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.