What we’ve seen since the beginnings of the Marvel serial in 2008 is an ongoing stretching: bigger casts, grander set-pieces and more intricate interplay between characters, with no clear end in sight. Ant-Man scuttles off in the other direction. Brisk humour, keenly felt dramatic stakes, and invention over scale. You know: small pleasures.

There’s a good trickle of laughs running through this, and an observation of British familydom that’s just on the credible side of cringeworthy.

If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.

In practice, the interplay between events old and new is equal parts tedious and indecipherable, with the characters talking about parallel timelines like studio executives thrashing out a franchise in a boardroom.

Cleaving hard to its road-trip formula, it works out less of an honest-to-goodness plot than Magic Mike, but goes even beyond that wonderfully loose, dexterous movie in feeling sexually liberated. It’s more glammed-up, rising above any element of tawdry exploitation, and is more of an outright comedy.

François Ozon and the late Ruth Rendell is a great match of sensibilities: it promises the French director’s winking subversion, wedded to the late crime writer’s slippery command of psychological twists.

What’s surprising about Minions is that it squanders these yellow oddballs’ new-found freedom.

Two decades after dinosaurs ruled the Earth’s cinemas, are we still capable of putting our phones away for two hours and being honestly amazed by them, without a glaze of cynicism or irony to keep us stuck? Trevorrow, his cast and crew would clearly like to think so. And in light of their efforts, you’d have to grinningly agree.

If Diao’s intent on confounding us, he has the courtesy to do it with frequently astonishing style and verve.

Survivor is about as silly as cinema can get, an explosives-packed thriller for those of you who found The Expendables just a little too understated.

Perry somehow allows his cast enough space in this meticulously authored environment to work creative wonders of their own.

It manages the all-important jump scares with the finesse of a skilled stage illusionist, but it’s the surprisingly sincere emotional core that makes it the pick of the series.

You just have to watch it, then grab a net and try to coax your soul back down from the ceiling.

You see San Francisco and Los Angeles falling apart very loudly and dangerously, and in great computer-generated detail. But there’s nothing memorable or beautiful about the carnage; no specific moments to replay in your head once the film is over.

Silk curtains flutter and fall, candles glow, fires crackle softly in the grate. Every scene, every shot, has been composed with total, Kubrickian precision, and calibrated for maximum, breath-quickening impact.

The demented brilliance of Miike’s film lies in the director’s ability to craft ideas that are simultaneously sublime and ridiculous.

The film's effect is anti-emotional, and that's the point; it's about the insatiable process of humanity working to eradicate all traces of itself. There's no time left to weep, because the nerve endings are already dead.

Its generation-spanning story has serious power, and, in its masterful opening chapter and final sequence, brushes against greatness.

Justin Kurzel’s blistering, blood-sticky new screen version of Macbeth unseams the famous Shakespearean tragedy open from the nave to the chops, letting its insides spill out across the rock underfoot.

This is an energised romantic drama overflowing with humour and passion.

Turturro deserves four stars – but the rest of Moretti’s saggy melodrama is scarcely half as good.

Precisely because it’s less emotionally coercive than Kore-eda’s last couple of pictures, it’s even more moving: rather than lunging full-bore for the solar plexus, the truths it’s telling creep up on you.

Van Sant wanted to study a man drowning in sorrow and guide him towards the light. But the guidance he gets is fake, forced, and unbearably tricksy, a kind of suicide rehab with gotcha devices.

There’s not much fault to find with Sicario on the level of craft or performances, just its rather sputtering momentum, and the lack of a higher purpose.

There are lightning-flashes of pure, ornamental brilliance throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, although there’s not much happening on the landscape they illuminate.

When the film gets going, it’s hard not to be bustled along with it, thanks mostly to León de Aranoa’s talent for punchy comic dialogue – doubly impressive, given this is his first English-language picture – and the plot’s habit of thwarting your expectations as to where the most morally upstanding course of action might lead.

The film feels like a personal project for Portman, but thankfully never a vanity one. It’s a fine piece of work – and you sense there’s better to come.

So if the sex is such a ball, what’s wrong with Love? The answer, unfortunately, is absolutely everything else, of which there’s more than you might initially expect.