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.

There are some gorgeous comic touches.

What you take from Miss Violence depends both on your stomach for this kind of brutality, and whether you appreciate its cold, mannered formalism – one viewer’s stylistic tour de force is another’s grating Haneke pastiche. Still, this is punchy stuff.

Ignore the ridiculous [spoiler omitted] ending of this film, and you have a much more fatalistic exercise in which Coppola eschews easy laughs in favour of the exposure of feeling and the fact that these people's lives, however empty, matter to them. Turner is in the Oscar class.

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

You forget how limited so many movies’ ideas of women are until Amy Schumer launches into an extended tampon joke: nothing is off-limits as she kapows through expectations of female characters.

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.

The creature effects are charming.... But the pig-chasing antics and cartoonish corporate nastiness that dominate much of the film become seriously grating.

Rogue Nation is an uneven film.

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

It's stunningly beautiful, mesmerising, exhausting, uplifting, amazing - all the things you could possibly expect from a masterpiece.

It's an endearingly loopy, occasionally half-cooked but always ambitious film.

This tense New York drama from the co-directors of Bee Season and The Deep End is sensitive and almost unwatchably perceptive about dysfunctional families – and it’s acted with knife-sharp precision.

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

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

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

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.

Low key and occasionally frustrating it may be, but Computer Chess is a supremely intelligent, beautifully constructed film, interweaving comedy and character, satire and subtext, and loaded with more ideas than some filmmakers manage in a lifetime.

Hogg displays a welcome desire to draw on global film influences and ignore the unwritten rules of what British cinema should or should not seek to achieve, especially in the realm of films about the monied and unsympathetic.

Rush is fast, slippery, stormy and dangerous.

‘Bodies’ gets under your skin and stays there. And the gospel handclapping soundtrack feels like it’s drawing you into a dream.

Ultimately, the film amounts to little more than a consummate study of suspense technique, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

His film is the product of tough-love, arresting, unexpected and worth your time.

It’s a bold, beautiful cosmic adventure story with a touch of the surreal and the dreamlike, and yet it always feels grounded in its own deadly serious reality.

Despite the film's conspicuously minuscule budget and shaky narrative structure, it is funny. If you value enthusiasm and imagination more than glossy sophistication, you'll laugh.

What makes The New Girlfriend special is that is has something to say about sexuality (feminine, masculine, gay, straight, and everything in between – it’s complicated).

Far from Men is a character study — a two-hander expertly acted by Mortensen and Kateb (best known for the terrific French cop show Spiral).

There is one lovely character, though - Orville the albatross, who runs an airline service armed with goggles, scarf, and a sardine tin for his passengers to sit in.

There’s horror here, but it never feels like a simple catalogue of degradation. This is down in large part to the performances, which are naturalistic without ever being amateurish, and the subtle, careful script, which refuses to slide either into pathos or tragedy.

With Dolan, you feel you're in the company of a truly original voice and one unafraid to make his mistakes right up there on the screen.

Director and co-writer Diego Quemada-Díez condenses many acute observations about life as an emigrant into a sure-footed, credible story.

It’s an uneven work, mysterious in its refusal to tell us much at all about Daniel, but it has a ring a truth to it even when it slips into less enigmatic thriller territory.

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.

What makes the film so effective is not so much the slightly sinister characterisation of the generally neurotic group, but the fact that Wise makes the house itself the central character, a beautifully designed and highly atmospheric entity which, despite the often annoyingly angled camerawork, becomes genuinely frightening.

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.

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

There’s wit, integrity and insight here, but it cries out for a lighter touch.

Frantz is a slightly over-polite and overly careful, and the black and white palette is unappealingly washed out – more like a collection of greys. But the sense of festering postwar anger and pain is strong, and there are intriguing questions here.

There’s typical grace and good humour in Kore-eda’s handling of this all-but-impossible situation. But the film’s critical lack of dramatic nuance undercuts its emotional resonance.

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.

This is a film built on sensation, misdirection and randomness. The result can be maddeningly obtuse, but it’s also breathtakingly lovely and genuinely unsettling.

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.

It’s all unexpectedly uninvolving.

As storytelling, it’s pristine: it moves like a reptile playing the long game. But its cruelty is tough to bear.

'Oh Lord', says the preacher in a suitably grave voice, 'do we have the strength to carry out this task in one night, or are we just jerking off?' Maybe Mel Brooks should have asked himself that question about this movie.

A lusty ballad of love and heartbreak sung with passion and power, and just a handful of off-key notes.

It’s lightly played, often very funny and shot all over Paris with energy and wit, and boosted by superb, inquiring turns from Broadbent and Duncan.

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

Hallström's finally struck a chord with the Americans, though it's much the same cocktail of whimsy and worry, the eccentric and the banal, that he's been mixing all along.

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

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.

With gorgeously crisp photography and pitch-perfect performances from the two leads, this is one of the most intriguing and thoughtful American films of the year.

Like Bujalski’s early mumblecore work, this is sensitive and meandering – and just a little bit patience-testing. But it’s also infectiously sweet and honest-feeling.

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

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.

For all its uncompromising toughness, the film, like the kids, gets out of hand, its bleak portrait of alienated, antisocial behaviour increasingly wrecked by hysterical performances (Glover especially), a sentimental teen-romance subplot, and melodramatic contrivance. There are some good, frightening scenes of volatile lunacy, but the whole thing badly lacks a controlling distance and perspective; much inferior to Hunter's script for Jonathan Kaplan's superficially similar Over the Edge, it continually teeters on the verge of self-parody.

Ghost Protocol plays it strictly by the book: the characters are bland, the plot is over-familiar and the action sequences are resolutely old school. But animator Bird relishes the chance to play with real people.

Any film that teams up gruffer-than-thou icons Shepard and Johnson is bound to go heavy on the testosterone, but Mickle undercuts all this strident manliness with a rich vein of self-mocking wit and paternal angst.

This captivating drama exists on another level: the devastating ending left me sobbing.

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.

Tale of Tales might lack magic in the immediate, flashy sense, but its strange spell is altogether seductive and special.

Scarecrow’ feels like an existential fairytale squarely rooted in the reality of America’s fraying backroads and small towns. It’s all a little rambling and anarchic, but later scenes in a jail have real bite. And when the sadness behind Lion’s smile is revealed, it’s also genuinely moving.

Kooler is a very likeable lead, and Michal’s battles – with loneliness, ageing, family, religious doubt and her own indecision – are smartly, sympathetically sketched by writer-director Rama Burshtein.

As arthouse coming-of-age films go, this is brilliant – smart and sensitive with a screw-you feminist streak. And it’s beautifully acted by two first-time actresses playing Eka and Natia, who have been friends forever.

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.

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

As a portrait of power gained and lost, of unchecked self-absorption and what drives people like Assange to do what they do, it’s absolutely fascinating. Watching it feels like history unfolding in close-up.

Over the course of three wild sequels, Coscarelli expanded his bizarre universe in a variety of imaginative and deliriously entertaining ways – but the original set the standard. [Remastered]

Exhibition succeeds in making us feel deeply uncomfortable for peering into other people’s lives.

In a welcome return to suspense, Pakula effectively conveys the claustrophobia of domesticity and courtroom procedure.

The film’s blanket refusal to question its subject feels not only cowardly, but antithetical.

It’s infuriatingly irresistible.

There’s a lack of subtlety or surprise which serves the story poorly... That said, it’s a thoughtful, timely, often quietly captivating drama.

A couple of overgrown brats seems an appropriate focus for John The Breakfast Club Hughes first adult movie, but if his direction is slick, his script lacks wit and perception. Essentially, it's the stars' keenly observed nuances of character that make this comedy amiable enough.

A stop-gap tale that’s modest, fun and briefly amusing rather than one that breaks new ground or offers hugely memorable set pieces.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This dizzying, courageous, utterly humane and slightly unhinged film is a unique achievement.

Its various riffs on codes, whether moral, sexual, societal or German, are plain to see rather than enigmatic or enlightening. Luckily it’s all anchored in a storming performance from Cumberbatch: you’ll be deciphering his work long after the credits roll.

It’s enthralling and haunting.

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.

What sets this apart from most modern horror movies, besides a sparing use of special effects, is Romero's careful development of a credible emotional context for the pyromaniac madness and razor-wielding terror. Romero's is a formidable talent which others can only hope to ape.

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.

Given the inevitably knotty plotting, the message is oddly unrevealing, although the film features more than enough intelligently, wittily scripted moments to remain a fascinating insight into a crucial episode in the souring of that old American Dream.

The film’s Groundhog Day-meets-Independence Day plot is actually pretty genius.

It ends up as a sweet-enough movie, and one that’s full of joy and invention – but also one that feels like a lot of effort has been put into serving a tale that maybe doesn’t fully deserve it.

Not just a cheeky stunt, Ferrara’s film is a genuine, worthwhile, thoughtfully unresolved attempt to understand the deepest, darkest mysteries of manhood and power.

22 Jump Street knows how to play to its strengths: Tatum’s performance here is even more puppy-dog lovable than last time, and his scenes with Hill possess a goofy, low-key warmth too often lacking in big-budget comedy.

Against all the odds, Stake Land director Jim Mickle has cooked up a controlled, affecting ‘companion piece’ that honours the Mexican original while deepening its themes.

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

First-time director Sophie Hyde’s mazy, impulsive but sympathetic approach is always true to her characters’ exasperating but ultimately affecting pathway towards hard-earned self knowledge.

Seidelman brings a hip '80s SoHo sensibility to this emancipated screwball comedy, even if the plotting (a mistaken identity farce involving that old chestnut, amnesia brought on by a bump to the head) is square as a square peg. Madonna has never found a better fit than the role of Susan, a thrift-store free spirit - and even then Arquette gives as good as she gets with a deliciously kooky comic turn.

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

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

There are no great upsets or fireworks here, just a tender sketch of what it means to (probably) be gay as a school kid. The storytelling style is as inoffensive as the music (Arvo Pärt, Belle and Sebastian), and the performances are amiable and relaxed.