Films: Pick of this week's best releases

The Oscar winner exposes every inch of her body in scenes of masterful seduction and sickening subjugation, including multiple sexual assaults and stomach-churning bouts of torture.

It's certainly not a film for the squeamish - the camera lingers on the aftermath of snapped bones and one sadistic sequence involving a skin grafting device is the stuff of nightmares.

Lawrence weathers these bone-crunching blows, then shatters her character's soul to smithereens when she thinks no one is looking, in the service of a tightly woven narrative, threaded with betrayal and daring double-crosses.

Unravelling the mysteries of director Francis Lawrence's puzzle picture is a nail-biting treat.

Monster Family (PG)

HOLGER Tappe’s animated adventure takes a half decent idea and goes nowhere with it. Emily Watson gives voice to Emma, a bookshop owner, mother and wife who wishes she and her family were happier, but work is busy, the kids want to do their own thing, dad is overfond of the sofa, etc. As luck and a little magic would have it, Emma and co are given the chance to try life in other guises. A starry voice cast that also includes Celia Imrie, Jason Isaacs and Catherine Tate cannot make up for scrappy animation, dull dialogue, and a tiresomely meandering plot

that seems to go all over the world without ever landing lucky.

A Fantastic Woman (15)

THE best foreign film Oscar field is typically strong this year, particularly with Russia’s Loveless in the running, but Sebastian Lelio’s Chile-set drama has to be in with a fair shout come

March 4. Much of that is due to the performance of Daniela Vega who plays Marina, the transgender partner of an older man, Orlando (Francisco Reyes). The two are blissfully content in their own little bubble, but when illness strikes Orlando, the world comes rushing in and Marina has to deal not just with the loss of her beloved but the anger and prejudice of his family and wider society. Vega is superb, unravelled by loss but controlled in her fury, a heroine you cannot help but cheer on.

GAME NIGHT (15)

Trivial pursuits escalate into life-or-death gambles in a rollicking comedy thriller co-directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, which is funnier and smarter than it initially lets on. Game Night deals us a winning hand full of likeable characters, uproarious

set-pieces and snappy dialogue laden with pop culture references. Screenwriter Mark Perez orchestrates a madcap murder mystery in sleepy American suburbia, where middle-class couples congregate to play competitive charades and Scrabble while swigging glasses of chardonnay and tucking into a cheese board.

Max (Jason Bateman) and his wife Annie (Rachel McAdams) organise one such gathering and are horrified when Max’s flashy, older brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) is kidnapped for real during the soiree.

I, TONYA (15)

According to a title card at the beginning of Craig Gillespie’s blackly humorous biopic, I, Tonya is based on “irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews” with US figure skating champion Tonya Harding and her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly.

The film illuminates a grubby episode in sporting history – the 1994 attack on skater Nancy Kerrigan – with considerable aplomb. Screenwriter Steven Rogers invites the deeply flawed protagonists to talk directly to camera, offering contradictory and overlapping testimonies that make sense of the chain of events that led to Harding’s ban from competitive skating.

Margot Robbie inhabits the title role with fearlessness and ferocity, tossing out expletives as if her life depended upon it as Harding suffers grievously at the hands of those closest to her. Sebastian Stan oozes slippery charm as the man who walks Tonya down the aisle and exerts his marital “right” to lay his hands on her in anger. Whether we believe Tonya or not, she recounts a cracking yarn of riumph against adversity.

FINDING YOUR FEET (12A)

WITH its familiar cast and bittersweet approach to getting older, Richard Loncraine’s London-set drama is chasing the Best Exotic Marigold pound as surely as autumn succeeds summer. Imelda Staunton leads the way as Sandra, one-time Greenham Common protester with proud leftie sister Bif (Celia Imrie), but now a betrayed and frightened wife trying to start again. Can she find friendship among Bif’s dancing, adventuring, good-time pals of a certain age? The answer is thunderingly predictable and the tweeness takes some getting used to, but with a cast that also includes Timothy Spall and David Hayman you are in safe hands.

DARK RIVER (15)

FUNCTIONING as a sort of antidote to Finding Your Feet is this grim-up-north drama from Clio Barnard. Alice and Joe Bell (Ruth Wilson and Mark Stanley) were close growing up, but Alice fled the farm in Yorkshire as soon as she could, with flashbacks to her life with dad (played

by Sean Bean) making clear why. With her

father now dead, Alice goes home to take what she feels belongs to her, but brother Joe has other ideas. While Barnard has been

unlucky with timing in that her drama explores some of the same areas as the recently released The Levelling, the performances

from Wilson (Luther) and Stanley (Game of Thrones, Love, Lies and Hope) make it well worth a look.

LADY BIRD (15)

Indie actress Greta Gerwig’s magnificent directorial debut is a sublime coming-of-age comedy drama set in turn of the 21st century Sacramento. Although Lady Bird isn’t strictly autobiographical, Gerwig draws on fond memories of her Californian home town for

a beautifully observed valentine to

mother-daughter relationships and youthful exuberance, infused with unabashed warmth

for her well drawn characters. The writer-director has a sharp ear for the ebb and flow of pithy conversations and she has attracted a stellar cast led by Oscar nominees Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf as the spunky title character and her hard-working mother who generate friction every time they are in close proximity. Lady Bird is a near-perfect confluence of direction, writing and performance. Being incredibly picky, there are several instances when Ronan’s accent falters and her melodic Irish lilt comes through loud and clear, which momentarily breaks the gently intoxicating spell cast by Gerwig’s film.

THE SHAPE OF WATER (15)

Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro recaptures the visual splendour and simmering menace of his Oscar-winning 2006 fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth with a swoon-inducing re-imagining of the Beauty And The Beast fairytale set in 1962 Baltimore. The Shape Of Water is a gorgeous, erotically-charged love story that empowers its richly drawn female characters to drive forward a tightly wound narrative and defeat prejudice in its myriad ugly forms. The script, co-written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, doesn’t sugarcoat the central romance between a mute cleaning lady (Sally Hawkins) and a carnivorous merman (Doug Jones). Carnal desires of the spirited heroine are laid delightfully bare and lustrous period detail evokes an era of suffocating Cold War paranoia with aplomb. Hawkins is luminous and heartbreaking, speaking volumes without saying a word – save for a musical fantasy sequence that choreographs a romantic pas de deux reminiscent of yesteryear’s La La Land.

Black Panther (12A)

Director Ryan Coogler made a name for himself with the laceratingly political Fruitvale Station and the crowd-pleaser that was Rocky Balboa’s return in Creed. Who better, then, to bring Marvel’s overlooked black superhero to the big screen? Chadwick Boseman plays T’Challa/Black Panther, king of Wakanda, a developing African nation to outsiders but secretly a rich powerhouse where peace and technology reign supreme. With Wakanda having so much, should it help outsiders in need? The screenplay by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole contains all the usual elements, including a tush-achingly long wham-bam finale, but it is packed with originality, wit and a cast iron sense of confidence in the world it creates.

WINCHESTER: THE HOUSE THAT GHOSTS BUILT (15)

Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig,

ringmasters of the eighth instalment of the Saw franchise, Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built fleshes out the spooky mythology of

a curious architectural landmark in San Jose, California. The wicked whispers that swirl around the grand Victorian property, built by

a grieving widow (Dame Helen Mirren), are far more tantalising than anything the siblings summon from the murky depths of their

imaginations. Doors rattle, a whispering wind blows out a flickering flame, strange noises emanate from a dank basement and a

cherubic boy is possessed by a malevolent spirit that causes his voice to drop two octaves. We are in achingly familiar territory and a linear script, co-written by Tom Vaughan, groans almost as loudly as the mansion’s polished floorboards. The Spierigs are content to trade in cheap shocks to convince us to jump out of our seats in between yawns and impatient glances at watches.

THE MERCY (12A)

The Mercy is a handsome but emotionally waterlogged dramatisation of the fateful journey of self-discovery of amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst (Colin Firth), who vanished in 1969 during a round-the-world yacht race.

Director James Marsh captained The Theory Of Everything to Bafta and Oscar glory but he struggles to keep this real-life tragedy afloat.

The ramshackle script bobs between present and past, inserting flashbacks to happier

times in Donald’s relationship with his wife (Rachel Weisz) as his sanity unravels in the claustrophobic confines of his boat. Being lost at sea with Firth would be a dream vacation for some people and the Oscar winner delivers a committed performance. However, I struggled to tether an emotional connection to his tormented sailor and my interest went overboard.

Tad the Lost Explorer (U)

Enrique Gato and David Alonso’s Spanish adventure goes to town on plot as a girl archaeologist finds the secret of King Midas, only to have a villain steal it. Joining forces with the titular and lovestruck Tad, can our Indiana Jones-style heroes win the day? You may struggle to care. A measure of the film’s doomed bid to escape dullness is its tally of not one, not two, but three comedy sidekicks for Tad in the shape of a dog, a bird and an Egyptian mummy.

FIFTY SHADES FREED (18)

When we left heroine Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) at the end of Fifty Shades Darker,

her riding crop-wielding beau – buff billionaire Christian Grey – had just emerged unscathed from crash-landing his helicopter and lecherous fiction editor Jack Hyde was poised to wreak revenge on Ana for getting him the sack for sexual harassment. In the third and final picture, Ana walks down the aisle to Christian in front of friends and family. The happy couple look forward to building a new life together but the return of Jack puts Ana and Christian in jeopardy. Meanwhile, Ana has unfinished business with Elena Lincoln, the woman who seduced Christian when he was 15 and refuses to let him go.

PHANTOM THREAD (15)

Daniel Day-Lewis delivers his final screen performance before self-imposed retirement as a perfectionist dressmaker in Paul Thomas Anderson’s artfully stitched drama, which is set in the salons of 1950s London. It’s another flawless embodiment of the emotionally crippled male psyche, deliciously complicated by an ambiguous sexuality and a softly spoken fastidiousness that doesn’t extend to personal relationships... except for an uncomfortably close bond to a ferocious, purse-lipped sister, played with scorching intensity by Lesley Manville. They are a formidable double act and you genuinely fear for the sanity of a sweet-natured waitress when she strays into the siblings’ tortuous web.