Aiming for the trippy qualities of The Matrix and Inception, Doctor Strange is possibly the most enjoyable Marvel foundation story since the first Iron Man, mixing wit with visual pyrotechnics.  Benedict Cumberbatch plays supercilious neurosurgeon Stephen Strange (wholly unrelated to the New Romantic singer responsible for “Fade to Grey”). A virtuoso of the scalpel, Cumberbatch’s Dr Strange has shades of Robert Downey Jr’s over-achieving Tony Stark – this is cinema art directed from the fantasy lifestyle of men’s glossy magazines.

Dr Strange has the requisite underappreciated on/off girlfriend (Rachel McAdams) who works alongside him, admiring his precision brain repairs while despairing of his heart. He lives in an icy Manhattan apartment, seemingly no walls and all windows that look onto the night-time city. Outside is his Lamborghini Huracan which really should not be driven while inspecting neurology scans. His self-inflicted fall from grace renders him incapable of operating, and sets him on a quest to find a cure for his shaking hands. Cue Cumberbatch with messy hair, a terrible beard, and a journey to the Mysterious Orient in search of mystical enlightenment (pictured below).

Redemption comes in the shape of a bald Tilda Swinton, playing the Ancient One who knows all the secrets of sorcery and inner powers which can make the crippled walk. There’s a touch of The Karate Kid in the two British thespians’ on-screen relationship that borders on ridiculous. It’s hard not to be cynical about the Ancient One intoning lines such as “Forget everything you think you knew”, while the repetitive scenes of gruelling physical training and humiliation on the road to transcendence wear thin.

Mads Mikkelsen plays Kaecilius, a former student of the Ancient One who has turned evil and provides Strange with his key opponent.  It’s difficult to take Mikkelsen too seriously as the villain if you end up wondering how much time he had to spend in make-up every day, having his eyes slathered with kohl and red sparkles to make them look like a pair of volcanoes getting ready to rumble.

Doctor Strange could descend into a clutch of clichés, but director/writer Scott Derrickson has injected plenty of wit. The visuals, especially in the modern-world sequences, are stunning. Vast cityscapes roll up like three-dimensional chess sets; dizzying fight scenes among ever-shifting skyscrapers are what one would imagine MC Escher would have designed if he’d been working with powerful digital software rather than a pencil. 

Stan Lee’s obligatory cameo is worth watching out for - chuckling over Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception. Sitting through the endless credits with the diehard fans is rewarded by not just one but two teasers. These taster scenes also hopefully make sense of why Chiwetel Ejiofor is so underused in Doctor Strange as the Ancient One’s protégé Mordor, and hint that there may be more interesting conflicts to come in the sequels.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer to Doctor Strange

Most of the crime Ken Loach investigates with compassion and humour happens off-screen right at the start. As the opening credits roll, a woman’s voice with sing-song affability perhaps appropriate to a child, if not for its bureaucratic, box-tick chill, asks Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) a sequence of questions wholly irrelevant to his problem. He can lift his arms, he can walk on his legs. So never mind the heart attack which almost made him tumble off a ladder at his work as a carpenter.

A prequel to Ouija (2014), Ouija: Origin of Evil zooms back to a mid-Sixties Los Angeles that's all miniskirts, white PVC boots, splendid chromed-up Chevrolets and Studebakers and clangy garage-band pop music. Our hosts are widowed mom Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser, of Twilight fame) and her daughters Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson). 

Four years on from Tom Cruise's debut as Jack Reacher in Jack Reacher, here he is doing it again. Not a lot has changed. Cruise eerily continues not to age (does the Scientology robotics division know something we don't?), Jack Reacher is still the man from nowhere who mystically materialises when he's needed, and bad guys obligingly queue up to get their asses kicked and their noses broken.

Among the myriad global offerings at the LFF, the resoundingly British Their Finest ★★★★★ , about a group of film-makers working for the Ministry of Information in London in 1940, is surely among the most sheerly enjoyable. Okay, it was directed by Denmark's Lone Scherfig (of The Riot Club and An Education), but the way it catches the Blitz-era mood of terror and uncertainty mixed with a determination to band together and carry on feels almost miraculous.

Dan Brown is famed for calamitous language massacres that sell by the kerchillion to tone-deaf Renaissance cryptogram junkies. His sentences hurt eyes and his plots numb skulls. But one thing you can say for Brown is he checks facts like an obsessive-compulsive über-nerd. When the books are transplanted to the big screen, he gets less control over this stuff. The result, in Inferno, is unintentionally comical to anyone (which means pretty much everyone) who knows Florence.

“It’s a business opportunity,” explains Jake (Shia LaBoeuf) to dreadlocked, wild-child Star (Sasha Lane). She’s eyeing him up in the aisles of a Midwestern Walmart while he dances around with a rag-tag, stoned young crew to Rihanna’s “We Found Love”. “We go door to door. We sell magazines. Come with us.” Sounds an unlikely proposition.

As an old Sixties lefty brought up on thrillers like The Parallax View, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American political conspiracies, and inevitably he portrays CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of America's intelligence agencies. If you work for the CIA you'll hate Snowden (★★★★), but Stone has fashioned the story into a tense, fast-moving drama which will leave you pondering over what's really justifiable for the greater good.

Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to.

Paul Verhoeven directing Isabelle Huppert as a woman seemingly unfazed by a violent rape sounds a recipe for outrage. Elle (★★★★) , though, provokes in subtle, lingering, sometimes comic ways. The rape of Michele (Huppert) mostly happens off-screen during the opening credits, though the ski-masked intruder’s violence in her plush, gated Paris house will be replayed as memory and fantasy. It’s what happens next that lurches right off the rails from the leering salaciousness, traumatised horror or rape revenge cinema usually gives us.