What makes it special is that it’s not another romance about finding a man. It’s about finding your people, about being a bit lost in your twenties and not knowing who you are or what you want to be. And it’s got bucketfuls of charm.

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

Packed with warmth and wit, this is a lovely lo-fi charmer.

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

Franco’s script teases out the character’s tangled ambiguities with immaculate control: even as the story proceeds in the lowest of keys, our nerves never settle.

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.

If director Thompson isn't quite skilful enough to give the film its final touch of class (many of the shocks are just too planned), the relentlessness of the story and Mitchum's tangibly sordid presence guarantee the viewer's quivering attention.

What emerges is a sympathetic portrait of a genuinely idiosyncratic, outrageous individual whose towering musical talent never stood a chance against his rampaging personal demons.

Irreplaceable builds in intensity as we realise the profound humanity and community spirit embodied by everyday heroes like this. Beautifully done by a writer-director who clearly knows his stuff.

This is sombre, artful and winningly ambiguous.

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

The connections might be a little more strained and diffuse than in "Nostalgia for the Light", but their cumulative power is strong nonetheless.

Intelligent and moving.

This is a fun action adventure that resonates because it doesn’t glamorise everything. You feel a warmth after watching it, as there’s something in its depiction of imperfect, loving family relationships that stays with you.

You forget how limited so many movies’ ideas of women are until Amy Schumer launches into an extended tampon joke: nothing is off-limits as she kapows through expectations of female characters.

It doesn’t entirely hold together; the relentless din and repetition flips from thrilling to exhausting and back again more than once. But in those moments when everything clicks...this is absolutely joyous.

This unnerving and enigmatic debut feature from Israeli director Nadav Lapid trains its steely focus on the group dynamics of the cops and robbers rather than asking us to get swept along in the specifics of their violence travails.

Sweet revenge for anyone who has sat through a foreign film suffering from a torrent of bad dubbing. For his first auteur-credit (!), Woody Allen got hold of a 1964 Japanese exploitation thriller and exploited it for his own ends, dubbing it delightfully with gags and Hollywood clichés. Enough one-liners to leave you with happy memories. A jolly oddity.

David Sington (In the Shadow of the Moon) shows extreme confidence in his subject by revealing the deeper truth in fragments, essentially allowing Nick to deliver a monologue or one man show, drawing us deeper and deeper into his story.

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

This really is Wonder Woman coming to the rescue of the DC Comics universe.

Pesci's variation on New Jersey machismo (vulnerable in this case) isn't enough to fill a comedy; but Dale Launer's script luckily provides some fine routines for the supporting cast, notably the scene-stealing Marisa Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito, Pesci's sharp-tongued girlfriend. It's a small, surprisingly gentle affair, prone to fits and starts, but fun.

Better than most Stephen King adaptations, mainly because an exceptionally strong cast adds substance to the facile storyline about a mysterious stranger, Leland Gaunt (von Sydow), who opens the antique shop of the title in Castle Rock, Maine, and, by tapping into the inhabitants' acquisitive desires, sets them at one another's throats.

In a welcome return to suspense, Pakula effectively conveys the claustrophobia of domesticity and courtroom procedure.

A pity that the directors prove less ruthless than their own creations, but there is more than enough here for people who enjoy murder attempts on cute pet poodles.

Like so much of the film it's a daft but not too daft proposition; and what redeems it is that the action sequences are superbly filmed, climaxing with Sheen's bullish entry into the arena at make-or-break time, the crowd singing 'Wild Thing' in clamouring unison.

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.

Allen's second feature, a tribute to the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, is a wonderfully incoherent series of one-liners centered around a puny New York Jew's unwitting and unwilling involvement in a South American revolution.