With this sequel to director Matthew Vaughn’s action-comedy based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John S Romtia Jr, writer/director Jeff Wadlow has done his best to make Kick-Ass 2 into a two-part franchise. It certainly doesn’t help that its release date puts it into a piranha tank of action films with bigger budgets and ideas.

"What do you call a bachelorette party without a bride?" asks maid-of-honour Regan (Kirsten Dunst). "Friday," comes her fellow hen’s deadpan response. In Bachelorette the bridesmaids lose the bride, tear up her dress and get trashed; these are high-school mean girls all grown up and, hey, they're just as mean as ever. Bachelorette is the spunky, spiky, sweary debut of writer-director Leslye Headland and appropriately it feels like a woman's work, albeit a woman proudly in touch with her inner bi-atch.

Kemosabe, The Lone Ranger is fun. Despite its star and producer blaming American critics for poor box office stateside, this film is Pirates of the Caribbean on horseback - and that's the Pirates franchise before it bloated in 2007.

Don't spend too much time looking for Kristin Scott Thomas in writer-director Pascal Bonitzer's Looking For Hortense (aka Cherchez Hortense). In keeping with the fleeting presence afforded the Hortense of the title, the divine Scott Thomas gets her customary star billing only to pretty much vanish from a largely somnolent Gallic exercise that sorely needs this actress's effortless command and wit. Cast as a theatre director called Iva who strays into the arms of her leading man - quelle surprise!

In the 1997 TV sitcom I'm Alan Partridge, Alan's nemesis, BBC commissioner Tony Hayers (David Schneider), describes his methodology as "evolution not revolution" before smugly axing Alan's chat show. It would pain Alan to hear those words again, but "evolution not revolution" perfectly describes the approach of the small screen icon’s first cinematic outing and the reason for its success. Directed by TV veteran Declan Lowney (Father Ted), Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa sees Alan at the centre of a local radio station siege.

A taciturn, bearded Irishman leaves Berlin to return to his homeland. He’s travelling there to record silence. Arriving in Donegal, he wanders the countryside with a microphone trying to capture an environment where sounds made by humans do not intrude. In the rain and on moors, he stands or crouches with his equipment. Occasionally, someone encounters him. He returns to the house of a raconteur for bread, cheese and ham (pictured below right), before he’s drawn to the remote, Atlantic-buffeted Tory Island where he grew up.

Things go bump in the night in James Wan's chilling latest, based on a supposedly true story. The Conjuring is an event horror movie, benefitting from a sizeable marketing budget and the distribution of a major studio (Warner Bros); appropriately enough it simply screams to be seen. And those looking for a touch of class to elevate their frights will find it heartening to hear that there's a leading role for Oscar nominee Vera Farmiga.

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is the most Melvillean of modern Westerns. It is the American conquest tragedy allegorised in a sprawling semi-fictional account of the 1892 Johnson County range war, in which the big ranchers of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, supported by President Benjamin Harrison, waged a vigilante campaign against the region’s small farmers, settlers, and rustlers. The film’s Ahab is Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), the supercilious, monomaniacal leader of the WSGA’s mercenary Regulators.

The basic set-up for The Heat is familiar – two mismatched cops are thrown together on a case and have to find a way of working together despite their differences in social background and methods – only in this case the officers are female. Add to the mix that the two actresses playing the roles are playing to type - loudmouth Boston street cop Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy, almost reprising her Bridesmaids role) and prissy, super-bright but socially inept FBI agent Sarah Ashburn, as essayed by Sandra Bullock in any number of her films.

Ulrich Seidl claims there’s a simple reason he goes easier on young teenager Melanie’s stumble through 21^st-century sexual desire and disaster than he did with her mum and aunt in Paradise: Love and Paradise: Faith. Going further with her requited crush on an adult would have involved exploiting his young star Melanie Lenz. So a director known for his provocations dutifully pulls up short.