The story soars and the Vikings go further and higher to newer and well-imagined lands with details doing justice to the film’s 3D branding, more characters come in, including strong women roles, and the film again packs in a fair amount of surprisingly tender scenes and touches. It doesn’t even have to throw in a joke, so smooth does this tale run. The scene where a masked creature in blue glides into view over clouds is breathtaking.

Gigolos, menage a trois and a Hasidic Jew court. Can a film actually have all three and yet be a warm, funny and romantic story about loneliness? The talented Italian-American actor John Turturro manages this with a deft touch, wry humour, unjudgmental kindness, some lovely music and a surprising sensuousness.

It’s taken nearly six years making it to the big screen, and while Million Dollar Arm is not too ambitious in its pitch, it has its heart in the right place.

It’s hard to keep the amazing coming, but somehow, Marc Webb manages it yet again, two years after The Amazing Spider-Man and not so many years later that people have forgotten Tobey Maguire doing those same tricks with more or less the same material. The primary reason is Andrew Garfield, who brings good looks and innocent charm, goofy spunk and enough heart, as well as dollops of romance, to give us a Spider-Man more close to our times, when being nerdy is not nearly as bad.

Oculus’s success as a horror thriller lies in how well it keeps its characters and consequently the audience on their toes. It raises the questions that matter without letting you feel settled about any of the answers it offers.

Crowe is very, very effective as the man who has borne the burden for a very long time, and the only one with the shoulders to do it. Connelly matches him every step of the way, particularly when Naameh finds herself increasingly distant from Noah.

McConaughey lends Ron both the swagger an outlaw hero such as him needs and, because we can’t put the image of the actor as the golden-boy behind us, the sense of the uphill battle he is waging. It is also surprisingly true to the real story of Ron Woodroof, fictional as it may seem at times in the extent to which he goes.

It’s a delight to watch the wooing of Travers by the Disney team, also including the scriptwriter of the Mary Poppins film Don DaGradi and the lyricist-musician duo of the Sherman brothers. She spars over everything from Mr Bank’s moustache to the dancing penguins, and it’s a nice observation into what an artist feels letting go of his or her life’s work. One can see the little girl in that ageing woman almost at every turn.

NEVER one to shy away from human privation, be it in Hunger or Shame, McQueen offers here in one horrific scene the brutality of slavery and the helplessness of blacks against their white masters.

…this film produced by Anant Singh and based on the South African leader’s autobiography by the same name, treats its subject with that delicate reverence, bathing him in drippling sunlight and framing him more than once as a heroic figure against scenic backdrops of his loved land. It sacrifices small details for a rushed narrative, and a deeper understanding for a biopic that touches upon the many chapters of Mandela’s eventful life without touching anything closely.