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.

It can be very funny, but there’s a bittersweet streak underpinning even the lightest moments.

Undoubtedly the zombie movie to end 'em all... The horror/suspense content is brilliant enough to satisfy the most demanding fan, and the film uses superb locations like a huge shopping mall to further its Bosch-like vision of a society consumed by its own appetites. But take no munchies.

The film also touches on Bell’s work for the British government, drawing up the boundaries of Iraq after WWI – which was to have consequences still felt today.

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.

The pressure for minimalist Simons to succeed in the ultra-feminine world of Dior is intense.

It's basically kleenteen fun. If you're worried about the Ramones, rest assured; they make a very adequate chunka chunka chunka sound.

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.

Heldenbergh and Baetens pull you in with committed performances ­– their raw pain and grief is totally believable. But all that honest, intense emotion is thrown away as the film outstays its welcome by 40 minutes or so, piling one tragedy on to another.

The message to take home: put a pot of lavender on your windowsill. Save bees!

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.

A jangling, lunatic sugar rush of a movie, in love with everything it satirises and bursting at the seams with psychotic energy

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

This is a magnificent, career-capping achievement from one of the great storytellers of our era.

For the first hour, this is masterful slow-burn melodrama, eking out the details of John’s crime and playing expertly with our sympathies. But as ambiguity is stripped away the film becomes less interesting, and the finale is weak.

Richter's comic genre hybrid comes complete with its own mythology, and team of established superheroes, and is curiously appealing.

The film’s said to be autobiographical, but that’s entirely left to us to guess.

Director Noyce's bravura camerawork conspires with Terry Hayes' spare script (adapted from the novel by Charles Williams) and some edgy cutting to exploit every ounce of tension, right down to a killer ending.

Thorncroft is a gem of comedy creation – played to perfection by Barratt.

A wonderful Maggie Smith plays all this dead straight, poker-faced for maximum laughs. It’s a peppery, unsentimental performance. She’s hysterically funny, till she’s not – flooring you as the regret and tragedy behind Miss Shepherd’s vagabond life is revealed.

It’s a remarkable story, but it’s undermined by some odd directorial choices.

Crystal's self-pitying character starts out promisingly - an early highlight being his lecture on ageing to schoolchildren - but the constant rapid-fire quips become increasingly predictable.

In each instance, the limp pay-off undercuts strong performances (manic Woods and sympathetic Drew especially), and the usual caveats about cumulatively unsatisfying portmanteau pictures certainly apply.

The film isn’t perfect. It’s slightly too long and drifts a bit in the middle. But the final showdown left me in a cold sweat.

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

A tasteful grieving-family weepie, it's conceived and performed with utmost sincerity, yet lacks the intemperate human authenticity, the sense of profound strangeness in the everyday, that made Trier's ‘Reprise’ and ‘Oslo, August 31st’ so hard to shake.

[An] informative documentary.

This is a fun action adventure that resonates because it doesn’t glamorise everything. You feel a warmth after watching it, as there’s something in its depiction of imperfect, loving family relationships that stays with you.

De Palma actually has the gall to combine the plots from both Vertigo and Rear Window in one big voyeur-fest and pull it off with a certain sly efficiency.

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

It's a long way down from even the second in the series.

As the actors move fluidly between various states, shedding one skin while assuming another, Polanski makes this subversive parlour game matter.

This microbudget indie about a pair of brothers in small-town USA looks great, sports strong performances and doesn’t outstay its welcome. But it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’ve seen all this before, and better.

The film is touching, but more than that it’s wise, witty and thought-provoking.

The result is entertaining and insightful, balancing cold statistics with real-life stories of success and tragedy, presenting a broad, clear-eyed view of an increasingly complex issue.

Into the Woods starts better than it finishes but it’s a great-looking film, with a nicely old-school, easy-on-the-CG feel.

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.

After a period of directorial uncertainty, the film demonstrated Eastwood's ability to recreate his first starring role, as the mythic Man with No Name of the Italian Westerns, and to subtly undercut it through comedy and mockery.

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.

One-joke comedy which indulges Moore's perpetual drunk act as his wastrel playboy attempts to mend his ways in order to get his hands on an inheritance and a blushing bride.

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

Inspired by They Live by Night and the original Gun Crazy, this is a love-on-the-run yarn, with the incendiary Barrymore immensely sympathetic as the promiscuous, sexually mistreated teen who goes on the lam with former prison pen-pal LeGross. Although it doesn't seek to excuse their wrongdoing, the film stands out for its convincing depiction of the up-against-it white-trash mentality and the overriding demands of youthful desire.

Jim Jarmusch's 16mm feature debut, made not long after the writer/director graduated from film school, is an oblique study of a young man (Parker) adrift on the streets of New York. As he roams, he has chance encounters with a car thief, a saxophone player and a grizzled war veteran, among others. Learning their stories, he begins to seem more and more isolated.

Bell is so goofy and likeable I found myself willing the film to keep up with her. But the funny bits are never quite funny enough, and the script loses feminist points bigtime for its sour bitch ex-wife character.

Like Cry Freedom, it's still whites debating racial injustice: fine for a book published in Afrikaans a decade ago, but a poor premise for a message movie.

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

Fundamentally a quite serious movie, relevant to contemporary personality problems and stresses, but shot through with a wicked streak of black humour. It doesn't always come off, but Romero makes stunning use of his Pittsburgh locations to create a desolate suburban wasteland, and at its best it is rivetingly raw-edged.

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.

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

With their unerring eye for potential, the distributors didn't release this hilarious black comedy to cinemas in Britain. Zemeckis subsequently went on to make Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and loadsa money. Infinitely more caustic than these blockbusters, Used Cars runs on a contemporary screwball motor with a slapstick chassis

The film keeps its good-evil borders compellingly supple, at least until a wobbly finale that requires Sarah to act like the Hollywood heroine she has so strenuously avoided becoming. It’s a minor blot on a film otherwise propulsively alive with prickly politics.

It’s Bulger whose grim appearance and even grimmer behaviour ‘Black Mass’ indulges. But it’s the quieter, more complicated Connolly who offers the film’s subtler pleasures.

It’s breezy fun, touching lightly on illness and worse. Saying that, there’s a spot of intrigue as the tournament hots up.

As a study in human greed this is shocking, but as this thorough, convincing, if slightly stodgy film makes clear, it’s also a moment to mobilise public opinion and shape change.

Crichton's adaptation of his own novel falls badly between genres, never quite making up its mind whether it's aiming for comedy or suspense, and not succeeding very conclusively at either. The characters stay largely undeveloped, while - despite superficially peculiar features - the robbery is stripped of the ingenious exposition of the novel to become just another heist.

‘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.

Concentrating on familiar rituals - the funeral, the hoe-down, the robbery (a stunning tour de force in slow motion) - Hill pays tribute to such directors as Ford, Hawks and Ray, emphasises the mythic aspects of the Western, and focuses on the subjects of kinship and the land (probably suggested by Scotsman Bill Bryden's screenplay). This last theme is emphasised by Hill's coup of casting real-life brothers as the members of the gang. A beautiful, laconic and unsentimental film.

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

What stops David Cronenberg’s grotesque noir Maps to the Stars, written by LA insider Bruce Wagner, from feeling tired is that it’s deliciously odd.

Friedkin hints at political themes, but the film suffers most from condescendingly over-emphatic direction, and a generally tedious, relentless grimy realism in the opening half hour

What dulls the enterprise is that Ritchie so keeps his distance from every character that we seldom give a damn. Subdued performances by Mars and Baker are hard to imagine, but here they are.

This also marks what may be Allison Janney’s funniest performance to date: her cheerful, outspoken drunk next door is an absolute hoot.

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.

The film showcases Lea Van Acken’s remarkable central performance and director Dietrich Brüggemann’s adept control of a deliberately rigorous aesthetic.

Pesci's variation on New Jersey machismo (vulnerable in this case) isn't enough to fill a comedy; but Dale Launer's script luckily provides some fine routines for the supporting cast, notably the scene-stealing Marisa Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito, Pesci's sharp-tongued girlfriend. It's a small, surprisingly gentle affair, prone to fits and starts, but fun.

The road movie/buddy movie situations and emotions gain an intriguing perverse edge from the setting, with its genuine freaks and sideshow illusionism, as well as from Alex North's wonderfully unsettling score and Harry Stradling's dark cinematography. Better on electric, eccentric ambience than for its final rush of plotting, but such risk-taking movies are a welcome rarity.

Reitman, who also originated Animal House and Meatballs, manages a reasonable success rate at pulling off the numerous verbal and sight gags with which the script is peppered.

Ayoade tips his hat to so many other filmmakers and writers that he leaves little room to consider anything other than what a good job he’s doing of distilling all his references into an effective Pinterest board of paranoia and alienation.

The result is a fascinating – at times illuminating – tightrope act, but rarely an enjoyable one: for all its luminous outsider’s-eye photography and painstaking, perfectly pitched performances, both the film and its shivering heroine prove difficult to warm to.

As ever with Jarmusch, as the five sequential stories proceed toward their unexpectedly poignant conclusion, there's a touch of the experimental at play; but it's also a film of great warmth. Character prevails throughout, and with the exception of a miscast Ryder, the performances are terrific. Though it may take a while to get Jarmusch's gist, hang in there; by the time Tom Waits growls his lovely closing waltz over the credits, Jarmusch has shown us moments most film-makers don't even notice.

An enormously satisfying film: carefully observed and consistently compelling, it feels like an instant American classic, if a minor one.

A minor but infinitely more appealing comedy vehicle for Pryor than the earlier "Stir Crazy"...An amiable but hardly memorable two-against-the-world farce that can't quite persuade you Pryor's talents are being properly used.

A little too rough around the edges to fully engage.

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.

The action's good, the photography excellent, the sets decent; but the real clincher is the fact that Bond is once more played by a man with the right stuff. Civilisation is safe in the hands of he who has never tasted quiche, and who, on the evidence here, at least, can perform a very passable tango.

After a shaky start, Bad Neighbours blossoms, with inspired visual gags in excellent poor taste.

The first half chugs along quite happily, but whereas in Airplane the jokes could simply be strung on a hand-me-down storyline, here the demands of the plot start to play havoc with the levity. Signs of desperation have begun to creep in some time before the end.

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.

Pretty bland, but you have to admit co-producer Belafonte had an eye for talent, spotlighting HipHop legends-in-the-making Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force, the Rock Steady Crew, and Grand Master Melle Mel and The Furious Five.

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

Scott's sword and sandal spectacular is a bloody good yarn, packed with epic pomp and pageantry, dastardly plots, massed action and forthright, fundamental emotions.

The film has moments of humour, but they are integrated into a totally serious structure which isolates the family's countervailing tensions with a scalpel-like penetration. Only in a single character, the failed husband of one of the daughters, does the tone falter towards soap. Otherwise the approach is rock steady and, if the film's surface invites superficial comparisons with Bergman, its real roots lie in the very finest American art.

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.

Allen's second feature, a tribute to the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, is a wonderfully incoherent series of one-liners centered around a puny New York Jew's unwitting and unwilling involvement in a South American revolution.

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

No comedy classic, then, but a good natured and engaging slice of goonish self-mockery.

What will take your breath away is how viciously Armstrong crushed and humiliated anyone who dared to make allegations against him, and that includes former teammates he’d doped with.

Tale of the eagerly criminal career of Virgil Starkwell is as unpredictably structured as Annie Hall, if not yet anything like as sustained in tone and mood. But it has plenty of hilarious jokes and concepts, like the ventriloquists' dummies at prison visiting time, and the return home from a chain gang break with five shackled cons in tow.

Alan Ormsby's script, about a new kid in a Chicago high school who hires the biggest guy in school to fend off a lunch money protection racket, is (unusually) directed not for nostalgia value but from a perspective of adolescent insecurity, and helped along by fresh performances from a cast of inexperienced young actors.

Like Restrepo, this troubling and thoughtful documentary asks tough questions.

It’s taut, creepy, compelling and sexy. And, apart from the location, it’s very much a Dolan film, focused on people testing the limits of their love for each other – and themselves.

The approach is pretty conventional, but the characters – from unassuming singer Ibrahim Ferrer to wonderfully glamorous Omara Portuondo – are so brilliant you’d struggle not to be swept up in it all.

The sheer sense of ludicrous, punch-the-air joie de vivre is impossibly infectious.

Romantic humanism may not be fashionable in these cynical cinematic times, but few directors reveal the tragicomic lives of ordinary people with such sensitivity and humour.

The characters are still fun to be around, the one-liners are still sharp...and the soundtrack is, of course, terrific. But there are only so many times you can slap on a Fleetwood Mac toe-tapper and expect it to paper over the cracks.

The script is solid, the period recreation spectacular and the performances muscular, but The Connection suffers from a severe case of overfamiliarity.

It’s a film that moves to the convincing rhythm of real life.

Narrated entirely by its subject – no famous faces popping up to tell us what a ledge he is – the film is intimate and crisply told.