Ignore the weather and lockdown gloom, and watch one of these instead…

1. BOOKSMART (15, 98 mins) Streaming now on Amazon Prime Video and from January 24 on Netflix

School’s out for the summer but life lessons about sisterly solidarity and abusing the good nature of a teddy bear never end in the raucous rites-of-passage comedy Booksmart.

Actress Olivia Wilde identifies herself as a high achiever with a riotous feature film directorial debut, strutting confidently down the same corridors of beautifully articulated teen angst as Clueless and Mean Girls. A sorority of four female scriptwriters cram in a dizzying array of pithy and potty-mouthed one-liners between some deeply touching moments of self-reflection and realisation.

The heartfelt hilarity is delivered with genuine warmth and grin-inducing sincerity by the dream team double-act of Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein. They have us rooting for their sassy, self-aware misfits from the moment they prepare for another day at school with impromptu body-popping on the side of the road.

Belly laughs are bountiful, trading in pop culture references and near-the-knuckle humour that never threatens to become crude or mean-spirited. These girls are sugar and spice and all things naughty-but-nice.

2. PADDINGTON (PG, 91 mins) Screening on Film4 on Saturday, January 23 at 4.50pm and streaming on Amazon Prime Video

More than 50 years after he first appeared in print, author Michael Bond’s beloved bear Paddington arrives on the big screen in his first star-packed family adventure. Director Paul King’s film lovingly weaves the traditional tenets of the duffel-coat wearing bear’s story into a modern narrative.

Like the books, the film starts in deepest, darkest Peru, where a well-mannered three-foot bear (voiced by Ben Whishaw) lives with his elderly Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton) and Uncle Pastuzo (Michael Gambon). When their home is threatened, Aunt Lucy packs her nephew off to the safety of London where he seeks shelter with worrywart Mr Brown (Hugh Bonneville) and his clan.

A villainous taxidermist (Nicole Kidman) becomes hell-bent on “stuffing that bear” so the Browns close ranks to keep their furry friend safe. King’s delightful adaptation is as comforting and sweet as Paddington’s beloved marmalade. The script has heaps of heart and enough humour and carefully plotted cameos to ensure everyone grins and bear hugs every feelgood frame.

3. PITCH PERFECT 2 (12, 110 mins) Screening on Film4 on Sunday January 24 at 6.45pm and Thursday January 28 at 6.45pm and streaming on Netflix

Lightning almost strikes twice in the sequel to aca-mazing comedy Pitch Perfect. Actress Elizabeth Banks nestles in the director’s chair for an uproarious second outing and she confidently conducts a choir of familiar faces through soaring musical mash-ups and pitch-slapping putdowns.

Screenwriter Kay Cannon, who penned the original, enforces the message of femme power by contriving a spectacular fall from grace for the Barden Bellas to inspire her plucky heroines to rediscover their sisterly solidarity.

Beyonce’s anthemic Run The World (Girls) is a fitting opener for one medley of redemption, emphasising that while these girls wanna have fun, they won’t do so at the expense of friendships or their careers. Rebel Wilson turbo-charges her scenes as Fat Amy and is rewarded with the film’s only solo – Pat Benatar’s power ballad We Belong – that builds to a rousing call to arms for the broken-hearted.

4. SUPERBAD (15, 113 mins) Streaming now on Netflix and streaming from January 21 on Amazon Prime Video

Tumultuous years, when hormone-addled teenagers cling onto the security of their high school cliques before striking out on their own, have been exploited endlessly for laughs and tears.

Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Superbad is a surprisingly sentimental story of two socially inept friends (Jonah Hill, Michael Cera), who live in each other’s back pockets but must now acknowledge their diverging futures. Greg Mottola’s film ricochets at full pelt between gross-out humour and touching self-reflection. Hill and Cera are an entertaining double-act. The former spouts a machine-gun tirade of obscenities while the latter is endearingly nervous of what life on a college campus may hold.

Rogen and Bill Hagen are two meddlesome cops who dispense words of wisdom about the rules of mating and dating. “I met the missus at paintball,” confides one officer. “Shot her in the neck… we really hit it off.”

5. BURIED (15, 94 mins) Screening on Channel 4 on Saturday, January 23 at 12.20am and streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Rodrigo Cortes’ thriller goes back to basics and daringly asks us to invest all our emotions in one character, who spends the entire film on screen, trapped in a single, cramped location. Not since Sam Rockwell discovered the terrifying secrets of Moon or Tom Hanks found himself a Cast Away has the weight of a film rested solely on one actor’s shoulders.

Ryan Reynolds is on his own in Buried, which traps the actor inside a wooden coffin deep underground for 94 nail-biting minutes. Cortes doesn’t allow his camera to escape the subterranean prison for a single second – no flashbacks, no fleeting glimpses of the sunshine above the tomb.

Instead, the camera cleverly moves around the space over Reynolds’s dirty, sweat-drenched body, lit by the flickers of a cigarette lighter or the beam of a torch. When darkness occasionally prevails, we can still hear his rapid breathing and clothes catching on splinters of wood. Viewers who suffer from claustrophobia should look away…

6. GONE GIRL (18, 143 mins) Screening on Film4 on Thursday, January 28 at 11.05pm and streaming on Amazon Prime Video

Ignorance is bliss when it comes to Gone Girl. If you haven’t read Gillian Flynn’s 2012 psychological thriller and you know nothing of the serpentine twists that propelled the novel to the top of the bestsellers list then jealously guard your cluelessness.

There’s an undeniable delight watching Flynn wrong-foot us with this spiky satire on media manipulation and the glossy facade of celebrity marriages. When the central characters promise to love, honour and obey, til death do them part, one of them takes the vow very seriously.

You have to dig deep beneath the surface of David Fincher’s polished film to find the jet black humour but it’s there, walking hand-in-hand with sadism and torture. Rosamund Pike plumbs the depths of human emotion as the pretty wife, who vanishes without trace on her fifth wedding anniversary and is presumed dead at the hands of her handsome husband (Ben Affleck). As battles of the sexes go, Fincher’s film is a resolutely one-sided skirmish.

7. HARRY BROWN (18, 99 mins) Screening on Five Star on Friday January 22 at 11.50pm and Tuesday January 26 at 11.05pm

Britain is broken. In dark and depressing times, unlikely heroes make a stand against the savagery. In Daniel Barber’s brutal and uncompromising directorial debut, that hero is a retired Marine whose best friend dies at the hands of a gang of yobs. Rather than sit back and let these animals run amok, the old-timer vows revenge by speaking the only language that these young men and women know: punishment.

Sir Michael Caine delivers a compelling performance in a role thematically reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s harrowing thriller Gran Torino. Barber’s film is grittier, opening with a gang initiation that comprises shooting a nameless woman on the street. It is the first of many instances of senseless bloodletting as the tightly wound narrative leads the eponymous vigilante on a heart-breaking tour of squalid drug dens and crime-riddled housing estates.

Scenes of violence are graphic and unsettling, punctuating a narrative that doesn’t pretend to hold any easy answers to 21st-century social malaise.