In this wildly promising debut feature from the 36-year-old British filmmaker Daniel Wolfe, the landscape becomes a kind of holy sanctuary for two young lovers fleeing a murderous plot.

Visually, it’s one great shrug, but to get by with a throwaway murder plot this routine, the zingers at least must zing. They rarely do. There’s something turgid and defeated about it.

This tale of epiphanies and religious schooling at a tiny monastery in the 1940s has a woozy, episodic lyricism all Thornton’s own. It’s also fuzzy and unfulfilled, groping for its images without ever precisely knowing what it needs them to say.

Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, the two-man writer-director team, are swinging at serious targets here... But their point soon wears itself out, and what remains is schlock with airs and tired black humour.

Anyone interested in animation needs to pay attention to what these films are doing. The writing formula may be crude, but the whiz-bang aesthetic is sensational.

Bombshell is a bright, watchable film on a subject that ought to make us squirm.

Dispassionate engagement won't fly here. You either stagger out early or plunge in up to your elbows.

Both actors, unfazed by the sheer oddity of their task, rise energetically to the occasion.

Parts of it tingle with a creepy, curtain-parting intimacy.

There are lightning-flashes of pure, ornamental brilliance throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, although there’s not much happening on the landscape they illuminate.

Although the access is intimate, what emerges is not particularly surprising.

Hawke expertly captures Baker’s angular fragility, both in his languidly crumpled face and his voice.

Yes, it’s a bright and splashy jukebox epic with an irresistible central performance from Austin Butler . . . But in that signature Luhrmann way, it veers in and out of fashion on a scene-by-scene basis: it’s the most impeccably styled and blaringly gaudy thing you’ll see all year, and all the more fun for it.

The director’s 28th feature is a magnificent slab of dad cinema, with Phoenix a startling emperor and Vanessa Kirby brilliant as his wife.

“A person’s a person, no matter how small,” Dr. Seuss once memorably counselled – and that’s as good a binding philosophy as any for Alexander Payne’s exhilaratingly odd new film.

While unlikely to steer future comedy in any direction you could identify – it’s barely in control of its own running time, frankly – the film is genuinely silly, at a time when silliness is quite welcome.

Flawed but compelling ... [A] hallucinatory gimmick feels a few rewrites away from working smoothly, and the thematic linking of Philippa’s plight with that of her subject’s never quite convinces. But Hawkins is quietly impressive.

Forbes has a delicate but unsentimental approach, which gives her film the same infectious energy that blesses and curses Cameron. The end result feels good without feeling superficial.

Any Hollywood gloss has been scoured away: the plot is raw, episodic and wholly unsentimental; a gruelling onward rumble from one brush with death to the next.

Samuel Peckinpah drank four bottles of whisky a day while filming his only war movie, but clearly it did nothing to diminish the power of his last masterpiece, related from the viewpoint of a German platoon retreating from the Russian front in 1943. [05 Apr 2014, p.33]

It’s addictive fantasy, satisfyingly snappy even in its absurdity, and something no Chastain fan can afford to miss.

It has the desperate vitality of something barely made-up.

Everett overdoes the lachrymosity right at the end, the one part of the film where a more subdued rigour would have served him better. At the very least, though, it’s a command performance he puts in front of us, an uncompromising feat of empathy in the role he’s made his own more than any other.

What we’ve seen since the beginnings of the Marvel serial in 2008 is an ongoing stretching: bigger casts, grander set-pieces and more intricate interplay between characters, with no clear end in sight. Ant-Man scuttles off in the other direction. Brisk humour, keenly felt dramatic stakes, and invention over scale. You know: small pleasures.

Mockingjay – Part 1 is all queue, no roller-coaster. The third of four films in the successful and admirable Hunger Games series is any number of good things: intense, stylish, topical, well-acted. But the one thing it could never be called is satisfying.

It’s jocular, never feels like a screed, and it’s refreshingly outward-looking.

Writer-director James Gunn finds moments of inspiration in this sequel, but the plot is a mess, the film irritable and frazzled.

It is first and foremost a picture of her, but it is also a picture of us; and just as Jennings did in his wartime documentaries, it reminds us not just of her profound decency but also, oddly enough, of ours.