The racing scenes are its one hope of reclaiming your attention, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to justify such a killing duration.

It’s a stunningly confident piece of filmmaking, which holds on to vital clues about how much time has elapsed, and what’s happened, then springs them on us. The performances slay you.

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.

If 300’s human touch largely came down to Butler’s roaring and screaming, it’s left entirely to Green to goose the sequel into life. Happily she obliges.

Particle Fever offers enough broad explanation to keep lay persons up to speed. Where it excels is in depicting the various personalities involved.

Guiraudie’s film is acutely brilliant on the funny, scary machinery of desire, and how easily humans can get caught up in its cogwheels.

The whole thing is so roaringly absurd, and delivered with such hands-clasped sincerity, that the only rational response is to laugh the house down.

The macho showmanship of director Fyodor Bondarchuk, wedded to such a facile script, turns this undeniably impressive megaproduction into a behemoth you mainly want to cower from.

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.

Nymphomaniac, which mainly plays out in the banal home-and-office settings you might expect from a 1970s porn shoot, is less drop-dead gorgeous than Antichrist but significantly more human.

Because genre lets us know roughly what to expect, it can put us at ease, which is the last thing Denis wants to do. So she leaves questions hanging and mysteries unsolved.

The problem isn't a lack of weight, but of lightness. It's stuck with lead feet for a historical caper and serves no other worthwhile purpose.

Cuban Fury belongs to an older, unfunnier time. Please let’s not go back.

It’s an elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class.

Jack Thorne's screenplay has all the emotional nuance of a Sudoku puzzle; directed by French romcom veteran Pascal Chaumeil (Heartbreaker), it's bouncy and vacuous enough to feel like a light comedy from the planet Neptune.

It’s sweet-natured and amusing, with a story to captivate kids; yet the script has enough witty touches to keep adults laughing too.

It’s wonderful.

The film is not only unchallenging, it seems actively scared of challenging us. You emerge feeling pacified and only semi-entertained.

Tom Gormican, the writer and director, mostly uses overlapping dialogue in place of actual jokes, although occasionally he stretches to toilet humour.

For a shot of pure forward-leaping, backward-dreaming animated pleasure, pick brick.

There may well be a worse film released this year than this unwatchable British black comedy, although it sets a terrifyingly low benchmark.

Although the access is intimate, what emerges is not particularly surprising.

It feels as though it would have been better served as a six-part sitcom, where its sentimentality, broad comedy and fantasy elements wouldn't rub up against each other so badly.

Their improvisation has been honed to the point where the jokes land solidly without losing naturalism.

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 film hinges on the bond between dad and daughter and on the expressive face of Fanning, as we see her shift from a sort of nervous adoration of the unpredictable, if loving, Joe, to something more steely and independent.

This is an impressively clear-eyed and deeply moving portrait.

The plot strong-arms the characters into increasingly contrived and overly familiar positions that leave you longing for the more relaxed vibe of Shelton's earlier films.

Forbes has a delicate but unsentimental approach, which gives her film the same infectious energy that blesses and curses Cameron. The end result feels good without feeling superficial.

Despite his free and easy camerawork, which generates some lovely moments between Ian and Sofi, Cahill's narrative jolts along in fits and starts.

It is down to the strength of the acting that the film succeeds as far as it does.

It’s an astonishing achievement. Linklater and his cast, who helped refine the director’s script, perfectly execute how long it takes us to become the lead characters in our own lives, and how fumblingly the role is first assumed.

Off-beat and punk-spirited.

Hyper-violent it may be but there is beauty in its brutality.

However genius may flourish, you know it when you see it, and Whiplash is it.

Oscillates between the jolting and the absurd, bottoming out with a nonsensical coda.

The sheer half-heartedness of the whole exercise, though, may still catch you unawares.

It seethes with frustration on its subjects’ behalf – that for all the impact their stand has had, they still face a many-headed hydra on the road to real democracy.

The real revelation is Alice Eve, who gives a strikingly direct and affecting portrait of a woman in a desperate situation. Still, after too many pat plot twists and one nauseatingly slow death, I wished the film surrounding her were a little fresher.

You’re left wishing that Adler had focused more on the no-win moral tangle of the handler-informant relationship, and less of the mechanics of its execution.

After watching Peter Farrelly’s Movie 43, I was immediately overcome with a sudden rush of emotion: not amusement, anger or even mild irritation, but a profound and faintly tragic sense of pity.

Kore-eda has crafted a piercing, tender poem about the bittersweet ebb and flow of paternal love, and his status as Ozu's heir becomes ever more assured.

As hot and wet as freshly butchered meat: every second, every frame of its three-hour running time is virile with a lifetime’s accumulated genius.

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

It is three parts The Mighty Boosh to two parts The Goon Show, which, when mixed with the quite astonishing lack of wit and finesse seen here, makes for pure cinematic strychnine.

It’s really a radical experiment in non-fiction cinema – not seeking to enlighten or inform, but to disorientate us, practically to drown us, in a nightmare vision of the ocean’s power.

Fill the Void is a real collector’s item: a film in which the forces of religion and tradition are shown to be working together, however haltingly and imperfectly, for the good.

The second leg of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, is mostly stalling for time: two or three truly great sequences tangled up in long beards and longer pit-stops.

Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, the two-man writer-director team, are swinging at serious targets here... But their point soon wears itself out, and what remains is schlock with airs and tired black humour.

This is a simple and beautiful journey undertaken purely for its own sake, and approached in that spirit, Tracks will lead you to a place of quiet wonder.

Just squeezably lovely.

It’s a misguided enterprise all round, and while it’s perfectly possible to applaud everything the film wants to say, you find yourself cringing at the ways it’s saying it.

Other than sniggering about what an outré stereotype they’ve served up, it’s hard to see how Lee and Copley can justify this performance, which is quite the worst of the year, and sends the whole final act of their movie straight to oblivion.

This meat-and-potatoes B-thriller stays modest and grounded: compared with the noisy excesses of higher-budgeted action flicks, it has a kind of crude integrity.

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 3D photography is shallow and muddy, although a David Attenborough voiceover helps sustain interest.

With the magnificent Elba to anchor it, the film gradually achieves a sort of grandeur, in the manner of the hero it depicts.

Klaartje Quirijn’s engaging film portrait of Dutch rock-photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn goes a long way towards explaining the emptiness and isolation that characterise his work

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.

It feels like a film that is attracted by the shape of love and pain, but is a long way from understanding the content.

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.

The movie doesn’t have a funny bone in its body, clomping from one unoriginal set piece to the next with a head-scratching lack of urgency.

For all its innovativeness, Everyday has the rhythms and intrigue of a not-very-interesting family’s Christmas letters.

It’s a critic’s instinct to auto-praise any blockbuster that tries to do something different, but Catching Fire is so committed to carrying on the fine work started by its predecessor that the applause flows utterly naturally.

[A] mildly engaging print-the-legend documentary.

Using home movies and other footage, Kopple provides a discomfiting portrait of a family’s deep-seated dysfunction.

This starfighter-recruit blockbuster is refreshingly idea-driven.

Rather than bionically enhancing all its characters, a better movie might have found ways to celebrate their sloth and slime.

For all its properly surreal mayhem, this flick isn’t quite as nimble or emotionally rounded as its predecessor.

The movie is hauntingly romantic at heart, in the best spirit of a Gothic fairytale, but without the harsh shadows or hard edges.

It feels entirely made by committee – the definition of house style, without a personal stamp in sight.

It’s Thompson as the heroically unbiddable Travers who makes the most of it; her bravura performance effectively dominates the film.

With a tighter plot and slightly more knowing craftsmanship, this might have worked, but Swedish director Mikael Hafström (1408, The Rite) isn’t really the man to poke fun with any sophistication at his stars’ well-established personas.

For all the solid efforts of the cast, it’s still one of those biopics with a totally canned story arc and as many head-slapping moments as intentional laughs.

A tough, vital, electrifying film.

Let’s blame Fellowes before Shakespeare – one of them built this house, the other has just walked right through it in his filthiest garden clogs.

Junger’s film is a decent, heartfelt tribute.

Perhaps because the joke’s already spent, this sequel has a pretty low bar to clear, and manages to be both utterly meritless and weirdly bearable.

For a while, the film gets by on silliness alone. But in the end, it all amounts to no more than a sniggery guilty pleasure.

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.

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.

Tonally the film is all over the rink, but it leaves you more convinced and entertained than you’d expect.

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.

There are those who find Žižek a delight; but well before the two-hour mark, one feels he has delighted us long enough.

I loved every minute of Filth, and couldn’t have stomached another second of it.

Captain Phillips is a triumph of solid, professional and sometimes inspired film crafts, deserving of all the plaudits that come its way.

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.

Wiese’s film is an efficient piece of work, competent as a film but blistering as an example of human rights advocacy.

The slotting together of songs and plot is often done with a spark of inspiration.

Runner Runner starts off with a solid draw, then folds on the flop.

Sophisticated, sharp and funny, Le Week-End achieves an unusual coup: it’s a film about two older characters that is neither deeply gloomy (like, say, Amour) nor twinkly and cheerily upbeat.

It’s less an adaptation than a recapitulation.

Morris gives it the old college try, but Rumsfeld is too smooth an operator to let anything slip.

If you are asking an audience to listen to one man talking for an hour and a half, you had better make sure he is worth listening to, and minute-by-minute, Hardy has you spellbound.

The film leaves you enlightened and disillusioned, but still furious at Armstrong, who seems to have drawn the conclusion that he is now a tragic hero.

Glazer’s astonishing film takes you to a place where the everyday becomes suddenly strange, and fear and seduction become one and the same.

Raucous but fatally confused, openly pilfering its central themes from Gilliam’s own 1985 masterpiece Brazil, but with no idea how to develop them.

Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery; every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip.