Feels both modern and traditional – a halfway house between the broodier Nolan way of shaking things up and the louder, bone-crunching style that director Zack Snyder established with films such as ‘300’ and ‘Sucker Punch’. Man of Steel is punchy, engaging and fun, even if it slips into a final 45 minutes of explosions and fights during which reason starts to vanish and the science gets muddy.

The film is touching, but more than that it’s wise, witty and thought-provoking.

Franck’s survival and investigation techniques are glossed over in favour of convenient coincidences and sensationalist set-pieces: this hero’s emotional struggles are kept at arm’s length.

Hats off to Viggo Mortensen. He pulls off playing identical twins in this Argentinian thriller, which never quite lives up to his talents.

The film's would-be subversive ideas about the kneejerk appeal of social violence get lost in the mix.

The struggle for LGBT rights in Uganda might sound like a dry or distant subject. It’s the achievement of Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall’s shocking, moving, enthralling and enraging doc to make it lively and urgent.

This is a portrait of cycles and change. But the mood of the film suggests that we should be impressed that this ever-growing, ever-changing city of ours is still chasing after new versions of the modern.

American Mary nods savvily to the ‘body horror’ of ‘Audition’ and ‘Dead Ringers’ but still possesses a truly original, deeply disturbing vision.

What Luhrmann makes intoxicating is a sense of place – the houses, the rooms, the city, the roads – and the sense that all this is unfolding in a bubble like some mad fable. Where he falters is in persuading us that these are real, breathing folk whose experiences and destinies can move us.

From this simple, not especially unique love story, Kechiche has fashioned an intimate epic.

It's to Ozon's credit that he never serves up easy answers.

If the final effect is somewhat less nuanced than his previous work, it's a good deal more vigorous.

It’s intricate and often mature as drama, but it’s also meandering and at times heavy-handed, even melodramatic, and the tight control of time, place and action which made ‘A Separation’ so gripping is just not there.

The Immigrant promises rich territory to explore, but in the execution it’s overly stately, dreary and unconvincing.

It’s an exploration of all things surface, yes, but it has soul too.

Unfortunately, Arnaud de Pallieres’s film succeeds neither as a decent adaptation of the book nor as a rewarding movie in its own right.

Desplechin’s film is a modest but very passable affair.

It’s Bruni Tedeschi’s sure grasp of the milieu – and in particular her acute understanding of the specific foibles of a rich, arty but out-of-touch class nostalgic for an earlier era – that makes the film a modest but surprisingly substantial delight.

Beyond the shocks and games, there's not a great deal to take away in the form of meaty ideas or lingering themes, and its catchy premise doesn't really deliver in the end.

More than ever Payne allows the humour to rise up gently from his story rather than burst through it.

[A] baggy revenge thriller consisting of short violent set pieces interspersed with far too many talky debates about the morality of protecting a killer.

There’s typical grace and good humour in Kore-eda’s handling of this all-but-impossible situation. But the film’s critical lack of dramatic nuance undercuts its emotional resonance.

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

Style over substance doesn’t really tell the half of it: you can bathe a corpse in groovy light and dress it in an expensive suit, but in the end that rotting smell just won’t go away.

It’s breezy fun, touching lightly on illness and worse. Saying that, there’s a spot of intrigue as the tournament hots up.

Part III has curiously little interest in being even remotely funny.

This philosophical war film is impressive and thought provoking but it’s also too restrained and pensive to ever completely connect.

The Coens have given us a melancholic, sometimes cruel, often hilarious counterfactual version of music history. It's a what-if imagining of a cultural also-ran that maybe tells us more about the truth than the facts themselves ever could.