The images have a painterly precision in Uberto Pasolini's Still Life, as one might expect from a writing-directing effort from the onetime producer of The Full Monty that co-opts a style of painting as its title. Lead actor Eddie Marsan is often positioned at the centre of the shot, the meticulous visuals of a piece with a movie about a 44-year-old man who is himself fastidious to a fault as he goes about his job.

The director Stephen Daldry has always worked beautifully with young actors, whether on film or stage, so it's not difficult to see what might have drawn him to Trash, the Richard Curtis-scribed adaptation of the Andy Mulligan novel about life on the Rio de Janeiro scrapheaps.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the saying goes – and Kingsman: The Secret Service is a cracking part-homage, part-pastiche of the James Bond franchise (and other British spy movies) done with knowing comedy, élan and obvious affection. It's based on The Secret Service comic book created by Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar, and is directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, X-Men First Class), and here he reunites with Jane Goldman, who also provided scripts for his previous works.

Thomas Pynchon and PT Anderson: too good to be true? News that the director of There Will Be Blood and The Master was adapting America’s greatest and most hiply profound living novelist certainly sounded like a heavenly equation. Better yet, Anderson had chosen Pynchon’s most consistently funny and approachable novel, Inherent Vice, in which the author had effectively passed around a convivial and especially mind-blowing joint to his fans, as a reward for braving the heaving banquet of his preceding, testing masterpiece, Against the Day.

Following the critical and commercial hits Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen, Disney's latest is a film which will win you over with its charming WALL-E-esque antics, oddball coupling and simple slapstick before it – somewhat annoyingly – reveals itself as a kids' first comic book movie, entering the superhero movie stratosphere by transforming into an origin story for the titular crime-fighting team.

More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was released in cinemas last year – his interviewees describe their experience as like “looking into hell”. We hear phrases like “world of nightmare”, “utter shock”, “beyond describing” repeatedly, uttered by the first Allied soldiers to enter the German concentration camps at the end of World War Two.

Charlie Lyne’s Beyond Clueless, a Kickstarter-funded film essay about the deeper meaning of post-1990 coming-of-age movies, aspires to be one of those Arena programs that takes a fresh look at a seemingly trivial or minor pop form to reveal deeper truths about the culture at large. Don’t get me wrong – I love teen movies and I think there’s a rich seam here to be mined. Unfortunately, because his analysis lacks rigour and is almost as superficial as the movies themselves, there are few insights here the perceptive viewer won’t have already gleaned for him/herself.

Alex Garland’s directorial debut is spare, clever s.f. Ever since he began his now abandoned novelist’s career with The Beach, he has known how to drive high-concept narratives home, viscerally fuelling them with human foibles. Ex Machina’s tale of artificial, attractive intelligence rings subtle changes on familiar s.f. ideas, while keeping within the clean lines of a mostly three-hand drama. When callow internet search engine employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a competition to visit his company’s legendary founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac, pictured below right with Gleeson) in his isolated retreat, Nathan says he wants Caleb to put his latest invention, Ava (Alicia Vikander), to the Turing Test: does his prettily human-shaped robot have true consciousness? Has Nathan created Artificial Intelligence?

Mind games and regular injections of intriguing ideas maintain a steady grip, while claustrophobic corridors keep the budget cannily low. The question of who has a soul also exercised Garland in his adaption of his friend Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone dystopia Never Let Me Go. Garland’s Dredd script is a better comparison. Ex Machina has the mix of fizzy intellect, black humour and streamlined thrills Judge Dredd’s comic-book home 2000 AD has always specialised in (as did an early, obvious homage to it, Blade Runner). It’s a glorified yet subdued version of one of that comic’s standbys, the twist-ending Future Shock. Discarded Dredd composers Ben Salisbury and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow's score, suggesting John Williams’ Close Encounters riff when Ava appears, confirms the link.

Ex Machina’s novelty isn’t in its concept, but its social detail. Isaac’s Nathan embodies the internet geek as alpha male.  The Mozart of computer coding by the age of 13, he speaks with the post-hippie informality beloved by Apple and Google, but pumps iron, has eyes cold with control, and lives in a Bond villain’s retreat, much as one imagines Bill Gates did. He has replaced Google with his own Bluebook by improving on the philosophy of search engines, tracking why we search, not what. When Caleb asks if Ava’s face was based on his porn profile, and Nathan mentions hacking into every mobile phone on the planet, the crazy dystopia we already live in is alarmingly clear. Nathan seems just the sort to have his hand on the virtual tiller: a mix of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, internet activist and corporate raider (and Bill Gates...).

Garland’s three hands are played by actors he has brought together just before their careers sail beyond his reach. Isaac’s versatile intensity has built through fierce supporting parts in Agora and Drive to Inside Llewyn Davis and the new Star Wars, where he’s joined by Gleeson. Swedish star Vikander, great as an abused Danish queen in A Royal Affair and just making her English-language breakthrough in Testament of Youth, is high-wattage for robot Ava. Like the minor fourth hand here, apparent sex slave Katya (Sonoya Mizura), Ava seems a captive victim, a just-born, android innocent. Ex Machina’s subtlest sleight of hand is that our eventual horror at her treatment only makes sense if she has passed the Turing Test. If Ava didn’t look and emote like Vikander, her plight would seem as tragic as a toaster’s.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Ex Machina