The trusty cartoon franchise brings Daffy Duck and Porky Pig back for fresh antics, updated pretty neatly for our times

The Looney Tunes franchise has been regularly resuscitated and rebooted for new generations ever since Warner Bros stopped making the original cartoons back in the 1960s, creating more minutes of screen time than all the Dracula, Wuthering Heights and Jurassic Park remakes and spin-offs combined. Like some fiendish glue from the Acme corporation, the Looney Tunes IP is sticky, resilient stuff: instantly recognisable, easily dubbed into other languages, with codes and quirks peculiarly pleasing to audiences of all ages, and yet easily malleable to fit the comic modes and manners of each age.

This feature, starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza), feels very 2020s – in that it’s not embarrassed about getting sappy from the off and then resolving its core dramatic problems with a big dose of child psychologist-friendly empowerment lessons about accepting people for who they are and the value of loyalty. Bizarrely for anyone raised on Saturday-morning repeats of the original 1930s-50s toons where the two were usually adversaries, Daffy and Porky are best friends forever here, raised together like brothers by their adoptive parent, Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore), who then promptly carks it in the first 10 minutes after enjoining them to always stick together.

Based on a 2000 novella, this sweet animation follows a young girl who wakes from a vegetative state on the verge of feral, but begins to bond with others after an intervention by her grandmother

This tender and sweet animation from film-makers Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is an involving, poignant study of early childhood; how fragile it is, and how strong you feel yourself to be to have outlived or surpassed it. It is based on the autobiographical novella The Character of Rain by Belgian author Amélie Nothomb, published in 2000.

Loïse Charpentier voices the role of Amélie, a little girl living in Kobe, Japan, with her Belgian family in the late 60s; mum, dad and older brother and sister. Until the age of three, she was in a persistent vegetative state, but was miraculously jolted free of it by a terrifying earthquake; yet she emerges quarrelsome and almost feral, to the despair of her parents. That is until her elegant grandmother Claude (Cathy Cerda) comes to visit and gives her a piece of narcotically delicious white Belgian chocolate, which causes Amélie to bloom into a lovely, biddable child who adores her Japanese nanny Nishio-san (Victoria Grosbois).

A diminutive young buck aspires to compete with rhinos and horses in ‘roarball’, but this by-numbers tale is not the greatest of any time

Greatest of all time? No. Possibly not even the greatest of half-term. This loud, chaotic and unlovable animated kids’ comedy feels as though it is bordering on AI slop, algorithmically generated and instantly familiar from Zootropolis, Sing and other movies with talking animals. It is a shame, because it has a real-life inspiration: basketball star Stephen Curry, who was repeatedly told at the start of his career that he was too skinny and too small to make it as a pro. Curry is a producer here, and has a performing role. But in spite of this connection, Goat lacks heart and soul, and a sense of genuine emotions.

What it does have is some pretty decent voice acing, bringing a degree of charm to the movie. Will Harris (voiced by Caleb McLaughlin) is a goat who has grown up dreaming of playing professional “roarball”, a fiercer and faster version of basketball. But Will is a “small” and roar players are all “bigs” – powerful beasts such as rhinos and horses. Will’s hero and the star of his favourite team, the Thorns, is a panther called Jet (Gabrielle Union), a champ close to retirement but determined to win the league. When Will gets a shot at joining the Thorns, he is laughed at, underrated but undeterred.

Asa Butterfield leads a cast of freaks looking for acceptance and love in a harsh and uncaring world in this rather melancholy version of Guy Bass’s kid-lit series

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this middling Brit-populated, European-financed, Indian-manufactured animation is the radical change of career trajectory it represents for its pinballing director, Steve Hudson. Hudson broke through with 2006’s Loachian social drama True North, a migrant movie starring Peter Mullan – now, having witnessed how the other half lives while directing episodes of primetime TV’s Cranford, he pivots to pixels with a big-screen adaptation of Guy Bass’s kid-lit books. Stitch Head feels like a tentative first step into a heavily crowded field, sutured together from ideas and images previously encountered in far more confident and accomplished entertainments.

Bass’s eponymous hero is rendered here as a boy with Bowie-esque heterochromatic eyes, a baseball-like head and the voice of Asa Butterfield; his home is a castle overlooking small town Grubbers Nubbin, where a mad professor (Rob Brydon) carries out Frankenstinian experiments. If the lead character design is solid – accompanying adults may wind up knitting replicas of Stitch Head’s onesie – the surrounding menagerie seems a bit too Pixar for comfort; Stitch’s furry cyclops pal Creature (Joel Fry) is conspicuously a hybrid of Monsters, Inc’s Mike and Sully. Once this pair abscond to join a travelling freak show, Stitch Head ventures a rather melancholy and misshapen showbiz story – that of a boy who, much like the film, just wants to be loved.

The stage and screen actor on turning gaffes into gifts, the impact of Eowyn, and the Lord of the Rings stew scene fans won’t stop asking about

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Your latest role is Queen of the Cuttlefish, in The Pout-Pout Fish; if you could be a fish for a day, which one would it be and why?

The blue groper at Clovelly beach – because it’s like an institution, and people go there to see it. I just think it’s cool that there’s a local fish that people actually go and see and talk about – it’s a special fish.

With a turn by Mark Hamill and a saltily suggestive catchphrase for Patrick, the fourth SpongeBob film shows that anything can still happen in Bikini Bottom

Could the students who snickered their way through those first SpongeBob adventures have foreseen the franchise persisting 25 years on, even after metabolising the most lysergic pharmaceuticals? Such longevity is partly down to extra-commercial considerations, in that the series has a capacity for tickling adults’ funny bones – possibly even those now fully grown students – as well as the very young. Though it can’t claim anything quite as unexpected as the David Hasselhoff cameo in 2004’s The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie – not so much a high bar as an unforgettably wonky one – feature four thinks nothing of making Clancy Brown talk like a pirate while handing royalty cheques to Barbra Streisand and Yello. Anything can still happen in Bikini Bottom.

Preceded by a festive short for Paramount’s other weathered babysitters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the new SpongeBob film soon settles into a familiarly goofy groove, its script a PG-rated treatise on the pros and cons of growth. This SpongeBob (once more voiced by Tom Kenny) is now 36 clams high, a source of particular excitement as this will allow him to ride the rollercoaster of his dreams. (One early, trippy laugh: our overexcitable hero’s imagined loop-the-loops.) As in the best contemporary American animation, though, the corkscrew plotting is the real rollercoaster. SB’s quest to obtain the fabled swashbuckler certificate that will prove him a “big guy” brings him into conflict with the Flying Dutchman, voiced by the suddenly ubiquitous Mark Hamill.

Star turns from Helen Mirren, Andrea Riseborough and Toni Colette can’t stop cartoony sentimentality smothering this film directed by Winslet and written by her son Joe Anders

Kate Winslet’s feature directing debut is a family movie, scripted by her son Joe Anders; it’s a well-intentioned and starrily cast yuletide heartwarmer, like a two-hour John Lewis Christmas TV ad without the logo at the end. There are one or two nice lines and sharp moments but they are submerged in a treacly soup of sentimentality; in the end, I couldn’t get past the cartoony quasi-Richard Curtis characterisation and the weird not-quite-earthlingness of the people involved. Having said this, I am aware of having been first in the queue to denigrate Winslet’s Christmas film The Holiday, that is regarded by many as one of the most successful films of all time.

Helen Mirren is the June of the title, an affectionate but sharp-tongued matriarch who is diagnosed with terminal cancer in the run-up to Christmas, and her entire quarrelling clan will have to assemble in her hospital room. June, with a kind of benign cunning, realises that she can use her last days as a cathartic crisis that will cure her adult children’s unspoken hurt. They are a stressed careerist (Winslet), a stay-at-home mum (Andrea Riseborough), a hippy-dippy natural birth counsellor (Toni Collette) and a troubled soul (Johnny Flynn), plus all their various kids. There is also June’s daft old husband Bernie, played by Timothy Spall, who likes a drink and can’t talk about his feelings, and whose scatterbrained goofiness has a sad origin. Stephen Merchant plays Riseborough’s lovably useless husband and a gentle hospital nurse, played by Fisayo Akinade, is the ensemble’s self-effacing guide to a wiser future.

Taika Waititi’s quirky family caper has no explicit mention of Christmas – but that doesn’t stop it from being the best Christmas viewing

Picking a Christmas movie is hard work. It needs to be suitable for the entire family, which rules out Die Hard, and entertaining for the whole family, which rules out It’s a Wonderful Life. It has to be good, which rules out Love Actually, and it has to suit distracted viewing, which rules out Muppet Christmas Carol, of which it’s a sin to miss a single second.

There is, however, no rule that says Christmas movies must include Christmas. Which is why Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople is the perfect Christmas movie.

David Heyman has joined the French media company StudioCanal with plans to bring one of the bestselling children’s book series of all time to the screen

The film-makers behind the successful Paddington series are to embark on a feature film adaptation of another British family favourite, the Mr Men and Little Miss series of illustrated children’s books.

David Heyman, whose Heyday Films produced Paddington and Paddington 2 as well as the Harry Potter series, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and White Noise, is to join with the UK arm of French media company StudioCanal to make the film.

Follow-up to 2016 animation about talking animals living in a utopia is a soulless film-by-numbers affair filled with corporately approved jokes

Another day, another supremely competent, passably-but-not-overwhelmingly funny digitally animated family comedy featuring talking animals. It’s not AI, but it might as well be. This is Zootropolis 2, which is named Zootopia 2 on its home turf in the US. (Is the reference to lefty ideas such as “utopia” too dangerous for the all-important foreign territories?) If this is the second in what promises to be a continuing series, perhaps Z3 will be cautiously hailed as a return to the franchise’s “dark” roots.

We are back in the magical wonderland of Zootropolis, in which all animals live together, big and small, prey and predator; a place, in fact, where the comedy lion can lie down with the hilarious back-talking lamb, and all the animals provide undemanding voiceover work for comedy talent such as Alan Tudyk, who makes a minor vocal appearance. As before, our heroes are an odd couple of cops in the ZPD or Zootropolis Police Department: idealistic young rabbit Judy Hopps (geddit?), voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin, and sly fox Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman, a creature once on the wrong side of the law but now a supposedly reformed character who has joined the police.