Yamada’s creative direction shows a filmmaker with a distinctive way of looking at the world, following in the footsteps of other maverick Japanese talents like Ozu, Kitano and Miyazaki. Yep, she’s that good.

Despite the Falling Snow is held back by stylistic choices.

This intimate documentary about the leftfield American filmmaker David Lynch is insightful and absorbing.

Overall, this is an enjoyable, compelling small-scale shocker.

For lovers of old-fashioned horror, this is your bloody Christmas.

It doesn’t entirely hold together; the relentless din and repetition flips from thrilling to exhausting and back again more than once. But in those moments when everything clicks...this is absolutely joyous.

Soul-crushingly unfunny...It’s a movie that assumes that if you repeat ad nauseam an unfunny joke about ass-licking, it’ll magically become hilarious. It’s so grotesquely misogynistic, it makes The Hangover look like Thelma & Louise.

A handful of tense moments and some neat Gravity style effects just about keep Life ticking along. But the direction by Daniel Espinosa (he of the dire Child 44) is seriously shoddy – there's a moment towards the end when everything seems suddenly to happen at once, and not in a good way – and the total lack of originality is disappointing.

It’s badly paced, has too many plotlines crammed in and gives Joan’s character one-liners that come off as mean rather than Alexis-sassy.

Watching Raw is a bit like seeing a toddler crawl toward a four-lane highway. You can’t tear your eyes away, but at same time you want to squeeze them shut. This is a film that doesn’t just put you through the wringer; it scrapes your insides out. It left me trembling for hours.

Commentary on a changing Europe – and especially a socially and economically forlorn Spain – underpins ‘The Olive Tree’, but the human relationships are most poignant here.

As an insight into the way families cope with adversity this is both razor-sharp and completely heartbreaking.

As drama, The Salesman wanders, meanders and searches, mostly pleasurably, until it hits an over-engineered final chapter.

This is a lavish pull-out-all-the-stops musical.

The absolute seriousness with which the band regard themselves – particularly drummer-songwriter Yoshiki, who’s so famous that Stan Lee turned him into a superhero – is never questioned by Kijak, resulting in a fitfully enjoyable but rather pompous fan film.

There is surely a sly attack here on the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin’s suppression of liberal values and demonisation of the LGBT community. As the tension escalates, there are some poking between the ribs questions too about free speech and facts in the post-truth era.

At just under two hours, the sheer relentlessness can become exhausting. But if you’re a fan of unfettered action, this will be a rare treat.

At the human level, this is shallow, and Chadha clumsily fuses political drama with romantic melodrama.

It’s a teasing celebration of outsiderdom without being a full-on endorsement

Still, it’s one of the terrorist's wives (Melissa Benoist) who carries the film’s most riveting and provocative scene.

The Fits is abstract and atmospheric, intense and surprisingly emotional. There are few explanations in this short tale. It’s hard to pin down, but guaranteed to leave a mark.

This forgotten chapter of history deserves to be better told.

Overall, Logan is something rather special: a moving and mournful story of life at the end of the line, and the perfect blockbuster for these embittered times.

The Great Wall is not exactly a good movie – but it’s a pretty enjoyable one.

The Space Between Us is mostly harmless. But it won’t come close to troubling your heartstrings, let alone the space between your ears.

It’s an important story, of course, but only mildly engaging as cinema.

These dysfunctional, hypersensitive Japanese teens and their quest for erotic and spiritual enlightenment make for a swooning, often riotously funny melodrama charged with a refreshingly perverse undertow.

Perhaps understandably, it’s slightly scrappy and can feel a little like an overextended TV sketch in places. I laughed hard – feeling like a bit of a sicko – but you might find it plain nasty.

What a stupendously entertaining ride it is. Director and former stuntman Chad Stahelski is back in the director’s chair, and he knows his craft inside out: every punch lands hard, every gunshot roars like thunder.

It’s easy to throw accusations of staginess at film adaptations of theatre like this, which honour the limitations of theatre and make only limited attempts to open up the play. But there’s a hothouse atmosphere to this domestic drama that works well on screen.

A ferociously paced, wildly silly pastiche of those comic-book blockbusters we’re all getting a bit sick of.

Imagine simultaneously eating wallpaper paste, listening to Coldplay and watching the entire ‘Da Vinci Code’ trilogy back to back and you’ll have some idea how grindingly tedious the experience of watching Rings becomes.

After the bruising honesty of ‘Calvary’, it’s probably not surprising that McDonagh felt the urge to cut loose a little and make a movie with few ambitions beyond cheap violence and filthy laughs. Let’s just hope he’s got it out of his system.

The script can’t find the right tone, torn between hard-hitting satire on the pitfalls of capitalism and goofy, upbeat we’re-in-the-money clichés. It’s a fine line that ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ walked with ease – but Gaghan, sadly, is no Scorsese.

Cameraperson’ is a thoughtful examination of the role of the documentary-maker, showing us how it feels to be that person behind the camera.

Danny Says doesn’t break the rock-doc mould, but it’s a must for fans of noise and nostalgia.

iBoy’ is a sparky film, embedded in London’s cheek-by-jowl world of wealth and poverty. It’s also a dark teen drama, peppered with brutal beatings, gang rape, drugs and dead bodies.

Denial cries out for a little more subtlety.

Like the original, T2 Trainspotting is a winning mix of low living and high jinx, a stylized spin on real life.

These young women have already witnessed enough horror to last a lifetime, and in this unforgiving society their lot seems unlikely to improve. A grim but necessary watch.

Director Amber Fares strikes a perfect balance, telling a righteous, uplifting story of triumph against the odds without ever losing sight of the bigger political picture.

Irreplaceable builds in intensity as we realise the profound humanity and community spirit embodied by everyday heroes like this. Beautifully done by a writer-director who clearly knows his stuff.

Packed with warmth and wit, this is a lovely lo-fi charmer.

The relentless gloom can feel oppressive, but there’s plenty of ambition here, especially in the layered storytelling and woozy sense of time and place, with plenty of soaring aerial shots that nod quietly to the all-seeing eye of a computer game.

There are a handful of really interesting scenes.... But for the most part Passengers is so anodyne, so frightened of the ethically troubling opportunities inherent in the setup that it just ends up feeling forgettable and silly.

True to the spirit of the title, writer-director Lee organises the sprawling mess of Mija’s personal life with the control and grace of a master, each digression and seemingly arbitrary encounter all building upon his elderly protagonist’s spiralling sense of distress.

It’s a sad project, a testament to lives cut short and stories half-told.

The tone careens from high seriousness to easy parody in a way that makes the film slightly imprecise and slippery. Still, nothing else quite like it out there, that’s for sure.

This is an imperfect film, bold but occasionally baffling, and one that in its final act grows into something much more exciting than you might initially expect.

You want to know more about what Aisholpan is thinking behind that shy determined smile. But that’s not her way. You can imagine her as the gutsy heroine of a Disney animation.

Overall this is a terrifically watchable, heartfelt documentary and a valuable glimpse into a singular life.

The extraordinary skill with which Shults’s camera prowls and probes the enclosed surroundings also channels Robert Altman in chamber-drama mode. Those are strong comparisons, but this unexpected and hugely impressive US indie debut is worthy of them.

The icky, well-teased, nightmarish climax is visually stunning for a low-budget project, though perhaps a touch too straight-up strange for some.

This is a film with a big heart and an even bigger imagination.

As a memorable teen character, she’s almost up there with Cher from ‘Clueless’ or Ellen Page’s Juno. Watch and wince.

While it fascinates as much as it frustrates, the film’s saving grace is that it always feels honest and never cynical. It seems both relevant to us and personal to the filmmaker.

Overall this is a stupendously entertaining movie, crammed with delights.

There are few surprises in Creepy. With the exception of a bleak, pointed ending, it all plays out as you’d expect. That’s not necessarily a criticism – it’s fun to watch the pieces click into place, and the film is never less than slick, well-acted and nice looking.

Allied attempts to balance joy with heartbreak, and never fully manages either. But fans of old-school entertainment are unlikely to leave disappointed

This entertaining first spin-off from the Harry Potter movies is both inventive and familiar – and Eddie Redmayne makes an endearing new wizarding lead.

While the characters lack credibility, the social backdrop and texture of the performances certainly don’t, and Villeneuve manages to say more about the sorry state of the Middle East (Lebanon is suggested but never mentioned) through the bold, crisp way he shoots faces, buildings and parched, beige-brown landscapes. So let’s call it’s a strong film based on a weak story.

Director Alexandra-Therese Keining clearly loves the book and tries to squeeze a little too much of it into her overcrowded film. But it is visually lovely – the transformation scenes are magical – and the young cast are terrific.

The strands don’t so much intersect as float into each other’s peripheries to basically inconsequential effect, despite attempts to tie them together.

It’s an emotionally involving rather than harrowing film, with scenes as beautiful as oil paintings.

There are sequences in Doctor Strange that could burn the top layer off your eyeballs, crammed as they are with some of the most unashamedly drug-inspired imagery since the ‘The Simpsons’ episode where Homer takes peyote. But problems arise when Doctor Strange tries to tackle the everyday stuff, like telling a half-decent story.

If Zwick’s film improves on Christopher McQuarrie's inaugural, incoherent 2012 entry in the series, it's not through any special initiative on the film's part. But it's efficient, unfussy, and doesn't try to think any faster than it can run.

[An] informative documentary.

Phantom Boy is frequently beautiful to look at, but the cops-and-robbers angle feels tired and the characters are thinly sketched.

Trolls is not break-the-mould brilliant like The Lego Movie or Toy Story, or a keeper like Frozen. But it’s a lovable and giddy guilty pleasure.

It's a spare film, muted in colour and unflashy – and it's all the more powerful and urgent for it.

Origin of Evil takes a while to get going, and the demonic possession plot pretty much runs on rails. And yet there’s plenty to admire here: strong performances (‘ET’ legend Henry Thomas is a welcome sight as a kindly priest), top-notch jump-scares and some unexpectedly lovely, almost ‘Far From Heaven’-ish autumnal photography.

Smartly cutting off before the long decline, this is an epic story, beautifully told.

75 minutes isn’t really long enough to fully examine the Sky Ladder project, let alone an incident-packed artistic career. Still, as an introduction, this is entirely serviceable.

By the end, even Hanks looks a bit bored.

Fitfully entertaining, with some grabby trial scenes, the film struggles to find a proper, engaging focus.

Like a fridge whose door’s been left open overnight, the film doesn’t feel chilly enough. It’s not terrible, but fans of the book may well be disappointed.

The use of education as a tool to enforce an ardent religious ideology upon children is what’s most distressing here (remember Malala Yousafzai?), and the filmmakers back up their investigations with testimony from key speakers in the Pakistani academic communities and a young girl who ran away from her local madrassa training programme.

Props should go to director Klaus Härö for making such a predictable premise feel fresh and his cast of characters – from a suspicious, disapproving headmaster, to the foil-swinging kids – feel engaging.

Whether Rossi knows it or not, this is one of the most compelling discussions of appropriation and the ignorance of the fashion world in ages.

It’s a small, successful sketch of now-great lives.

Accusations of tastelessness are bound to arrive, with some justification. If your priority is to respect the dead, why hire the director of Battleship?

Like four or five Harry Potter books squeezed into a single movie: it makes precious little sense.

The picture it paints of America’s frontline intelligence services – confused, internally quarrelsome and completely in hock to corporate interests – is fascinating.

It will drive some viewers up the wall, but fans will feel the rush of discovering a unique new director and, in Richard,a gawky yet captivating screen presence.

The Lovers and the Despot is compelling as a Cold War-era thriller, but it also offers a small window on life in the higher echelons of power in North Korea at that time.

It is solid and watchable, and Radcliffe is genuinely ace, giving a smart, understated and intelligent performance.

A United Kingdom is just a little too cosy and sentimental for its own good.

If you’re the person who watches weepies with a cynical curl of the lip, this isn’t the film for you. Everyone else, prepare to have your heartstrings plucked.

By the climax all concerns have gone out the window, as Vigalondo delivers an operatic finale that feels both earned and genuinely cathartic. For better and worse, you won't have seen a movie like Colossal before, and you won't again. And that, in itself, is a strong recommendation.

Certain Women moves, as all Reichardt’s films do, at a languid pace, and a handful of characters – notably Williams’s – could have been a little more developed. But it's hard to recall a movie with such a precise, immersive sense of place, and the very specific mood that comes with it.

There’s plenty of warmth and compassion here, and the true story is a belter, but this ‘Lion’ doesn’t quite roar.

Overall, Bleed For This is difficult to dislike: the story may be hokey but it’s real, and so is the sentiment behind it.

The Clan shouldn’t be as enjoyable as it is. But it’s a delight to be in the hands of a storyteller who can impress you with his stylistic bravado (one sequence cuts together a nasty death with ecstatic sex) while never losing sight of the suffering at the story’s heart.

Overall this is an absolute pleasure. There are times when Waititi’s script borders on genius.

I’ve never liked Renée Zellweger more as a warmer and wiser Bridget Jones – but still capable of making a total prat of herself.

The absence of George and John is felt keenly, but Paul and Ringo are a pleasure to listen to as ageing raconteurs.

There's a gripping, dark, truly monstrous film lurking in here somewhere, but Bayona seems hell-bent on keeping it at bay.

Voyage of Time veritably tongue-bathes the eyeballs with its succession of extravagant images and with its digitally enhanced vision of a natural world that practically tips the scales into unearthliness. But somehow we're never truly surprised by any of its wonders.