Hopkins is one Oscar winner you want to see

The Father

Cert: 12A, 1hr 37mins Nobody ★★★★★

Cert: 15 , 1hr 32mins Ellie And Abbie... ★★★★★

Cert: 15 , 1hr 22mins ★★★★★

The Father, deserved winner of two Oscars, is the film to get you off the couch and back into the cinema. It has a careerdefining performance from a dazzlingly good Anthony Hopkins (main picture) and a theatricality that transfers beautifully to the big screen.

It’s also one of those films best enjoyed when you know very little about it. So let me just say that the 83-year-old Hopkins is playing a still-well-turned-out Londoner who shares a large mansion flat with his middleaged daughter Anne, played (very nicely) by Olivia Colman.

Hopkins’s multi-layered performance conveys an extraordinary range of emotions and is fully deserving of the Oscar for Best Actor. But director Florian Zeller – co-adapting from his own stage play, alongside Christopher Hampton – fully earns his Oscar too. This is a brilliantly constructed, challenging and deeply revealing film but it holds your attention from beginning to heart-wrenching end. You’ll want to have seen it.

In Nobody, Hutch Mansell is purportedly a dull suburban accountant, until armed thieves break into his house and steal his small daughter’s

favourite bracelet. Big mistake. For inevitably it turns out that Mansell – played by Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star

Bob Odenkirk – is the guy various agencies used to call when they needed something ‘clearing up’. And now he’s back in business, with the bad guys getting badder, and more Russian, with every bloody encounter. It’s very violent but good fun.

Australian coming-of-age drama Ellie And Abbie (And Ellie’s Dead Aunt) details a teenager who thinks she might be in love with her classmate (Zoe Terakes, near left, with Sophie Hawkshaw as Ellie) when the ghost of a long dead aunt arrives to offer advice. It has neither the performances nor the screenplay to make it essential watching.