John Krasinski employs very few tricks in this simple story, except perhaps using children too often to turn up the horror.

While Rani Mukerji is good as always, the actors who play the students are also natural and without any artifice, with the film cleverly dodging stereotypes just when you suspect one around the corner.

Guillermo del Toro, still enjoying his Oscar, has to take some blame for this metal-on-metal havoc, which he helmed the first time around as director (Pacific Rim, 2013) and now shepherds as producer.

The most satisfying scenes in the film involve Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin (Ashkenazi) and Defence Minister Shimon Peres (Marsan) discussing their options, driven largely by political one-upmanship.

Rarely has an actress gone through more physical battering, even if to establish herself as an action figure. It’s hard not to feel for that very sensitive face and that delicately lean frame, which though — surprise, surprise — emerges none the worse for wear.

In one of the warmest affirmations of love, family and friendships on screen, Greta Gerwig tells the story of a 17-year-old’s one year from high school to college, as she rediscovers who and what she is.

A combination of some nifty directing, winsome acting, and some genuine laughs make Game Night as entertaining a film as one with such limited goals can get.

…there is no doubt that in putting a greying, foul-mouthed woman, in shapeless overalls and bandanas, in frazzled hair and cutting no slack, at the heart of this story of sort-of revenge, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, has given McDormand the definitive words of this gone year: “This time, the chick ain’t losing.”

That The Shape of Water has 13 Oscar nominations indicates that the love story largely floats above the problems with the film — buoyed to a large extent by a timorous, luminous, powerful Sally Hawkins.

The trenchant Christian Bale, always an actor who can make everything he does seem important but remote, struggles to portray a battle-hardened Captain of the Union army.