It’s all thumpingly corny, but in the way good family films often are.

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.

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

Cinematogapher Dean Semler gets amazing colours as the sun sets, and there’s a bravely avant-garde debut score from Kiwi composer Graeme Revell, pumping up the pulse with sinister breathing sounds. The plot even thrives on a tacit cultural tension between the Australian stars and the arrogant interloper.

This is a film about human flaws. It should not be missed – whatever your views on Greenpeace.

Needless to say, Armstrong’s script is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the zingers, and you could spend an enjoyable evening in the pub debating your favourite gags, but it would all amount to nothing without Mountainhead’s unsparing psychological insight.

It’s a hysterical screwball fantasia that openly steals from Lubitsch, Hawks, Capra and Sturges and wants to be caught with its fingers in the till. The result is a highly-sexed Jenga-pile of silliness, to which Bogdanovich can’t resist adding block after teetering block.

As a statement, Benedetta won’t win any awards for coherence, but there’s just Too Much Verhoeven going on here for sensation hunters ever to feel short-changed.

Vogt gives us a brilliantly slippery handle on the rules of this rather twisted game, but also makes it real, in that it’s coming from a place of authentic terror, anxiety and loneliness in Ingrid’s head. Intellectually exciting though his film’s gambits are, they feel like acts of tremendous imaginative empathy – lightbulbs in the dark.

We’re stuck with Key, a stand-up virtuoso who is thankfully amazing playing a windbag who can’t read the room – a ludicrous ruiner of sunsets, or any other vaguely peaceful moment.

Via breezy metaphysical farce, Palm Springs identifies this very recognisable strain of millennial malaise, before skewering it with merciless accuracy.

Time has been kind to Lindsay-Hogg’s film. I felt like I was viewing the period through a fresh perspective, perhaps simply because his editing style and choices (made contemporaneously, without benefit of hindsight or a deeply nostalgic agenda) felt quite radically different to Jackson’s. [2024 Restored Version]

Even at practically Kubrickian length, though, the lockstep slaughter barely gives you pause for breath. It’s a barrage, and a blast.

Nodding in that direction without going for broke, the film becomes an open-ended saga about rejecting family to pursue your own independent path, and keeps us wondering just how much scorched earth – or flesh, for that matter – Thelma intends to leave behind.

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

In a classic Brit-com flanking manoeuvre, the film tries to simultaneously reduce the viewer to tears while inviting us to bask in the fuzzy glow of our friends and neighbours’s innate decency. Luckily it succeeds, thanks in no small part to the commitment shown by Horgan and Scott Thomas.

This agreeable film pushes past the stereotype of Blunt as the second coming of Chris de Burgh and delivers an affecting portrait of a posh pop star who has endured a lifetime of vitriol.

Everything’s told in shards, and Amalric does very well to create a sense of emotional continuum amid all the procedural detail. His own performance is fantastic, jittery and dishevelled.

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

Grand, propulsive.

It’s a film which understands the pleasure of seeing familiar roads driven with consummate expertise. The F does stand for formula, after all.

Booth is simply outstanding, weighing up with deep shading the oppressive circumstances that have made Evelyn both torturer and captive, nemesis and potential lifeline.

Heidi Thomas’s screenplay, cannily expanding a little on Bennett’s glisteningly witty original script, shows its hand with tactical finesse.

It’s a wholly respectable adaptation, though perhaps a flash or two more of wildness wouldn’t have gone amiss.

A summer blockbuster that’s not just thrilling, but that orchestrates its thrills with such rare diligence, you want to yelp with glee.

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.

As a psychothriller, it gives itself one simple assignment – to set your heart rate pounding through the roof. And on this level, with a lurid voltage that might require health warnings, it nastily delivers.

Laugh for laugh, it may well be a series peak. I bow down to the perfection of one immaculately organised prank in a furniture shop, especially when innocent bystanders weigh in with their “He went all up in the ceiling!” comments.