It takes a while to find its focus – and takes itself just a little too seriously – but as low-budget Ozploitation goes, it’s snappy and effective.

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

It’s just a shame the film is slightly ragged, with a tendency to preach when there’s more than enough drama to get the point across. Still, it’s an important story, told with commitment.

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

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.

While it’s often beautiful and moving, emotionally it never quite sticks.

The Commune may veer towards sentimentality in the final act...but overall this is a warm, sharply characterised and absorbing melodrama.

This super-gargantuan historical drama may not be much of a movie, but it delivers Hollywood spectacle of the sort we’ll never see again.

An unbalanced but never less than entertaining film, enthralling and deflating in roughly equal measure, and studded with moments of true, old-school glory.

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

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.

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

It’s all a bit heavy-handed at times, but this is a sweet story honestly told.

Though the writer/director is working abroad and telling a linear story, it's immediately apparent - from the measured pacing, the immaculate compositions and elegant camera movements, the audacious ellipses and the inspired use of music - that this is a hallmarked Davies film. As such, it is extraordinarily moving, notably in a simple, underplayed death scene. Gena Rowlands' performance is a marvel of subtle nuances.

In his prime, co-writer Michael Ritchie might have turned this into a caustic Downhill Racer or Bad News Bears-style critique of professional sporting values. Director Turteltaub, on the other hand, patronises both characters and audience with daft knockabout humour, tear-jerking sentiment and racial stereotyping which skates on very thin ice.

Tense rather than terrifying, and with a strong black comic undercurrent, it rests on the mordant observation that zombies or no zombies, chances are the living will tear each other apart. A fitting conclusion to a remarkably astute series, a landmark in the horror genre.

When it puts down its copy of ‘Political Philosophy for Dummies’ and focuses on character and action, Tomorrowland is a blast.

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

It all spins out of control in a final blowout of naff special effects and random shouting, but there’s just enough leftover goodwill to carry it through.

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.

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.

After a spendidly traditional opening sequence, the message about the dangers of scientific research begins to loom ponderously large, with banks of super-computers dedicated to science fact but the dialogue (Good God, it's growing!) still mired in fiction.

An unsettling if not entirely successful social-cum-psychological drama. As a study in the complex relationship between violence and cinema, it's an unsensational alternative to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Man Bites Dog.

This slapdash but endearing doc about the rise, fall and resurrection of '80s pop outfit Spandau Ballet is an inside job, packed with strong archive footage yet lacking anything you'd call truly incisive.

Props should go to director Klaus Härö for making such a predictable premise feel fresh and his cast of characters – from a suspicious, disapproving headmaster, to the foil-swinging kids – feel engaging.

Crichton's excellent adaptation of Robin Cook's novel is one of the most intelligent sci-fi thrillers in years. A simple enough story, but one told in such chilling fashion that visitors to hospitals will never feel the same again.

Neither an anti-war tract nor a jingoistic rallying cry, the brutal but humane Lone Survivor instead registers as a howl of despair for so many young men and women lost in war.

Some of the performances (Hurt, Davis) give it an illusion of depth, but it's mostly expert in avoiding moral resonance and ambiguity: everything is satisfyingly clear-cut, just as every shot and every cut are geared to instant emotional impact. Political, moral and aesthetic problems arise when you try to superimpose the film on the 'truth' it purports to represent. As a head-banging thriller, though, it makes some of Hollywood's hoariest stereotypes seem good as new, and it panders to its audience's worst instincts magnificently.