The film’s about a chapter we prefer to get out of the way in adolescence; revisited as this kind of helpless mid-life crisis, it’s exquisite torture.

Southpaw asks both too much of Gyllenhaal and not enough – he’s being forced to build a whole character out of scraps, sawdust, and horrendous clichés.

The sum total is superior in every way to what he dished out last time. With a third one openly teased at the end, the fog has lifted: Hemsworth has landed on his Bourne, and this is his Supremacy.

It’s another flick through a familiar and by-now bulging scrapbook, but it leaves you craving less – and more.

Forget computer-generated spandex: that top must be the single most psychologically precise piece of costuming in the entire Marvel project. That it also looks completely at home beside Hemsworth’s scarlet cape and induction-hob breastplate might be the neatest encapsulation to date of the franchise’s charms.

Sometimes it just takes one actor to elevate a film from innocuous, take-it-or-leave it fare into something winningly tender – and if your first film’s needing that kind of lift-off, you could hardly do much better than Monica Dolan.

Seydoux is coolly enthralling throughout: her mask-like face, often streaked with a single, strategic tear, mirrors the fundamental blankness of her line of work. Thanks to her performance, France is never less than intriguing. But it’s also extremely hard to get along with – a broadcast-news parable whose sense of purpose keeps fuzzing in and out.

Too hectic to be scary, and with a plot that’s regularly bogged down in optimistic franchise-building spadework, The House with a Clock in Its Walls never quite grasps what made its inspirations tick.

The film is street-hawking its thesis all over the parish. Had it tried a softer sell, it would have been much more tempting to stop and listen.

This is an innovative, occasionally provocative, often frustrating film, but one whose perspectives on guilt and victimhood offer a new angle on a notorious case.

If production problems didn’t thwart Maclean and crew from making a proper fist of all this, the editing took its eye off the ball.

The last thing you want to feel about the end of the world is that you’ve seen it all before.

The film has limitations. But it has Binoche, and that’s almost enough.

These characters get ghastly fast. It’s the pace and panic of modernity Moverman grasps best as morally corrosive forces: the soft ping of iPhone email alerts never letting us be, and consciences wiped clean as quickly as the next news cycle whips around.

The film is not a total disaster, however. There is a captivating, unsettling climax and some impressive supporting performances.

With Statham literally riding shotgun, Ritchie has binned any pretence at subtlety and goes back to basics with an bullet-strewn romp that kicks down the door first and asks questions later. And which is, in the end, nothing more than an excuse for its star to punch as many villains as possible.

Both the sweetest and the funniest performer is Love and Friendship’s Tom Bennett, endearingly innocent and dreadfully coiffed as a third-generation British hedgehog gently upgrading from his dad’s tired routines.

It’s the character dynamics here, more than the dark and stormy set-pieces, that get things off the ground.

If it weren’t for the stifling earnestness about patriarchal dogma, you could mistake it for M. Night Shyalaman’s The Village given some kind of vague off-Broadway workshopping, and regurgitated minus the twist.

A stickler might argue – not wrongly – that Havoc is ultimately a handful of astonishing set-pieces, linked by interludes of Hardy growling and ambling around. But as Howard Hawks once pointed out, all a good movie needs is three great scenes and no bad ones.

Despite his free and easy camerawork, which generates some lovely moments between Ian and Sofi, Cahill's narrative jolts along in fits and starts.

Fuqua’s film is lacking much of an intelligible plot other than “tough hombre rights wrongs in ways pushing the boundaries of a 15 rating”.

Many things in this film have an off-kilter absurdity, for good and bad.

This modest ladcom scores rather higher on the sincerity scale, much like a best man’s speech that fluffs the jokes but semi-accidentally gets a deep sense of friendship across.

The plot, directed by Michael Curtiz, is thin but warm-hearted. [22 Dec 2014]

Like its absurdly named hero, Extraction gets a serious and deeply silly job done in style.

This expensive-looking follow-up, which tells the story of Simba’s father’s own coming-to-power, sheepishly papers over all of the now-unfashionable concepts on which its forerunner was built.

The animation is technically wondrous – the colour and detail amazes, while the Minions themselves have never looked more bouncily robust – but it’s always in service of the overriding slapstick agenda. Even the flat, side-on compositions – less than ideal for showing off graphical prowess – feel like knowing evocations of the deadpan staging of vintage cartoons.