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

If you enjoy improbable plot twists, overcooked dialogue and Hollywood legends champing on scenery, this adaptation is a highly entertaining slice of American Gothic.

Devil’s Due spends far too much time on home movie footage of likeable newlyweds Zach (Zach Gilford) and Samantha McCall (Allison Miller), while neglecting to scare the bejesus out of us.

If you’ve never been to a burlesque show, now you know what you’re missing. The dedication and warmth of the performers are infectious.

In Firth’s every grimace and flinch you feel the torment of Lomax’s private world, but emotionally ‘The Railway Man’ feels trimmed and tidied up.

It’s a shame, because there’s a good, solid documentary to be made about this fascinating, enormously talented, slightly self-congratulatory little man and his unmistakeable ouevre.

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.

The effect is talismanic: overlaid by a thoughtful voiceover, it invites the audience to share the pain in a cathartic act of imaginative reclamation.

Ultimately story is secondary to Russell’s delicious detailing of character and milieu.

Scorsese never digs too deeply under the skin of these reprehensible playboy douchebags, and there are times where the swooping photography, smash-and-grab editing and toe-tapping soundtrack conspire to almost – almost – make us like them. But when the film’s cylinders are firing, it’s impossible not to be dragged along.

Cloying at times – but always good-natured.

There’s plenty of flesh (much of it belonging to porn doubles), although the film is rarely, if ever, what most people would call erotic or pornographic. It’s neither deeply serious nor totally insincere; hovering somewhere between the two, it creates its own mesmerising power.

We’re never far from Von Trier, and both Skarsgård and Gainsbourg appear to offer different versions of the author himself.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is not the disaster some feared it might be, but neither is it the endlessly quotable, deliciously idiotic follow-on so many of us were optimistically anticipating.

There’s not a single, solitary laugh to be had.

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.

Softley negotiates layers of deceit with skill, but an uncharacteristic visual and narrative tightness leaves one wondering what might have been.

There are no interviews, characters nor narration, and after an hour it can feel like a chore. Yet the images are staggering.

Moretz is unnervingly talented, but Carrie is not a role she was born to play. She hasn’t a victim’s bone in her body and fluffs the early scenes when the mean girls pick on her.

Even after The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, this brings us chillingly closer to the real story of the post-Iraq shitstorm.

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.

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.

A virtual remake, down to the final shot, of Michael Winner’s 1974 exploitation hit ‘Death Wish’ – and lacking even that film’s adolescent grasp of street justice.

Director Sung-su Kim doesn’t spend long explaining how the heck this ravenous form of avian flu has come about, concentrating instead on the chaos as the epidemic spirals out of control.

A potentially gripping study of the fallout from the JFK assassination as experienced by his doctors, secret service agents and the man who famously photographed the incident is rendered tame by a combination of flat writing and overly busy storytelling.

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.

The film’s sole saving grace is Tommy Lee Jones’s amusingly cranky FBI agent, but he can’t save this ship from sinking.

This is a woman who has been through hell and come out kicking, and the result is as much a celebration of her life as it is a documentary.

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.

Like so many campaigning doc-makers he’s much more interested in throwing darts at the other guys – the anti-nuclear brigade (who have better slogans: ‘Hell, no, we won't glow’) – than giving us a balanced film.

There are only so many scenes anyone can take of Law (never suited to the geezer role) strutting down streets shooting his gob off. If it was all in service of a smart story, so be it. But it isn’t.

At least Cameron Diaz gives it some welly as the gold-toothed femme fatale who may or may not hold all the cards.

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.

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.

Catching Fire looks and feels epic. Hands down it’s one of the most entertaining films of the year.

Seidl gestures towards understanding rather than confrontation – turning in a slighter, softer-grained film than its predecessors, but no worse for it.

This is tame, lifeless stuff.

Baldwin and Toback make a snappy comic duo, and half of their talks with a line-up of luminaries focus on the art of filmmaking rather than the business.

This painful, beautiful doc chronicles the fightback.

There’s a pleasing no-frills tone to the whole enterprise as well as a convincing grasp of the rituals and beliefs of the age.

The film does approach Milius with a certain reverence, but it can’t disguise the fact that he’s a troubling, divisive figure: bull-headed, almost cartoonishly macho, staunchly right-wing and dangerously self-obsessed.

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

It’s a touching film and a fascinating glimpse into one of those couples you can’t quite believe are still together.

Child’s Pose plays its thematic cards far too early, but it’s sustained by Gheorghiu’s compelling central turn as the endlessly self-deluding grande dame.

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

For all its humanistic warmth and undoubted charm, Short Term 12 just never quite rings true.

Though it’s most successful as a character study, the movie also works as an unusually honest variation on the traditional cinematic love story (it rings especially true on the difficulties of starting over after years of settled family life).

This is a deeply silly, extremely noisy and sometimes impenetrable action movie that’s drowning in CGI, wild overacting and mullets. And it’s enormously entertaining.

There are a couple of bawdy sight gags that hit the mark, although the outtakes in the end credits provide the film’s funniest moments. The cast and crew appear to have had a ball making it, at least.

As the sexual, financial and criminal shenanigans get ever more complicated, absurd and melodramatic, the film becomes increasingly tiresome; it’s not even possible to enjoy its excesses in a ‘so bad it’s good’ way.

This anime feature takes an intriguing premise and does little with it. The detailed Ghibli-esque visuals are decent enough, but this is disappointingly bland.

Occasionally baggy, always sincere, this is an essential document of a defining era when ‘soul’ really meant something.

How Knight and Crowley managed to persuade such upstanding actors – not to mention Jim Broadbent, Anne-Marie Duff, Ciaran Hinds and Riz Ahmed – to take part in this fiasco is destined to remain a mystery. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trite.

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.

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.

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.

It’s not a pretty story, but its warmth lies in its fondness – love, even – for the two boys at its heart.

What 12 Years a Slave is really interested in is creating an honest, believable experience: in culture and context, place and people, soil and skin. The result can, at times, be alienating.

Nicole Holofcener has a reputation for making Woody Allen-ish chick-flicks. Which sounds like a snidey compliment. Enough Said is her best yet.

Kids should be game for the ride, and the colourful characters offer humour and poignancy: Paul Giamatti’s cautious snail Chet shares a sweet friendship with reckless Turbo. Comparisons with Pixar’s ‘Cars’ are easy to make, but that’s no bad thing.

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.

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.

Love, Marilyn blows out of the water the impression of Monroe as the helpless dumb blonde.

Escape Pla’ would have made a perfect vehicle for, say, a Chuck Norris or even a Jean-Claude Van Damme. But these two redoubtable, enormously watchable old-school heroes deserve better.

Intelligent and moving.

This sequel suffers from the same lack of quality control that plagued the first film.

Sadly, much as we want to relish the shameless parade of cartoon violence, while indulging the equally shameless cavalcade of adolescent sexism, the soggy plotting and slack comic timing are downers.

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.

It’s adequate and often fun, but no match for Cumberbatch’s talents: physically, his Assange is far more complex and intriguing than most of the things we hear him say or see him do.

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

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

It’s all done with care and authentic Japanese locations, and is engrossing for anyone with an interest in the subject. But there’s scant drama as proceedings plod their way towards mutual understanding.

Don’t be put off by the jock-ish ‘extreme sports’ subject matter, this is an insightful, deeply affecting journey of emotional discovery beyond the thrill of speed and the roar of the crowd.

Kevin Macdonald’s slightly drab adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s popular teen novel would be nothing without Saoirse Ronan.

This punky adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Filth is a glossary of grimness, a dictionary of darkness. But it also dishes up humour that’s blacker than a winter’s night in the Highlands and unpolished anarchy that’s true to Welsh’s out-there, frighteningly frank prose.

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

You’ll be left scratching your head wondering what a naked girl draped in a purple net curtain in a cemetery has got to do with frocks. Not many revelations here.

A right royal mess.

Yet just when the movie has us in its grasp, the script falls to pieces and turns into a crass female-in-peril button-pusher whose shameless psycho-killer clichés insult the intelligence.

One of the most pleasing things about Blue Jasmine is that it feels truly knotty and never obvious in how it unfolds.

A masterclass in how the most local, most hemmed-in stories can reverberate with the power of big, universal themes.

It’s an intoxicating marvel, strange and sublime: it combines sci-fi ideas, gloriously unusual special effects and a sharp atmosphere of horror.

It’s anarchic, sometimes amusing, intermittently tedious, with ideas about digital alienation and the corruption of technology that too often feel blunt and tired.

It's a terrifically moving film that has a fitting earthbound feel to it.

Instead of developing the story’s wartime context, Trueba and veteran screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière offer passing reflections on the relationship between observation and the largely mental process of creativity, but little that ignites genuine drama.

Bell goes easy on the preaching and heavy on the laughs without losing her feminist message.

The outcome may be pre-ordained, but Emmerich’s knack for a witty pop-culture reference, a pulse-pounding gun battle or a sneaky political undercurrent (the film has drawn fire in the US for being leftie propaganda) hasn’t deserted him.

Rush is fast, slippery, stormy and dangerous.

For all but the most forgiving horror fans, this is a lazy, stupid and incoherent failure.

No shortage of appetising ingredients here, yet the execution sadly fails to make the most of them.

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

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

Its encouragement to let ourselves be captivated by everyday humanity as well as the old masters is both richly illuminating and quirkily endearing. Time well spent.

Rousing as a tale of saintly gays against the system, Any Day Now is less stirring as cinema.

This isn’t just the best-looking film of the year, it’s one of the most awe-inspiring achievements in the history of special-effects cinema. So it’s a shame that – as is so often the case with groundbreaking effects movies – the emotional content can’t quite match up to the visual.

The aliens are unscary and easily despatched, Vin’s too silent to be interesting, and the other characters – a gang of bounty hunters on Riddick’s trail – are either dull or offensive.

The film overdoes it with the awkward, unconvincing re-enactments, many starring the director himself. The result will amuse hardcore Cash fans, but few others.

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