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

“Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre,” Roth wrote in Everyman, but other than a few jokes about Axler’s limp erection and thrown-out back, we don’t see much of that.

Jolie has assembled an A-list team – Roger Deakins behind the camera, the Coen brothers in charge of the script - but while her film is perfectly competent, it hardly dazzles.

Confused plot and digressive globe trotting notwithstanding, the best Bond in years.

Luckily, Jackson’s singular talent for massive-scale mayhem hasn’t deserted him, and the hour-long smackdown that crowns the film gives him ample opportunities to indulge it.

The first half of Magic Magic is greatly enjoyable... Sadly, director Sebastián Silva isn’t sure where to take his characters.

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 initial stages of this epic movie are somewhat stodgy, but once Attenborough achieves his momentum there's no holding him. The performances are excellent, the crowd scenes astonishing, and the climax truly nerve-wracking. An implacable work of authority and compassion, Cry Freedom is political cinema at its best.

This feature-length Mr Peabody and Sherman is by no means unbearable: there are a few decent gags, and the episodic plot just about manages to hold the interest. But there’s little here for any but the most easy-to-please youngsters.

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.

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.

I’ve never liked Renée Zellweger more as a warmer and wiser Bridget Jones – but still capable of making a total prat of herself.

This story of humanity manifesting itself in unexpected circumstances just doesn’t have enough surprises on offer to make good on that early promise. A noteworthy debut nonetheless.

There are more than a few false notes here.... Still, the sight of Emma Thompson, wearing old-lady prosthetics and a leopard skin coat as Barney’s mum...is not to be missed.

The fish-out-of water moments are great fun, watching arthouse gods Depardieu and Huppert in tacky tourist hell.

Apart from a clumsy climax, a wry and exhilarating bit of entertainment.

As a self-conscious exercise in kitsch graverobbing, ‘Viva’ succeeds through a combination of cultural nous and sheer aesthetic audacity.

Directed by cartoonist-turned-filmmaker Marjane Satrapi (‘Persepolis’), ‘The Voices’ steamrolls over boundaries between genres and giddily ignores the limits of good taste.

The visuals are painstaking and horribly beautiful – shades of Hitchcock, Carpenter, even Spielberg – while the gore scenes are truly outrageous, knocking cheap imitators (hey, Nicolas Winding Refn, this is how it’s done) into a cocked hat.

It's a crack at the American Dream which carries all the exhilaration and depth of a 133-minute commercial break.

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

It’s a wild, at times exhilarating watch – but an exhausting one.

When the talking stops the film takes off, with a pair of bone-rattling chases set in Athens and Las Vegas that cause maximum damage to people, property and the audience’s eardrums. A bracing reminder of how fiercely efficient Greengrass can be, these scenes just about justify the existence of Jason Bourne. But, please, no more.

Even Dench, while adeptly highlighting the vulnerabilities of age and the loneliness of power, can’t distract from the soft treatment, which leaves little room for the harsh realities of prejudice which must have made this a more painful and ugly chapter for many involved than this film ever dares suggest.

Based on a novel and a disowned script by the late Paddy Chayefsky, Russell's noisily grandiose swipe at psychedelia embellishes what is no more than the cosily familiar story of the obsessive Scientist Who Goes Too Far and Unwittingly Unleashes, etc.

Lindsay-Hogg wrote and directed this dull, static flounder, which exposes both MacDowell's limitations and Malkovich's withdrawal of labour.

Davis handles the pacy action sequences confidently, with dark, claustrophobic interiors enhancing the suspense; so it's all the more disappointing when corny dialogue and barely-sketched characters let things down.

An amusing watch, this has a freshness and naturalism rarely found in the typically over-styled French romcom genre.