Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has followed up one big, awardsy film from last year (Dallas Buyers Club) with another at lightning speed. That was a braver film, but it's the spaciousness of this one that distinguishes it from being just another mechanically pre-ordained adversity narrative.

In terms of sheer energy and invention, it more than holds its own, and boasts action scenes whose wit, vibrancy and gracefulness make Lightyear look low on batteries.

The film is crammed with so much transporting spectacle and visual invention, it feels epic even at living-room size.

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.

Miracle Mile is unforgettable and quietly devastating. [29 Jan 2007]

It’s all so giddily bizarre, the film deserves a health warning of its own: will induce (entirely pleasurable) lightheadedness and shortness of breath.

Dunham’s film has the kind of winning light touch that’s impossible to fluke.

This art-form has long been thought to have reached its twilight years, but Yonebayashi’s film brims over with the bounce and spark of childhood.

His recollections are as sobering as his images, and a great many of both will embed themselves in your head.

While there’s still (arguably) some fun to be had with this independent comedy’s double-entendre-friendly title, the laughs – such as they are – don’t extend a great deal further than that.

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.

As yarns go, it is all comfortingly chunky and luxuriantly spun – winter comfort viewing that treats its audience as gallantly as its heroes treat their mission, while taking itself just seriously enough.

Unrelated is an emotionally and sometimes wince-inducingly acute debut from British director Joanna Hogg that looks and feels and sounds like few other British films.

Russell, a revelation in Trey Edward Shults’s under-seen Gen-Z melodrama Waves, is career-makingly good here, while Chalamet’s tender, tousled allure and razor-edge of raw danger powerfully recall the late River Phoenix: his Lee is a hustler to the core, always calculating where his next meal is coming from, and who he’ll have to sink his teeth into in order to get it.

Denis Villeneuve's new adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel – starring Timothée Chalamet – is an awe-inspiring piece of work.

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.

Gray has taken a dicey risk here, by thinking through white guilt from such an unapologetically personal place. In this retrospective mea culpa, he’s trying to be honest about his own conscience and childhood regrets, but also examining the multiple failures of education that set these two kids on such divergent paths.

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.

For all its promised rebellion, Colette’s story really segues into a more nuanced tale of outgrowing: not just a childish and bullying spouse, but an age of acquiescence.

While it's possible to fantasise a truly explosive, riskily disturbing version of The Workshop, that simply wouldn’t be what its own makers intended.

It’s summer-holiday eye candy with a sherbetty experimental fizz.

None of this quite counts as stop-the-presses stuff in the present day, but it’s enough to make this a sharp debut, with a shivery undertow.

Directed with what you might call resounding competence by Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures isn’t pushing the cinematic boat out in any new directions, but it steers its prescribed course nimbly and nicely.

The pitch to the studio was "Romeo and Juliet on junk": fair enough, but it crackles with life, and this is a tremendous rediscovery.

This psychological thriller is far from Alfred Hitchcock's finest, but it is held together by strong leads. [13 Jun 2015, p.36]

The vignettes of rule-breaking and social exclusion have a funny and stinging force.

Interstellar is Nolan’s best and most brazenly ambitious film to date.

Scrapper rummages around with style. It puts bubbles in the kitchen sink.