Aiming for the trippy qualities of The Matrix and Inception, Doctor Strange is possibly the most enjoyable Marvel foundation story since the first Iron Man, mixing wit with visual pyrotechnics.  Benedict Cumberbatch plays supercilious neurosurgeon Stephen Strange (wholly unrelated to the New Romantic singer responsible for “Fade to Grey”). A virtuoso of the scalpel, Cumberbatch’s Dr Strange has shades of Robert Downey Jr’s over-achieving Tony Stark – this is cinema art directed from the fantasy lifestyle of men’s glossy magazines.

Dr Strange has the requisite underappreciated on/off girlfriend (Rachel McAdams) who works alongside him, admiring his precision brain repairs while despairing of his heart. He lives in an icy Manhattan apartment, seemingly no walls and all windows that look onto the night-time city. Outside is his Lamborghini Huracan which really should not be driven while inspecting neurology scans. His self-inflicted fall from grace renders him incapable of operating, and sets him on a quest to find a cure for his shaking hands. Cue Cumberbatch with messy hair, a terrible beard, and a journey to the Mysterious Orient in search of mystical enlightenment (pictured below).

Redemption comes in the shape of a bald Tilda Swinton, playing the Ancient One who knows all the secrets of sorcery and inner powers which can make the crippled walk. There’s a touch of The Karate Kid in the two British thespians’ on-screen relationship that borders on ridiculous. It’s hard not to be cynical about the Ancient One intoning lines such as “Forget everything you think you knew”, while the repetitive scenes of gruelling physical training and humiliation on the road to transcendence wear thin.

Mads Mikkelsen plays Kaecilius, a former student of the Ancient One who has turned evil and provides Strange with his key opponent.  It’s difficult to take Mikkelsen too seriously as the villain if you end up wondering how much time he had to spend in make-up every day, having his eyes slathered with kohl and red sparkles to make them look like a pair of volcanoes getting ready to rumble.

Doctor Strange could descend into a clutch of clichés, but director/writer Scott Derrickson has injected plenty of wit. The visuals, especially in the modern-world sequences, are stunning. Vast cityscapes roll up like three-dimensional chess sets; dizzying fight scenes among ever-shifting skyscrapers are what one would imagine MC Escher would have designed if he’d been working with powerful digital software rather than a pencil. 

Stan Lee’s obligatory cameo is worth watching out for - chuckling over Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception. Sitting through the endless credits with the diehard fans is rewarded by not just one but two teasers. These taster scenes also hopefully make sense of why Chiwetel Ejiofor is so underused in Doctor Strange as the Ancient One’s protégé Mordor, and hint that there may be more interesting conflicts to come in the sequels.

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Doctor Strange

Dan Brown is famed for calamitous language massacres that sell by the kerchillion to tone-deaf Renaissance cryptogram junkies. His sentences hurt eyes and his plots numb skulls. But one thing you can say for Brown is he checks facts like an obsessive-compulsive über-nerd. When the books are transplanted to the big screen, he gets less control over this stuff. The result, in Inferno, is unintentionally comical to anyone (which means pretty much everyone) who knows Florence.

The cinema trailer for A Monster Calls ★★★★ looks faintly ludicrous, with its scenes of a giant tree stomping around the landscape, but don't be deceived. In conjunction with screenwriter Patrick Ness, who also wrote the original novel, director J A Bayona has conjured a bittersweet and often painfully moving account of bereavement and growing up, in which the grim burden of terminal illness is alleviated by the healing power of art and fantasy.

If you’re expecting family drama, the opening of Captain Fantastic will surprise. We’re following a hunter, greased-up so he’s invisible in the woods, stalking a deer. There’s an edginess to the scene, the atmosphere primal as the animal is killed. Other disguised forms emerge from the trees, and a ritual of smeared blood ensues – nature, red in tooth and claw.

It feels a long way from civilisation; it transpires that we have been witnessing a rite of passage for eldest son Bodevan as he turns 18, orchestrated by his father Ben (Viggo Mortensen, bearded, back in The Road mode, on excellent form). This is not a family tied to convention: home is an Indian tipi deep in the forests of Washington State, where they live off the land. Director Matt Ross gradually reveals how Ben structures his children’s lives around physical testing (hard exercise, pictured below, risky rock-climbing) and mental discipline, which has seen them develop at an intellectually precocious rate: it’s a film where a little girl will exclaim “I’m a Maoist” out of the blue or riff on Pol Pot, and everyone’s jumping ahead with their Great Books (Karamazov to Middlemarch, via Lolita). They make up quite a nice little family music band, too.

That road trip allows Ross’s script to expand its range, particularly towards comedy

Mortensen moves vigorously between benign patriarch and commander, and any balancing feminine presence seems much missing. Ben has set up this survivalist, counterculture hub with his wife, Leslie, a decade or so earlier, leaving society behind to create the very distinct world in which they want their six children to grow up. They are named almost à la Tolkien: as well as Bodevan (played by British actor George MacKay, lean and nervy), there are twin sisters three years younger, Vespyr and Kielyr, who manage something of a motherly presence, 12-year-old Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton, stroppy), and the youngest, Zaja and Nai, who have only ever known this way-out world.

They live so far off the grid that it takes Ben a long ride in the family camping van – which has a relatively normal name for these parts, Steve – to reach the nearest phone, a journey he makes to keep up with news of Leslie, who is in hospital in the care of her parents, down in New Mexico. Her illness, of which we gradually learn more, is something their alternative lifestyle can’t deal with, but neither can its traditonal counterpart: she is dead, and her father (Frank Langella, dominating) warns that if Ben and family come anywhere near the funeral, he will have them arrested. There’s little shared ground between these worlds of individualistic self-expression and convention, but that’s not going to stop the family journeying south to pay its last respects.That road trip allows Ross’s script to expand its range, particularly towards comedy, as this busload of isolationists brushes up against small town America in a confrontation occasionally as abrupt as Ben’s description of Cola as “poison water”. Yet there’s a subtlety to the balance that Ross presents: the family’s right on the nose in some things, not least when they note that virtually everyone they encounter is obese, but there are other incidents that make us think twice. An elaborately staged supermarket grab, genially redefined by Ben as a “Free the Food” moment, has him feigning illness while the kids make off with the shopping. It makes us ponder. yes, it’s an appealing game, a thumbs-up to society (albeit one clearly rehearsed, which makes you wonder, not for the only time, just when, and how?), that serves as prelude to an impromptu “Noam Chomsky Day” celebration – Chomsky takes the place of Christmas for this lot – to cheer everyone up. It’s not only the knives being bandied around by six-year-olds that makes us wonder whether it’s a good thing…

Let out into the wider world the children are challenged in other ways. Bodevan, who has applied for college (with his mother’s encouragement, but keeping the news from his dad), is already thinking of the future, the present being a place in which he’s rather lost: attracted to a girl at one of their camping stops, the only way he knows how to conclude their meeting is to propose to her. It’s very funny, very natural and guileless (and MacKay plays very nicely, absolutely convincing beyond his usual horizons), but brings home how the enclosed environment in which they have grown up can’t last forever.

That sense of different worlds colliding reaches its peak at the funeral, at which Ben and family turn up dressed like they're having a wild party (main picture). Leslie had left her own instructions for her send-off, and they aren’t being followed in the ceremony organised by her parents, so their disruption is right on one level, but it leads to more grief. An element of resolution, even reconciliation follows, as the family comes to terms with its loss: as well as the Langella’s uncompromising grandfather, Ann Dowd plays a more nuanced grandmother, and a decision about the children’s future appears to be reached (Ann Dowd with Frank Langella, pictured above right).

At which point Ross changes the register of his film dramatically. If until then he’s been making an essentially indie, rather than Hollywood studio film – a dichotomy that, it could be argued, in some way parallels the distinction between the independence of the family's forest world and the conventional society which they are rejoining – from here on Ross starts playing by more predictable rules. There’s a particular moment at which Captain Fantastic turns away from more challenging territory, one where issues can be left unresolved, towards something increasingly sentimental.

That may not be a reading shared by the majority of viewers, and it doesn’t stop the film from still being entertaining, funny and moving, while the acting remains outstanding throughout, but it flows against the original grain. After that opening scene that went to one extreme, Captain Fantastic closes on Ben and his remaining offspring living what might almost be a parody (but, I fear, isn’t) of the American domestic hearth, right down to soft focus furnishings and granola. It’s just too cosy to be true, and it’s hard to credit how Ben has ended up there unless he’s been stiffed a quick off-screen lobotomy (he hasn’t). Closing credits recording archery and taxidermy contributions remind us of what’s gone missing.    

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk          

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Captain Fantastic

“A porno film where the point was the plot?!” The Nice Guys asks you to make quite a few imaginative leaps: to find Russell Crowe endearing and Ryan Gosling funny and to believe that anyone in 1977 would set out to shoot a skin flick with a storyline. Implausibly, but delightfully, all of the above come to pass in a buddy caper in which Crowe and Gosling partner up to crack jokes, bones and crime in 1970s Los Angeles.

Gosling plays Holland March, a widowed private investigator of low morals and lower ability who exploits confused old ladies for an easy living. He’s hired by one such to locate her missing niece Amelia, until a burly enforcer comes round to his house and encourages him to drop the case by breaking his nose and his arm. The next time March meets Jackson Healy (Crowe) the tables have turned and he’s offering to go into business. Amelia’s mother (Kim Basinger), a bigwig in the justice department, is eager to bring her rebellious daughter in out of harm’s way.

Their odyssey takes them into the neon den of Californian hedonism as Amelia’s activities, it becomes clear, involved participation in a blue movie called How Do You Like My Car, Big Boy? Its star, a buxom pin-up called Misty Mountains, has already died in a spectacular crash at the start of the movie, and the corpses continue to form a disorderly pile, first when the trail takes the two partners to a high-rise hotel from which bodies can be seen tumbling, then at an orgiastic pool party in the Hollywood hills.The plot may be the point of How Do You Like My Car, Big Boy? but, while it keeps the characters on the move, it’s not exactly central to The Nice Guys. It involves, for the record, the criminal involvement of the car industry in a secret plan to thwart the green lobby. The pleasures are mostly to do with the rambunctious, knockabout antics of the two improvising male leads as they variously flirt and threaten their way through the immoral maze of the case. Crowe channels his drizabone inner Ocker to punch first and reflect later, and makes a lovely foil for Gosling’s hyperactive mugging. One delicious little sequence finds him ambushed in the john, attempting to keep his dignity with a girlie magazine over his privates. Somehow Gosling, hitherto the most straight-faced Hollywood lead of his generation, manages to make it extraordinarily funny.

There’s the added joy of Angourie Rice (pictured above with Gosling) as March’s wise-beyond-her-years 12-year-old daughter Holly, who tags along resourcefully even when the bullets fly, which in the final third of the film they do with a certain stylised relentlessness. Happily, scriptwriters Anthony Bagarozzi and Shane Black, who also directs with a florid eye for killer sight gags, are far more interested in the winning flaws of their heroes and even their villains. Their script taps into a spirit of exuberant cynicism. “Marriage is buying a house for someone you hate,” says Crowe. Plenty of zingers where that came from. The Nice Guys is one of the most pleasurable lessons in screen chemistry since Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin crossed America in Midnight Run.

• Read more reviews of the latest movie releases on theartsdesk

RYAN GOSLING'S FILMOGRAPHY

Blue Valentine (2010). A controversial break-up melodrama sees things from the male point of view

Drive (2011). Ryan Gosling's brilliant, bruising ride into LA darkness (pictured)

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). Ryan Gosling teaches Steve Carell how to score in a film that doesn't

The Ides of March (2011). George Clooney's star-packed morality tale superbly anatomises political chicanery

The Place Beyond the Pines (2013). Derek Cianfrance and Ryan Gosling follow Blue Valentine with an epic tale of cops and robbers

Gangster Squad (2013). Ruben Fleischer swaps zombies for gangsters with mixed results

Only God Forgives (2013). Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling follow Drive with a simmering tale of vengeance

The Big Short (2015). Director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis

The Nice Guys (2016). Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling buddy up to crack jokes, bones and crime in 70s LA

La La Land (2017). Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (pictured above) will have you floating out of the cinema on a cloud

Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Nice Guys