It’s been a big year for Amy Schumer, one that saw her shift from niche feminist comic to full-scale poster woman for patriarchy-busting – oddly, via a self-written movie showcase that meets Hollywood very much on its own conservative terms. A decent Judd Apatow film and a dismaying Schumer one, Trainwreck (Universal, 15) sets the bar for mainstream female empowerment markedly low. Its protagonist, Amy, is a talented journalist with a fuller figure, dirty sense of humour and voracious sex drive. These are marks against the archetypically winsome romantic-comedy heroine that Apatow and his eager star deem sufficient to justify the film’s iffier life lessons: women, change everything about your lifestyle to suit that of a more demure man and true happiness awaits.

That’s not on, even with a man as winningly dorky as Bill Hader playing a buttoned-up sports doctor who raises an eyebrow when his girlfriend orders wine with lunch. (So does the film: enjoying a drink and multiple sexual partners seem pretty modest vices to earn that unironic title.) Yet there’s little parity or compromise in a story fashioned as “the taming of the screw-up”. You wait for the scene where Schumer’s character shows Hader’s the occasional benefits of living out loud, or where the single life is permitted any advantage over the domestic bliss of her married sister (a superb Brie Larson), but it never comes. Good thing Schumer’s still very funny – even as she gives the best lines to Tilda Swinton’s gleefully vile lads’ mag editor. But Apatow, architect of the modern movie manchild, ultimately dictates her manifesto.

An actor more effectively, and surprisingly, taking the alpha male down a notch is Joel Edgerton. The Gift (Lionsgate, 15), his terrific debut as a writer-director, nervily rearranges the usual stakes of the yuppie home-invasion thriller. As an upmarket Los Angeles couple (Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall, both in career-best form) are menaced by Edgerton’s vaguely sex pest-scented loser, nothing proceeds quite as expected: the two men enter a stomach-clenching moral war that questions, as in the best domestic horror stories, just how close to home the true danger lies. Taut and nasty in genre terms, but rich and searching in human ones, it promises better things yet from Edgerton.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Paramount, 12) arrives with more to live up to than usual for a fifth film in a familiar action franchise – against all odds, Brad Bird’s preceding entry was the series’ most exuberant and inventive. This one, directed with businesslike zoom by Christopher McQuarrie, earned similar praise in many quarters, but I found it a rather cold return to the status quo: full of nimbly executed stunt theatre, patently recognisable but mirthless Hitchcock homage and Tom Cruise’s never-better teeth. There’s plenty to passingly enjoy in that formula, of course, but Bird’s madcap cartoon sensibility is missed.

I’d frankly rather see a sequel to a far less practically conceived spy blockbuster, Guy Ritchie’s The Man From UNCLE (Warner, 12), not that one will be forthcoming, after this quaintly japey cold war throwback all too inevitably evaporated at the box office. As storytelling it’s more or less a bust: Henry Cavill’s suave, side-parted CIA agent and Armie Hammer’s surly KGB counterpart give viewers little to invest in individually, so the back and forth of their reluctant collaboration passes by in a pomade-slick flash. As a style exercise, however, the film is compellingly meticulous, to the point of fetish play: there’s a positively queer undertone to the leads’ exquisitely self-aware sartorial duelling. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, even as my head drifted elsewhere. And I’ll always take an elegant nonsense over a toxically ugly one: the Adam Sandler-starring cacophonous video-arcade eyesore Pixels (Sony, 12) and Terry Jones’s loopy but laughless Simon Pegg romp Absolutely Anything (Lionsgate, 12) can safely stay on the shelf.

On the arthouse front, the ever-singular critics of Cahiers du cinéma recently named Nanni Moretti’s maternal melodrama Mia Madre (Artificial Eye, 15) the year’s best film, but I found myself largely immune to its moderate charms. Moretti’s personal investment is unmistakable in a story that splits its unconditional love between Mamma and the movies, and there’s fine work here from Margherita Buy as his female alter ego, but there’s something pat and incurious about it all.

Believe it or not, with almost three months to go until the awards, Oscar season is very much under way: last week the Academy announced a competitive 15-film shortlist for best documentary. Among them was Best of Enemies, a spry, subtly affecting portrait of political punditry that is now available on Netflix, where, given its concern with televisual persuasion, it is perhaps most aptly viewed. At its centre is the 1968 liberal-conservative debate between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr, a rhetorical showdown that influenced subsequent media discourse as vitally as the more scrutinised Frost-Nixon talks. Yet the film’s perspective isn’t strictly historical: with America’s key parties more polarised than ever, this is a timely study.