Wheatley’s extraordinary film shakes you back and forth with a rare ferocity, but the net result is stillness.

Come the final act, the best political thrillers don't play nice, after all – they twist the knife. This one’s so concerned with making the world a better place, it retracts the blade and wipes it clean

In the end, I was nagged by a question posed by Polley’s sister Joanna in the film’s opening minutes. “I guess I have this instinctive reaction: who cares about our ----ing family?” The answer, of course, is Polley herself, who smilingly tells us that a story like hers can never truly be tied down, even as she screws every last piece into place.

You’ve never seen a documentary like The Act of Killing. If you saw too many like it, your hold on sanity might fray, which is not so much the film’s fault as that of its bloodcurdling subject. This movie is essential.

That the film ends up floundering is not really their fault. These two belong on screen together: when they’re not completing each other’s sentences, they’re completing them wrongly, which is even better.

This apocalypse isn’t a nightmare so much as the ultimate bromantic fantasy, one in which – with the removal of any responsibility – the boys are free to bicker, banter, and bed down together.

The one inspired idea here is what happens to the minions when they’re injected with serum by the film’s mystery baddie, and this is enough to give us at least a reel’s worth of anarchic pleasure.

Where we might have expected a gentle or rueful coda, we get a battle of the sexes as blistering as the best of Tracy/Hepburn, and infinitely more frank.

Like Someone in Love, is another miracle at close quarters. Its subject is the impossibility of intimacy in the modern world: chewy stuff, to be sure, but Kiarostami explores it with a depth and delicacy that recalls the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu.

Neither clever nor stupid enough to work.

It’s funny and touching, but feels like a missed opportunity.

Acker and Denisof spar with each other in the best traditions of screwball comedy; worthy modern equivalents to Tracy and Hepburn. They’re the main source of joy in a film overflowing with treats.

The movie subverts expectations, and not in a good way, by seeming in a dither about its own identity. The romance is by the by, the comedy as sparse as can be. We’re left with a curious non-film about the pitfalls of higher education assessment. Odd.

It’s a thoroughly warm diversion, whose lapses into cliché only make it cosier.

It has heft, it looks amazing, and it's businesslike to a fault.

This cherishable Irish B-picture is one of those rare horror films with an unimprovable premise.

There are cameos from James Franco, Stephen Dorff, a comically moustachioed David Schwimmer and an unrecognisably hirsute Chris Evans as various lowlifes. A pity, then, that nothing else in Ariel Vromen’s movie is remotely on Shannon’s level, from the plodding, Scorsese-clone script to the needlessly lifeless editing and cinematography.

The actual exorcism sequence, involving three well-meaning cult members and a chicken, is strangely uneventful – and if there’s one thing a movie exorcism should never, ever be, it’s that.

Despite the Smith family’s association with Scientology, which unmistakably informs this tale’s belief system (“Fear is a Choice”), as well as its shaky attempts at mythic patterning, it is in no way the laughable shambles that John Travolta’s infamous "Battlefield Earth" was.

What we get is a collection of moderately violent action set-pieces untroubled by humour or broader coherence.

While his ambitious conceit hangs together over two hours of loudly-declaimed meta-metatheatricality, my word, does it feel like an unholy slog.

This movie starts from a premise so sociologically batty it’s hard to take any of its subsequent terrors seriously, which means tension doesn’t so much fly out the window as fail to even get up the driveway.

A dizzying collage of all the changes in London’s social and architectural fabric since light was first trained through celluloid.

This would-be-frothy date flick is a sub-"Meet the Fockers" dog’s dinner.

The diminution works its appeal once again in Epic – the latest film from the creators of "Ice Age" and "Rio" – which is just as well, because the rest of the narrative follows a rather predictable route.

It is beautifully shot, too: even the writing on the posters and graffiti observes the style of classical French écriture. Given enough time, maybe one could even grow nostalgic for the pomposity.

It is an extraordinary, prolonged popping-candy explosion of pleasure, sadness, anger, lust and hope.

François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful is, in the very best sense, a film that won't add up.