This Pan is loud, colourful, busy and full of ideas. Not all those ideas work in sync – but most are bold and some are winningly eccentric.

Ascher’s aim isn’t simply to inform. The Nightmare wants to be the first properly scary documentary, employing time-honoured horror movie techniques in a concerted effort to spook the viewer. But it’s here that Ascher slightly oversteps himself.

Zarafa never pauses for breath, rattling from one hasty, perfunctory sequence to another.

Sicario occasionally seems a little too impressed by its own nihilism. Still, this is an involving, grown-up film from a director whose muscular technique continues to impress: one might call it pulp in the same manner one would a plate of minced meat.

Everything about this film makes you look with fresh eyes at the familiar.

Give Northern Soul its due: this feisty, frequently amusing chronicle of one young man’s journey through the dancehalls of Lancashire nails its time and place.... A pity, then, that the story is so tiresomely familiar.

For this slick, beautifully paced documentary, director Marc Singer was given unprecedented access to everything from police tapes to trial recordings to Dunn’s own private phone conversations, and the result is a uniquely compelling real-life legal thriller.

This Macbeth is ferociously well acted. Fassbender’s prowling energy electrifies the film.

Clarke directs fights in weird slo-mo and is generous with scenes of himself in his undies.

There’s more at play than a feelgood factor, as William and Kate are forced to examine their own reasons for making the trip. However well-intentioned, giving, they realise, is also taking.

It’s a more subtle, damning film for implicating the media – as much as the church, the courts, the legal profession and other Boston institutions – in the systematic, wider cultural cover-up it describes.

A lusty ballad of love and heartbreak sung with passion and power, and just a handful of off-key notes.

A wonderful Maggie Smith plays all this dead straight, poker-faced for maximum laughs. It’s a peppery, unsentimental performance. She’s hysterically funny, till she’s not – flooring you as the regret and tragedy behind Miss Shepherd’s vagabond life is revealed.

There’s wit, integrity and insight here, but it cries out for a lighter touch.

It’s a nail-biting story, but this doc isn’t as gripping as it should be.

In the closing act, the film sharpens and becomes something far more compelling.

Ultimately superficial yet watchable throughout, it’s the very definition of classy fluff.

It's an endearingly loopy, occasionally half-cooked but always ambitious film.

It’s both soaringly romantic and truly sad.

This is a magnificent, career-capping achievement from one of the great storytellers of our era.

There’s something sloppy and sluggish about ‘Irrational Man’, even by Allen’s patchy standards.

What Hooper fails to do is get to grips with sexual identity in any way that's intellectually or emotionally provocative or surprising. That makes for a cold, pretty, delicate movie – one that too often relies on scene-stealing production design or the overwhelmingly insipid score for its otherwise strikingly absent emotional power.

Writer Abi Morgan ('Shame', 'The Iron Lady') and director Sarah Gavron's ('Brick Lane') tough, raw, bleak-looking film makes the suffragettes' dilemma feel immediate and real.

It’s Bulger whose grim appearance and even grimmer behaviour ‘Black Mass’ indulges. But it’s the quieter, more complicated Connolly who offers the film’s subtler pleasures.

In what is surely his finest hour, Tom Hardy plays both brothers. Much more than a gimmick, it’s like watching one side of a mind wrestle with the other – literally, in one explosive, fun-to-unpick fight scene.

Kormákur creates such a convincing world – the craft of this film is astonishing – that you’re willing to forgive its less delicate touches in favour of its totally compelling depiction of what it must be like to ascend into a place that’s heaven one moment and hell the very next.

This debut feature blows its chances by keeping us waiting way too long for revelations.

Cameraman and director Michael Heineman has created a riveting story of how, with awful inevitability, power always corrupts.