Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

HOTLINE MIAMI 2: WRONG NUMBER Kill, die, repeat in this garish, hypnotic action sequel

Kill, die, repeat in this garish, hypnotic action sequel

There are so many worthy, interesting, non-violent games in the world. And then there's this… this steaming hot mess of pulsing electronica, endless ultraviolence and drug-inflected hyper-visuals. This is the videogame the Droogs would have played in A Clockwork Orange. And, rather worryingly, it's absolutely brilliant fun.

Britain's Bloodiest Dynasty, Channel 5

BRITAIN'S BLOODIEST DYNASTY, CHANNEL 5 Horrible history and medieval mayhem as the Plantaganets get the soap treatment

Horrible history and medieval mayhem as the Plantaganets get the soap treatment

Dan Jones has turned up to narrate the dramatised story of the Plantagenets in history lite mode, perhaps aimed at capturing a young audience. In Plantagenet country, as shown on TV, we witness a medieval version of soap opera family sagas where all hinges on an overbearing father, a conniving queen, murder, and general mayhem. The tale, we were informed, was shocking, brutal, more astonishing than any fiction, and this ruling family, from its inception with Henry II of Anjou, became the greatest English dynasty of all time. (Tell that to the Hanoverians.)

Expendables III

EXPENDABLES III Stallone's gang of geriatric mercenaries still haven't lost their stomach for the fight

Stallone's gang of geriatric mercenaries still haven't lost their stomach for the fight

There was a brief moment back in the day when Sylvester Stallone thought he ought to be a serious actor (remember Cop Land?), but posterity will surely recall him as the King of the Franchise. As if Rocky and Rambo weren't enough, the 68-year-old Stallone is now enjoying a major string of paydays with The Expendables, and this third instalment will merely whet the global appetite for more.

Miss Violence

MISS VIOLENCE Greek tragedy on a domestic scale in this haunting effort from Alexandros Avranas

Greek tragedy on a domestic scale in this haunting effort from Alexandros Avranas

Miss Violence opens with an 11th birthday party whose brightly coloured balloons, pointed party hats and forced family jollity might seem unremarkable if a little girl hadn't chosen to stick Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" on the stereo - not only Cohen at his most sinisterly sensual but a song inspired by the Holocaust. He wrote it after learning orchestras were a feature of some concentration camps, and that they were sometimes pressed into playing through brutality, so that their music became horribly anomalous accompaniments to punishments or violent death.

Going to the Dogs, Channel 4

GOING TO THE DOGS, CHANNEL 4 Man's best friend sought in not very friendly Birmingham locations

Man's best friend sought in not very friendly Birmingham locations

Two years ago Penny Woolcock was at the heart of Birmingham street gangs in her documentary One Mile Way; that one was titled after the fact that two of the city’s competing outfits were separated only by the distance of the film’s title. In Going to the Dogs, she's back in the same 'hood, this time investigating the city’s dog-fighting scene, with the help of one of the earlier film’s lead protagonists, Dylan Duffus, who proved here a very able narrator-presenter.

Fruitvale Station

FRUITVALE STATION Star turn from Michael B. Jordan at the heart of affecting directorial debut

A star turn from Michael B. Jordan is at the heart of this affecting directorial debut

In the very first hours of 2009, Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old African-American, was traveling back to the East Bay suburbs with a group of friends after celebrating New Year’s in San Francisco when they were herded off their BART train (the Bay Area’s version of the Tube) by the transport police onto a platform at Fruitvale Station following an altercation. After an escalation of anxiety and machismo on both sides, one of the BART police shot the unarmed, handcuffed Grant in the back (he later claimed he thought he was firing his Taser) as the train waited in the station.

Blue Ruin

BLUE RUIN Jeremy Saulnier's striking second film is a story of spiralling revenge

Jeremy Saulnier's striking second film is a story of spiralling revenge

Ah, revenge. Why does something so bad sometimes feel so necessary? Particularly in its most bloodthirsty form, it's a concept well explored onscreen, from almost every western and martial arts film to the final act of so many horrors – and the entirety of the spectacularly absurd TV series currently showing on E4, which is so obsessed with the idea it couldn't be called anything other than Revenge. But what do those determined to get their own back truly hope to achieve, and where does an eye for an eye actually end?

The Raid 2

Gareth Evans delivers a fiercely exciting, expansive sequel

After reinvigorating the actioner in 2011 with The Raid and its furious flurry of feet and fists, what next for the obscenely talented Welsh writer-director Gareth Evans? More of the same? Well, not quite. The sequel widens its net and extends its running-time, taking the action from a Jakarta tower block to the city's streets and dividing its time between the gangs competing for control of the city. Returning are Evans' martial arts muse Iko Uwais (with whom this marks his third collaboration) and the almost embarrassingly exciting ultra-violence.

300: Rise of an Empire

A second dose of vaguely historical, highly hysterical action - with added warrior women

300: Rise of an Empire is the follow-up to perhaps the most homoerotic film of all time, 300 - a film whose obsession with the well-lubricated muscularity of the male form was matched only by its unabashed exaltation of ultra-violence (rendered endlessly and often tediously in slow-mo). It was hardly high art or sound history, but it had aesthetic bravado and a certain logic, with the strangely sexy battles effectively evoking the Spartan idea of a glorious death.

Non-Stop

Airborne, asinine heroics with Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore

At some point during Non-Stop - a mostly serviceable though increasingly nuts peril-on-a-plane movie - I began to doubt that Liam Neeson had ever had a credible career. Recently we've seen him starring in assorted nonsense such as Battleship and Wrath of the Titans and if you go back a few years you'll recall him looking bored in The Phantom Menace. But what we've gotten particularly used to is Neeson as the middle-aged action man, the skull cruncher from the pretty hideous Taken movies.