Sin City 2 glowers and sulks and is determined to show you the best bad time you’ve had in years. It’s neither high art nor noir, but it’s what a Sin City film should be.

Metro Manila is so spellbound by its setting that it is a good hour before we discover what kind of film it is going to be. It begins as a swirling drama of survival in the Filipino capital — but then suddenly it slips off down an alleyway, only to emerge a scrupulously engineered, Christopher Nolan-ish crime thriller.

What distinguishes the film from last year’s backpacking adventure, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, apart from its lobotomised worldview and charred, corroded soul, are Hector’s philosophical musings – “people who are afraid of death are afraid of life,” is one – that pop up on screen in a handwritten font whenever a lesson has been learnt.

It’s preposterous, but I dare you not to smile at the high-kicking silliness on offer, or the sweetly old-fashioned undertones: as the inevitable final showdown looms, loyalty, hard work and fair play are just as important to the dancers as strutting their stuff.

You can’t help but wonder if some important people in boardrooms watched the last two Expendables films and, between sips of mineral water, diligently noted all the ways in which the third might be made slicker and more polished, without realising the franchise’s doughy unslickness was the wellspring of its charm.

[A] minor and distinctly unchilling fare.

The fun of it – and Guardians of the Galaxy specialises in fun, served by the sugar-sprinkled ice-cream-scoopload – is in seeing this odd quintet bluster through space battles and alien brawls that would have defeated anyone smarter and better-equipped. Just as the team makes do with the junk they find around them, the film feels like a mound of gems culled from decades of pop-culture scavenging.

Sure, the film is crude, calorific and full of groanworthy half-jokes, but it holds together. It stacks up as an oafish pleasure for an undemanding summer – a rewriting of myths in scrawled crayon, with a nonchalant quality that makes its judiciously brief running time fly by.

Shan Khan’s feature debut swaggers into its subject with more cocksure style than cogent analysis, like a tabloid splash designed to grip first and (if at all) illuminate later.

There's evident patience and intelligence to the filmmaking all over, as well as an engagement with genuine ideas about diplomacy, deterrence, law and leadership. However often it risks monkey-mad silliness, it's impressively un-stupid.

Transformers has ambition and attitude in its pores, and spectacle to spare. Bay shoots cars like they’re women, and people like they’re cars, and tosses around metal like it’s made from thin air. The film wasn’t meant to make you think, but it does. For better or worse, it’s cinema.

Unrelated is an emotionally and sometimes wince-inducingly acute debut from British director Joanna Hogg that looks and feels and sounds like few other British films.

No other British director is making films quite like this.

Postman Pat: the Movie doesn’t get a stamp of approval.

The subject is an important one but would benefit from a shorter running time.

It’s a pleasing if minor piece of work, like a semi-precious stone that you’d still keep.

Rather than do something freshly cinematic with Saint Laurent’s precise, elegant creations, the film is content to exhibit them.

Rather than embracing the jangling song-and-dance numbers that made the live version box-office catnip, Eastwood sheepishly tidies them into the background, treating the project instead like a standard music-industry biopic.

Like one of its animated 3D asides, the film jumps out at you, twiddles around and then folds itself away into nowhere. It’s all pop-up, no book.

Woodley and Dern breathe a ghost into the machine. Willem Dafoe has fun, albeit not too much, in a brief, vital role as a creepy writer. Most crucially, the words that survived from Green’s novel did so for a reason.

Hogg withholds the specifics, and lets you decode things for yourself. Her camera rarely moves, but every shot is composed with total artistry, building to a final image that’s somehow both joyful and devastating.

While admitting the man’s flaws, Coogler chooses to give Oscar the benefit of the doubt, which is precisely what he didn’t get on that platform just after midnight struck.

This excellent film is a sequel and knows it, and wants us to know that it knows it.

It’s well-acted, especially by Healy (The Innkeepers), who makes you feel the pain of every wound, the ratcheting torture of every dilemma. But the film’s also a gimmicky exercise whose hollowness and credibility are constant problems.

Thank heavens, then, for the time-loop gimmick, which sustains a full hour of screen time with enough variations on its gambit to hook you in.

MacFarlane’s making no effort to push the envelope, which is something of a relief, but nor is he winning anyone around to his increasingly desperate stylings as a nerd-turned-bully.

The action sequences are executed with rhythm and punch, and our heroine swoops and swirls around like Iron Man in a sheath dress. Maleficent may be short on true enchantment, but until we find a superhero who can pull off a black silk cocktail gown in battle, she’s very welcome.

Mightily clever in its rather theatrical structure, but bracingly cinematic in its formal approach, the movie has a bold, ambiguous final act.