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.

This is a heartbreaking story – how could it not be? But Frears’ film breaks your heart and then repairs it.

Oswald’s brother Robert, played by James Badge Dale, is the film’s only rational human being, and Dale makes you wish Landesman had written the entire film from his angle.

This is mesmerically assured and tensile film-making, with two complex and plausible performances at its core, and the shin-stinging kick of a Chaucerian moral fable.

Kim rattles you with this family’s bizarre and pitiful plight, and only then, from a place of agonised discomfort, does the laughter follow, in great whoops and roars.

Though pristinely faithful to Maynard's book, it blurs inexorably into Nicholas Sparks.

Joe represents a return to the independent-spirited storytelling that characterised Green’s early career.

Abi Morgan's script – better, for my money, than her work on either Shameor The Iron Lady – elegantly straddles two timelines to illuminate a deliberately obscured life

Benedict Cumberbatch is inspiredly cast, serving up a technically ingenious performance which may be his juiciest ever.

It's a bureaucratic noir nightmare that may put you more readily in mind of Kafka, albeit with a tone of tongue-in-cheek bleakness that's bracing and funny – at least at first.

At just under two hours, it's a little long, but the blend of biting character study and campaigning pharmaceutical docudrama is zesty and memorable.

Elicits from McQueen a directing job that's compellingly humble but also majestic, because his radical showmanship is turned to such precise, human purposes.

A vastly enjoyable theatrical banquet, if perhaps not a profound one, is served up in a bit of a rush here, as if they can't wait to get the next sitting in. But you certainly don't come away feeling hungry.

The result is a film that does perfectly respectable justice to Lomax's ordeal, without ever making a strong case for itself as independently stirring art.

The scares are mostly very scary indeed, and that means the film does its job.

There are visual flights of fancy here as glorious as anything Miyazaki’s studio has created, but the story is rooted in a country trudging towards its own destruction.

It’s hardly fascinating. It doesn’t offer new facts about the Princess’s life. And it certainly doesn’t explain her complexity or contradictions.

Flexing some of that Jean Valjean resolve, but with a payload of untrammelled, Wolverine-like rage behind it, Jackman comes closest to shouldering the movie, without ever seriously threatening to make it work.

Unlike Walter Salles’s recent adaptation of On The Road, which embraced the Beat philosophy with a wide and credulous grin, Kill Your Darlings is inquisitive about the movement’s worth, and the genius of its characters is never assumed.

Rush has sex, glamour, a fair degree of wit and a breathless, pedal-to-the-metal spirit. But its greatest achievement may be to underline that there are real men, all vulnerable flesh and blood, inside those infernal machines.

A science-fiction thriller of rare and diamond-hard brilliance.

Every turn Karl Golden’s cheeky-chappie comedy-drama about the early-Nineties rave scene takes is a little less original or convincing.

The key to the film’s success, and the reason it often left me hooting with laughter, is Aniston, and her character’s struggle in vain to maintain her sweetheart persona.

Lovelace tells a difficult story creditably, yet its period detail has the effect of distancing the story, and its heroine remains an enigma.

Handsomely shot and stopping just short of cloying sentiment, this is an accomplished, engaging work.

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

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.

The plot is an incomprehensible tangle of dead ends and recaps.

Spurlock himself is nowhere to be seen, perhaps because the man in charge of this film is plainly Cowell himself, whose influence hangs over the picture like the smell of a leaky bin bag.

Modest as it may look, this is boundary-pushing cinema in all the best ways, and what a thrill it is to hear those boundaries creak.

About Time is itself a film less directed than quilted: it’s a feathery old patchwork under which you might snuggle at the end of a tiring week.

So, what happens in Grown Ups 2? Almost absolutely nothing.

There’s nothing soft and romcom-cuddly here, but a brutal dissection of competitive friendship dynamics, eating disorders and selfish misery.

DisneyToon Studios have borrowed so much from Pixar here, and yet they seem to have learned almost nothing.

Could this be the late-emerging hit movie of summer 2013? No chance, although if this was August 1987, a time when we allowed action films to be smart on their own dumb terms, it might have cleaned up.

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

Overall, it’s joyous, uplifting – and as funky as the music at its heart.

Your ass is constantly braced in readiness and hope, but it remains un-kicked.

As an indictment of the industry, this is strong stuff.

If films were gestures, this one would be a perfectly timed shrug, with the smile to match.

Dean Parisot, who made the delightful Galaxy Quest, has a funnier sensibility than the first movie’s director, Robert Schwentke, but he’s still defeated by a script that’s over-complicated and under-sophisticated.

Holiff assembled this memoir from his father’s papers and audio diary, although the portrait of Cash that emerges is that of a pill-popping religious nut, and there is next to no insight into his music or creative process.

Goro Miyazaki’s film is about the point at which we decide not what we want to be when we grow up, but who, and the way the tiniest moments in our lives often have the most far-reaching effect.

A good cop/bad cop action comedy with the funniest two-women-above-the-title pairing in memory.

Wan’s film is a sturdily built supernatural chiller, with next-to-no digital effects or gore, and it delivers its scares with a breezy lack of urgency.

It’s just a big blue blur – too anodyne to elicit more than heavy sighs, too full of Smurfs not to recommend solely to the under-eights.

Where the film completely falls down is in director Joshua Michael Stern’s disastrous decision to cast Ashton Kutcher in the central role.

Alpha Papa’s biggest laughs explode from moments of pure inconsequence.

The Lone Ranger is a grand folly that, in a sane world at least, would never have been made, although I’m really rather glad someone did.

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.

Fans of Cage and Cusack, previously paired as unlikely allies in Con Air (1997), may be looking forward to a bit of deranged actorly combat once Hansen is cornered in the interrogation room, but it’s here that this hopeless flick comes up especially short.

There are no shattering revelations here – if Gibney’s canny gathering of various narratives, shimmering score and cool graphics give his film the goose-pimply intrigue of a spy thriller, it just happens to be one you’ve already seen. It’s also one in which the subplot, if anything, takes over from the main plot.

The whole thing unspools at such an unremittingly earnest pitch that it leaves you groping under your seat for a ventilator.

A story stretched thinly between two many characters, without the dynamism or momentum to keep itself charging onwards.

The film’s family-saga pretensions and bombastically overdone characterisation keep hobbling its better elements.

Norris and his director of photography Rob Hardy have shot it with stylish confidence, but Mark O’Rowe’s script (adapted from Daniel Clay’s novel) feels cramped and over-schematic.

This Iberian spin on the Snow White legend is a curio and a wonder; a silent fairy tale woven from softest velvet.

The animation is photoreal – startlingly and mesmerisingly so. And the depth of feeling the tale of their friendship evokes is matched only by your incredulity, as you paw at your eyes six minutes later, that you are crying about two computer-generated umbrellas.

The World’s End is a fitting end to the trilogy: it is by turns trashy, poignant and gut-bustingly funny, and often all three at once.

It’s a powerful testimonial to a fading way of life.

Mikkelsen, who is not given to sympathetic roles, has never been better. This is cinema that sinks its claws into your back.

Director Meadows (This is England, Dead Man’s Shoes) has crafted a rowdy, raucous documentary that complements the band’s combative image; bristling with energy, it celebrates their reformation after a 16-year gap.

At first, watching Pacific Rim feels like rediscovering a favourite childhood cartoon – but del Toro has flooded the project with such affection and artistry that, rather than smiling nostalgically, you find yourself enchanted all over again.

Call it a landlocked variant on Robinson Crusoe, but it’s a hypnotic one, with a sense of mystery and interior life that are all its own.

Wheatley’s extraordinary film shakes you back and forth with a rare ferocity, but the net result is stillness.

Come the final act, the best political thrillers don't play nice, after all – they twist the knife. This one’s so concerned with making the world a better place, it retracts the blade and wipes it clean

In the end, I was nagged by a question posed by Polley’s sister Joanna in the film’s opening minutes. “I guess I have this instinctive reaction: who cares about our ----ing family?” The answer, of course, is Polley herself, who smilingly tells us that a story like hers can never truly be tied down, even as she screws every last piece into place.

You’ve never seen a documentary like The Act of Killing. If you saw too many like it, your hold on sanity might fray, which is not so much the film’s fault as that of its bloodcurdling subject. This movie is essential.

That the film ends up floundering is not really their fault. These two belong on screen together: when they’re not completing each other’s sentences, they’re completing them wrongly, which is even better.

This apocalypse isn’t a nightmare so much as the ultimate bromantic fantasy, one in which – with the removal of any responsibility – the boys are free to bicker, banter, and bed down together.

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.

Where we might have expected a gentle or rueful coda, we get a battle of the sexes as blistering as the best of Tracy/Hepburn, and infinitely more frank.

Like Someone in Love, is another miracle at close quarters. Its subject is the impossibility of intimacy in the modern world: chewy stuff, to be sure, but Kiarostami explores it with a depth and delicacy that recalls the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu.

Neither clever nor stupid enough to work.

It’s funny and touching, but feels like a missed opportunity.

Acker and Denisof spar with each other in the best traditions of screwball comedy; worthy modern equivalents to Tracy and Hepburn. They’re the main source of joy in a film overflowing with treats.

The movie subverts expectations, and not in a good way, by seeming in a dither about its own identity. The romance is by the by, the comedy as sparse as can be. We’re left with a curious non-film about the pitfalls of higher education assessment. Odd.

It’s a thoroughly warm diversion, whose lapses into cliché only make it cosier.

It has heft, it looks amazing, and it's businesslike to a fault.

This cherishable Irish B-picture is one of those rare horror films with an unimprovable premise.

There are cameos from James Franco, Stephen Dorff, a comically moustachioed David Schwimmer and an unrecognisably hirsute Chris Evans as various lowlifes. A pity, then, that nothing else in Ariel Vromen’s movie is remotely on Shannon’s level, from the plodding, Scorsese-clone script to the needlessly lifeless editing and cinematography.

The actual exorcism sequence, involving three well-meaning cult members and a chicken, is strangely uneventful – and if there’s one thing a movie exorcism should never, ever be, it’s that.

Despite the Smith family’s association with Scientology, which unmistakably informs this tale’s belief system (“Fear is a Choice”), as well as its shaky attempts at mythic patterning, it is in no way the laughable shambles that John Travolta’s infamous "Battlefield Earth" was.

What we get is a collection of moderately violent action set-pieces untroubled by humour or broader coherence.

While his ambitious conceit hangs together over two hours of loudly-declaimed meta-metatheatricality, my word, does it feel like an unholy slog.

This movie starts from a premise so sociologically batty it’s hard to take any of its subsequent terrors seriously, which means tension doesn’t so much fly out the window as fail to even get up the driveway.

A dizzying collage of all the changes in London’s social and architectural fabric since light was first trained through celluloid.

This would-be-frothy date flick is a sub-"Meet the Fockers" dog’s dinner.

The diminution works its appeal once again in Epic – the latest film from the creators of "Ice Age" and "Rio" – which is just as well, because the rest of the narrative follows a rather predictable route.

It is beautifully shot, too: even the writing on the posters and graffiti observes the style of classical French écriture. Given enough time, maybe one could even grow nostalgic for the pomposity.

It is an extraordinary, prolonged popping-candy explosion of pleasure, sadness, anger, lust and hope.

François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful is, in the very best sense, a film that won't add up.

This is a fun piece of play-acting for as long as it lasts, but it never quite feels like much more. Things may become kinky in front of the lens, but you can sense Polanski lurking behind it throughout, always ready with his safe-word. Cut!

[A] stately and ambitious ensemble drama.

So hauntingly perfect is Barnard’s film, and so skin-pricklingly alive does it make you feel to watch it, that at first you can hardly believe the sum of what you have seen.