What Morgan lacks in philosophy and ideas, it makes up for in bone-crunching violence.

Fans of the Stath and his inimitable oeuvre may find just enough shooting, punching and snarling to keep them satisfied. But those who enjoy proper movies are urged to steer clear.

It's the fashion designer's second movie after his 2009 debut A Single Man, and this is a far more ambitious film, with its sprawling cast, various periods, layered storytelling and musings on life and art. But it's also far less endearing and coherent, and feels almost unbearably cruel and cynical.

The film’s no-nonsense, visually plain documentary-style of shooting feels utterly appropriate to its sly evocation of the absurdities and banalities of modern life. Just brilliant.

[Chazelle's] soaring, romantic, extremely stylish and endlessly inventive La La Land is that rare beast: a grown-up movie musical that's not kitschy, a joke or a Bollywood film. Instead, it's a swooning, beautifully crafted ode to the likes of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain.

Cat lovers (and possibly fans of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’) will appreciate the role of an ageing black feline as a symbol of the sudden changes in Nathalie’s life. Everyone else should warm to the way that Hansen-Løve distils the chaos of life and the life of the mind into such a warm, thoughtful, surprising drama.

To enjoy the film's arresting musings on language, time and how much we can ever understand others, you'll have to close your eyes and ears to the wealth of schlocky hokum surrounding them.

While it’s often beautiful and moving, emotionally it never quite sticks.

War Dogs simply doesn’t dig deeply enough into the duo’s personalities to be more than a fitfully entertaining escapist spin on a ripped-from-the-headlines yarn.

Against a backdrop of tensions between French and Flemish speakers, this is a forceful presentation of social divisions and the urgent need for change from within.

The film is built as a long crescendo, opening at a level of considered, Zen-like reflection and ending with a prolonged cacophony of elaborate, town-wide annihilation.

It’s in contextualising Sands’s struggle that ‘66 Days’ is most effective.

There is a message here about celebrating differences, which would be a bit more convincing if they’d cast a smaller actor in the role – instead of using distracting CG effects on Dujardin.

If self-aware, ultra-arch arthousery isn’t your bag, give it a miss. If you’re looking for a good, weird, often very funny time, don’t miss it.

‘Childhood’ is not always a subtle film, and some of the writing and acting feel like a bit of a slog. But its very spooky mood leaves a strong impression.

The documentary twists and turns like a guy getting his armpits tickled, but its driving force is Farrier’s personal determination to reveal the manipulation of the athletes involved. It’s unexpected and brilliant.

Being stuck in a cinema with David Brent for 96 minutes can be trying (the lazy ending doesn’t help). But when Gervais is on an improvisational roll, Brent digging himself deeper and deeper into some awful pit of social awkwardness, we can’t help but remember why we love to hate them both.

The film’s pleasures are simple – soaring landscapes, old-school DIY adventure and some sweet performances by the child actors. It makes for a charmingly old-fashioned family adventure.

A film with a fistful of memorable moments—most of them involving Bridges hurling insults at people—but not a great deal new to say.

The plotting may be a little ropey, especially towards the end. But ‘ID2’ has smart things to say about identity and social class, and strides confidently through the minefield of British racial politics.

If you’re a fan of the classic streets-to-stardom formula, this is a solid rendition.

The fish-out-of water moments are great fun, watching arthouse gods Depardieu and Huppert in tacky tourist hell.

It’s most fascinating when dealing with the fallout from her divorce from first husband Petter Lindstrom and very public affair with director Roberto Rosselini – a reminder of how much gossip, scandal and public opinion were at the heart of Hollywood long before Twitter.

This being a kids film, there is a ‘message’ – about the destruction of nature. But the eco theme genuinely works with the film’s wonder at nature.

In the end, the characters are more lasting than the story, which is a standard save-the-city-from-destruction yarn. But this crew is a riot, and their world is intriguing and even a little meaningful.

It’s not a happy watch – but it’s an essential one if you want better to understand the city and people around you.

When the talking stops the film takes off, with a pair of bone-rattling chases set in Athens and Las Vegas that cause maximum damage to people, property and the audience’s eardrums. A bracing reminder of how fiercely efficient Greengrass can be, these scenes just about justify the existence of Jason Bourne. But, please, no more.

It might not be note perfect, jazz fans will probably hate it, and whole chunks might not be true. But ‘Born to Be Blue’ feels like it’s somehow getting inside Chet Baker.

The Commune may veer towards sentimentality in the final act...but overall this is a warm, sharply characterised and absorbing melodrama.

It’s enthralling and haunting.

An empathetic, often heartbreaking piece of work, at times tough to watch – one party scene is particularly grim and confrontational – at others calm and contemplative.

The film can feel truncated, as if only a longer film or TV series could do proper justice to the details of the story. But it’s a sensitive and moving tale nonetheless.

The visual style here is pleasingly simple, with round, Moomin-ish faces and washes of icy pastel colour. But the story is pretty flat, spending ages setting up a rivalry between aristocrats that turns out to have no bearing on the story at all.

This is bland, shallow and totally unconvincing, veering between cartoonish overstatement and outright tedium.

It’s the directorial debut of novelist Helen Walsh and details as small as the actresses’ eyebrows reveal huge amounts about their characters. It’s also cleverly shot.

Just the name ‘George Galloway’ – this doc’s presenter and co-writer – will have some vowing to go nowhere near this lively character assassination of Tony Blair. But anyone expecting wall-to-wall ranting and raving might be surprised by it’s relative sobriety.

A fascinating true tale of animal welfare becomes an annoyingly pretentious doc.

Director Athina Rachel Tsangari keeps things brisk, maintaining an almost nature-doc distance from her subjects. Her affection for them is plain, but that doesn’t mean she lets them off the hook.

Hull clearly had a profound and lucid response to his blindness, and this thoughtful, illuminating film goes some way to inhabiting his thoughts.

You can see why this girl-saves-guy storyline clicked with Watson’s feminism, and she brings pin-sharp intelligence to the role. But everything here feels inauthentic.

What emerges is a sympathetic portrait of a genuinely idiosyncratic, outrageous individual whose towering musical talent never stood a chance against his rampaging personal demons.

This is all fun all the time, a dizzying carnival of wisecracks, fisticuffs, explosions, chases and truly eye-popping effects.

Precious Cargo isn’t actually as objectionable as your average petrol-station-bargain-bin thriller, thanks to one or two half-decent lines, a plot that vaguely makes sense and an unexpected dearth of outright misogyny. It’s still pretty rubbish, though.

The visuals are painstaking and horribly beautiful – shades of Hitchcock, Carpenter, even Spielberg – while the gore scenes are truly outrageous, knocking cheap imitators (hey, Nicolas Winding Refn, this is how it’s done) into a cocked hat.

Men & Chicken is a fun film but rarely a funny one; clever comic touches abound but are undermined by some base slapstick.

It’s time to put this franchise on ice for good.

An intimate, warm embrace of a film, it radiates joy and harmony despite playing out entirely in the shadow of a difficult father's death.

There are times when Cell feels like a surreal pastiche of po-faced apocalypse movies. But no such luck: this is every bit as bad as it appears.

Intelligent and screwball-funny with clever and complicated female characters.

Skarsgård himself is fairly bland as Greystoke, delivering a po-faced Byronic spin on the character, all velvet coats and dreamy romantic stares at his belle while sitting barefooted in the boughs of trees. But at least the animals are memorable – best of all is a pack of scene-stopping silverback gorillas digitally created for the movie. This Tarzan isn’t quite the jungle VIP – but it’s got a little swing.

This is one of those romances where the woman only exists to be a figure of worship for a nerdy, socially awkward young man, whose side we’re meant to take unquestioningly. Sorry, Pif, but you’ll need to try a bit harder.

The photography is starkly lovely, the slow drip of information is smartly handled and the central performances are appealingly ambiguous.

Everything here feels inauthentic, from the cast speaking their lines in English to the unthrilling final escape attempt.

It’s all too much too fast, and the cumulative effect is like watching a two-hour trailer – more dizzying than thrilling.

The word "personal" is bandied around a lot in film reviews, but it’s hard to think of a work that better fits the description than avant-garde icon Chantal Akerman’s intimate swansong No Home Movie.

Cruz has enough charm to melt a glacier, but she can’t rescue the shamelessly sentimental script by director Julio Medem (‘Sex and Lucia’). Ma Ma is going for the heartstrings, but don’t bother taking tissues.

How much you love this low-budget British effort will depend on your tolerance to quirkiness.

There are some funny-sweet observations about pets and our projections on to them. And the animation is expressive.... But the manic pace, piling on the action sequences, is exhausting.

Thank the movie gods for Dwayne Johnson, who delivers a performance of such charm, such unexpected goofiness that the screen practically glows every time he appears.

This Danish crime thriller is so dark and stormy it will leave you dazed as the credits roll.

Never less than professional, rarely more than functional.

It’s refreshing to see a movie like this directed by a woman, Eva Husson, so boys and girls are objectified equally. Which is not to say this passes the feminism test.

Unique and intoxicating, an art movie that grips like a thriller.

The film's quietly angry plea is for compassion, understanding and more than one eye open on this modern horror.

Makhmalbaf says he was inspired by the Arab Spring, and his film is pitched somewhere between allegory and satire.

Director James Wan has his method down. The scares are effective and the camerawork is superb, all lurking long shots and short sharp shocks. Wan is fully aware of the austerity-era parallels in his story, and the period detail is surprisingly authentic.... But there’s little here we haven’t seen before.

After a ruthlessly focused, almost-Hitchcockian first hour, Na’s film fans out into a flabby, multi-stranded gang war and loses all sense of purpose.

[A] calm, reflective, gorgeously uneventful slice of nostalgic romance.

At once compassionate, engrossing from start to finish, and utterly relevant.

The movie manages to shift sensitively from laugh-out-loud moments to tear-jerking scenes, discussing euthanasia on the way. It’s not perfect, but the novel’s five million readers have nothing to worry about: it’s totally loyal to the book (unsurprisingly since Moyes wrote the script).

The total absence of originality here is notable, but it needn’t have been a problem: with a tighter plot, a touch of humour and some peppier, less slab-fisted action scenes this might actually have worked – a kind of Guardians of the Galaxy meets Lord of the Rings.

As a storyteller, Farr is bold enough to keep us guessing until the film’s final moments, but a late need to explain lets the film down a little.

As a story about how hard it is to make your own way in the world, Kiki’s Delivery Service is truthful and scalpel-sharp. That it manages all this while remaining consistently funny, optimistic and exciting – even for little ones – is a mark of Miyazaki’s genius.

The film’s pace barely leaves you time to think – blink and you’ll lose the plot. But there’s plenty of imagination here to honour the spirit of Carroll’s topsy-turvy tales, even if the emotional resolutions are of a distinctly twenty-first-century sort.

Wears its heart a little too much on its sleeve. But it also manages to pack a punch, and the lead performances from Bercot and Cassel are strong.

Few films make you care about the characters like this one does.

There's no escaping it: Money Monster is a basic, silly movie. But it has on its side a top-notch cast and an entire absence of self-seriousness.

The fictional character Huppert creates is simply so lived-in and plausible that to insist Michele react differently to her own lived experience would be as obstinate as insisting that a person in real life cannot possibly feel the way that they say they feel. Whatever your take, it's a film that will inspire debate for decades to come.

The word exploitation comes to mind.

It’s not a despairing movie – Mungiu even suggests that a new generation might put things right – but it’s a brutally honest one.

Art, the film suggests, is about first noticing then communing with the world around you. In that sense, it’s another wise, wonderful Jarmusch movie about the importance, in this sad and beautiful world, of friendship and love.

Sean Penn's pompous, ethically bankrupt humanitarian aid drama The Last Face would surely have worked better as a charity single.... Instead, we get this vain mess, a vacuous romance with real human pain as background noise and where the only honest pleasure is waiting to see what misstep it will take next.

If there’s nothing profoundly original or insightful here, there’s no denying the atmosphere of squalid authenticity, particularly in the scenes shot on the streets.

The virtue of Aquarius – the title, incidentally, alludes to the name of the block Clara lives in – is that it never feels the need to sermonise: its ethical, political and psychological insights are carefully contained within a consistently compelling narrative that feels fluid, relevant and true.

Unfortunately, because it's so cinematically inert, all that craft and talent seems wasted. Let's hope his next film sees him working on another Dolan original.

Amid all the shifting mirrored surfaces and hazy ambiguities of Olivier Assayas's bewitching, brazenly unconventional ghost story, this much can be said with certainty: Kristen Stewart has become one hell of an actress.

It's a bold film, full of energy and spunk, but a patchy, half-formed, rambling one too.

This is a thoughtful film, but one that's slightly limited by its own careful restraint.

There's little humour, and strip away the styling and what it has to say about fashion has been said a thousand times before. But there's a mesmerising strangeness to Refn's vision that can't be denied, and Fanning does an especially good job of portraying innocence lost in the belly of the fashion beast.

Some clunky coincidences and unlikely events confuse the film's mission, and it lacks the clarity and parable-like meaning of the brothers' best films.

It might be familiar territory for Almodóvar, but only a master of his art could make it look so easy.

Flaws aside, this is a superior, inventive kids' film, and one that's bound to make Rylance's giant a favourite with younger audiences.

If you loved the game, you might enjoy watching the script contort itself into ever more zany shapes to incorporate the necessary elements: giant slings, teetering towers, boomeranging toucans. But it’s not enough to counteract the tiresome, sub-Lego Movie snarkiness of the script or the bright, busy and unengaging animation.

Once you get past some bumps in the road of believability, Our Kind of Traitor turns into a brisk, energetic drama, with Anthony Dod Mantle’s photography adding interesting layers to a fairly straightforward plot.

It’s raw, funny and incredibly moving.

The art is undeniably impressive, but there’s a lot of I-did-this-before-him-without-her-help, which drags. Still, look at that: it’s massive!

Respect is due to Joe Johnston and his screenwriters for not only fashioning a nifty, highly entertaining slice of pulpy comic-book action, but for making this most divisive of costumed crusaders universally relatable.