What sense there is of big ideas being thoughtfully chewed over stems largely from Rapace’s steely, wounded central performance, which often feels like a decade-later echo of her work in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films.

Only a film as big as Africa could have done Adichie’s novel full justice; the treatment it gets here, equally honourable and hurried, reduces it to Nigerian soap with BAFTA-level acting.

Ridley Scott's crime drama feels like a soap opera with airs, but its star's sheer chutzpah ensures it's never less than watchably raucous.

It’s a candy-coated underworld romp, and pleasingly weird at times – when we’re invited inside Harley’s cutely tattered parlour, no explanation’s given for why she has a stuffed beaver in a pink tutu on her kitchen table. It’s just… the kind of thing she would have. Yan’s film converts her from livid to likeable, and doesn’t give a hoot if you mind.

Who knows what it’ll look like down the line as a record of its own premiere – the live-streaming may well have been its oxygen. But we did watch the boundaries crumble outright between live performance and real, on-the-hoof film-making, to amply entertaining effect.

There’s something ever-so-chic, a touch too manicured about the film’s despondency, and only rare moments land to touch us, especially. But it’s a gentle, genial watch.

It is down to the strength of the acting that the film succeeds as far as it does.

Perhaps the play’s overfamiliarity is the one thing holding this back in the end: you’re expecting it to cross the barrier from solid to gut-wrenching, and that never quite happens.

For the most part it’s as briskly enjoyable as the studio’s output tends to be, with likeable characters trading polished repartee while large computer-generated objects explode convincingly in the background. Yet perhaps for the first time, the briskness often doesn’t sit right with the material at hand.

The film has an impetuous, let’s-try-it-on quality that makes it a modest pleasure.

Harold’s trek has its moments to savour, but Wilton seizes the day by sculpting her own mini Mike Leigh film on the side – armed with only a vacuum cleaner and a face like thunder.

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.

Genres don’t come much more formulaic than frat-house comedy, and nobody, in this fair-to-fine example, feels like rocking the boat.

It can’t be denied that as a piece of cover-all-bases, hi-sheen, lo-thought, built-to-order corporate product, the film runs with a steady and satisfying whirr.

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

Director Camille Delamarre and Luc Besson, who co-wrote the screenplay, relocate the story to Detroit and tone down some of its (admittedly broad) social satire — although the Parkour remains centre-stage, and is mostly hair-raising.

As a critic-turned-partisan who also narrates, Krichevskaya is the right kind of observer here on paper. But there’s too little airing of her own views at the time of walking out, when she didn’t have faith in Dozhd’s true independence.

The Miracle Club’s own manoeuvrings can, at times, feel a bit pat and convenient. But its final moment of reconciliation – Smith and Linney back home by the shore, having pruned back 40 years of emotional overgrowth – justifies the trip.

The plotting meanders its way to the very brink of incoherence, but as the scenes tick past, the vague sense of a many-tendrilled mystery being solved does gradually descend.

The showdown (in the usual abandoned auditorium) is perhaps the campiest yet to be unveiled, proving that a generally-clapped-out franchise is capable of some fairly fun death throes.

This is a fascinating and outrageous next step for Escalante, with a strong central concept and some oozily plausible special effects. It’s just a pity that its human side doesn’t measure up to its inhuman one.

This adaptation of Leonard Wibberley's novel, and sequel to The Mouse That Roared satirises the space war, Cold War and politics to varied effect. [07 Dec 2013, p.40]

It’s a modest but polished psychological drama that keeps threatening to mutate into an old-fashioned toxic relationship thriller – and the tension between what it actually is and where it might be going makes it an enjoyably nerve-jangling watch.

Even when the heist gets underway, the film takes its time about everything: what Zahler has essentially done is put a 15-minute mid-blockbuster set-piece on the rack and stretched it out until its cartilage pops. The duration is part of the point – you can’t do gnawing fatalism in a hurry – but the repetitions and languors here can feel presumptuous.

The undersung director, Emily Atef, does well to make the business of dying, which can be the hoariest of cinematic subjects, feel like a fresh quandary here for two people making up the rules as they go along.

The whole package is still charming on its own cosy terms – the film equivalent of a loveable old hound that fetches your favourite slippers, rolls over for a tickle, curls up on your feet, contentedly passes wind, then nods off.

A cram-it-all-in adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s 2010 history book of the same name, which knuckles down to its task with sleeves rolled, upper lips stiffened, and vast sheaves of exposition to whip through.

An unfashionably male art film of Nietzsche-quoting, Tarkovsky-adjacent bent that’s ghoulish, baffling and rather brave.