Ex Machina (15), directed by Alex Garland

4/5

Last year a computer pretending to be a 13-year-old boy reportedly became the first machine to pass the Turing test, bringing us one step nearer to the creation of a fully conscious artificial intelligence that can think for itself.

But what of the ethical and moral implications, as well as the consequences for mankind and its future? These are the thorny issues explored in Alex Garland’s complex and razor-sharp sci-fi film, embedded within a tense psychological thriller.

Set in the near future, it opens with Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a brilliant 24-year-old coder at the world’s largest internet company, who wins a competition to spend a week with the firm’s reclusive CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac).

Yet when he arrives at his boss’s remote mountain retreat he discovers that he is actually there to carry out the Turing test, which determines a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent human behaviour, on artificial intelligence Ava (Alicia Vikander).

She’s exquisite-looking, with her human features encased in a robot’s body, and Vikander gives an electrifying performance, exuding ethereal poise and elegance. The more Caleb interacts with her the more human she appears and the sexier she seems — you can’t blame him for falling for her.

Gleeson is superb as the unsuspecting pawn while an unrecognisable Isaac gives a powerful and intense performance as Ava’s drunken creator.

A 21st-century version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this is a truly impressive debut film from writer turned director Garland, who delves further into the issues touched on in the 2013 sci-fi rom com Her in creating a believable love triangle with an artificial intelligence.

What’s fascinating is that he gives Ex Machina a feminist twist and makes you root for Ava. But its ending doesn’t bode well for the human race.

Maria Duarte

Beyond Clueless (15), directed by Charlie Lyne

3/5

This dissection of the modern teen flick will be a joyous and entertaining jaunt down memory lane for anyone in their 30s.

In a non-stop montage of back-to-back film clips from more than 200 films — with not a talking head in sight — first-time director Charlie Lyne attempts to get to the heart and soul of the genre in this novel documentary.

Lyne, who also wrote and edited the film, shows great promise in delivering this painstaking and evocative film.

Aptly narrated by former cult teen star Fairuza Balk, it illustrates the common components of such films — the cliques, teenage angst, sexual awakening and the prom — with poignant sequences.

The great fun of Beyond Clueless, though, is in recognising the countless teen dramas, rom coms and comedies along with very youthful looking A-list stars.

Maria Duarte

The Gambler (15), directed by Rupert Wyatt

2/5

Mark Wahlberg plays a charismatic English professor by day and a high-risk gambler by night in this style-over-substance adaptation of the 1974 film The Gambler.

Wahlberg portrays Jim Bennett, who has a wilful disregard for his own life and family in order to get his next gambling fix.

It’s impossible to sympathise with a man who comes from a privileged background and whose wealthy mother (Jessica Lange) keeps bailing him out. Yet he insists on betting all his money away instead of paying back the loan shark and crime bosses that he owes.

Directed by Rupert Wyatt, this is a fast-paced race-against-time thriller with splendid performances by Wahlberg and Lange, who never disappoint.

Highly entertaining and instantly forgettable.

Maria Duarte

Mortdecai (12A), directed by David Koepp

1/5

Almost inevitably, a brown-nosing reviewer will be anxious to be quoted in advertisements by describing this face-freezingly unfunny waste of film as “laugh-a-minute.”

They might be right. I could have blinked and missed the minute the single laugh occurred. Otherwise it’s about as amusing as a proctological examination

The story centres on twittish upper-crust English rogue Charlie Mortdecai, sporting a ludicrous moustache and an even more preposterous English accent, who’s overplayed like a rep theatre neophyte by Johnny Depp.

The caper, such as it is, involves charismatic British aristocrat and part-time shady art dealer Mortdecai, who’s down on his luck.

When Alistair Maitland (Ewan McGregor), a college friend and MI5 operative, asks him to find a stolen Goya painting, he’s up for it.

What follows is worth paying to miss.

Ethan Carter

La Maison de la Radio (PG), directed by Nicolas Philibert

3/5

Given the recent horrors in Paris, you might have thought this film on 24 hours in the life of Radio France would be more in tune with contemporary realities.

Not so. It makes the Beeb appear cutting edge as it covers the range of the station’s activities from news, music, crank call-ins and eccentrics, including dotty Tour de France enthusiasts.

One caller flirts with the interviewer, another’s a fan of potato-peeling meditation and there’s an avant-garde composer who builds a Meccano music maker.

Still, while it doesn’t fail to remind you that there is another world out there, it’s a radio experience that goes from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Jeff Sawtell

A Most Violent Year (15), directed by JC Chandor

4/5

Oscar Isaac, terrific in Ex Machina, is similarly outstanding in this riveting saga of gangsterism in 1981 New York.

Isaac is not your traditional brooding hoodlum beloved of Robert De Niro — he’s a Hispanic immigrant married to a gangster’s daughter (Jessica Chastain, effective enough).

Isaac plays Alberto Morales, who’s trying to support his family by building up his company that transports cooking oil in the Big Apple but ends up tangling dangerously with merciless mobsters.

Writer-director JC Chandor superbly recreates 1981 New York — “statistically one of the most crime-ridden years in the city’s history” — as grey, depressing and without the money-driven gloss of Times Square.

Hero, gangsters and action — notably injected into a character-driven story when Morales chases a hoodlum on the subway— are convincingly created.

The characters, including a prosecutor as corruptible as the criminals, provide a powerful dramatic punch. But the focus is firmly on Isaac — and he’s worth watching in every frame.

Ethan Carter