Christmas films

Nearly 100 years after smashing shop windows and blowing up letterboxes, the British suffragettes finally get a film they deserve. And thank god it’s not a pretty-pretty sugarcoated period drama. 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. You feel the knife-edge danger of women risking everything...

Well, this certainly feels like a full stop. Daniel Craig has been slippery and circumspect when asked if ‘Spectre’ will be his final outing as James Bond. From both the tone and content of ‘Spectre’, we’d guess this could be his swansong: this is a film that gathers all the great – and some of the not-so-great – things about the three previous films in the Craig-as-Bond cycle into one rousing, spectacular, scattershot and somewhat overextended victory lap...

Anyone easy-to-please and mourning the fact that Martin Scorsese hasn’t made a mobster flick in a while should take heart from ‘Black Mass’. It’s the entertaining, if limited, tale of how seriously nasty South Boston crim James ‘Whitey’ Bulger (Johnny Depp, looking like an embalmed vampire with terrible teeth and a bald patch) operated with near immunity from the late 1970s to the early 1990s...

‘Badlands’ and ‘The Thin Red Line’ director Terrence Malick’s late-career float into fragmented, personal, poetic and explicitly spiritual filmmaking continues with ‘Knight of Cups’, a largely LA-based portrait of a successful Hollywood writer, Rick (Christian Bale), lost in life, love and the heady puzzle of a Malick movie. Time and place are as fluid as the Pacific Ocean, in which characters regularly paddle and swim as we see Bale glide through a succession of relationships...

At the start of this brilliant, brutal film of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, Michael Fassbender’s Macbeth lays oyster shells over the eyes of his dead son: an eerie funeral rite before the tiny body is burned on a pyre. Traditionally, the Macbeths have been portrayed as power-hungry. Cutting loose the play’s baggage, Australian director Justin Kurzel (who made the ultraviolent true-crime film ‘Snowtown’) recasts them as damaged...

Even with this summer’s staggering ‘Inside Out’ still visible in the rearview mirror, the vistas of Pixar’s ‘The Good Dinosaur’ take your breath away. Sun-dappled streams, swaying trees and an almost palpable sense of changeable weather shock you with their photorealism – and strain against the movie’s slightly tired story of an anthropomorphised boy dinosaur who, separated from his prehistoric family, must go on a journey of self-discovery...

Amy Schumer is a comedy superwoman. Her stand-up is funny-as-hell; she’s a viral sensation with her ‘Inside Amy Schumer’ sketches and lately she’s become every feminist’s new girl crush. Now add to that list: she’s the best thing to happen to Hollywood since the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler double act at the Golden Globes. Schumer’s new autobiographical comedy ‘Trainwreck’, about a commitment-phobic New York writer, is the funniest film of the summer...

So here it is, the triumphant finale to ‘The Hunger Games’ franchise, and time for plucky heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) to march proudly into the Capitol, aim her trusty arrow and loose it straight into the heart of that dastardly villain President Snow (Donald Sutherland). A rousing cheer, and we all go home satisfied. Except that ‘Mockingjay – Part 2’ isn’t that movie...

After being rammed amidships by an angry sperm whale, the crew of the nineteenth-century British vessel Essex are forced to spend 90 days adrift at sea. Before you ask, yes, they do start eyeing each other hungrily… After his top-notch racing film ‘Rush’, ginger ninja Ron Howard is on a roll, and he’s rousted out a rollicking crew of salty sea dogs including Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw and Brendan Gleeson to join him on this voyage...

If you care about ‘Star Wars’ you’ll already have the skinny on ‘The Force Awakens’: you’ll know that ‘Star Trek’ rebooter JJ Abrams is directing, that the diverse, well-chosen cast includes Peckham’s own John Boyega, newcomer Daisy Ridley, ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ star Oscar Isaac and of course the original three icons, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford (plus sidekicks Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2)...