This week, there's a chance to catch up with some of the much-anticipated features that were released towards the end of last year, but didn't quite have the anticipated impact during the awards season.

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's BATTLE OF THE SEXES - Despite the fact that documentarist James Erskine covered the 1973 grudge match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King in admirable detail in The Battle of the Sexes (2013), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris revisit the showdown between the Lobber and the Libber with the same genial brio that made Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Ruby Sparks (2012) so engaging. Steve Carell returns from the former to play the three-time major winner and he is well matched by Crazy, Stupid Love (2011) co-star Emma Stone, who softens the edges of the fiercely competitive King without over-idealising her.

King was going through a tough time when Riggs began boasting that a woman could never beat a man at tennis. She had led a walkout of the top female players after chauvinist American Lawn Tennis Association supremo Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) had refused to give men and women equal prize money. Moreover, she had fallen in love with meets hairdresser Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), even though she was married to the supportive Larry King (Austin Stowell). But, when prudish Australian rival Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee) lost to Riggs in a challenge match, the 29 year-old King felt compelled to take on the 55 year-old - whose gambling problems have estranged him from devoted wife Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue) - in the Houston Astrodome for a purse of $100,000.

Stone and Carell deliver solid performances and the period feel is spot on. Thanks to computer-generated body doubling, the on-court choreography is also markedly better than it was in Janus Metz Pedersen's Borg vs McEnroe (2017). But Simon Beaufoy's script doesn't quite convey what King had at stake in setting up the Virginia Slims Tour with business partner Gladys Heldman (Sarah Silverman), in committing adultery with another woman and in risking her equality crusade by losing to an accomplished, but ageing opponent.

Andy Serkis's BREATHE - Actor and image-capture pioneer Andy Serkis makes a disappointingly conventional start to his directorial career with this biopic of polio victim Robin Cavendish and his doughtily supportive wife, Diana. Produced by their son Jonathan and scripted by William Nicholson, this treatise on fortitude and devotion culminates in a heartfelt plug for legislation enabling the right to die. But, for all the actorly earnestness and technical expertise on show, this paean to British pluck feels like something that might have starred Kenneth More and Dinah Sheridan back in the day.

Having met at a cricket match in 1957, Robin (Andrew Garfield) and Diana (Claire Foy) swank it up on a Kenyan tea plantation until he collapses on the tennis court and is left paralysed from the neck down by polio at the age of 28. Flown back to Blighty, he is confined to bed by his respirator and seems set for a miserable existence in his otherwise idyllic pile in Drayton St Leonard. However, having survived the family dog pulling the plug out of its socket, Robin is given a new lease of life when Oxford professor pal Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville) concocts a wheelchair that enables him to make his breathing apparatus portable.

Holidays in Spain are now possible, although Hall has to fly out in a flap after Diana's dimwit brother, Bloggs (played as twins by Tom Hollander), causes the respirator to malfunction. But, having seen his son grow up and become a spokesman for an accessibility for invalids programme sponsored medic Clement Aitken (Stephen Mangan), Robin decides he can no longer endure the agony of his increasingly frequent bleeding fits and, in 1994, he seeks a form of assisted dying.

This is unquestionably an inspirational story and it's admirably acted in the plummiest of accents by Garfield and Foy. But, with Nitin Sawhney's saccharine score reinforcing every moment of crisis and joy and Robert Richardson's camera bathing proceedings in a nostalgic glow, it often feels more like a `disease of the week' teleplay than an in-depth study of medical progress. What's most problematic, however, is the lack of emotional depth cause by the idealised depiction of the Cavendishes, who seemingly never had a cross word through all their travails. By contrast with James Marsh's The Theory of Everything (2015), this feels unrelentingly twee.

Paul McGuigan's FILM STARS DON'T DIE IN LIVERPOOL - Although Annette Bening snared a BAFTA nomination for her performance as Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame, this adaptation of Peter Turner's 1984 memoir struggles to recapture the affection and frankness of the jobbing actor's account of his May-December romance with an Oscar winner with a talent for trouble. Merely a passing mention is made of Grahame's tangled relationships with director husband Nicholas Ray and his son, Anthony, and, as a result, she comes across as a victim rather than someone who seized life with both hands, no matter what the consequences. Screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh has something of a reputation for biopics after profiling Ian Curtis and the young John Lennon in Anton Corbijn's Control (2007) and Sam Taylor Wood's Nowhere Boy (2009). But, while it contains flickers of joy and poignancy, this works too hard at avoiding linearity to draw the audience into its remarkable story.

Collapsing in her dressing-room in an English provincial theatre, Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening) discharges herself from hospital and goes to stay with old flame Peter Turner (Jamie Bell) at his parents' terraced house in Liverpool. While mother Bella (Julie Walters) and father Joe (Kenneth Cranham) are happy to see Grahame again, chip-shouldered brother Joe, Jr. (Stephen Graham) can scarcely hide his displeasure. As she continues to deny the fact she is dying from an untreated recurrence of breast cancer, Grahame thinks back two years to the whirlwind romance she enjoyed with Turner (who is half her age) after they met at a London rooming house. However, their relationship was always stormy and it's only when they accept they are going to be parted forever that Grahame and Turner realise what they meant to each other.

Touching on the loneliness of the fading star, this frustratingly shallow saga should have said far more about how old-style movie icons and their public struggled to distinguish between an image of glamorised perfection and the often vulnerable human being it masked. Instead, we get an old-fashioned `woman's picture' that adopts a veneer of shabby Sirkian gloss to disguise its humdrum melodramatics. The use of Eve Stewart's interior designs and Urszula Pontikos's camera moves to slip between time frames feels as arch as J. Ralph's emotion-tugging score. But Bening and Bell act with conviction, with the standout scenes being a trip to the cinema to see Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and his meeting with her mother and sister, who are played with ghoulish gusto by Vanessa Redgrave and Frances Barber.

Sean Baker's THE FLORIDA PROJECT - Having made an excellent impression in filming Tangerine (2015) entirely on an iPhone, Sean Baker reaffirms his affinity for life in the margins with this delightful, but deceptively dark update of the Our Gang and Little Rascals comedies that slapstick producer Hal Roach used to churn out in the 1920s and 30s. Strikingly designed by Stephonik Youth to take advantage of the bubblegum buildings dotted around Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida and photographed on widescreen 35mm by Mexican cinematographer Alexis Zabe with a mischievous eye for the tacky and the tragic, this often feels too garish to carry a serious message about the poverty and social disengagement that is the legacy of eight years of empty Obama optimism. But, behind the quips that Baker and co-scenarist Chris Bergoch provide for their exceptional young leads, there is a good deal of disillusion and despair.

Six year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) lives with her twentysomething mother, Halley (BriaVinaite), in the Magic Castle, a lavender and purple motel on the edge of the tourist routes around the Disney resort. She spends her days mooching around the grounds and nearby retail lots with Scooty (Christopher Riven), who is the impish son of Halley's best friend, Ashley (Mela Murder), who slips them free food from the diner where she works. A windscreen spitting prank leads them to befriend Jancy (Valeria Cotto) from the next-door Futureland Inn in place of Dicky (Aiden Malik), whose father is tired of him forever getting into trouble.

The kids are watched over with a benevolent eye by motel manager Bobby Hicks (Willem Dafoe), although he is constantly having to badger the lip-pierced and heavily tattooed Halley for her rent and warning her against using her room for prostitution when the pickings are slow selling knock-off perfume to guests at the swankier motels in the neighbourhood. Hicks also protects the children from the occasional paedophile who drifts into the play area. But he is powerless to help Halley when she drifts apart from Ashley following a fire at an abandoned housing estate and resorts to theft to make ends meet.

Ending with a moment of exhilarating escapism that was covertly filmed in the Magic Kingdom Park with an iPhone 6S Plus, this is hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. Brooklynn Prince, Christopher Riven and Valeria Cotto are superb as the tiny tearaways with smart mouths and a complete lack of respect for the authority they already sense will always let them down. If the Academy had any gumption, it would have nominated Prince for Best Actress instead of Meryl Streep in Steven Spielberg's The Post, as she commands the screen with spiky spontaneity like a trailer park Shirley Temple. However, it did recognise the excellent Dafoe, who tries to keep his creaking business afloat and his more hapless residents out of trouble. But it's a losing battle, much like running America. Let's hope someone takes a plunge on releasing Take Out (2004) and Prince of Broadway (2010) alongside the quirkily Capraesque Starlet (2012).

Simon Curtis's GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER ROBIN - Following in the footsteps of Marc Forster's Finding Neverland, this cringingly gauche account of how the Winnie-the-Pooh stories impacted upon the life of creator AA Milne's son, Christopher Robin, is the kind of nostalgic wallow that gives heritage cinema such a bad name. David Roger's production design, Odile Dicks-Mireaux's costumes and Ben Smithard's photography could not be any more picture perfect. But that's part of the problem, especially when director Simon Curtis starts stirring a little magic realism into a mix that is already indigestibly glutinous, thanks to Carter Burwell's relentlessly swooning score and a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughan that is too preoccupied with period platitudes and slipping in sly references to Milne's books to bother offering any serious psychological insights.

Tucked away in their idyllic Sussex retreat in 1941, AA Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) and his wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) receive a telegram about their soldier son, Christopher Robin (Alex Lawther). As Milne (who is known to everyone as `Blue') fulminates in the nearby woods, he thinks back to his own ordeal on the Western Front and how long it took him and illustrator pal ER Shepherd (Stephen Campbell Moore) to get over their shell shock. Tired of tossing off hit West End comedies, Milne sought sanctuary to work on a pacifist tome. But, when nanny Olive (Kelly Macdonald) is called away to attend her sick mother while Daphne is living it up in London, Milne is forced to bond with his young son (Will Tilston), who is known to everyone as `Billy Moon'.

The way in which Milne shaped this father-and-son encounter into an enduring bestseller is rather cornily depicted, as stuffed animals Edward Bear, Tigger, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga and Roo are found their niches around Hundred Acre Wood. But the story takes a more intriguing turn, as Nou (Billy Moon's nickname for Olive) takes exception to the manner in which Milne and Daphne exploit their son when the Pooh phenomenon erupts. Yet, rather than exploring this in any depth, the writers deposit Milne, Jr. in a boarding school, where he gets roughed up by envious bullies and becomes obsessed with doing his bit against the Nazis.

The nature of the narrative somewhat dictates the tone of the performances, with Gleason being stiffer than his brilliantined hair and Robbie occasionally letting her Australian accent intrude upon her cut-glass ghastliness. With his chubby cheeks, gap-toothed smile and pudding-basin haircut, eight year-old Will Tilston is suitably sweet as the hapless Billy Moon. But Alex Lawther is all at sea as the 18 year-old incarnation and the picture rather falls apart after the ever-excellent Kelly Macdonald resigns to keep company with a nice chap called Alfred (Shaun Dingwall). Hopefully, this stuffy misfire will put an end to these behind-the-scenes peaks into the great works of children's literature. But, as Kenneth Grahame told the Wind in the Willows stories to a sickly son (named Alastair, but known as `Mouse') who later threw himself under a train while studying at Oxford, we may have to endure at least one more.

Yorgos Lanthimos's THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER - The Euripidean tale of Iphigenia provides the inspiration for Yorgos Lanthimos's dark dissertation on taking responsibility for one's actions. Nosocomephobiacs are going to have a particularly hard time watching this seething allegory, as much of it takes place inside a Cincinnati hospital that Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch might have concocted while sharing a nightmare. But, thanks to production designer Jade Healy, even a plush family home feels like something out of a grim fairytale.

Although he might not look it behind his grizzled beard, heart surgeon Colin Farrell has a nice life with ophthalmologist wife Nicole Kidman and their two children, 14 year-old Raffey Cassidy and the tweenage Sunny Suljic. However, the recovering alcoholic has a secret to hide and it manifests itself in the form of 16 year-old Barry Keoghan, who keeps showing up at the hospital and making demands on Farrell's time and pocket. Still mourning the death of his father a few years earlier, Keoghan has hopes that Farrell will fall in love with his mother, Alicia Silverstone. But, when he walks out on her after dining at their home, Keoghan informs Farrell that he must choose and kill a member of his family to atone for murdering his father through drunken negligence on the operating table.

Arrogant and cowardly in equal measure, Farrell ignores the demand. However, he is forced to take Keoghan's threat that his wife and children will slowly perish when Suljic suddenly loses the use of his legs and Cassidy soon follows, even though she has developed a crush on her persecutor. Fuming at his colleagues for their inability to help his kids, Farrell eventually comes clean to Kidman, who appalled by his continued refusal to own his failings. However, when Farrell abducts and abuses Keoghan, Kidman realises that there is only one way to lift the curse.

Photographed with gliding, glacial grace by Thimios Bakatakis, this is a deeply unsettling satirical horror that could only have come from the godfather of the Greek Weird Wave. Collaborating again with co-scenarist Efthimis Filippou, Lanthimos lacerates the patriarchal élite for its reluctance to admit its culpability for the world's woes. But, by having the characters deliver their lines with little or no inflection, he also seeks to lampoon them for their insistence on sleepwalking through increasingly serious situations.

With Johnnie Burn's audio design being complemented by evocative pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Schubert, György Ligeti and Sofia Gubaidulina, this often sounds as sinister as it looks. But the greatest sense of unease comes from the performances, with Keoghan letting flashes of Norman Bates at his most ingratiating through his blank façade, while Cassidy and Suljic have a Midwich Cuckoo quality that they have clearly learnt from their Stepford parents.

Kenneth Branagh's MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS - Sidney Lumet's 1974 version of Agatha Christie's 1934 whodunit inspired by the Lindbergh babynapping remains the big screen's best adaptation of the Queen of Crime. Kenneth Branagh's all-star remake brings flamboyance and bombast to the story without making the mystery any more intriguing or the method any more ingenious. Like the moustache that Branagh sports to play the Belgian sleuth renowned for his `little grey cells', this is stylish, but somewhat outlandish and excessive.

Having solved a crime in Jerusalem, Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) boards the Orient Express at the invitation of the train's director, Bouc (Tom Bateman). Shortly into the journey through the snowy countryside, Poirot is asked by shady art dealer Samuel Ratchett (Johnny Depp) if he will protect him in the wake of some death threats. But Poirot refuses and comes to regret his decision when Ratchett is repeatedly stabbed in his sleeping compartment after the train is held up by an avalanche.

While awaiting rescue, Poirot begins to question the other passengers in the Calais carriage. They include American widow Caroline Hubbard (Michelle Pfeiffer), Austrian professor Gerhard Hardman (Willem Dafoe), Russian emigrée Princess Dragomiroff (Judi Dench) and her German companion Hildegarde Schmidt (Olivia Colman), Spanish missionary Pilar Estravados (Penélope Cruz), Italian car salesman Biniamino Marquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), Hungarian count Rudolph Andrenyi (Sergei Polunin) and his wife Helena (Lucy Boynton), and Brits Dr Arbuthnot (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and teacher Mary Debenham (Daisy Ridley). Making up the numbers are Ratchett's secretary, Hector MacQueen (Josh Gad), and his valet, Edward Masterman (Derek Jacobi), as well as the train guard, Pierre Michel (Marwan Kenzari).

This being the blockbuster era, Branagh swoops Haris Zambarloukos's 65mm camera over and around the speeding steam locomotive before it grinds to a shuddering halt on a rickety viaduct. He also steers it through Jim Clay's impeccable carriage sets before dollying it towards the suspects gathered for the big reveal in a brazier-warmed tunnel like figures in a pastiche of Leonardo's Last Supper. But, while these flourishes prove distracting, they do less damage to the delicacy of Christie's story than Michael Green's meddlesome script, which not only replaces an English colonel with a black medic, but also gives Poirot a lost love and a much higher profile than any of his suspects. Thus, the audience is required to admire Branagh's artistry as a film-maker and a thespian rather than pick up the clues in what remains a rattling good yarn.

Stephen Frears's VICTORIA & ABDUL - Having fiercely defended her right to place her faith in a kilted servant in John Madden's Mrs Brown (1997), Judi Dench returns to the role of Queen Victoria in this glossily superficial account of the ageing monarch's relationship with Indian retainer Abdul Karim. Adapted by Lee Hall from a 2010 tome by journalist Shrabani Basu (which drew on Karim's journals and Victoria's Urdu notebooks), this Stephen Frears costume saga delights in showing the Royal family and its entourage as prejudiced prigs. But an insufferable smugness permeates this Downtonisation of history.

Sent to Britain to present a gold mohur coin to mark the Empress of India's Golden Jubilee in 1887, 24 year-old Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal) brings a glint back to Victoria's eye and she promptly has him installed as a prominent member of her inner circle. Much to the frustration of the Prince of Wales (Eddie Izzard), private secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby (Tim Pigott-Smith) and Jane Spencer, Baroness Churchill (Olivia Williams), the 68 year-old widow declares Abdul to be her `munshi' and warns anyone against disrespecting him. Moreover, she has a wing at Osborne transformed into the Durbar Room.

Victoria is hurt when she discovers he has a wife and feels duty-bound to dismiss him when she learns he has misinformed her about the events of the 1857 Indian Mutiny. But not even the news that Abdul is a prison clerk from Agra or the revelation from court physician Sir James Reid (Paul Higgins) that he is riddled with gonorrhea can persuade her to part with her spiritual guide and trusted friend.

At 82, Dench can still twinkle like a schoolgirl and the close-ups of her eyes lighting up in Bollywood star Ali Fazal's presence are genuinely touching. But the bombastic reaction of Bertie and his cronies is hamfistedly played for mocking laughs, as is the dismay felt by Abdul's travelling companion, Mohammed (Adeel Akhtar), who detests being dressed in braided liveries and paraded around like a subcontinental curio. Despite the efforts to upbraid the élite, however, there's something patronising about the depiction of the Indian characters, with Mohammed's righteous contempt for the entire imperial enterprise being made to seem as dyspeptic as the heir to the throne's snooty disdain for Muslim mystics.

Stephen Chbosky's WONDER - Keeping sentiment at bay is always key in tackling stories about daunting medical conditions. Following on from The Four Corners of Nowhere (1995) and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), novelist-director Stephen Chbosky struggles to avoid the mawkish melodramatics in this well-meaning adaptation of an RJ Palacio novel that inspired a `Choose Kind' social media campaign. Taking its title from a Natalie Merchant song about overcoming the stigma attached to disfigurement, this is more ambitious than Andy Serkis's Breathe in its narrative approach. But, while it sensibly points out that everyone has their issues and insecurities, the multi-chaptered scenario penned by Chbosky, Steven Conrad and Jack Thorne becomes increasingly detached from prickly reality as principal and secondary characters alike queue up for their epiphanal moments.

Ten year-old Auggie Pullman (Jacob Tremblay) has undergone 27 procedures to rectify the craniofacial problems caused by a genetic mutation. Parents Isabel (Julia Roberts) and Nate (Luke Wilson) have doted on him to the detriment of older sister Via (Izabela Vidovic), who has learnt to be self-reliant since the death of her beloved grandmother (Sonia Braga). But, now, Isabel has decided to stop home-schooling her son at their cosy Brooklyn brownstone and send him to Beecher Prep. The principal (Mandy Patinkin), form teacher (Daveed Diggs) and science teacher (Ali Liebert) all keep an eye on Auggie, but resist making a fuss of him so that he can negotiate his own relationships with classmates Julian (Bryce Gheisar), Jack (Noah Jupe) and Summer (Millie Davis), even though the first is a bully and the second doesn't want to stand out by befriending the outsider.

Having just started high school, Via has her own problems, as best friend Miranda (Danielle Rose Russell) had changed beyond all recognition after a summer at camp. But she learns new things about herself when black classmate Justin (Nadji Jeter) talks her into joining the drama club and she gets to steal the show when Miranda relinquishes the lead on opening night. It should come as no surprise to learn that they are staging Thornton Wilder's Our Town, as this is relentlessly upbeat exercise in loose end-tying is riven with the same kind of New Deal communality.

Buried beneath Arjen Tuiten's creditable make-up (as well as an astronaut's helmet), Tremblay employs a high-pitched voice to reinforce Auggie's vulnerability. But he also plays the role with plenty of spirit and is splendidly supported by a guesting Chewbacca and a cast determinedly on the same wavelength. Vidovic particularly impresses as the daughter longing for her mother's affection and approval, while Jupe has the kind of cherubic sweetness that makes him the perfect foil for Tremblay, especially when he blots his copybook and has to re-earn his friend's trust. There are moments when Roberts and Wilson seem to be on autopilot, as though they had been lulled into a state of soporific tweeness by Marcelo Zarvos's emotionally manipulative score. Yet, while it sells its positivity pretty hard, this makes a worthy companion to Peter Bogdanovich's Mask (1985).