As a toy-advert movie full of artistry and heart, it’s as slyly progressive as it is shamelessly nostalgic.

It’s profoundly compelling, expertly made, and quite intentionally horrifying.

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

Causeway is an excellent, moving, determinedly low-key slice of US indie cinema.

It’s Deneuve who musses up the formula and makes the film worth seeing, by generously bringing out her inner vulgarian.

Its sombre sincerity and hypnotic, treasure-box beauty make Crimson Peak feel like a film out of time – but Del Toro, his cast and his crew carry it off without a single postmodern prod or smirk. The film wears its heart on its sleeve, along with its soul and most of its intestines.

That the film winds up cramped, underwhelming and strangely thwarted is hard to square with all the effort up on screen – or perhaps it just feels too much like effort.

It’s an elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class.

It’s a weighty technical accomplishment – the extraordinary detailed motion-capture technology alone, which stretches Rylance’s human performance to giant-sized proportions, is river-straddling bounds beyond anything you’ve seen before.

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.

[A] beautiful, humane and moving biopic.

The set-pieces are quick, light and for the most part fun. What Game Night lacks in (any) plausibility or coherence it makes up for in Friday night, pleasingly brainless entertainment.

Sketchy it may be, but the film finds dreamy consolation in the final curtain.

It is grippingly unpredictable – a film with a glint in its eye and smoke curling from its nostrils and underpants. But you dismiss it, or miss it, at your peril.

Like any good chocolatier, King has obsessively focused on texture and flavour. And it’s those qualities – tuned to mass-market tastes, yet held in connoisseurish balance – that give his film its irresistible velvety sweetness.

Blanchett makes us feel the creeping horror of professional disgrace, the fear and stigma, however unfair Mapes argues her treatment may have been. We watch a polished professional come apart at the seams, caught up in self-incrimination and spiralling neurosis.

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.

William Devane's performance – as Major Charles Rane, a former POW who sees his family get killed by hoodlums – remains magnetic: stoic and unhinged.

Its supremely frank and unflinching treatment of its essentially taboo subject gives it a certain brandy-slug of consolatory warmth, despite the bitter chill that blows through most of its scenes.

Fascinating.

Slack Bay is half as long as Quinquin, but still feels too long. Major ensemble scenes (a family banquet, a service on the beach) dawdle indulgently, as if waiting for the joke to start.

For this usually understated filmmaker, it’s a madcap outlier, and often resembles an early Steven Spielberg film having a nervous breakdown.

Roofman has heart, energy and personality fit to burst. If the cinema gods decided that it was finally time for Channing Tatum to have a chance at an Oscar nomination, they could hardly have equipped him better than with this role.

The film frustrates because it’s frictionless, almost completely devoid of credible conflict, and generally keen to sail through as a testament to everlasting love at its most altruistic.

As portraiture, it’s also unapologetically (and therefore unfashionably) complex: the unsavoury aspects of his personal life are frankly addressed, but never used as a stick with which to beat the work. Rather, the signature tone of the narration – nicely delivered by the Doctor Who actress Pearl Mackie – is one of curiosity. And the fascination proves infectious.

In trying to pretend a blip was a seismic revolution, the film winds up distinctly strained, and more depressing than it quite knows.

It makes you wince at the fragility of life while simultaneously welling up at the wonder of it – and that unexpected mixing of the sentimental and the existential left me feeling what can only be described as aww-struck.

The film fares best when the chief negotiator, a fellow Marine vet played by the late, great Michael Kenneth Williams, steps into the fray. It’s one of his final performances, and a wary, angry one that elevates the material.