Garrone knows exactly where he’s leaving both his heroes and his audience: on the agonising cusp of a happily-ever-after his film makes you want to will into existence.

Seyfried reads the tone of this hokum better than anyone, and knows restraint is hardly called for, using every excuse in the book to go completely bananas.

There is something about the cast’s doughy physiques that has allowed Park’s flair for caricature to run completely berserk, with every character model pushed right to its expressive limits.

Writer-director Jeremy Lovering, in his feature debut, keeps a skilful handle on technique — his film is a calling card that could give you paper cuts.

There is also a wonderful range of archive materials apparently dug out from Sievey’s cellar, including footage of Frank’s transfixingly odd appearances on Saturday morning children’s television, skulking around behind Andy Crane on Motormouth and riffing with Andrea Arnold on No. 73.

Çatak’s film turns out to be less intrigued by where the missing money actually goes than how the school reacts to its disappearance: as a sort of loose organism purging itself of impurities as its collective survival instinct kicks in. It’s a sound lesson in politics – or is it biology? – but more importantly, it’s a chalk-snappingly tense watch.

It would be near-impossible to love Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women more than Greta Gerwig does.

Hawaiian waves crash over a high-calibre Hollywood prestige drama, sharp and sobering, with top-drawer work from Lancaster, Clift and Sinatra.

Coppola’s uproarious and bitingly timely film feels every inch a necessary artwork.

The mood flits between solemn and rascally, and the pacing is measured: this is storytelling at a mosey rather than a trot.

For all its baroque pomp, though, McQueen intuits the one unspoken terror – loneliness – which nudged this fascinating artist into the void.

Audiard’s trick is to make the overblown mélange into something amazingly confident – it’s clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful and absolutely bonkers. It’s hard to believe he pulls it off, but he does.

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.

At a time when the corporation’s live-action output keeps doubling down on the franchise grind, here from just over the garden fence is a lesson in storytelling that feels at once elegantly classical and zingily fresh.

It’s an absorbing blend of comedy and tragedy.

A heady hybrid of comedy, polemic and period crime drama, it could have been scattergun stuff, and there are patches of preachy overkill. Much more often, though, there’s a rollicking drive and focus to it.

Packed to the rafters with musical numbers, this cheerful documentary features moments from films such as Gone with the Wind, Meet Me in St Louis, and Singin' in the Rain - a fun watch, even though it was not as commercially successful as Part I. [01 Nov 2014, p.32]

If Diao’s intent on confounding us, he has the courtesy to do it with frequently astonishing style and verve.

The Limehouse Golem may be hokum, but it’s glorious hokum that brings something fresh to the stale old cadaver of Victorian melodrama.

This film leaves you itching to read a meaty biography, even as it solidly maps out Hepburn’s emotional life, and explains the relationship with trauma which cut her out so well to be a UNICEF ambassador, raising millions for Bosnian war orphans and Somalian famine relief.

What gives the film its lip-smacking, chilli-pepper kick is that we are never entirely certain who is conning whom, or even if what we are watching has any truth to it at all.

The first full run-through of the crisis, in the White House Situation Room, is perhaps a little dry. But as things replay from various angles, the steady build-up of context effectively compounds the tension, and soon we’re every bit as lost as President Elba, desperately searching for clarity in a chain of events that necessarily precludes it.

The first film’s very specific pleasures are comprehensively encored.

Even with the steady supply of clichés and occasional leaps of logic, the dramatic scenes smoulder away nicely.

It serves as a handsome homage while persuasively making the case as its own discrete entity.

From its unshowy script on down, Mississippi Grind is content to rumble along as a character piece, keeping its storytelling loose and unpredictable, like a repeat flick of the dice.

Taken as a speculative romance, and in the right matinee spirit, it’s lushly engaging, with a star pairing that – appropriately – rivets.

For shoestring charm, One Cut of the Dead remains unbeaten, but Final Cut brings off the same hugely satisfying Tetris symphony of emotional and narrative blocks falling into place.