Given the keys to the franchise and a role in the writing, Black has massively upped the verbal sparring and kept the broad inventiveness of comic-book malleability in mind. “I’m a mechanic,” Stark says to the boy in a moment of self-doubt. That’s 100% Black, that line, a tidy code of craft, and the jitters pass.

Cristián Jiménez's dust-dry dramedy attests to the writer-director's own bibliophilia (the film is literally divided by chapter pages), as well as his lead actor's ability to milk a deadpan look that would make Buster Keaton proud.

Its brainless brawn is again pretty entertaining, until the credits roll and you can instantly forget the whole thing.

Trauma from WWII haunts each character, but even the historical foregrounding doesn't keep Ben Sombogaart's weepie from being more soapy than serious.

Straight-line conflicts, low-light visuals: the film's basics, its strengths, and its critical Achilles' heel are all those of the classic American male action movie.

Garris plays it for laughs, and despite dull moments (and the obvious plagiarisation of Gremlins), does a pretty good job.

At the end of the day, it’s not really Hamlet, it’s something new that uses the words from Hamlet. But at its best, it’ll still hit you with all the force of Shakespeare's existential masterpiece.

This is no family-friendly "Peanuts" special.

At times, the film's lyrical drift shades into incoherence, spackled with globs of free-floating voiceover and Larry Clark-like indolent moments. It's both lovely and frustrating, at least until hard times lay bare the gulf between Skye's fractured family and the boys' more stable lives.

Well, Ghost Protocol ultimately ends up as an eye-rollingly towering totem to L. Ron's favorite son, complete with treacly music cues and longing glances - bromantic and otherwise - that will send you screaming into the thetan-stealing clutches of Lord Xenu.

Ridley Scott delivers a spectacular but flavourless French history lesson.

Time and changing tides have been kind to Graceland (and to the local musicians who've since become internationally renowned), but an on-camera meeting between the songwriter and ANC leader Oliver Tambo finds their conflict between creative freedom and revolutionary solidarity fascinatingly unresolved.

The result is not so much a documentary as an engaging, if didactic, travelogue with embedded yuks.

It's especially disappointing when the story takes an inevitable turn to starry-eyed mush, dulling the sharp satire of the crazy, stupid ins and outs of romantic entanglement with an unconvincingly saccharine one-true-love-for-all moral.

Mostly it remains enjoyable for its colour and visual flair. Danilo Donati's costumes are, as usual, breathtaking.

A smart horror film will fatten its pigs before the slaughter, and the mock doc The Last Exorcism feeds its prize hog nicely.

The look of the film certainly achieves the right rubble-strewn, monochrome period feel with precision and genuinely cinematic scope. Perhaps the greatest hurdle cleared, however, is the problem of incident. Radford's achievement is to have incorporated the impossible preaching and crazed ideas into the fabric with hardly any loose threads. The locations look very like modern Britain; and Burton at last found the one serious role for which he searched all his life.

A typically plot-heavy script from Ernest Tidyman survives unimaginative direction to deliver that current rarity, an unpretentious action movie. A bit out of its depth at the top of a bill, but vastly superior to the ostensibly similar Jaguar Lives.

Avildsen draws good performances from the three actors who play PK, as well as from the ever-reliable Freeman and Müller-Stahl, but subtlety is abandoned when he focuses on the ring and teen romance. The climax is a slugging match between PK and a former school bully which would make Rocky proud.

The central idea here is as durable and effective as a well-told fireside ghost story, but in the cold light of day, the film fades.

That One Lucky Elephant ultimately comes down on the side of anthropomorphizing Flora and her kind is extremely disappointing - a little clear-eyed ambivalence would have helped the film feel more focused and less like patchwork.

Still, if his doc is as toothless as Cookie Monster 2.0, it’s still a nostalgic treat to spend time with the man who gave us Kermit, Big Bird and the Goblin King.

Price is fun (this was the film that typed him as a horror star), the fire in the waxworks is good for a gruesome thrill, and De Toth brings off one classic sequence with Kirk fleeing through the gaslit streets pursued by a shadowy figure in a billowing cloak.

It’s tamer than its deeply unsettling predecessor, but still unhinged enough to keep you nicely on edge.

A drama about the dirty business of gaining power, it needs bared fangs - and more bite.

While billed as a psychological horror, it may be best approached as a dark drama or thriller, rather than a fully terrifying experience. But if you invest in its characters, it offers a thought-provoking insight into the depths of the human mind when faced with the laws of survival. It’s grim, but good.

It's prime B-movie material put through the Ridley Scott Cuisinart.

Did we really need this Dracula footnote to set sail at all? Perhaps not, but while Øvredal’s expansion on the world isn’t as fun as the grim fables from which it draws blood, it still has some bite.