Christopher Machell

Despite its bland paperback title, French writer-director Stéphane Demoustier proves hasty assumptions wrong with his gripping, thoughtful third feature, courtroom drama The Girl with a Bracelet.

Fire Will Come is of an enigmatic and poetic cinema, borne of fierce, barely-contained vision.

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.

The grimy, crime-ridden cesspool of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s is a well-worn cinematic setting, but in her debut 1982 feature Smithereens, indie director Susan Seidelman used guerilla filmmaking techniques and a faux-documentary style to unearth the vitality and the verve of urban life at the bottom.

Herzog has a knack for extracting pithy, poetic responses from his subjects, but here he outdoes himself.

An uneasy and messy union of genre and arthouse, Possessor disturbs, thrills and eludes us in equal measure.

Just as we feel that we have grasped the truth behind the image, it vanishes into thin air: The Real Charlie Chaplin is a Sisyphean task of the directors’ own making.

Aster has concocted a weird mixture of dread, black humour and pathos, conjuring sympathy for the devil in a feverish hallucination.

Okuno’s Watcher is smart, engaging and intelligent, and it’s especially refreshing to see this sort of mid-budget, grown-up genre film getting a proper theatrical release.

By situating the film in the context of domestic abuse, Whannel avoids cliché by evoking the way that distressed women are routinely treated as irrational and disreputable – a theme carried through to the film’s inspired conclusion.

The film is strongest in its first half but the double act between Wright and Pattinson sustains throughout: never has the Bat-Gordon partnership been so well-realised. Inevitably the door is left open for sequels, but The Batman stands up as an incredibly satisfying, grown-up vision of its own.

Endless drone shots, perspective switches and too many CGI animals undercut any grit or claustrophobia that Trachtenberg – director of the brilliant 10 Cloverfield Lane – might otherwise have crafted. Meanwhile, the interminable score refuses to quiet down and let the images or emotions speak for themselves.

No Way Home feels like a full and complete film in a way that earlier MCU entries failed to. No Way Home takes a cynical corporate elevator pitch and uses it to examine what it means to be Spider-Man in a world where Holland’s Peter isn’t the only hero.

A rollicking masterclass in escalating tension.

The film’s doggedly chronological structure – at odds with its ostensible privileging of psychology over history – sometimes leaves its personal observations feeling superficial.

This version of Emma. is unlikely to win any accolades for invention. Indeed the 1996 film Clueless arguably remains the most exciting version of Austen’s novel. Nevertheless, de Wilde’s version is a confident and lively translation of Austen’s wit on to the screen.

Teemu Nikki's Euthanizer reveals itself to be an affecting examination of cruelty.

With Sorkin's signature whip-crack dialogue driving an astonishingly assured directorial debut, Molly's Game is an exhilarating, superbly crafted crime drama.

Shazam!’s candy-floss sweetness rarely fails to hit the spot.

There is a vitality and a quiet defiance to this kind of filmmaking that is difficult to resist.

Vesper is throughout a gripping post-apocalypse fable. Despite its mythological derivations, Buozyte and Samper’s world, grounded in blood, mud and viscera, is often uncomfortably close to our own.

Memory certainly makes a good go of it, weaving together industrial production history with its mythic, pulp and artistic inspirations. The disparate strands of Alien’s origins have never quite been connected like this in a popular documentary, but billing this as the “untold story” of Scott’s film is a bit of a stretch.

This is strong work for a debut feature, and while not presenting assisted suicide itself with the greatest of nuance, Plan 75 is an accomplished portrait of capitalist alienation.

Julia’s journey is one of nihilism having transformed into a quest for meaning: Rodeo’s final image speaks to both of these impulses.

La Mif refuses to proselytise on the moral character of its subjects; Lora’s terrible confession to the girls at the film’s climax is played not for tabloid revelation, but as a final expression of the flaws inherent in ourselves and the systems we depend on to protect us.

While Binoche is reliably magnetic and the fitfully pretty visuals match a ripped-from-the-headlines script, Who You Think I Am’s pot never quite comes to the boil.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa is at once a deeply satirical depiction of Hollywood and a sumptuous saga of the rise and fall of a star.

Del Toro’s latest ventures away from fantasy, revealing the monsters in this fable to be all too human.