survival in extremis.

The third Night at the Museum film starts strongly, with its heart in the past... It’s an exciting opening, and perhaps too exciting for the film’s own good. It’s hard not to be disappointed when the plot moves back to the present and settles into the time-honoured formula of digitised creatures running riot and famous people in fancy dress doing shtick.

The film is a whirl of pure pleasure that just keeps whirling: Sondheim doesn’t write show-stoppers but show-surgers, and from the moment the glorious opening number whips up, introducing the central players, the film cartwheels onwards until it lands at its unexpected but quite beautiful happy-ever-after.

Amid the bungles, Collins is a bright spark.

You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, and there’s a lot of smooth here. Jim Broadbent has the balance of jollity and melancholy just right as Santa.

The film’s stark realism and bruising impact are enough in themselves, but the risk, and the real artistic payoff, is its bold sensory plunge into this Hadean inferno.

David Oyelowo has never given a better performance. He seems to penetrate into King’s soul and camps out there for two hours. He’s tremendous, of course, when electrifying his congregation at the podium, but a sense of fatigue is even more paramount.

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.

The trouble is that Jackson can’t make it mean very much: when every life on Middle Earth is seemingly at stake, few individually grab our attention.

The film settles into a Forrest Gumpian groove that doesn’t glorify the human spirit so much as sap it.

This is bold and uncompromising stuff from Scott; a Biblical epic to shake your faith in the order of things, not reaffirm it.

This is the problem with being held hostage in the worst studio comedy of the year: for cast and audience alike, there’s little to do but wait for it to stop.

Farhadi’s films are like moral whodunits, and as Sepideh and her friends gradually unearth the truth, he expertly buffets our sympathies in all directions until the very last shot.

Serious as Paddington is about meaning something, it’s even more serious about the business of having fun.

Night Will Fall isn’t simply a film about the war, it documents the power of emerging technologies to reveal and publicise war crimes - something that also feels acutely relevant today.

There’s no question The Rewrite is underpinned by the same story mechanisms it draws attention to... But there are moments here when sunlight breaks through the shtick.

Mockingjay – Part 1 is all queue, no roller-coaster. The third of four films in the successful and admirable Hunger Games series is any number of good things: intense, stylish, topical, well-acted. But the one thing it could never be called is satisfying.

It’s a nocturnal fantasy, seductive and ablaze with threat.

Nothing here is raw enough for the strength of the brothers’ bond and the weight of their sacrifice to really bite.

Interstellar is Nolan’s best and most brazenly ambitious film to date.

Poitras sets the saga on a low simmer, while the Social Network-like score throbs away.

A melding of old and new modes of animation, in which the attentive artistry of the past coexists with the hyper-detailed, computer-generated present.

Any Hollywood gloss has been scoured away: the plot is raw, episodic and wholly unsentimental; a gruelling onward rumble from one brush with death to the next.

The film thrives on unsettling images of overgrowth and rot, such as the dead flower that drops at Kerr’s touch, and the beetle that crawls obscenely out of the mouth of a cherub statue.

The film is stupendous: as antic as Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love, but with The Master and There Will Be Blood’s uncanny feel for the swell and ebb of history.

If they had to give Drac an “origin story” this literal-minded, at least they had the sense to keep it keen and lively, whittled to a point.

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

Fuqua’s film is lacking much of an intelligible plot other than “tough hombre rights wrongs in ways pushing the boundaries of a 15 rating”.

In a memorably bad summer for children’s films, this, surely, is as low as things can sink.

For all its simmering malice and buried secrets, it’s worth remembering that this is David Fincher in fun mode: unnerving, shocking and provoking for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, but mostly sickness.

The film is not a total disaster, however. There is a captivating, unsettling climax and some impressive supporting performances.

There is a beguiling, melancholic quality to the film, mirroring Cave’s personality.

Baumbach packs his film with the wit and vigour of a polished one-act play, right down to a climax which wants us to notice how much juggling he’s doing with his ideas.

It’s certainly Redmayne’s film, and his performance is everything you could ask for: completely convincing in its physicality, credible in its pain, and warmly but not crassly optimistic in its nearly constant good temper.

It’s extremely moving in the gentlest, most linear way, and the other performances are sterling, too.

Some of the supporting performances are so hammily spiteful and giggly they let the side down, but the film is perfectly cast in its main roles.

Maguire tries hard, and has a good stab at Fischer’s twitchy rage, but can’t bring much freshness or specificity to anything else.

Ferrara has come up with something pretty special here: a subtle, seductive, lamp-lit hymn to one artist’s talents from another in the process of rediscovering his own.

The film’s a satirical thriller, which is a novel enough entity in itself these days; it has a pungent, can’t-miss-the-point premise, and a big, weird, sharkish performance from Jake Gyllenhaal powering it up. It’s a must-see and a must-talk-about film, electrically overblown in the moment, if not wholly in control of its pay-off.

A searching, timely drama about the dehumanising effects of waging war at a distance.

Strickland has made something uniquely sexy and strange, built on two tremendous central performances and a bone-deep understanding of cinema’s magic and mechanisms.

Director Joe (Gremlins) Dante delivers some terrific spine-tingling chills on the way towards a disappointingly overblown climax.

It feels less like a real Dante film than a dashed-off counterfeit.

The two who do succeed in forging a convincing bond are Bateman and a spry, switched-on Driver, as brothers with a significant age gap who get each other and tend to join forces against the surrounding tumult.