It’s Thompson as the heroically unbiddable Travers who makes the most of it; her bravura performance effectively dominates the film.

With a tighter plot and slightly more knowing craftsmanship, this might have worked, but Swedish director Mikael Hafström (1408, The Rite) isn’t really the man to poke fun with any sophistication at his stars’ well-established personas.

For all the solid efforts of the cast, it’s still one of those biopics with a totally canned story arc and as many head-slapping moments as intentional laughs.

A tough, vital, electrifying film.

Let’s blame Fellowes before Shakespeare – one of them built this house, the other has just walked right through it in his filthiest garden clogs.

Junger’s film is a decent, heartfelt tribute.

Perhaps because the joke’s already spent, this sequel has a pretty low bar to clear, and manages to be both utterly meritless and weirdly bearable.

For a while, the film gets by on silliness alone. But in the end, it all amounts to no more than a sniggery guilty pleasure.

Allen’s ambitions with this taut, tart character study might not be stratospheric, but they’re at least moderate-to-high, and his degree of success is exciting.

Wright’s inkily beautiful, imaginatively structured picture - drama bleeds into newsreel and archive footage - is another excellent new film about the strange ways British landscapes (and here, seascapes) work on British minds.

Tonally the film is all over the rink, but it leaves you more convinced and entertained than you’d expect.

Their fans will love the efficient, well-shot concert scenes: but its woeful parallel story suggests bands like Metallica are rarely more than one remove from Spinal Tap.

There are those who find Žižek a delight; but well before the two-hour mark, one feels he has delighted us long enough.

I loved every minute of Filth, and couldn’t have stomached another second of it.

Captain Phillips is a triumph of solid, professional and sometimes inspired film crafts, deserving of all the plaudits that come its way.

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.

Wiese’s film is an efficient piece of work, competent as a film but blistering as an example of human rights advocacy.

The slotting together of songs and plot is often done with a spark of inspiration.

Runner Runner starts off with a solid draw, then folds on the flop.

Sophisticated, sharp and funny, Le Week-End achieves an unusual coup: it’s a film about two older characters that is neither deeply gloomy (like, say, Amour) nor twinkly and cheerily upbeat.

It’s less an adaptation than a recapitulation.

Morris gives it the old college try, but Rumsfeld is too smooth an operator to let anything slip.

If you are asking an audience to listen to one man talking for an hour and a half, you had better make sure he is worth listening to, and minute-by-minute, Hardy has you spellbound.

The film leaves you enlightened and disillusioned, but still furious at Armstrong, who seems to have drawn the conclusion that he is now a tragic hero.

Glazer’s astonishing film takes you to a place where the everyday becomes suddenly strange, and fear and seduction become one and the same.

Raucous but fatally confused, openly pilfering its central themes from Gilliam’s own 1985 masterpiece Brazil, but with no idea how to develop them.

Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery; every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip.

This is a heartbreaking story – how could it not be? But Frears’ film breaks your heart and then repairs it.