The hesitancy of the storytelling, with its comforting lulls and odd delays, is a funny sort of boon.

The film ends exactly one scene too late, lessening the brutal statement its ending might have made. But these really aren’t deal-breakers in a crisp bullseye of a debut feature which has guts and brains to spare.

On his broadest canvas yet, Trapero mounts a saga about the role of conscience, which might seem old-fashioned if it weren’t so urgently imagined. An added fillip is Michael Nyman’s stirring score, his best in years.

Merlant’s film isn’t being unladylike: rather, it’s asserting that ladylike is what all of these things really are, and it’s high time cinema admitted it.

Very little is out of place in Branagh’s do-over, but that’s almost a problem: there’s a feeling, throughout, of going perfectly through the motions. The film is all smoothly-operated crane shots, excellent hair, gleaming teeth. Originality is the glass slipper it never even tries on.

The role fits Farrow like a silk slip, but its kooky premise doesn’t quite shake up the by-now familiar narrative concerns.

This is Holmes intentionally slowed down to a hobbling, reflective, end-of-life pace: dare we call it refreshing? It’s a film to rummage around in, picking up old clues, considering their meaning, and turning them in your palm.

As metaphors for life go, wine has a very high yield, and Gilles Legrand’s sensitive screenplay tramples out every last drop of juice.

All the best parts of the movie are transitions and montages, jazzing up the video-game-ish plot with mock-heroic exuberance. The summer ahead is looking madly stuffed with talking animals, but Po has jammed his bulging frame through first, and done it with style.

It’s the interplay between the film’s many different characters, rather than the blow-up-the-world crisis they’re trying to defuse, that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Captain America: The First Avenger is all utility. It has everything you might want from a movie of this kind — bangs, baddies, nonsensical backstories — except for the most important element of all: surprise.

It’s a film of few frills or flourishes, which never tries to dress up its subject or soften its blows. Yet in its rage and its pain, in the wire-brush scrub it gives to the movies’ woozily romantic notions of alcoholism, Glassland feels wholly honest and true.

The groundwork is laid here for something potentially high-octane – think La Haine meets Ready Player One – but 20 minutes in, the film enters a holding pattern it never really escapes.

The problem with Sausage Party is that, for all the silliness, it so desperately wants to be taken seriously. What should have been a shamelessly filthy stoner movie has been watered down with ill-judged, undergraduate musings on religion, philosophy and race.

At a time when digital animation is breaking radical new ground, it can be tempting to view the hand-drawn sort as its old-fashioned forebear, with no more scope to evolve. But Momose’s film elegantly proves otherwise: it has the artistry, but also the visionary spark.

The slotting together of songs and plot is often done with a spark of inspiration.

Novello again, in an underrated road-to-ruin melodrama, plays a public-school rugby champ disgraced when he takes the fall for getting a waitress pregnant. Visual experiments abound and there's a justly famous scene with the curtains of a Paris nightspot being pulled back, exposing its superannuated regulars to the unsparing sunlight. [14 Jul 2012, p.4]

There is a danger of filing Peterloo away as an “important film” – but it is also a complex, rousing and rewarding one for anyone prepared to meet it on its own unapologetically ambitious terms.

Alpha Papa’s biggest laughs explode from moments of pure inconsequence.

It wants to become a cat-and-mouse game between the leads, but the leaky script dampens any real hope of suspense.

The whole is rather less than its constituent parts – which didn’t really fit together in the first place.

This prodding, acidic, bumpy-but-worthwhile movie is about even the world’s consenting creatures winding up with nothing they really wanted, while a dog submits to human will just to make us feel like we’re the ones in charge.

At times it edges towards the saccharine. The director asks no challenging questions, and the only other people to appear in the film are Anderson’s supportive sons, Brandon and Dylan.

It’s a chewy watch, heavy on the socio-political carbs, and its method can be a little exhausting. But its determination to do right by its subject – and Gitai’s own country too – is soberly compelling.

It’s eye-opening, well acted and darkly entertaining.

The comically impish and frankly outspoken instincts that have served Capaldi so well in the social media age prove a gift for a documentarian. This film is not so much warts and all as twitches, farts, curses and everything else.

Perhaps more than any other Disney live-action remake to date, Mulan feels like a blockbuster version of great mime – it’s performed with such consummate precision and showmanship that at times you would swear you were watching something with a heart.

It’s an absorbing but disappointingly tasteful watch.