Luckily, there are just enough truths about ageing beneath its corny, farcical surface. Also, it’s hard not to enjoy two hours in the company of this cast.

It’s impossible adequately to describe the haunting intensity of It Follows: this is a film that makes a virtue of silence, that lives in the shadowy spaces between the splattery kill scenes that punctuate your average stalk-and-slasher.

The chassis may be slick and speedy, but under the hood Focus lives up to its Ford-produced namesake: sturdy but not exactly stimulating.

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.

It’s all very sweet and harmless, though you can’t help wishing that Cinders got her happy ending for more than being kind to her digital mice and weathering a lot of crap with a never-ending smile on her face.

Don’t watch this doc for a lesson in the crisis. Maidan is hard work, with no voiceover or interviews and just the odd scrap of information written on screen to guide you through.

The plot’s old, the title’s borrowed and the jokes are blue – but there’s nothing remotely new in this wearying bromantic comedy.

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.

Let’s not kid ourselves: cast-iron interpretations of Malick’s recent filmmaking are risky. It’s also a matter of taste. You either slip into the pretty, dreamlike, wistful groove of his later films or you don’t, and even hardened arthouse film lovers may find Knight of Cups way out of their comfort zone.

Overall this is dull, derivative, murky stuff, full of running and shouting but never really going anywhere.

Maybe an hour would have been enough, but even the slower patches have charm to burn.

This is one mad mess from start to finish... But the sheer ambition is impossible to ignore, and the sense of fun is infectious: you may fear for your sanity during Jupiter Ascending, but you’ll come out smiling.

The film plumbs no great depths. But it snappily combines frisky aerial action, a sprinkling of fairy dust and much cuddly bonding with the massive furball of the title.

Sissako’s methods are confrontational, yet never to the point that you feel you’re watching sacrificial lambs instead of people caught in a horrible situation. In this terrible context, madness and death are blessings. It’s living that’s the curse.

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.

It’s all put together with a crisp confidence that suggests its writer-director will swiftly move on to bigger things.

Some people will hate Trash for being not grittily real enough, but Daldry’s point – a hope-against-hope optimistic one – is that the energy of young people can change Brazil.

Never less than slick, precision-tooled multiplex entertainment, Kingsman hews close to the formula Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman established in their superficially similar "Kick-Ass": hyperspeed action, pithy one-liners and grotesque ultraviolence.

It aims for a loose, French New Wave style but settles for muddled and rambling. It’s tortured for all the wrong reasons.

Contrary to appearances, Mortdecai isn’t a total disaster: Depp may be suffering the most catastrophic career slump since Eddie Murphy said yes to Norbit, but he’s still perfectly watchable.

“Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre,” Roth wrote in Everyman, but other than a few jokes about Axler’s limp erection and thrown-out back, we don’t see much of that.

Vikander’s spellbinding, not-quite-human presence (her synthetic skin is silky yet creepy) keeps us watching. But an only-too-obvious ‘twist’ and some clunky plotting...drain much of the credibility from a story which promised so much.

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

A beautifully acted but disappointingly stiff period drama.

Curry’s film hints at the role of media images in determining such self-conscious behaviour on the world’s frontlines, yet misses an opportunity to take VanDyke to task.

It’s a thoughtful, well-acted and perceptive drama. However, for a film about a love triangle the sparks don’t exactly fly.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s at fault here: the performances are flawless – Carell fully justifies his unlikely casting, while Ruffalo is as dependable as ever – and the script is astute, intimate and at times shocking. But there’s just no real life in the film.

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.

Taken 3 scores over its predecessor on almost every level: the stakes are higher, the LA locations are nicely photographed and, best of all, there’s an actual plot, with twists and everything.

It quickly devolves into predictable shock tactics, drippy wartime romance and scenes in which the characters leaf tremulously through Victorian photo albums and spout exposition.

This is a whale of a movie, grotesque and a little bloated but impossible to ignore. Its power and its horrors sneak up on you.

Burton lets Waltz run wild, sucking the air out of every scene with his hysterics, and the always-endearing Adams is left looking like a rabbit in the headlights.

There’s enough sly wit in the margins to engage the grown-ups and the whole thing conveys Christmas cheer without being overly cynical.

From Visconti and Pasolini through to I Am Love, Italian cinema has a proud tradition of dramatising class tensions, but this feels more like a TV soap lost on the big screen. The dividends are disappointing.

This enjoyable-despite-itself horror flick has precisely nothing new to offer - with the arguable exception of a monster in a miniskirt, which may be a first.

The film is frantic and silly and our biggest gripe is that all the penguins look the same.

Black Sea runs a few fathoms short of classic status. But its blend of old-fashioned storytelling values and zeitgeisty relevance make it a worthy addition to sub-aquatic cinema’s nerve-juddering legacy.

Jolie has assembled an A-list team – Roger Deakins behind the camera, the Coen brothers in charge of the script - but while her film is perfectly competent, it hardly dazzles.

Luckily, Jackson’s singular talent for massive-scale mayhem hasn’t deserted him, and the hour-long smackdown that crowns the film gives him ample opportunities to indulge it.

It’s charmingly simple. But it also offers a sharp modern spin on Michael Bond’s London-set stories without being cynical.

Another convoluted tale of criminal bumbling.

The writing and direction lean towards the obvious, but there’s much to chew on regarding tradition, progress and the power of the white lie.

The original footage – devastatingly intimate; familiar yet alien – still stops us in our tracks more than six decades later.

This isn’t much more than a series of ridiculously dotty sketches, and might have worked better as a sitcom, but it’s surprisingly hilarious.

The cast fail to gel and the tone of the film sways uneasily between melodrama and something more gentle. It’s too twee and theatrical to take seriously.

Even now at 50, Jarvis is a man who remains head-on crushable while dry humping an amp like your geography teacher on the Bacardi Breezers.

Everyone here deserves better.

You’ll walk out of this electrifying documentary about the Arab Spring with your blood boiling.

While it definitely takes its foot off the action, Mockingjay – Part 1 goes deeper and darker.

There’s much over-egged mugging from the grown-ups (bumbling toff Richard Griffiths, shouty sarge John Lynch), but the lads are spot-on: young Mackay is effectively touching and bristling O’Connell hints at Next Big Thing charisma.

The film’s unwillingness to judge either the decent yet doubt-wracked pastor, or the damaged souls seeking a new start, effectively draws us in to a whole cluster of gnarly dilemmas, where humane intentions prove counter-productive and the truth only makes matters worse.

Extraterrestrial doesn’t amount to much beyond a mish-mash of movies we’ve seen before.

In the end Horns is weird without being interesting.

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.

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.

Diehard romcom fans will have their socks charmed off, but this is no ‘Notting Hill’.

We don’t invest anything in either character, and with barely any tension, Serena grabs neither head nor heart.

It’s hugely entertaining.

Citizenfour is at its most eye-opening and essential simply as a portrait of the then 29-year-old Snowden at a point of absolute no-return in his life as he spends almost a week hiding out in Hong Kong before disappearing into an entirely new existence.

Brad Pitt pulls along this gutsy, old-fashioned World War II epic by the sheer brute force of his charisma.

As a thriller, Before I Go To Sleep is perfectly effective, but while director Rowan Joffe keeps the twists coming, something about Kidman’s blank, frosty performance is unconvincing.

You can watch The Innocents twice and walk away with different conclusions. Psychological horrors have imitated its ambiguous ending ever since. Few have pulled it off half as creepily.

Demange is a strong storyteller and masks the script’s tendency to nod to every opinion and social division by offering a masterclass in tension as soon as his dramatic bomb starts ticking.

Entertaining but never quite thrilling, this actually feels like the second film in a franchise, coasting along, but saving the best bits for the next episode.

With solid performances from all three leads and lovely twilight photography, the stage is set for a heartfelt coming-of-age drama – but the dire script has other ideas.

There’s only so many times an audience will fall for the same manipulative editing tricks. Still, with fine performances and a rich sense of place, this is a promising start.

The London scenes are fine but the guys seem far too relaxed in Miami considering death is looming. And we’re given no reason to root for them other than that they’re young and good-looking.

Janiak has succeeded in making what she calls ‘an elevated genre story’, yet much of its frightening psychological ambiguity is erased by a disappointingly conventional ending.

Pawlikowski’s film may be bleak and unforgiving, but it’s also richly sympathetic and deeply moving.

Kids still experiencing World Cup withdrawal symptoms may be entertained by this animated oddity from Argentina.

A Walk Among the Tombstones is well paced and fairly watchable, but it does take itself desperately seriously.

Wade’s dialogue is totally convincing, all in-jokes and boarding school banter... The trouble with The Riot Club is that dramatically it never quite comes together.

The film conceals as much as it reveals, and its beauty is that it pretends to do nothing else. It embraces a mystery and protects it, and it’s thrilling to behold.

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.

Dante plays the early scenes perfectly, racking up the clammy dread without tipping over into outright nastiness. But somewhere along the way, the tension dissipates.

Sentimental and shallow, although just passable as a kids’ movie.

The Guest is not new, exactly, but Wingard knows just which buttons to push, and he pushes them with gusto. Stevens, meanwhile, has never been better.

Breathlessly paced and surreally funny, ‘The Boxtrolls’ fizzes with visual invention and wild slapstick. But the grotesquerie is overbearing.

It’s all unexpectedly uninvolving.

It’s a joyous film, full of love and warmth but unafraid to admit that with sticking out your neck comes struggle and sorrow. Truly lovely.

This ridiculous, highly watchable, at points startlingly psychedelic action thriller is probably Luc Besson’s best film since ‘Léon’ (which isn’t saying a great deal).

A charismatic performance from Downey Jr and the growling presence of Duvall makes up for a multitude of sins in this big and brash family drama that puts the heavy emphasis on drama over family.

The 3D effects are dazzling, but the script creaks and the characters are thin.

It's dazzling and rambling, intimate and sprawling, and it's carried along by an infectious, off-the-cuff jazz score. As soon as it ends, you'll be dying to fly with it again.

It’s impressive but not dazzling.

Dunst handles her sidekick role with a mature ease that’s new to her, but it’s the men you remember: Mortensen in psychological freefall and Isaac always tough to read and hiding something behind a handsome, controlled exterior. It’s a gentle and smart blast from the past.

That a film in 2014 can still get away with depicting all women as either dumb, hapless sluts or ball-busting harridans is frankly unbelievable.

There are times when it feels underpowered or unfocused... but this is an intelligent, sensitive debut.

Ellis’s twisty plotting gets too clever-clever for its own good. But it’s pacy, engrossing, and Jake Macapagal’s turn as the plucky schmuck protagonist is stellar.

Folman’s vision is just too personal and obtuse, and the result can feel rather like watching someone else drop acid, enjoying their giddy descriptions of all the pretty colours but unable to fully engage.

The soundtrack is crammed with ’60s and ’70s pop gems – several of them instantly familiar from Scorsese’s movies – while the colour palette is all muted corduroy brown and rainy urban grey. The result is less a homage than a slavish, overproduced cover version, lacking all the spark and integrity of the original.

Simon Pegg plays the world’s most unconvincing psychiatrist in this fluffy, irritating Brit comedy.

Using home-video footage and talking-head interviews, Dinosaur 13 dramatically depicts the thrill of archaeological discovery. But the overbearing soundtrack and shots of weeping palaeontologists do feel a touch manipulative.

Thank the gods of war for Antonio Banderas, who single-handedly steals (and almost saves) the show as a loquacious assassin.

Extreme cinema aficionados will doubtless get major kicks from Moebius. For others, the cumulative shocks are likely to induce weariness and boredom.

There are other good performances to enjoy – notably from Koteas and Alba – but it’s Affleck who justifies the price of your ticket.

Overall this is giddy, ridiculous fun, a witty, wacky and wonderfully generous sugary gift of a film.

Strap on your swordbelt, buckle your sandals and oil up your rippling six-pack, because here comes yet another interminable, CGI-drenched mythic mish-mash with far more money than brain cells.