Allan Hunter

Director Lone Scherfig’s sentimental approach favours easy laughs and warm romance but the film starts to cut a little deeper in its closing stages.

The second feature from Nicolas Bedos is a sweet, inventive Richard Curtis-style romantic-comedy crowdpleaser that deftly balances hearty laughs and heartwarming emotion.

The economical, precisely calibrated screenplay is nicely filled with enough simmering conflicts, character flaws and guilty resentments to keep you intrigued by what lies beneath the surface of these comfortable, middle-class lives

The Dating Game is sustained by the humanity that Du Feng finds in each of the individuals we come to know and understand a little better.

The initial promise of a South African Brokeback Mountain broadens into a measured consideration of class, race, self-loathing and self-assertion in a compact but pleasingly complex drama.

La Civil paints a compelling picture of a society in which nobody can be trusted and everyone is complicit in a neverending cyle of violence, intimidation and revenge.

The people interviewed are sharp and witty, carrying their heroism lightly and revealing a strength of character that sustained them through lengthy imprisonment and beyond.

This is unflinching, but is very much a film of love and understanding

A modest, social realist drama, its air of familiarity does not diminish its impact as a heartbreaker.

2018 wears its heart on its sleeve and succeeds as tense, well-paced popular entertainment.

A heartwarming true story that has been expertly crafted into an irresistible, emotion-charged documentary.

Hanging By a Wire may have all the urgency of a Hollywood disaster movie from the 1970s, but also incorporates an undercurrent of commentary on the neglect of poor rural communities in Pakistan.

It is a governing sense of restraint that lends the film such an emotional kick, and breathes fresh life into an old classic.

It is the attention to detail and the refusal to compromise that allows Serra to create such a compelling, coherent vision.

Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy allows Hamaguchi to return to themes he has explored in previous work from the way life is measured in twists of fate to a sense of duality in individual lives and characters.

The result is an appealing, soulful romance with a considerable emotional tug.

Sadiq’s screenplay navigates a complex web of secrets and lies, pressures and prejudices to create a soulful human drama intent on challenging narrow minds.

Drag is a form of self-expression, an act of political defiance and a means of reinvention in Solo.

Even those with little interest in the beautiful game should be entertained by Saipan, a breezily engaging narrative.

Szumowska’s command of craft and a torrent of unsettling imagery will enhance her reputation as a visionary director.

Dynamic storytelling and powerful performances bring out the pathos in an unusual tale of conflicting loyalties set on the criminal edges of a travelling community.

As free-wheeling as a Preston Sturges farce, the handsome-looking Mug feels scattershot at times but it does convey the sense of a Poland racing towards hell in a hand cart.

Giving her characters shading and the story space to breathe, Talati has created a quietly captivating, sharply observed film.

The ending is as low-key as the rest of the film, but the subtle shifts in power and understanding feel like a significant coming of age.

The thriller-like intrigue in Meeting With Pol Pot is sustained by tension around whether the title event will ever actually happen and, ultimately, whether any of the trio will make it out alive.

Winterbottom delivers a heady cocktail of absurdity and profundity, laced with a generous measure of cutting one-liners in a film that builds into a scathing commentary on a world where the rich keep getting richer and the poor are merely collateral damage.

The bittersweet realities of being a stranger in a strange land create a complex, thought-provoking human interest film.

Bobi Wine is an intimate portrait of a hugely engaging figure that also serves as a sobering warning about the seeming impossibility of democratic change in a dictatorship.