Barry Hertz

Dunn’s work is a far more fantastical feat, one that mixes slow-burn drama with a welcome Cronenbergian sensibility. Oh, and Isabella Rossellini plays a talking hamster. Just try to top that.

A sharp dramedy focusing on the romantic stirrings of a lonely office worker, played with considerable wit and verve by the 69-year-old Sally Field.

The drama is an endlessly inventive and devastating work, a lyrical ode to a city that has turned its back on its most devoted citizens.

The director’s semi-autobiographical, 1980s-set story may be small – it mostly focuses on the turbulent relationship between Julie and Anthony as the former struggles to find her artistic voice and the latter battles various addictions – but her impulses and vision are grand.

The filmmaker has such a strong command of mood, character and performances – especially impressive given the age of her cast – that her world quickly, seductively overwhelms.

There is no grand narrative or point to be hammered home; instead, Olshefski delivers a subtle, sincere and honest portrait of barely making ends meet in modern America.

White Lie is a wildly entertaining ride.

The film’s delightful collision of the poetic and the profane is illustrated perfectly about midway through Chapter 2.

Waves is unmistakably and defiantly its own thing – and when its ideas and aesthetics coalesce, it is a wonder to behold.

Whimsically beautiful, as if Anderson discovered a long-lost Antoine de Saint-Exupéry picture book.

It’s all delightfully fizzy, bloody fun – even if there’s the teeniest, tiniest hint of sequel ambitions.

Baker mostly crafts a tiny adventure of absorbing wonder.

The film is filthy with nuanced moments of fierce, sweaty intimacy, all shot with a precise eye for detail. At the very least, it will make you rethink your next rodeo.

In some ways, it’s almost a silent film – characters only speak when necessary, with Foster and McKenzie (a remarkable find, who is bound to generate Lawrence comparisons) telling the story with their eyes. But Granik’s attention to family dynamics, and the pained feelings of those living outside America’s rigid expectations, speak louder than words.

The film’s bizarre, gore-soaked premise actually manages to ease viewers into the far more uncomfortable topic of grief – after all, dying is easy, but living with death is much more complicated.

Blanchett, as always, is flawless as the seductive and secretive Kathryn, but it’s Fassbender who reveals a different side of himself.

Hanks is, not surprisingly, excellently cast, but it’s Heller’s direction and inventive aesthetic instinct – everything is washed out browns, with the exception of a moving blue-lit finale – that sell the work so well.

Puzzling out the reality and meaning of Long Day’s Journey into Night’s second half is as involving and absorbing an experience as watching the thing itself. And by the time Luo makes his way to what seems like the end of his journey, it is hard to not similarly feel transformed, or at the very least shaken.

What follows is a dizzy, politically astute murder-mystery comedy that, while not reinventing the genre, certainly hits all the expected beats with flair.

From its joyful and exuberant opening half to a late-game moment of deep and sombre introspection, Lee’s version of American Utopia is thoughtful pop performance art captured with the propulsive power of cinema.

His characters are the brightest, slickest people you will ever meet, and whether you’re meant to love or loathe them, Sorkin has a genuine talent for ensuring his heroes and villains will forever stick in your head, wandering the recesses of your mind in an eternal walk-and-talk formation.

Part siege movie, part rural drama, part gore-soaked freak-out, Bacurau is the one instance where it’s the destination, not the journey, that matters.

Clifton Hill becomes just as thrilling and disturbing as its titular strip of haunted houses and fading-fast motels.

Campbell is tasked with carrying much of the film’s action and dialogue -- including two seemingly rambling but actually profound monologues delivered to unseen audiences in a nondescript bar -- and easily commands the screen.

It is only when Diggs and Casal near the end of the film − including a too-convenient-by-half encounter with a cop − that the effort’s ambition in creating a treatise on all of Western society’s ills begins to crack. But until then, Blindspotting possesses enough flair, passion and sweat to put up one hell of a fight.

An intense new film that pivots on a tremendous, teeth-gnashing performance from Law as a 1980s father whose aspirations of upward mobility threaten to destroy his life.

It is a love story, as beautiful as it is devastating.