If Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games had somehow left you in any doubt about the magnetic screen presence of Jennifer Lawrence, prepare to surrender your remaining misgivings. Playing outspoken, emotionally damaged young widow Tiffany, Lawrence is a firecracker, a powder keg, a force of nature. Watching her, you feel simultaneously secure and on edge, as though you’re in safe hands and yet as though anything could happen. 

It’s Gambit in name only. Producer Mike Lobell struggled for 14 years to bring the remake of this beloved caper to the big screen. In so doing, he has broken the new rule of Hollywood: Thou Shalt Not Remake Something Good, especially if you’ve gutted and purged the original story from its redolently good title.

What a year for great British institutions. Sixty years of Elizabeth II, 50 years of James Bond, and a half-century of the Rolling Stones. To recycle an even older cliche, we will never see the like of any of them again.

If the subtitle - The Life and Near Death Story of Patty Schemel - didn't make it clear enough, Hit So Hard was never going to be your average "rockumentary". At about eight minutes in, before the titular drummer properly establishes us in the 1990s US grunge scene that forms much of the backdrop to her story, Schemel is already speaking openly and frankly about the addictions to alcohol and drugs that cost the lives of friends, her role in a platinum-selling rock band and very nearly her own life.

In The Master, it is the hand that matters. Lancaster Dodd is the charismatic leader of a cult-like therapy/religion similar to Scientology, its lengthy, non-sensical "processes" aiming at metaphysical time travel. But that isn't important. In fact, nothing is important about the plot of The Master. It works, in tailor’s terms, on “the hand” - the way it feels.

The last gasp of the Twilight franchise is really quite good, fugueing on the idea that if vampires live forever, wouldn’t it be great if a vampire fell in love with a human being - and didn’t drink her to death? As irresistible as that seems, there are times over its run when the Twilight franchise seemed to work against itself - what with huge idiotic CGI wolves that are neither scary nor realistic, etc.

In the 1960s the Kiwi cartoonist Kim Casali started the comic strip Love is… which mawkishly defined love in a series of statements like, “Love is…being able to say you are sorry” - messages still printed on Valentine’s cards to this day. In Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winning latest, however, love is measured and told in pain: amour means longevity, dedication and the willingness to make difficult decisions. Try putting that on a greetings card.

Sometimes the premise of a film is so intriguing that you wonder how any story could live up to it. Alps is such a film. The title refers to the name given by the leader of a small group whose members impersonate the dead to help the recently bereaved. It puts you in mind of Bart Layton’s The Imposter, released earlier this year, in which a Frenchman in his twenties impersonates a missing Texan teenager. He is accepted by the family, despite looking and sounding nothing like the boy.  

There must be a way out of their Hackney council estate life for brothers Rashid (James Floyd, very sharp on screen here) and Mo (non-professional Fady Elsayed), whose claustrophic home life lived (more or less) to traditional parental rules, contrasts with the energy of the streets outside, where drug-dealing is the most lucrative occupation and there’s always a hint of violence in the air.

Three hours is a testing length for any film. Directors may stretch to that because they’re telling a huge story with plenty of plots and characters, but in Aurora, Romania's Cristi Puiu pares down plot, such as it is, to an absolute minimum. Elements of semi-documentary set in, as we watch his hero Viorel (played by Puiu himself in his first screen role) move disaffectedly through contemporary Bucharest.