As a title, Hail, Caesar! is as delightfully self-conscious and “inside Hollywood” as The Hudsucker Proxy and O, Brother Where Are Thou? An alternative might have been It’s a Wonderful Lie.

Richard Gere is a quiet knockout in Time Out of Mind, the Oren Moverman film that has for some reason remained as below the radar as its invisible (to the rest of society anyway) central character. Why wasn't this performance in the Oscar mix for the seasonal gongs just gone? He'd have had my vote, that's for sure, though it's doubtless part of its Israeli-American writer-director's game plan that this star turn remain unshowy and self-effacing in keeping with the sorrowful terrain that it traverses with unforced ease.

The get-the-President movie, a genre we might term "POTUS in Peril", has had a chequered history, from The President's Plane Is Missing, Air Force One and Escape from New York to White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen. Now here's London Has Fallen, which is the sequel to the last of these, but adds almost nothing in the way of innovation or inspiration.

The causes kept coming – diversity, of course, but also climate change, sexual abuse, LGBT rights and more – at the 88th annual Academy Awards, which surely ranked as the most politically charged Oscars in years. And that’s not only because one of the warmest welcomes of the night went to the American vice president, Joseph Biden, in an evening during which Donald Trump’s name – surprisingly or mercifully, or maybe both – was heard only once.

Exposed is a film suffering from blunt force trauma to the head. Director Gee Malik Linton’s name only remains as screenwriter after his largely Spanish-language film – more meaningfully called Daughter of God and centring on Dominican-New Yorkers – had a helpful supporting role from producer Keanu Reeves greatly expanded by its US distributor, hoping to transform it into a Keanu cop movie.

Secret in Their Eyes is not a mystery-thriller that leaves us pondering for long “whodunit”. The focus is on how two investigators and a Deputy District Attorney can relinquish obsessions that have glued them to a murder case for 13 years. This is a story of longings, obsession, and the inability to move on from events unaccounted for by justice. 

The set-up behind Spanish film-maker Álvaro Longoria’s intelligent documentary on North Korea is almost as bizarre and unlikely as the regime he’s attempting to probe.

There’s always a slight sinking feeling when the first words to appear onscreen are "Based on a True Story". The first worry is that it’s a story you already know, and the movie will lack any narrative surprises, the second that it will be a Good Cause. Sadly, Freeheld doesn’t dodge these pitfalls, despite a quality cast. This has to be blamed on the predictable script by Ron Nyswaner (of Philadelphia fame) and Peter Sollet’s by-the-numbers directing. 

This is a film which, if you want to see it in a cinema, needs to be caught fast. It’s unlikely to please big crowds. Chronic won Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2015 and its elliptical narrative will certainly stay with you, but it’s not a joyous experience.

A "guests-from-hell" saga on a panoramic scale, Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash is a reworking of Jacques Deray's 1969 sex-and-jealousy movie La Piscine. The action has been transported from the south of France to the island of Pantelleria in the Strait of Sicily, where rock icon Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is recuperating after a throat operation with her filmmaker boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts).