To call Fast X one of the most ludicrous action films ever made would be a borderline tautology for any instalment in the Fast and Furious franchise. But this one takes the cake.

From a premise of purest hokum, the Sixth Sense director wrings out an impressive amount of sweat – it's a real return to form.

There's hardly a shot in Polanski's debut that isn't laced with purpose. [12 Jan 2013, p.10]

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

Morgen manages to stay clear of hagiography, instead compiling an exhilarating piece of film-making – one that’s fully in keeping with Cobain’s virtuosity.

The best thing about Destin Daniel Cretton’s blockbuster is how confidently it goes its own way: these call-backs to surrounding Marvel lore are sly without being smug, at least until the obligatory end-credits gesture ushering Shang-Chi into the fold.

The Nest is good on a first viewing and special on a second, when its cramped horizons and avoidance of full-bore tragedy are strategies for which you’re prepared. Durkin’s use of Kubrickian dissolves makes the passage of time feel like no one’s friend.

Collet-Serra’s rigorous craftsmanship and Lively’s muscular-in-every-sense movie-star performance – the film takes Olympic-level pleasure in watching her swimming, leaping, fighting, scrambling, enduring – ensure every attack and counterattack convulses and grips.

With its thickly-accented voiceovers, re-recorded into English by Mathieu Amalric, the film is a pleasingly eccentric watch, and one full of rare insights.

Once the significant shock of the film fades, what stays with you are its implications – the way it shows division digging in and self-perpetuating like cancer in bone, with each flare-up making the next more grimly probable. This is history retold in the blistering present tense.

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.

Blade is arguably too much of a good thing. But hey, that’s immortality for you.

A social conscience movie with real cinematic bite.

The recurring fungal and archeological imagery suggest a conception of consciousness as a kind of mushroom patch, with human experience blooming from and feeding on the experiences that came before, all the way back to its unknowable cosmic beginnings.

The film’s comedy is loose and generous, and its esprit de corps sneaks up on you with a soft tread.

Over two and a half hours, the pop-gothic intensity can get a little much – at times I felt like a fire extinguisher was going off in my face – but you wouldn’t necessarily want to lose any of it.

Crucially, Kelsey Mann’s film, co-written by returning screenwriter Meg LeFauve, gets Pixar back to doing what they always did best: juggling big concepts in fun and ingenious but also surprisingly wise and moving ways.

A sensationally funny and gently science-fictional German rom-com.

If big-tech hubris is now a non-fiction Dewey classification all of its own, this was nonetheless an extremely well told tale of arrogance, carelessness and the destruction – not disruption, please – that follows in its wake.

It is a valentine to the kind of innocent adolescence that modern teenagers will never have a chance to experience.

Rush hurls himself into the film’s star turn with a cantankerous abandon that more than compensates for his slightly unsteady accent. It’s a wildly entertaining performance that feels vividly inhabited both physically and vocally.

What with all this material, and the focus on Cengiz and Abdulaziz as key players in the ongoing story, The Dissident has a lot to juggle. We can forgive Fogel if his portrait of Khashoggi himself seems a touch incomplete: with its restless style of activism, the film arguably builds on his legacy better than it would have done as a work of retrospective biography.

While Kayla Day is very much a teenager of her precise time and place, her gruelling anxiety – and Fisher’s wonderful yearning in the role – make her universally relatable anyway.

With a dearth of psychoanalysis, the jazzy pace barely lets up, but the result - essentially an Allen stand-up show that just happens to be set in the middle of a fascistic, architecturally stunning future society - is no less seminal for its slapstick ebullience: a lesson that the pursuits of making art and making a complete idiot out of yourself are not mutually exclusive.

It’s a punchy, propulsive watch, blown along by snappy editing and a hip-hop-driven soundtrack that stresses that there’s still much fun to be had when hefty themes of inequality and geopolitics are being tackled. And honestly? There really is.

The movie rattles with provocations.

It’s hard to remember the last time an actress aged as convincingly on screen as Zhao Tao does in the melancholic, gently epic Ash Is Purest White.

There’s no bold genre reinvention afoot in this reboot, and its thwart-the-baddies plot remains bound to familiar equations, though at least now the equations actually balance.