Henry Barnes

It’s a glorious spectacle, but a slight drama, with few characters and too-rare flashes of humour. It wants to awe us into submission, to concede our insignificance in the face of such grand-scale art. It achieves that with ease. Yet on his way to making an epic, Nolan forgot to let us have fun.

It aims for sexy and/or dangerous, but the tone is dry and the pace lags.

Red Army is executive produced by Werner Herzog and Polsky borrows some his impishness. He makes sport of the old guard's rebuffs, glories in the occasion when Fetisov gives him the finger. This, he seems to say, is the attitude that made these guys.

From a subdued start Nightcrawler unfurls into a ghoulish and wickedly funny satire on journalism, the job market and self-help culture.

A huge improvement on the muddled melodrama of Labor Day, Men, Women and Children is still a flawed Jason Reitman film. Its scope is too big, his ambitions too high.

Niccol creates an atmosphere that is airless and dull, an unusual tone for a modern war film, but one that fits the subject matter perfectly.

Vallée, in collaboration with screenwriter Nick Hornby, gives the film its energy by pulling the narrative apart. They create a two-hour hallucinatory montage of the hike and Cheryl's back story that's wound together with the songs, phrases and poetry that she recited to herself as she walked.

Horns plays instead like a high concept beer advert – breezily stylish, memorable in its time, but a bit too full of gas.

The result is an unpredictable film, a difficult approximation of a biopic. But it delivers a Jimi Hendrix experience somehow the richer for sidelining the man and subverting his music.

The Other Woman scrawls out a dumb dumb-feminist message with a big, fat marker pen.

If only the transitions in and out of the dollops of broad sex comedy weren't such a bumpy ride.

Sometimes it works - Brosnan and Thompson are sedately charming, Spall and Imrie are naturally funny together - but there's only so much humour you can squeeze out of Pierce's dicky prostate.

For a film that champions talent that takes risks, Frank can sometimes feel a little too conventional. The real Sidebottom's wayward genius would be a hard fit for any story arc, but Frank does a good job of dipping into surrealism and pop in equal measure.

Nothing really adds up to much, past a solid performance from Woodley and the energetic - if out-of-place - turn from Green.

Writer-director Kate Barker-Froyland's debut feature is a mournful number, held back by an uncertain performance by Flynn and an alienating reverence for the restorative power of middling indie-folk.

Infinitely Polar Bear is heartfelt and honest, but it's too cute by half.

Vitthal's film is full of heart, but overly ambitious. He could have made it easy on himself and steered us down a much more familiar route. Instead he delivers a moralistic story that's pure in its intention and a real slog to watch.

Joe Swanberg's follow-up to Drinking Buddies is short and slight, but undeniably charming.

The Raid 2's faults are not in Evans's technique – he's unusually adept at capturing the art of violence. Instead, the film suffers from too much potential.

It's rare to see a film about music that professes its love for the music and its characters equally.

Amma Asante's second feature tells Dido's extraordinary story in handsome, if formulaic, style.

A gooey love story is pitted against the end of the world. No wonder the romance comes up wanting.

It's pulled this way and that by a hiddly-fiddly soundtrack, spun senseless by scene after scene of Radcliffe and Kazan trading flirtatious banter.

The Double isn't an original idea. It wasn't even in Dostoyevsky's time. But it's a great story. And Ayoade has produced a brilliant copy.

There's romance and tragedy, but little depth and no nuance.

What Rush has to offer is a great human drama, two dangerously talented men pushing each other to risky victory and a superb script, delivered with some mastery by Hemsworth and Brühl.

The flat hammerblows of The Wolverine bear little relation to the zing and pop of Matthew Vaughn's colourful treatment. Inconsistency is inevitable in a world that's constantly being dug up and done over, but it leaves us no time to fall in love with anything being flung at us.

Originality may be out of Blood's jurisdiction, but it manages to plod on, dutifully walking a tired old beat.