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.

Sir Ian McKellen is a pleasure to watch as an elderly Sherlock Holmes, though the drama isn't as compelling as it might have been.

Much of the film's impact stems from a pair of remarkable lead performances.

This is a valuable companion piece to other accounts and a vivid collage of in-the-moment imagery.

While the anatomical special effects are imaginative enough, the manic rather than magical tone fails to achieve the sense of awe that made Fantastic Voyage - clearly this film's inspiration - so fascinating.

Beyond the shocks and games, there's not a great deal to take away in the form of meaty ideas or lingering themes, and its catchy premise doesn't really deliver in the end.

Whedon has revealed that his first cut ran for well over three hours, and it shows: Ultron feels excessively nipped and tucked, barrelling from one explosive set-piece to the next, leaving ideas half-formed and character motivations murky.

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.

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

The story is a bit predictable and rough around the edges. But it’s heart-on-the-sleeve sweet.

Four bombed-out astronauts journey endlessly through the galaxy, whiling away the time with jokes, sunlamp treatment, personal diaries on videotape, and games with their own pet alien. Sheer delight.

Seven sketches parodying a sex manual, in which Allen strung together "every funny idea I've ever had about sex, including several that led to my own divorce."

The film has plenty to recommend it, thanks to a string of memorable one-liners and Coogan’s unmatched knack for skin-crawling physical comedy. But this is a long way from the back-of-the-net strike it should have been.

Moonraker is mercifully much better than recent Bondage, with fantastic special effects, some excellent buffery (cracks at Star Wars, Close Encounters, Clint Eastwood, to name but a few), and the usual location-hopping style that makes Versailles feel like Disneyland.

Polanski's thriller boasts several superb set pieces, even if it doesn't quite snap shut on the mind the way Chinatown did. Funny and unsettling.

Overlong but slick, this still gets away with simplistic dialogue and characters, perhaps because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Phantom Boy is frequently beautiful to look at, but the cops-and-robbers angle feels tired and the characters are thinly sketched.

The opposition of good and evil is devoid of any subtle shading, so just sit back and enjoy the spectacular dogfight over downtown Los Angeles.

This is easily Coppola’s funniest film. Leslie Mann is hilarious as Nicki’s phony spiritual mum.

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.

Basically, it's the charming tale of a New Jersey shoe-salesman who fantasises about being a cowboy, and takes a group of assorted weirdos on the road with a travelling show. Not a lot to it in terms of plot, but Eastwood manages to both undermine and celebrate his character's fantasy life, while offering a few gentle swipes at contemporary America (the Stars and Stripes tent sewn together by mental hospital inmates). Fragile, fresh, and miles away from his hard-nosed cop thrillers, it's the sort of film only he would, and could, make.

Not much happens in The Midwife, but its depth and texture make this a moving film about families, time passing and shared history – and the handful of scenes in the maternity unit where Claire works, five or six little miracles of birth, somehow add to its sense of a life as mysterious and precious.

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.

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.

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

What Hooper fails to do is get to grips with sexual identity in any way that's intellectually or emotionally provocative or surprising. That makes for a cold, pretty, delicate movie – one that too often relies on scene-stealing production design or the overwhelmingly insipid score for its otherwise strikingly absent emotional power.

As a director, Gordon-Levitt demonstrates considerable technical flair through stylistic flourishes and coaxes great performances out of his co-stars, while he remains centre stage throughout.

Robbins is amiable enough as a Gary Cooper type, and Meg Ryan does her own sweet thing, but the equation is overbalanced by Matthau's matey old man.

In the closing act, the film sharpens and becomes something far more compelling.

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.

Lovering’s taut direction and editor Jon Amos’s skilfully modulated cutting wring the maximum suspense from cinematographer David Katznelson’s multi-camera set-ups, tapping into deep-rooted psychological and primal fears.

For a comedy double-act who make their money out of people stoned beyond discrimination, Cheech and Chong are probably better than we deserve...The plot is, er, like an irrelevant hassle, and the observations on sub-culture work better than the slapstick paced for the brains of the wasted, but there are enough of these - especially a welfare office freak show - to serve as a reminder of how good the high times can be.

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

Shelton's film is about the nature of truth and popular myth, about the single-minded pursuit of glory, and the horrors within. It's also very funny. Jones gives a grandstand performance - this is his Patton, or even perhaps his Macbeth - as the pistol-packin', pill-poppin' Cobb, a monster who daren't look himself in the face, and refuses to apologise.

This entertaining first spin-off from the Harry Potter movies is both inventive and familiar – and Eddie Redmayne makes an endearing new wizarding lead.

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.

Pacino wears a vest and bandanna and moons through the part. Pfeiffer plays dowdy. Marshall directs as if Marty had never happened.

After An American Tale, Bluth surely had the clout to make a more adventurous animated feature than this, with its anthropomorphic espousal of American nuclear family values and its static, unimaginatively rendered backgrounds.

Efficient enough as a thriller, but what makes this mandatory viewing is the return of Pacino. There are isolated scenes as good as anything he's done, and if the role is less demanding than Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon or Michael in The Godfather, his presence lifts the production in the way De Niro lifted Midnight Run.

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

First-time feature director Omid Nooshin makes the best of a minuscule budget, and his punchy script doesn’t brake for breath.

A solid watch for gore fans.

It’s impressive but not dazzling.

This is an imperfect film, bold but occasionally baffling, and one that in its final act grows into something much more exciting than you might initially expect.

A United Kingdom is just a little too cosy and sentimental for its own good.

Eschewing metaphor and mysticism (save insofar as his characters adopt them), [Dumont] has for once given us a film of immense visual beauty, thematic clarity and subtle resonance.

Origin of Evil takes a while to get going, and the demonic possession plot pretty much runs on rails. And yet there’s plenty to admire here: strong performances (‘ET’ legend Henry Thomas is a welcome sight as a kindly priest), top-notch jump-scares and some unexpectedly lovely, almost ‘Far From Heaven’-ish autumnal photography.

The result isn’t as powerful as it should be. But it’s still cheering to see a film whose moral journey has little to do with the usual Hollywood chestnut of white middle-class consciousness-raising.

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 pleasure and an education.

The shattering downbeat ending is well earned and genuinely shocking.

The material inspires affection, given its knowing pastiche of everything from Universal horrors to '50s grade-Z sci-fi, and a shamelessly hedonistic, fiercely independent sensibility that must have seemed a welcome relief from the mainstream bombast of other '70s musicals.

Liman mines the story for familiar but fun comedy...though it never reaches the comedic heights of rise-and-fall classics such as Goodfellas or The Wolf of Wall Street.

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.

It has a rigorous, even unrelenting, grey, green and brown palette and, narratively, it’s tough to penetrate.

In this heartfelt film, Fleifel shows us the human cost of the conflict.

Stick with it and writer/director Alice Rohrwacher’s first feature reveals another side: taking a small town as a microcosm of Berlusconi’s something-rotten-at-the-core Italy.

Director Amber Fares strikes a perfect balance, telling a righteous, uplifting story of triumph against the odds without ever losing sight of the bigger political picture.

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.

Languorous pace and uneasy self-consciousness notwithstanding, it's in a similar bracket to the work of Hal Hartley and Atom Egoyan; it has a spaced-out charm of its own. And Glover's ludicrous wardrobe and whip-dancing skills make this a must for completists of Crazy Crispin.

An enjoyable if slightly innocuous biopic based on the brief life and short-lived fame of teen rock'n'roll idol Richie Valens.

The whole thing goes down with a few bucketloads of sugar. What keeps it from becoming sticky schmaltz is Thompson, who plays Travers with wit and warmth, adding a spoonful of spoilt child to help the battleaxe go down.

Anyone expecting gritty realism will be disappointed, because Hill is offering something better: shooting entirely on NY locations at night, he has transformed the city into a phantasmagoric labyrinth of weird tribes in fantastic dress and make-up who move over (and under) the streets as untouched as troglodytes by the civilisation sleeping around them. Mixing ironic humour, good music, and beautifully photographed suspense, it's one of the best of 1979.

This is a lavish pull-out-all-the-stops musical.

They do make 'em like it any more.

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.

Really, this is David/Walter’s show. For reasons too spoilery to give away, Fassbender is electric, giving a spectacularly skin-crawling performance.

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.

While Monsters University can’t claim outright originality, this is a far richer movie than most were expecting.

More notable perhaps for a roster of future stars and Oscar winners than for its unexceptional plot, this well executed film nevertheless has its charms.

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.

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

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!

Crisply photographed, thoughtfully plotted and sharply soundtracked, The Transfiguration is a solid slice of US indie horror.

Based on Kurosawa's Yojimbo, it sets a fashion in surly, laconic, supercool heroes with Eastwood's amoral gunslinger, who plays off two gangs against one another in a deadly feud.

All in all, ‘Madame Bovary’ is quite something, gradually building to a jawdropping final scene. Anyone with an interest in Chinese arthouse cinema really needs to see this.

As filmmaking, X+Y is unassuming and not entirely remarkable, but the relationships play so sweetly and memorably.

Nothing succeeds like excess, this comedy would have us believe. But the thwarted egos, rampant libidos, and starry cast - while wonderful at first - begin to look frayed around half-way through.

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.

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.

If Del Toro is pitching for an audience of 12-year-old boys (and we do mean boys: this is old-school macho), he’s done a bang-up job. Still, there are times when Pacific Rim could be the work of any jobbing Hollywood director – the warmth and idiosyncracy that characterises Del Toro’s finest work, from Pan’s Labyrinth to Hellboy 2, is absent.

Overall, this is an enjoyable, compelling small-scale shocker.

Essentially, this is sci-fi with a heart, albeit one made entirely of cheese. Both director and writer sometimes seem unsure whether to pitch the tale as knockabout comedy or sentimental fable. It's to the lasting detriment of the movie that Howard opts for the latter. Resistible.

The Lovers and the Despot is compelling as a Cold War-era thriller, but it also offers a small window on life in the higher echelons of power in North Korea at that time.

By far the most compelling voices are those of the impoverished Haitian people; unfortunately, they're only heard briefly at the end. While the film's real-life twists and turns are difficult to follow, the human desperation it depicts is all too easy to grasp.

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.

Impeccably liberal in its orientation to 'issues' - the power and responsibilities of the press, the impact of misinformation - this avoids the excesses of Stanley Kramer-like telegraphy, only to come up looking aesthetically wet.

Writer Abi Morgan ('Shame', 'The Iron Lady') and director Sarah Gavron's ('Brick Lane') tough, raw, bleak-looking film makes the suffragettes' dilemma feel immediate and real.

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

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.

During the 94 minutes of this delightful movie, the Muppets graduate from college, hit New York, are parted and reunited minutes before curtain-up, with Kermit saved from amnesia by a right hook from Miss Piggy.

Sleek and quite fun all the same, with SPECTRE holding the world to ransom after stealing a couple of nuclear bombs, Bond almost getting his in the villain's shark-infested swimming pool, and a cleverly choreographed underwater battle to provide the icing on the mix.

Catch Me Daddy feels authentic and informed, but wears its research lightly and prefers to thrust us into the atmosphere of the moment rather than offer too much background or tie things up neatly.

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.

This is a whistle stop tour that leaves you wanting more.

Big Bad Wolves requires a high tolerance for pain, but its wicked humour and oblique satire rip open Israel's paranoid, militarised system like a jagged saw blade.

Sometimes you find yourself wishing for an alternative version of the film unfolding before your eyes. ‘Belle’ is a good-looking and exceedingly polite film where perhaps a more complex one with less good manners would have been better.

At least there’s plenty from Whitney herself in incredibly poignant TV interviews where she talks about her struggles with fame and addiction.