But in its best moments, there’s a yarn-spinning intimacy to it too – an old war story told around a spectacular campfire.

It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.

Middleweight, non-intelligence-insulting fare right to the core, Bleed For This keeps you squarely in your seat, but barely once excites you enough to leap up out of it.

In the annual way of these things, Office Christmas Party is something you might regret not dropping in on, but you could cut your losses after an hour or so, and only miss sordid carnage and a sore head.

The level of not very funny things this entails, even by the standards of barely-awaited sequels to lowbrow Yuletide comedies, is kind of impressive.

It’s considerably too polite to do Philip Roth justice. Only in that single tête-à-tête does it truly crackle with the cold, white heat required.

There’s half an argument that this schlocky lowlife caper energises its director’s visual imagination more than we’ve seen lately – hey, at least he’s trying something – but it’s not a juggling feat he can keep up all day.

Intertwining, Altman-esque social tapestries are all well and good, but the connections between characters should ideally run a little deeper than having them occasionally stroll past each other in the street.

Allied, swathed in larger-than-life, luxurious imposture, is the real heart-racing deal.

The film is immaculately cast, and the chemistry between its four heroes holds your eye with its firework fizz.

Incendies is no one’s idea of a joyful ride, but it’s a remarkable work, and its complex story etches itself on the memory.

It's just a shame the whole thing is so steeped in honkingly signposted feelgood sentiment.

It’s almost certain to be the most existentially probing talking animal cartoon of the year.

As a thriller, it’s lethargically paced, uninspiringly edited, and hardly raises your pulse even during life-or-death mano-a-mano.

For a comedy about a tribe of manic homunculi with nylon faux-hawks, it’s really got to be counted a pleasant surprise.

Put simply, you care about the Katwe kids because he does, and in the same way, too – not with high-strung melodramatic concern, but a warm glow of empathy in your gut. That’s stoked up in part by the film’s keen eye for telling, truthful-feeling detail.

It’s Herzog’s uncertainty as a tourist in the field that gives the film its enticing charge, as surely as his wanderings in the Antarctic, or gropings in the dark to find the world’s oldest cave paintings.

The one thing there’s no accounting for in The Accountant is taste.

The only way to understand it is to swim in it for yourself, feel your own heart braid around these two interwoven lives, and gaze up in awe at the silvery arc those falling stars trace across the sky.

An emotional pounding this brutal leaves you yearning for a little softness, and by the time the film’s ending rolls around, a scene which by rights should be overly sentimental...feels not only allowable, but blissfully, cathartically welcome.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Doctor Strange, within the lockstep rubric of these things, is how non-Marvelly it manages to feel.

Far more than his previous films, which tend to unfold in a dream-like daze, Free Fire is a mad contraption, bristling with bravado and black, sardonic wit.

A densely funny, lovingly orchestrated hour and a half of amiable chaos.

The script never lunges for cheap drama by forcing Saroo into a binary choice between mothers, and the most complex beats are about tip-toeing around, often counter-productively, to avoid hurt or betrayal.

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 all wickedly tendentious mischief, but when it's this gloriously funny, the points score themselves.

While the plot’s endless lurches and jinks are designed to hold you in a constant state of pleasurable bafflement, the cumulative effect is desensitisation: no single thread holds long enough to give you anything to cheer for or believe in.

Theoretically, getting to see Peña and Skarsgård goof around with these leading roles is the film’s headline draw; but the script is so misguidedly pleased with itself, all you’re doing is watching two amiable stars mug strenuously and try their best.