Name seven students in Ravenclaw. Which 14 subjects are on the syllabus at Hogwarts? Create a shopping list of 20 different types of magical sweet. In her Harry Potter stories JK Rowling conjured up an almanack of wizarding facts and figures which, for parents, proved extremely useful during long car journeys or steep mountain climbs (even if this parent didn’t know all the answers). A handy staple was “List 16 magical creatures”. It would keep them going for hours because, if memory serves, Rowling created only 14 of them.

David Yates is not the best-known film director in the world, but he has been at the helm of four of the most successful. All of them had “Harry Potter and the” in the title. After the last Potter movie he took a break among the computer-generated jungle foliage of The Legend of Tarzan, but he’s now back working in the service of JK Rowling’s imagination with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

While the world goes to hell in a handbasket, it’s faintly reassuring to imagine that there might be some intelligent life form out there beyond the stars that’s just waiting to land on our planet and make us all love one another – or swiftly put us out of our squabbling misery, once and for all. This familiar story – from The Day the Earth Stood Still, through Close Encounters and Independence Day, to Mars Attacks – is  reworked for adults with a philosophical bent in Arrival.

It's getting mighty crowded in the superhero lounge. After the underwhelming Batman v Superman and the overwhelming Captain America: Civil War, here's the X-Men posse back on the warpath, once again under the bombastic helmsmanship of Bryan Singer.

Jurassic World opens on a close-up. The smooth creamy surface of an egg is shattered by a claw attacking it vexatiously from within. In no time at all a scaly little critter is peeping out at us. It took a mite longer for the latest in the Jurassic Park franchise to hatch. The last film was 14 years ago and this fourth instalment seems to have been on the development slate almost ever since. Now that it's here at last, what’s new?

Joss Whedon’s Avengers sequel loses much of the original’s exhilarating freshness. It begins in the middle, doesn’t really end, and regularly makes you wonder just how long the Marvel box-office bonanza can continue. The moment when its Cinema Universe’s exponentially growing complexity slams into entropic reverse, as happened to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original comic-book vision, is plainly visible on the horizon.

Born in an era when the Japanese were censored out of making a straightforward post-Hiroshima film, King of the Monsters Godzilla – or aka his infinitely cooler Japanese name Gojira – is a hero, cultural phenomenon and metaphor: he represents nature that can both kill and save. As a film star, however, he’s moved from ultra low-budget to high in over 28 films of various quality. The original 1954 Japanese film produced by Toho is often considered the best with Roland Emmerich’s 1998 version almost killing the monster and the franchise off entirely.

Best known for the Mortal Kombat twosome, the Resident Evil franchise (one of the DVD extras noted how the zombie dogs constantly ate off their zombie makeup) and big, bulging swipes at other genres with Event Horizon, AVP: Alien vs Predator and The Three Musketeers, director Paul W S Anderson’s Pompeii has been neither a critical nor box office hit in America. It is not, however, without charm. Call him old fashioned but Anderson knows how to stage a fight and pace a story.

Unless Peter Jackson and his team decide to mine The Silmarillion for three more J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations, their films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will, by this time next year, comprise a complete hexalogy – or, at least, two consecutive triptychs.

Sometimes, a little bit of everything amounts to a whole lot of nothing. RIPD features a standard buddy cop caper bolted on to a heaven-can-wait drama channelling a body swap comedy also starring a CGI cartoon element. There’s even a heavy dollop of the old Wild West and a splodge of Armageddon alarmism. You get a grab-bag of half a dozen film styles jostling for attention. It must be like this teaching a classful of needy reception kids with ADD.