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

The ever-present air of madcap, goofball insanity carries it through. A seriously guilty pleasure.

It’s hardly high art, but for a cheapjack homegrown action flick this is surprisingly solid.

A solid watch for gore fans.

From the opening voiceover to the out-of-their-heads party scenes, it’s utterly generic.

The students keep filming when it is insane to do so, and an avalanche of speculative tosh smothers everything except our mocking laughter.

It doesn’t even qualify for dumb fun.

A gorgeous, amusing ode to the pleasures of stretching your wings a little.

Seyfried is fine but has little character depth to work with: Sarsgaard impresses with a more complex character, as does a barely recognisable Sharon Stone as Linda’s bitter mother. If only the whole film were as well-rounded.

This tense New York drama from the co-directors of Bee Season and The Deep End is sensitive and almost unwatchably perceptive about dysfunctional families – and it’s acted with knife-sharp precision.

What’s the opposite of warts-n-all? ‘No warts’ doesn’t even begin to describe Morgan Spurlock’s fly-on-the-wall film about One Direction. No warts, no acne – there’s not even a pimple on the butt of this on-tour portrait of the reality-bred boy popsters.

It’s a potent mix for young fans that gets off to an entertaining, action-packed start with bursts of knowing humour. But it’s soon bogged down by an increasingly convoluted plot, an overindulgent running time and absurd dialogue.

Complications escalate to a tiresome degree, leeching the fun from the movie, which is slung together with cold competence (and not much more) by jobbing Icelandic maverick Baltasar Kormákur.

There’s nothing groundbreaking about the animation or script. That said, the characters and story still offer low-key charms.

The best thing about ‘Kick-Ass’ was Moretz, and Hit-Girl still gets the best lines. Like the first film, Kick-Ass 2 pulls the reality of teen life into its fantasy.

The Lone Ranger is content to simply pull another western trope out of the bag – the honky-tonk whorehouse, the ranch raid, the cavalry charge – give it a CGI spit-and-polish, and chuck it in the general direction of the audience. The result is frustrating, lazy and lifeless.

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.

This is a messy, poorly structured film, riddled with plot holes and lacking any kind of satisfying conclusion.

There’s really nothing to recommend ‘Sea of Monsters’: the young cast are smug and forgettable; the action sequences barely get going before they’re over; and the whole affair is riddled with product placement and pop cultural references – one girl even seems to possess a magic iPad. Keep the kids at home

This is an unambitious, old-school thriller, nothing more and nothing less.

What isn’t so charming is Azaria’s irritatingly over-egged impersonation of the Child Catcher in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ – that and the headache-inducing 3D.

This turgid return papers over the previous film’s narrative, but creates little in the way of a fresh character arc.

If its script is a little unwieldy and overwrought at times, Broken is still a work of delightful moments and strong promise for many of those involved. Norris works hard to inject some joy and wonder into what could easily be a much more dark and miserable experience.

Events are still unfolding, so this is a snapshot in time, but Gibney’s conscientious, revealing document proves a mine of valuable information and affecting emotional insights.

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

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.

This is a tighter, smarter film than either Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, and buried beneath all the blue-goo aliens and terrible punning is a heartfelt meditation on the perils and pleasures of nostalgia.

This is a film built on sensation, misdirection and randomness. The result can be maddeningly obtuse, but it’s also breathtakingly lovely and genuinely unsettling.

What a knotty, frighteningly real drama The Hunt is.

It’s a testament to the duo’s jazzy comic chemistry that they wring some laughs from this dated, frankly sinister premise.

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

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.

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

Everyone has a different story. I found myself holding my breath listening to them talk. The story twists like a thriller.

Its repetitive qualities are beyond reproach. Every bit as amiable and disposable as its predecessor, it recycles everything from slapstick gags to its own voice cast.

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

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.

There’s something a bit over-familiar here – in a solidly entertaining, made-for-telly, nothing-we-haven’t-seen-before, way.

Putting the ‘retch’ into ‘wretched’, this wedding comedy makes the fatal assumption that the sight of acting icons of a certain age – Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon and Diane Keaton – behaving badly will have us rolling in the aisles.

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).

Feels both modern and traditional – a halfway house between the broodier Nolan way of shaking things up and the louder, bone-crunching style that director Zack Snyder established with films such as ‘300’ and ‘Sucker Punch’. Man of Steel is punchy, engaging and fun, even if it slips into a final 45 minutes of explosions and fights during which reason starts to vanish and the science gets muddy.

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

Franck’s survival and investigation techniques are glossed over in favour of convenient coincidences and sensationalist set-pieces: this hero’s emotional struggles are kept at arm’s length.

Hats off to Viggo Mortensen. He pulls off playing identical twins in this Argentinian thriller, which never quite lives up to his talents.

The film's would-be subversive ideas about the kneejerk appeal of social violence get lost in the mix.

The struggle for LGBT rights in Uganda might sound like a dry or distant subject. It’s the achievement of Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall’s shocking, moving, enthralling and enraging doc to make it lively and urgent.

This is a portrait of cycles and change. But the mood of the film suggests that we should be impressed that this ever-growing, ever-changing city of ours is still chasing after new versions of the modern.

American Mary nods savvily to the ‘body horror’ of ‘Audition’ and ‘Dead Ringers’ but still possesses a truly original, deeply disturbing vision.

What Luhrmann makes intoxicating is a sense of place – the houses, the rooms, the city, the roads – and the sense that all this is unfolding in a bubble like some mad fable. Where he falters is in persuading us that these are real, breathing folk whose experiences and destinies can move us.

From this simple, not especially unique love story, Kechiche has fashioned an intimate epic.

It's to Ozon's credit that he never serves up easy answers.

If the final effect is somewhat less nuanced than his previous work, it's a good deal more vigorous.

It’s intricate and often mature as drama, but it’s also meandering and at times heavy-handed, even melodramatic, and the tight control of time, place and action which made ‘A Separation’ so gripping is just not there.

The Immigrant promises rich territory to explore, but in the execution it’s overly stately, dreary and unconvincing.

It’s an exploration of all things surface, yes, but it has soul too.

Unfortunately, Arnaud de Pallieres’s film succeeds neither as a decent adaptation of the book nor as a rewarding movie in its own right.

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

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.

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.

More than ever Payne allows the humour to rise up gently from his story rather than burst through it.

[A] baggy revenge thriller consisting of short violent set pieces interspersed with far too many talky debates about the morality of protecting a killer.

There’s typical grace and good humour in Kore-eda’s handling of this all-but-impossible situation. But the film’s critical lack of dramatic nuance undercuts its emotional resonance.

If Heli lacks enough focus and thematic clarity to make it properly special, it's still winningly provocative and always compelling.

Style over substance doesn’t really tell the half of it: you can bathe a corpse in groovy light and dress it in an expensive suit, but in the end that rotting smell just won’t go away.

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

Part III has curiously little interest in being even remotely funny.

This philosophical war film is impressive and thought provoking but it’s also too restrained and pensive to ever completely connect.

The Coens have given us a melancholic, sometimes cruel, often hilarious counterfactual version of music history. It's a what-if imagining of a cultural also-ran that maybe tells us more about the truth than the facts themselves ever could.

There’s little we haven’t seen before, including farting elephant seals.

With its puerile dialogue, daft performances, flat comic repartee and ear-rupturingly loud sound levels, the experience of watching ‘Fast & Furious 6’ is like listening to death metal pour out of 500-watt speakers while being strapped to a pneumatic drill. Apart from Diesel’s likeably mild-mannered persona, there’s little here that we haven’t seen before.

Riz Ahmed is superb as Changez (pronounced Chan-Gez, not like the Bowie song),

It’s a broader, starrier project than either of Nichols’s previous films, and he handles the transition to the major league with relative confidence.

A Hijacking’ is gripping in the way the best Danish TV is – in its no-frills authenticity.

Berberian Sound Studio is like nothing before – and whether or not it ‘works’ seems almost irrelevant. In this era of cookie-cutter cinema, Strickland’s deeply personal moral and stylistic vision deserves the highest praise.

A way-too-leisurely thriller whose destination is fairly obvious from early on, but to which the talented cast apply themselves with effortful seriousness.

I’m So Excited is the closest Almodóvar has come in years to early romps like ‘Labyrinth’, ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom’ and ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’

A stop-gap tale that’s modest, fun and briefly amusing rather than one that breaks new ground or offers hugely memorable set pieces.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The standard of acting is poor beyond belief. What happened to Grant’s career that he should be in the likes of this?

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

Abrahamson has pulled off something quietly remarkable: a study of morality which never feels like a treatise, a bracingly realistic film about teenagers which never becomes patronising and a gripping melodrama which swerves sentiment. He may also have unearthed a genuine star.

The cliché-averse will doubtless resist, but the laughter and tears here are never less than fully earned. A lovely film.

From the moment a pair of workmen crack open a seventeenth-century plague pit and unleash the undead, Matthias Hoene’s lairy, gory zombie comedy delivers.

It’s undeniably entertaining – and worth seeing for Kingsley alone – with the misfires never fully overshadowing the moments of glory.

A startling movie, I Am Not a Witch is many things. It’s a magic realist fable set in present-day Zambia that has plenty to say about gender and superstition. It’s also a satire, a tragedy and a comedy. And, impressively, debut writer-director Rungano Nyoni makes this heady mix work.

LaBoeuf is good, but his performance is – ironically – desperately serious, as is the tone of this film.

It's a road movie where the origin feels more interesting than the destination, but it's never less than warm and likeable.

Like Orwell on helium, this reimagining of Stalin’s demise and the subsequent ideological gymnastics of his scheming acolytes is daring, quick-fire and appallingly funny.

From chases on boats to bust-ups on buses, the action and locations are fitfully engaging, but the story feels cobbled together and the dialogue is often painful.

Writer-director Francis Lee has drawn on his own farming background and his film is full of convincing detail. The lack of chat feels especially truthful.

The best moments come with two bravura and ultra-realistic chase sequences through grotty, dimly lit back allies, and director Na Hong-Jin also does his best to toy with expectations whenever possible. This playfulness, however, backfires massively in the second half when coincidence and unforeseen consequence conspire uneasily with bloody, messy results.

You won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Terminator Salvation isn’t the gritty, futuristic blitzkrieg for which fans of the first two films have been salivating. It isn’t even the slick, entertaining Hollywood blockbuster most were realistically expecting. It is a shambolic, deafening, intelligence-insulting mess, a crushing failure on almost all counts.