Missing is Cameron’s signature action modification, best exploited in Aliens: the strapping female heroine. McG’s testosterone-juiced world feels a little doomed without her.

As brightly alive a movie as the season will offer.

Set against this is the blithe humour of the proceedings, a welcome shortage of love interest, Dolph's minimalist wit, and two arch-villainesses attired in black plastic and other form-fitting fabrics. Destructive, reprehensible, and marvellous fun.

This is meat-and-potatoes genre work, certainly superior to a Hollywood product like "Edge of Darkness," but not by much.

It’s a familiar tale, but one told with gusto, wit and visual flare; of particular note is the dilapidated Germanic fortress where Capricorn and his cronies reside, which looks like it was plucked straight from the warped minds of a Gilliam or a del Toro.

To be fair, Craig is still the best Bond since Connery, and a Man Who Knew Too Much–style set piece at a Vienna opera house momentarily offers the fleetness and wit the rest of the film lacks.

That it doesn’t have anything new to say about the coldly efficient Hollywood machine and its stratum of fearsome executives only hinders it further, leaving you with a film that feels every bit the product of its purportedly ruthless and artistically corrupting milieu.

Dean Morgan’s cheeky-chappy act is grating indeed, while his tight-lipped rival’s so utterly stolidly Firthian we could easily be watching his Madame Tussaud’s mannequin. Painless anodyne fare, though genuine laughs are few, apart from comfort-eating Firth’s illicit ‘naughty choccy’.

Take Out is a sweet-and-sour look at the immigrant experience.

Part meticulous character study, part hyperrealist drama, Trapero’s film is as interested in documenting how such an institution functions on a day-to-day basis as he is in presenting the joys and pains of female cohabitation in such a confined space.

Deliberate camp (to paraphrase Susan Sontag) is never as successful as pure, or naive, camp.

The first-person recollections of Nanking’s survivors are as uncommonly wrenching as their captors were brutally thorough.

Schrader can’t seem to choose a proper outcome, and the lack of a higher morality is weird, especially from a filmmaker who managed hints of spirituality in a movie about Bob Crane. Still, if you suffered through Schrader’s Exorcist prequel Dominion, you’ll know he’s somewhat back on track.

A brilliantly staged early scare signals that the safety rails are off and, despite an unexpected, last-minute swerve into the supernatural realm, the edge-of-the-seat tension is sustained to the very last second.

The portrait that emerges is refreshingly clear-eyed yet highly insular.

This meditation on loneliness and the definition of family is a lot less bloody—though no less fascinating—than its predecessor.

A fun-sapped maelstrom without meaning, 300 simply pummels you with endless loops of battle-porn. While you couldn’t classify the movie as entertainment, it might have a long, prosperous future as a Clockwork Orange–style Ludovico Technique.

The first hour is an absolute hoot, as the constant replaying of scenes lends a zany comic edge to Makoto’s otherwise banal social life. The animation is vibrantly coloured, the action fluid, the editing masterly and the voicework just on the right side of brash. It’s a shame, then, that the final third rejects the light touch of the preceding section to descend into drab moralising and a furious tying up of loose plot ends.

Following exiled Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon as he returns home to gauge feeling on Hussein and the devastating effects of sanctions, the endless conflicts and now the terrible carnage, the film grants brief access to the lives and opinions of those always on the harsh end of geopolitical manoeuvres.

Wong Kar-Wai's second feature is a brilliant dream of Hong Kong life in 1960.

Though he's too ubiquitous now to dupe real authoritarians, his film nevertheless proffers plenty of cheek - even if most of its gross-out gags come signposted.

Andersen makes humorous hay out of the stark home designs of Richard Neutra — only suitable, it seems, for drug dealers.

They don’t make many like this any more; Roger Corman would be proud.

The dialogue-free story makes for an accessible blast, although it's tricky to gauge individual personalities.

There’s a quiet fury to Johnny Guitar, best embodied by Mercedes McCambridge’s vicious Emma, who wants to drive Vienna out of town. It’s a film that climaxes with a gunfight between two women, while the men hide behind tree stumps.

A paranoid police procedural, a perverse parable about the corrupting elements of power, and a candidate for the greatest predated Patriot Act movie ever, Elio Petri's stunning thriller makes no attempt to hide the culprit behind the film's grisly murder.

The best style has a purpose to it, and Russian Ark, in its hypnotic, endless swirl, gets at a deep truth of the post-Soviet psyche, haunted by its legacy of czarist rule and Stalin-era sacrifice. The film is a sad home for ghosts.

Ambitious, profoundly articulate, and despite its avoidance of sentimentality and sermonising, very compassionate.