Director: Josh Trank
Cast: Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly, Alex Russell
Certificate: 12A
Chronicle trailer

If you've seen the trailer for Chronicle, you've either groaned at the thought of yet another found-footage movie or been bored by the idea of yet another superhero with a gritty, modern origins story. But Josh Trank's sci-fi takes that tired genre and the tried-and-tested format and comes up with a brilliant play on both.

Did Spider-Man spend his formative months pranking people at the supermarket? Did ickle Magneto shuffle around parked cars for a laugh? Andrew (DeHaan) does. He also gets beaten up by his alcoholic father (Kelly) on a nightly basis. And carries a video camera around with him all day.

Director: Jason Reitman
Cast: Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson, Elizabeth Reaser
Certificate: 15
Young Adult trailer

Mavis (Theron) is driving back to her childhood town of Minnesota. She has one aim: to win back her old flame, Buddy (Wilson). So what if he's married and he's got a kid? Everyone knows babies are boring. Mavis sticks in an old cassette tape of 90s music. The Concept by Teenage Fanclub comes on. "She wears denim wherever she goes. Says she's gonna get some records by the Status Quo," she sings. "I didn't want to hurt you, ohhh yeah..." She stops. She rewinds. She listens again.

Director: Roman Polanski
Cast: Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly
Certificate: 15
Carnage UK trailer

“Why are we still in this house?” cries Kate Winslet after 80 minutes. She plays Nancy, wife of Alan Cowan (Waltz). Their son assaulted another boy with a stick at school. And so they go round to talk things through with his parents, Penelope (Foster) and Michael Longstreet (Reilly). Things start off amicably. Smiles. Coffee. Apple and pear cobbler. Half an hour later, they’ve descended into total carnage.

Director: Tomas Alfredson
Cast: Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Toby Jones
Certificate: 15
Release Date: Monday 30th January
RRP: £19.99

"I'm retired." Those are the first words spoken by George Smiley (Oldman), and they don't occur until 15 minutes in. But even before then we've spent enough time with Tinker Tailor's hero to know what he's about. We see him forced out of MI5 ("The Circus") alongside the paranoid chief, Control (Hurt), and follow him home during the muted opening credits. Throughout, Smiley says nothing.

It's a hugely effective sequence that sees allegiances change, powers shift, and paperwork go up and down in a lift. Welcome to Tomas Alfredson's take on John le Carré's world. It's a quiet, tense, and stylish place to be betrayed. How British.

Drake Doremus' superbly moving anti-rom-com Like Crazy is out in UK cinemas today. Here are five reasons why you should see it...

Director: Paris Leonti
Cast: Billy Zane, Robert Fucilla, Geoff Bell, Kirsty Mitchell, Vas Blackwood
Certificate: 15
Trailer

“And Billy Zane.” There aren't many words in the English language that can contain the same exciting potential of amazing brilliance - or spectacular crap. This is, after all, William George Zane Jr., the guy who starred in Titanic, Dead Calm, Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part II. And The Phantom. But not even The Zane's latest hairpiece can rescue this low-budget mess.

It begins, almost promisingly, in Serbia. A military coup sees a group of fighters shoot their way into the president’s house and kill him. It’s quick, it’s bloody, it’s trashy. And it features a bad guy called Olodan Cracovic – a name that even William George Zane Jr. would be jealous of.

“Let me tell you a story and you tell me, is it material for a comedy or a tragedy?”

The starting point for Melinda and Melinda is the opening for every Woody Allen movie. As a director who finds comedy in the depressing and futile meaningless of life, Allen’s best work features comedy that stems from serious drama. Hannah and Her Sisters. The Purple Rose of Cairo. Husbands and Wives. Manhattan.

That duality is something that Allen openly confronts in binary titles. Crimes and Misdemeanors. Melinda and Melinda. Even Love and Death highlights the contrast between the silliness of farce and the philosophy of Chekhov. It’s when the director steps away from this balance that he starts to falter - see the Bergman-inspired Interiors, or the melodramatic Match Point, which expands one half of Crimes and Misdemeanours into a full feature-length narrative.

And so, as the BFI Woody Allen season continues, here are some thoughts on two of Woody’s most explicitly binary movies.

Director: Alexander Payne
Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Matthew Lillard, Nick Krause
Certificate: 15
Trailer

“My friends on the mainland think because I live in Hawaii, I live in paradise. Like a permanent vacation, we’re all just out here drinking Mai Tais, shaking our hips and catching waves…”

That’s how Alexander Payne’s latest film – his first in seven years – begins. With a clichéd voiceover that sticks out like a sore thumb covered in neon fairy lights.

Matt King (Clooney) is a father whose wife Elizabeth is in a coma after a jet-ski accident. His kids don't like him much and he's also facing a tough decision about selling off the oodles of Hawaiian land he's inherited. To top it off, it turns out Ellzabeth was cheating on him. All of these things we can work out without his unnecessary opening monologue, which seems to exist just for its closing sentence: “Paradise? Paradise can go fuck itself.”

"I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything."

There's something about the surreal tone of Woody Allen, that intelligent silliness, that often reminds me of Monty Python. But unlike Python, Woody's neurotic humour stems from the inherently bleak, futile crappiness of human existence. And, of course, most of the grief (as well as the good bits) come from relationships.

Indeed, for the most part, it isn't a Woody Allen film if two married couples aren't both having affairs - usually with each other. So, to continue this blog-along series with the BFI Woody Allen season, here are some thoughts on two films with particularly tempestuous relationships.

If you've seen the opening credits for a Woody Allen film, you'll have noticed two things: the Windsor font and the music.

So, as the BFI Woody Allen season ventures into the 1990s, we look at two of the director's most musical numbers: Everyone Says I Love You and Sweet and Lowdown.