The Water Diviner is solid and old-fashioned.

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.

The word exploitation comes to mind.

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 script by New Line's head of production, Michael de Luca, does not allow Carpenter free range, nevertheless he manages some neat flourishes of his own, handling the narrative twists and unsettling sfx sequences with customary skill.

Two hours long and anti-climactic, but Bond fans won't be disappointed.

Thematically, White Elephant is a vague animal and its true interest never truly comes into focus.

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

If the crime element feels like little more than a red herring, it’s the characters that give the film its appeal.

Despite much old-school splatter, it’s seldom frightening and oddly unfunny.

The thrills and the effects are cheap, but this is in hard-driving, good-humoured command of its own silliness.

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

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.

That Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi adore this music is not in question – it’s lovingly chosen and brilliantly performed – but the film sometimes feels like a work of cultural tourism, particularly in scenes set in a gospel church and a Chicago street market. These lively musical sequences also sit awkwardly with director John Landis’s bizarre predilection for wholesale destruction: sure, smashing up cop cars can be fun, but Landis takes things to a tiresome extreme.

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.

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.

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

It's admirable that Kore-eda sets himself new challenges each time he makes a film, but the attempt to conjure substance from conversations improvised around a complicated and obscure back-story in Distance proves fairly unrewarding.

The unusually extended shooting period and Winterbottom’s decision to cast siblings as the kids make for a strangely intimate and powerful depiction of time passing and the peaks and troughs of childhood.

This is a fresh and un-stuffy period drama mostly, but it could have done with a pinch more danger.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is not exactly killing it, but coasts on the charisma of its central stars.

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.

Yes, The Lobster is arch: this is cinema in quotemarks, tongue-in-cheek storytelling that uses absurdity to hold a mirror to how we live and love. At its best, it has incisive things to say about how we shape ourselves and others just to banish the fear of being alone, unloved and friendless.

The mix of fact and fiction is a little confusing, but a strong sense of warm enquiry pulls it through.

[Redemption] doesn’t always work but wins points for originality.

While the characters lack credibility, the social backdrop and texture of the performances certainly don’t, and Villeneuve manages to say more about the sorry state of the Middle East (Lebanon is suggested but never mentioned) through the bold, crisp way he shoots faces, buildings and parched, beige-brown landscapes. So let’s call it’s a strong film based on a weak story.

After the bruising honesty of ‘Calvary’, it’s probably not surprising that McDonagh felt the urge to cut loose a little and make a movie with few ambitions beyond cheap violence and filthy laughs. Let’s just hope he’s got it out of his system.

What Morgan lacks in philosophy and ideas, it makes up for in bone-crunching violence.

The tone careens from high seriousness to easy parody in a way that makes the film slightly imprecise and slippery. Still, nothing else quite like it out there, that’s for sure.

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.

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

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.

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.

Carpenter has always been a skilful genre mechanic, breathing life into old forms; if he stubs his toes up against the bamboo curtain this time, there is still more enjoyable sly humour than in most slug-fests.

Just the name ‘George Galloway’ – this doc’s presenter and co-writer – will have some vowing to go nowhere near this lively character assassination of Tony Blair. But anyone expecting wall-to-wall ranting and raving might be surprised by it’s relative sobriety.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's très chic and charming but a bit disappointing when you see where it's headed.

It should be disastrous. But psycho ground controllers (Stack and Bridges), laff-a-second pace, and bludgeoning innuendo make this the acceptable face of the locker-room satire.

It’s the directorial debut of novelist Helen Walsh and details as small as the actresses’ eyebrows reveal huge amounts about their characters. It’s also cleverly shot.

It’s impressive but not dazzling.

The seductively exotic surface of this mythically underpinned fantasy might be offset for some by much graphic gore, but if you can buy the romantic metaphors for the primitivisms of sexual obsession, the film delivers down the line.

Overall, there’s a sense that ‘Fast and Furious 8’ knows exactly where it wants to go and won’t bust a gasket getting there: you might ask for a little more character work here, a few more plot surprises there, but on the whole this rattles along just fine.

A little too rough around the edges to fully engage.

The cat-and-mouse chase across the desert that follows is entertaining to begin with but unnecessarily drawn out, leaving far too much room for Douglas to plug with cartoonish quips and daft machismo.

The strands don’t so much intersect as float into each other’s peripheries to basically inconsequential effect, despite attempts to tie them together.

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

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 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.

An overlong, at times almost plot-free soap opera that introduces a wealth of characters and dips into a wide variety of subplots but never comes together as a story.

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

City of Tiny Lights is always entertaining, and proves a great excuse for Ahmed to confirm his newly minted matinee-idol status. If only it had the confidence to shrug off its influences and do its own thing.

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 result looks less like a horror flick and more like a thinking man’s action-thriller – the ‘Newsnight’ of zombie films (you’ll know if that’s your cup of tea).

The first half of Magic Magic is greatly enjoyable... Sadly, director Sebastián Silva isn’t sure where to take his characters.

Any kid growing up in the early ’60s will remember this one for several reasons: Birley Shassey’s screamer of a theme; Bond’s shocking use of a beautiful girl as a human shield; bullion-obsessed baddie Auric Goldfinger’s top hat-wielding henchman, Oddjob; Honor Blackman’s risquely monikered Pussy Galore; and, above all, Bond’s stupendous, gadget-infested silver Aston Martin DB5, the car that spurred a thousand Corgi purchases.

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.

Don’t tell Liam Neeson, but someone had the gall to make a violent Euro-thriller about a rampaging American dad without him. And not a bad one either.

This sequel to Planet of the Apes isn't bad, but degenerates the original conception into routine comic strip adventure.

Good Kill is a dour, claustrophobic film, offering an acute and stunningly photographed exploration of middle-American banality and moral ambivalence.

The film never works out how to generate genuine dramatic fire from its material. There are convincing performances and decorative retro detail to admire, but the heart needs to beat just that bit faster – and it doesn’t manage that.

What marks out director Mike Newell and writer David Nicholls’s version is its impeccable acting.

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.

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

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.

Director Daryl Goodrich has access to all the right people, and his footage is nicely chosen, but ‘Ferrari’ is unlikely to convert non-petrolheads.

Built on fantasy stereotypes – friendly little folk, evil witches, misunderstood heroes, guys on horseback with bloody great swords – it nonetheless contains enough epic action, narrative momentum and spit-and-sawdust pre-CGI special effects to hold the attention.

Another one flies over the cuckoo's nest in this soft-hearted romantic three-hander. It's acted out in the secondary emotional register of the glass menagerie: whimsical, delicate, idiosyncratic, barmy.

Men & Chicken is a fun film but rarely a funny one; clever comic touches abound but are undermined by some base slapstick.

Luckily, Hawke and Delpy remain as charming as ever, and their combined goofiness is more endearing than annoying. Winning, too, is the sense that this peculiar project, though imperfect, could grow old with its audience and its cast.

Muddled campus revolt comedy, distinguished by Elliott Gould's marvellously grizzly performance as an ageing dropout who decides to drop back in again, and resolutely keeps his nose glued to his books in self-defence. Robert Kaufman's script casts a nicely caustic eye not only on the juvenility of the student demands, but also on the hopeless desiccation of academia.

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.

Thank the movie gods for Dwayne Johnson, who delivers a performance of such charm, such unexpected goofiness that the screen practically glows every time he appears.

The film can’t match the novel’s elegant, startlingly excellent Booker-Prize-winning writing, but a first-class cast (including Charlotte Rampling and Sinéad Cusack) make this an absorbing watch.

Social media has never been so scary.

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

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.

The film’s bouts of slapstick and sentiment sit slightly oddly with its downbeat tone, but if Wilson isn’t entirely consistent as a character, Harrelson is consistently funny – and if anyone can make a sociable misanthrope believable, he can.

It’s Bruni Tedeschi’s sure grasp of the milieu – and in particular her acute understanding of the specific foibles of a rich, arty but out-of-touch class nostalgic for an earlier era – that makes the film a modest but surprisingly substantial delight.

There's a gripping, dark, truly monstrous film lurking in here somewhere, but Bayona seems hell-bent on keeping it at bay.

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.

For a while the film broaches genuinely unexpected comedic and emotional territory, and while matters eventually return to the safe haven of pat formula, at least there’s been some vim and vigour added to the amiable observational humour and likeable performances.

The result, despite an uncertain start, is in the end a surprisingly intriguing and affecting movie.

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

Desplechin’s film is a modest but very passable affair.

Only Lovers Left Alive drags its feet and shows serious signs of anaemia as a story.

Bits of Allied really do work. There’s a clawing tension to the later scenes, as their marital bliss starts to turn sour. Pitt’s anguish is convincing, and even if some of his actions are ludicrous – endangering an entire Resistance cell for his own peace of mind, for instance – we still feel for him.

The problem with the film is that Potts’s life story has been put through the Hollywood meatgrinder. Awkward details have been changed or erased – they’ve made Potts Welsh (he grew up in Bristol) and eliminated his siblings.

Cloying at times – but always good-natured.

At one point a character even ponders aloud that it’s probably best not to think too hard about how this ecology might work or whether it makes sense. Amen to that.

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

There are few surprises in Creepy. With the exception of a bleak, pointed ending, it all plays out as you’d expect. That’s not necessarily a criticism – it’s fun to watch the pieces click into place, and the film is never less than slick, well-acted and nice looking.

Jackson's showy technique does little to lighten the over-earnest heroics and ponderous references to samurai, which are punctuated by assorted numbers and costume changes for Houston. Lawrence Kasdan, it seems, mulled over the first draft of his screenplay twenty years ago; it should have been left to languish in development purgatory.

Willow Creek doesn’t take us anywhere new – the climax is abrupt and unsatisfying – but it’s a whole lot of jarring, juddering fun while it lasts.

Despite the hackneyed sub-Frankenstein plot, the dazzling computer-generated special effects almost carry the film.

It falters once the actual war begins: Ben Kingsley shows up as a Maori warrior with the weirdest imaginable accent, the final battle is uninvolving, and there’s an unconvincing upbeat coda. Ender’s Game ends up being fitfully engaging and endearingly odd.