Perhaps inevitably, the film as a whole doesn't stack up to its central performances.

Director Stephen Frears sketches out her tragic backstory, and Streep in grande dame mode is not to be missed.

It’s not a total washout: at least one gag in five is actually funny, and the action scenes set an enjoyably breakneck pace. If you’re an 11-year-old on a week-long sugar jag, you might just love it.

A nagging sense of incompleteness means that Civil War isn’t quite as satisfying as the first ‘Avengers’ (it’s all building up to the ‘Infinity War’ two-parter in 2018). But overall, this is Marvel at their best: a pacey, intelligent super-sized blockbuster and a roaringly fun night out.

The problem is that it all feels like a sixth-form production of the Bourne series. Still, if you’ve ever fantasised about a Luther-Robb Stark crimefighting duo, look no further.

A candid, often shocking documentary portrait of the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Overall, the film just feels too much like an obligation, as though everyone involved had spent too much time and money to back out, so they forced themselves to grit their teeth and get on with it. You may feel the same.

There are beautiful moments from David Hockney’s home-video stash in this thoughtful doc.

This Jungle Book has the bare necessities, and then some.

All told, ‘Winter’s War’ is not the fairest sequel, but it’s not so terrible that it deserves to be taken out to the forest and finished off.

There are some genuine laughs, and the air of deep-frozen cynicism reminds you that Niven’s book was on to something behind the violence and farce.

It might have made a good episode of ‘Entourage’, but as a full-length feature it misses the mark.

What’s most winning about ‘The Club’ is how Larrain manages to allude to the wider structures, behaviour and corruption of the church without ever making this claustrophobic, moody and very local story feel anything but crucial, thrilling and disturbing.

Overall, there’s just not enough going on in Disorder: largely plotless and set almost entirely in a single, bland location, it doesn’t have enough atmosphere to compensate for the lack of action.

Rock the Kasbah just isn’t remotely funny or smart, and none of the characters come within shooting distance of likeable.

The connections might be a little more strained and diffuse than in "Nostalgia for the Light", but their cumulative power is strong nonetheless.

This is sombre, artful and winningly ambiguous.

It all leads to a climax so staggeringly lazy and glib that you honestly expect Woodley just to turn to the camera in the final scene, shrug her shoulders and walk off.

It’s all so overly macho that it plays like a camp pleasure-cruise.

The world that Zootropolis creates is intelligent and fascinatingly detailed – it feels more like a movie by Disney-owned Pixar than a straight Disney film.

There are more than a few false notes here.... Still, the sight of Emma Thompson, wearing old-lady prosthetics and a leopard skin coat as Barney’s mum...is not to be missed.

Nobby is hardly a character for the ages. He's a basic fool. The movie, too, is chaotic and crude. But its lack of sophistication, like its odd mix of souped-up action and base comedy, ultimately feels like a badge of honour.

Writer-director Billy Ray (the writer of Captain Phillips and the first The Hunger Games) honours the Argentine original with keynote scenes set in a mirrored lift and a crowded sports stadium, but the mood is too often sluggish and pedestrian.

Is there something creepy about Franny’s aggressive generosity and need to be needed? In a film with a better script, yes.

Asking far more questions than it could ever answer, Exposed ends on a note so flat and predictable that it undermines all that went before. But there are strange and memorable moments here, and a mood of eerie foreboding that’s hard to shake.

There are a few ideas knocking about in the script – including repression of childhood trauma – but the silly, hand-me-down scares just don’t chill.

With references to sexting and a hazy Instagram-filtered look, it would be easy to write ‘King Jack’ off as just another modern coming-of-age-story. What sets the movie apart though, is its ability to capture the fear of teenage-hood, without patronising its characters.

There may be little here we haven’t seen before – glassy reflections of Michael Mann’s Heat pop up everywhere you look – but it’s all carried off with brashness and momentum by a director who genuinely seems to be having a blast.

There are a few lovely scenes: Mavis listening to a new mix of one of her father’s last recordings is heartbreaking. For old-soul fans, Mavis! is a must.

Franco’s script teases out the character’s tangled ambiguities with immaculate control: even as the story proceeds in the lowest of keys, our nerves never settle.

As modern dating movies go, How to Be Single gets a lot right.

This is a confident, terrifically enjoyable film, superbly written, shot and performed.

Mostly, Zoolander 2 hits the mark with style. Just don’t expect anything too deep.

It’s all so horribly cynical, with every line, every twist and every note of music painstakingly focus-grouped to extract maximum cash value from the audience.

What Welcome to Leith does very well is dig deep and expose Cobb – and by extension the entire American neo-Nazi movement – as weak, confused and desperate, using a dying ideology as a way to feel less alone in the world.

The average lifespan of a chipmunk is five years – which means the kids’ cartoon franchise about the trio of singing superstar rodents has already outstayed its welcome.

At its heart, is Danner’s lovely performance, vulnerable and smart behind the sarcastic façade, and sealed by a devastating karaoke performance of Cry Me a River that hints at the musical talent her character left behind in her youth.

As the determined but fragile son, Reynor has a strong presence, but Collette’s character is too thinly sketched to make much sense.

Bloody, shallow and oh-so-smug, Deadpool is so eager to offend that it’d almost be sweet if it wasn’t so, well, relentlessly annoying.

Gorgeous and haunting, this is a tantalising introduction to Pamuk’s work.

It all spins out of control in a final blowout of naff special effects and random shouting, but there’s just enough leftover goodwill to carry it through.

This low-key charmer of a movie packs an unexpected emotional punch once the brothers finally manage a rapprochement of sorts.

The result is an odd, inconsequential but not entirely charmless misfire: an action-horror-comedy-romance with none of the first two and precious little of the third.

The top-notch cast keep calm and carry on, but this TV remake is a waste of everyone’s time.

It’ll most likely keep the smaller kids diverted while parents capture a few zzzs.

There are laughs, but they’re tinged with the sadness of watching a beloved elderly relative making a bloody old fool of himself.

In its own restrained way, this drama packs an emotional punch.

We’re all set for sparks to fly, but unfortunately reality doesn’t quite live up to the set-up.

It’s a strong setup, poorly handled.

Lau’s astute performance is rather like the film as a whole – at first you think it’s underdone, but it’s actually cannily judged to favour genuine feeling over pushy sentimentality.

Visually, it’s never less than arresting. Gently amusing, too, is the relationship between Keitel and Caine, even if the dialogue Sorrentino writes for them often displays a fondness for empty epigrams.

Daddy’s Home raises the occasional smile, but it’s not exactly Wahlberg or Ferrell’s finest hour.

Brand is a winning – cuddly even – bridge between his film’s ideology and the wider world.

Jennifer Peedom’s film is stunningly photographed (how could it not be?) and brilliantly sly: she gives the tour guides and their rich, self-absorbed charges just enough rope to hang themselves, and they duly oblige. But it’s also a heartfelt tribute to the resilience of a people.

Sisters is too strained for a comedy starring two of the funniest people alive.

Nine years in the making, this impressive doc pieces together the story of the biggest global protest in history.

Lawrence is gritty, real and totally genuine. And, after ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘Carol’, here’s another film that passes the Bechdel Test for proper female characters with flying colours.

Too many obnoxious relatives, evil critters and weak gags at the expense of fat kids and foul-mouthed old ladies.

What makes this more than just a punishing, fearful, expertly crafted thriller focused on one man’s endurance is heavily down to Emmanuel Lubezki’s attractive, thoughtful photography.

It’s a winning yarn, but Osmond has to crack the whip to get it over the finishing line.

This is a simple, sweet tale about the basic pleasures of home and hearth, rendered unflashily in a delightful style of hand-drawn animation that employs a beautiful array of warm pastel colours.

Overall, excitement levels are moderate. But even if the film can’t match Hollywood for spectacle, there’s a sobering sense of the painful sacrifices and compromises facing those who toil in secret to keep us safe from harm.

When it’s playing for laughs, ‘A Royal Night Out’ is harmless good fun.

Greater conflict (or simply more probing interviews) might have made for a more gripping movie. But what’s here will delight anyone who dreams of living free, sleeping rough and scoffing beans around the campfire.

This is a solid take on the material, but it could have done with a little less narrative incident and a little more cinematic sparkle.

It’s a film with the texture and truth of life, and at its heart is a beautiful performance by Cliff Curtis, who never in a million years will be nominated for an Oscar, but deserves one.

Rather than letting the CGI do all the graft, Hardy unleashes a beautifully handcrafted army of puppets and animatronic demonic creatures. Too many, too soon, really. It’s overkill and pretty quickly you’re suffering from fiend fatigue.

The list of co-stars – Jane Fonda, Octavia Spencer, Aaron Paul – is so impressive that it’s hard to know what attracted everyone to such a soapy, cloying script.

The film works best when it explores the impact of FGM.... But the film is also trying to be a rousing, celebratory sports story, as the Warriors jet off to London to take part in a cricket tournament. And this is less successful.

David Sington (In the Shadow of the Moon) shows extreme confidence in his subject by revealing the deeper truth in fragments, essentially allowing Nick to deliver a monologue or one man show, drawing us deeper and deeper into his story.

The largely non-professional cast are as authentic as the craggy, unforgiving surroundings, and the way the film balances the simplicity of its central rite of passage with a broader outlook on a people caught in the shifting sands of time is a tribute to the filmmakers’ clarity of vision. A truly memorable first feature.

Skyfall is a highly distinctive Bond movie. It has some stunning visual touches.... Also, it mostly manages to convince us that there’s something at stake by giving a hint of Bond’s emotional life beyond this story.

This might be the most downbeat blockbuster in memory, a film that starts out pitiless and goes downhill from there, save for a fleeting glimmer of hope in the final moments. It’s a bold statement about the unforgiving nature of war, unashamedly political in its motives and quietly devastating in its emotional effect.

Even just watching this impressive documentary, you feel a little unhinged by the scale of suffering.

It’s a struggle to glean many positives from this ugly, superficial offering, which gestures towards feminist empowerment while heaping mental and physical hurt on every one of its female characters.

It’s a dour, at times glacial film that perhaps takes itself just a little too seriously, but it’s also grimly convincing and, in a remarkable final scene, shockingly effective.

It’s a wild, at times exhilarating watch – but an exhausting one.

An unbalanced but never less than entertaining film, enthralling and deflating in roughly equal measure, and studded with moments of true, old-school glory.

It’s just a shame the film is slightly ragged, with a tendency to preach when there’s more than enough drama to get the point across. Still, it’s an important story, told with commitment.

The humour lacks the zingy surprise that Pixar or Disney might have brought to it.

It’s not all doom, gloom and personal disasters — the film also offers lucid insights on the links between the man and his movies.

This is a forceful, initially uplifting, ultimately sobering illustration of how much protest matters, how far those in power will go to stifle it, and how ugly and criminal those efforts look in hindsight.

Timoner refuses to run fully with Brand’s elevated idea of himself, preferring to offer glimpses of a vulnerability and ruthlessness behind the clownish bluster.

This is a relentlessly unengaging affair, its derivative and logic-deficient script matched by flat direction and fussy, unconvincing CGI.

All three actors work hard... and when the melodrama hits fever pitch, Crimson Peak lurches into life. But overall this lacks weight and intensity: a Brontë-esque bauble smeared in twenty-first-century slickness.

SuperBob is part-comic book spoof, part-superhero movie in its own right, and it comes with plenty of laughs. But while it succeeds in sending up superhero tropes, it fails to avoid romcom clichés, and the love interest storyline is disappointingly predictable.

The story feels only half told. The team’s defeats are glossed over, it’s all peak and no trough.

Loushy’s project can feel repetitive, a bit too in awe of his admittedly significant sources. Perhaps most striking are their prophecies that this was only the beginning of an intractable conflict that could only get worse, not better.

There’s nothing here we’ve not seen before, and it all feels a little cheap. But if ‘oi, slag!’ mobster movies are your bag, you could do worse.

The Program offers no obvious new revelations and Armstrong remains elusive – but it has an unsettling air that carries us through its more pedestrian patches.

This Pan is loud, colourful, busy and full of ideas. Not all those ideas work in sync – but most are bold and some are winningly eccentric.

Ascher’s aim isn’t simply to inform. The Nightmare wants to be the first properly scary documentary, employing time-honoured horror movie techniques in a concerted effort to spook the viewer. But it’s here that Ascher slightly oversteps himself.

Zarafa never pauses for breath, rattling from one hasty, perfunctory sequence to another.

Sicario occasionally seems a little too impressed by its own nihilism. Still, this is an involving, grown-up film from a director whose muscular technique continues to impress: one might call it pulp in the same manner one would a plate of minced meat.

Everything about this film makes you look with fresh eyes at the familiar.

Give Northern Soul its due: this feisty, frequently amusing chronicle of one young man’s journey through the dancehalls of Lancashire nails its time and place.... A pity, then, that the story is so tiresomely familiar.

For this slick, beautifully paced documentary, director Marc Singer was given unprecedented access to everything from police tapes to trial recordings to Dunn’s own private phone conversations, and the result is a uniquely compelling real-life legal thriller.

This Macbeth is ferociously well acted. Fassbender’s prowling energy electrifies the film.