At a glance, A Boy Called Christmas looks delightful enough, with its snowy landscapes, cosy knitwear, and scenes of Jim Broadbent larking around in a periwig and frock coat. But beneath its Paddington-meets-Potter storybook exterior, its bloodstream runs with purest gloop.

While the plot is straightforward, characters are well-drawn, many defined by ironic delusions.

It’s far less endearing than we’re presumably meant to think.

Land will give you a craving to be in the great outdoors, maybe before it’s even over.

Does it add up to much? Not really. Not finally. But it’s a suggestive puzzle-box of a picture, worth turning over in your palm.

Vanishing Point is a fantastic chase film, which despite its heavy-handed symbolism, is an absolute must for any movie lover – whether you're a petrol head or not.

Blue might be the warmest colour elsewhere, but here it’s just a bit tepid.

The film has bite without a lot of nuance.

Some of us saw a while ago that turning Avatar into a franchise would prove to be a creative cul-de-sac. Having reached the top of the street three years ago, Cameron spends all of Fire and Ash trying to turn his enormous articulated lorry around. The back-up beeper is beeping, the spinning yellow lights are spinning, and he’s just knocked over his third wheelie bin. I do hope he eventually gets out.

The Informer is one of the year’s more pleasant genre surprises: a clenched fist of a crime thriller in the mode of The Departed or The Town, in which every element is just a notch smarter than you’d expect. Generic though the film may look, it holds together absorbingly, thanks to a sturdy script which ups stakes and adds characters with cunning and intelligence.

This is at the very least a beautifully designed failure, marrying crepuscular photography with faultless art direction, and blessed by a gorgeous, otherworldly score by Augustin Viard, a specialist in the ondes Martenot. It looks and sounds so darkly inviting – but sends you home unsated.

To borrow a screenwriting buzz-phrase, "fun and games" is all you get, and the lack of meaningful connective tissue between the antics means the film begins to flag far earlier than it should.

The legend loses something in the retelling, but what’s new here is mostly worth the trip.

The film is thrillingly reckless enough to make you genuinely dread what’s coming next.

Vogt-Roberts manages the neat trick of making his film feel both nostalgic and current.

It might end up being the most beautiful, moving and all-around-loveliest children’s film of the year.

Elephant is set in a world without poachers, developers or tourists: the picture it paints is beautiful and educative, but doesn’t feel quite complete

Maggie Carey, the writer and director, has plenty to say about life on the cusp of womanhood, but never quite works out a way to make her points without getting her characters to recite them verbatim.

The new film Dog is essentially an hour and three quarters of Channing Tatum rolling around with a dog – and quite frankly, for many of us, that’s enough.

Hunt, who served as editor on the first three Connery films, gives Lazenby’s fist fights a whipcrack intensity and the ski-jumping, stock car-racing, bobsled-sliding finale is one of the series’ best.

Cleaving hard to its road-trip formula, it works out less of an honest-to-goodness plot than Magic Mike, but goes even beyond that wonderfully loose, dexterous movie in feeling sexually liberated. It’s more glammed-up, rising above any element of tawdry exploitation, and is more of an outright comedy.

A serious-minded, often beautiful, utterly heartfelt character study that nevertheless lacks its astonishing protagonist’s fleet-footedness and only partly captures what made him tick.

It is a head-spinning shock-and-awe satire that comes in hot then cranks up the thermostat to infernal – a Molotov cocktail of biopic, documentary and black comedy, with a thrillingly short fuse.

This is cinema as decathlon – a string of tribulations to sap your stamina and make your ligaments burn.

There’s nothing at all wrong with Respect, which is colourful and pretty well played, other than an overall air of caution – and the thing about Aretha Franklin’s voice is that it really swung for the rafters.

A documentary that couldn't fail to entertain.

The point is that you could watch these films for four hours, then spend 14 arguing about them – about whether sex, for vor Trier, is an eternal human mystery, or a cosmic joke at our expense.

Before, after, and between these (action) sequences, even by the paltry standard of previous scripts, it’s slow-witted and won’t shut up.