Moonlight, the new film from Barry Jenkins, is a nuclear-fission-strength heartbreaker. It’s made up of moments so slight and incidental they’re sub-molecular – but they release enough heat and light to swallow whole cities at a stroke.

It’s as if the book has been given a full-body massage en route to the screen, teasing away some of the spinal kinks that actually made it interesting.

Both actors, unfazed by the sheer oddity of their task, rise energetically to the occasion.

Southside With You all but begs you to unpick every line and gesture for shivery echoes of the future, and it’s to first-time writer-director Tanne’s credit – and, equally, that of his perfectly chosen leads, Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter – that the film not only withstands but thrives under such scrutiny.

The film ends exactly one scene too late, lessening the brutal statement its ending might have made. But these really aren’t deal-breakers in a crisp bullseye of a debut feature which has guts and brains to spare.

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

Berg’s favourite subject...is heroism at the brink, but the rescue efforts here aren’t pushed to the outsize or sentimental extremes they might have been.

Struggling with tone and urgency during its recruiting phase, the film clomps along to a pedestrian drum-roll, summoning a stark, brooding edge without quite enough lift-off.

Though the movie offers no new bombshells the filmmakers have nonetheless wrought a spare and unflinching feature that offers a fresh perspective on Knox without descending into the sensationalism that attended original coverage of the trial.

[Zlotowski] creates a situation, casts it perfectly, and backs out of a fully achieved story. As drama, it’s coitus interruptus, with a Geiger counter doing the interrupting.

This is a fascinating and outrageous next step for Escalante, with a strong central concept and some oozily plausible special effects. It’s just a pity that its human side doesn’t measure up to its inhuman one.

Pike and Oyelowo have a hearty, wholemeal chemistry together, and play their small moments with sincerity and a light elegance.

Blair Witch styles itself as a love-letter, but it’s pure transcription.

Its conclusions rarely make your head spin, but it meticulously shows its working out. (If it was an exam paper, it’d be impossible to dock it any marks.)

Everything that works in Nocturnal Animals is intoxicating, provocative, delicious – and happily, so is everything that doesn’t.

Hacksaw Ridge is a fantastically moving and bruising war film that hits you like a raw topside of beef in the face – a kind of primary-coloured Guernica that flourishes on a big screen with a crowd.

Its salvaged parts combine into an internally incongruous but crazily unique whole.

It's a comeback you root for, then, even while it’s wobbling and occasionally falling in the mud. But goodwill gets it home.

The problem with Sausage Party is that, for all the silliness, it so desperately wants to be taken seriously. What should have been a shamelessly filthy stoner movie has been watered down with ill-judged, undergraduate musings on religion, philosophy and race.

Hansen-Løve and Huppert cup a single life in their hands and ponder the mixed blessing of freedom from a philosophical position: the trade-off between self-sufficiency and aloneness that Nathalie finds herself negotiating.

Both Fassbender and Vikander explore their characters’ various thorny moral quandaries and shifting states of mind in breath-catching depth, drilling down through the plot’s melodramatic crust to the swirling ethical magma underneath.

This is riveting, dizzying stuff from Villeneuve.

La La Land wants to remind us how beautiful the half-forgotten dreams of the old days can be – the ones made up of nothing more than faces, music, romance and movement. It has its head in the stars, and for a little over two wonderstruck hours, it lifts you up there too.

Nothing here looks like a genuine interaction between real human beings: Spacey may be the first actor to give a comedic performance in which his own smile looks like it had to be green-screened in at a later date.

For the usually irrepressible Miike, it’s remarkably controlled, even restrained. And yet it involves 200 bodyguards being annihilated every which way, in a sustained frenzy of blistering choreographic skill that Hollywood won’t top all year.

Byrne’s film is concerned with the process and practice of myth-making: the way the right person, or action, or face, can capture a moment, or galvanise a movement – and, for both good and ill, transform politics into something like art.

This is high adventure in safe hands.

The Commune doesn’t openly stumble so much as constrict itself awkwardly inside its main love triangle, short-changing the terrific supporting cast, and nearly forgetting what we thought it was all about.