Christopher Machell

Conceptually, Azor, is brilliant and its dreamlike editing that joins one meeting to the next with little connective tissue is often intriguing. But as a viewing experience, it is roundly obtuse with a repetitious, meandering narrative.

Only the Animals remains a highly satisfying and gripping thriller that, like the best of them, finds the time to properly contemplate the depths of its dominoes as they are arranged before the capricious hand of chance gleefully knocks them down, one by one.

Though its 60s-inspired, Gilliam-esque animation style is certainly awkward enough to draw the notice of the arthouse and indie crowds, Cryptozoo’s storytelling and themes fail to come up to the complexity of even a middling Pixar effort.

Grander in scope than any of Villeneuve’s work yet, Dune is proper, ambitious blockbuster filmmaking for grown-ups.

While Duarte and Stockler’s deeply-felt turns anchor the film from drifting into simplistic sentimentality, Hélène Louvart’s sumptuous cinematography elevates the script’s high-flung emotion with spaces that are often dreamlike; light is tangible like a haze, colours deep and tactile, and characters are glimpsed and doubled through screens, glass and mirrors, and Benedikt Schiefer’s classical score tenderly fills out and gives detail to the broader emotional brushstrokes.

Following in the footsteps of legendary documentary Paris Is Burning, Pier Kids is a poignant and chaotic study of the community of young black gay men and trans women who congregate at the piers of Hudson River Park, New York City.

Actor Daniel Brühl makes his directorial debut with this delightfully taut, blackly comic satire.

Balloon never uses its characters as proxies for political discussion; Tseden’s concern is firmly with his characters as human beings. His method is rooted in realism, favouring intimate, often handheld camera work whose immediacy is juxtaposed against often stunningly beautiful compositions and dreamlike landscapes.

The footage of Leclerc ascending sheer, near-featureless sheets of rock is so defiant of physics that it is easy to forget just how mind-bogglingly dangerous it is.

The Lost Leonardo is about obsession, ego, power and greed. For almost all of the film’s characters, Salvator Mundi represents nothing more than opportunity.

The film uses the Troubles and Brexit to frame its understanding of the past and the present. Brady suggests a liminal psychological space – much like the liminal political space that Brexit created – through which Lauren and Kelly’s traumas move and, perhaps, can be understood.

Pig offers something strangely tender and even sometimes lyrical, wrapped up in the trappings of a noirish thriller that is as much a satire on the meaning of value and social status as it is a straightforward revenge film.

Depicting a fictional uprising in an unnamed Mexican city, New Order ably depicts the terror, confusion and violence of political revolution, but stops short of offering meaningful context.

The magical realms of Justino’s stories are echoed in the real world, where spaces are enclosed but liminal, defined by uneasy boundaries that are easily breached.

Andrésen became an overnight worldwide sensation and, through the lens of documentarians Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri, an object lesson in the exploitation of children by the entertainment industry.

Nowhere Special is driven by the primal emotion of its child-parent dynamic and moving performances from both its leads, while the theme of social class resonates throughout.

Broomfield’s triumph is in reimagining Biggie and Tupac’s murders out of their mythology and into a new context in which they are emblematic of a social malaise characterised by toxic masculinity, misogyny, racism, and police corruption.

There is a wealth of real humanity underneath The Truffle Hunters‘ polished surface; in key moments, the film’s high aesthetics fade away to reveal unvarnished, understated pathos.

Structured in parts like a thriller, Sweat is truly most successful as a character study, while its representation of social media gives rise to a nuanced understanding of contemporary anxieties over isolation and intimacy.

A charming, deadpan study of national identities, an idiosyncratic love letter to his home and an unvarnished tribute to life’s universal absurdities.

Shiva Baby is ostensibly a comedy yet has all the tension of a thriller. At its most emotionally fraught, it uses the visual and aural grammar of horror cinema.

Machoian has crafted an intense, moving and bleak portrait of a disintegrating marriage and fractured masculinity.

What we are left with instead is a story of astonishing tenderness; a study of love as a tempering salve to the sublime of history’s passing.

Sound of Metal is an astonishing accomplishment for both its long-nascent director and its British star, Riz Ahmed, for whom his turn as heavy metal drummer Ruben represents a career-best performance.c

This western-tinged, visceral Icelandic drama deserves as large an audience as possible.

Fun, violent and cathartic, but with an air of arch self-satisfaction that misses the complexity of the debate it constructs around itself.

The film undoubtedly delivers, with all the monster thumping and building smashing that we could want, not to mention a not-so-surprise late appearance from a classic adversary.

Bryan Fogel’s new documentary painstakingly – and painfully – traces the moments up to and following Khashoggi’s murder.