The on-screen chemistry between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was so powerful that they ended up making nine movies together, to huge public acclaim. But in no other film did that chemistry produce such delightfully explosive results as Adam's Rib.

Van Dyke's energy is prodigious (especially when he leaps around with a gang of sooty chimney-sweeps on the London rooftops) and the songs are classics.

A classic adventure story that brilliantly transcends its fairly average formula (buttoned-up city gal is softened by devil-may-care chancer while outwitting baddies in foreign lands) through a mixture of perfect casting, lashings of chemistry between the stars and a clever script.

Peter Baynham, best-known for Borat and Alan Partridge, co-wrote this script, which offers just the right of blend of madcap farce and piercingly precise gags about social media.

As portraiture, it’s also unapologetically (and therefore unfashionably) complex: the unsavoury aspects of his personal life are frankly addressed, but never used as a stick with which to beat the work. Rather, the signature tone of the narration – nicely delivered by the Doctor Who actress Pearl Mackie – is one of curiosity. And the fascination proves infectious.

Cool Runnings is a charming tale of determined underdogs, with plenty of laughs, moments of real tension, and five engaging performances.

You emerge from this brutally unsentimental education with your chest pounding and your ears ringing – its radical empathy extends to putting us in not just the same room as its subjects, but the same helpless, despairing position. Some films are made to leave you speechless; for some experiences, there can be no words.

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.

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.

Pitch Perfect 2 is a joyous harmony of bawdy humour, campus high jinks and crisp musical performances.

Flies buzz, sweat trickles, negotiations continue, and you feel your breath dry up.

Sincerity and conviction are now rare qualities in the blockbuster field, but this is a film that puts its monkey where its mouth is.

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

In staging the Jimmies’ various acts of violence (to which they refer, horribly, as “charity”), DaCosta may have taken a cue from Kubrick’s own parable of British decay: even toughened horror fans should find it disturbing, if not downright hard to watch.

By managing to keep faith with this fast-unravelling person, even in her most bozo moments of losing the plot, Wilson turns in her best and bravest work in films to date.

There’s a bicep-flexing quality to Landes’s direction, with its bursts of colour and chaos, its conjuration of a surreal experience out of tactile reality. You tumble out of it bruised, bewildered, mesmerised.

Weapons manages to keep its powder dry – a feat of crafty editing by Joe Murphy – for a knockout finale that’s twisted, hilarious and savage, all at once.

This is Sachs’s eighth film and one of his best.

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.

The combination of satire and savagery is pretty fierce and intriguingly unique.

Deadwyler does magnificent work in it, making bold, risky choices to communicate a near-operatic range of emotion.

There's evident patience and intelligence to the filmmaking all over, as well as an engagement with genuine ideas about diplomacy, deterrence, law and leadership. However often it risks monkey-mad silliness, it's impressively un-stupid.

The fun of it – and Guardians of the Galaxy specialises in fun, served by the sugar-sprinkled ice-cream-scoopload – is in seeing this odd quintet bluster through space battles and alien brawls that would have defeated anyone smarter and better-equipped. Just as the team makes do with the junk they find around them, the film feels like a mound of gems culled from decades of pop-culture scavenging.

Re-entering Mike Leigh’s stomping ground in Hard Truths is both a solace and, in the best possible way, a slap in the face. It’s also an impressively funny ordeal, in that unmistakably morose way no one has ever mastered better than Leigh.

Gloomy? Not even a bit. This is a glossy and sophisticated workplace comedy about the end of a gilded age of sophisticated froth – deftly written by Aline Brosh McKenna and fizzily directed by David Frankel, both returning from the first film.

It would be hard to overpraise Burghardt, a debuting actress on the spectrum whose scenes are so tender, relaxed and generally sweet she deserves at least half the credit.

All is True is a tongue-in-cheek title all the same, for a script which fills in factual gaps with its own blatant leaps of imagination: they’re just far more respectful and illuminating leaps.

Dupieux elevates it by seeding entire swaying crops of confusion: we can never be entirely sure where scenes end and the mess of making them begins.