Christopher Machell

She Dies Tomorrow is billed as a horror, and its scenario certainly is that. But the word ‘horror’ denotes active subjects – even if their activity is mainly screaming and running – whereas there’s a melancholy to Seimetz’ film that feels too fixed in place for the instability of horror.

No amount of tight corridors and shots of CCTV monitors ever make protagonist Tatyana feel in peril: this, far more than derivative monsters and confusing themes, is Sputnik’s fatal error.

There’s little here to surprise anyone with a passing familiarity with the story, and its creepiest elements sometimes feel neutered. It may be heresy, but the body-horror of the Land of Toys and sublime terror of the whale were imagined far more viscerally in the Disney version.

Labyrinth of the Turtles is a charming and occasionally moving love letter to the legendary Spanish-Mexican surrealist, and at a spry 80 minutes, doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Make Up taps into a rich Gothic tradition where repressed emotions find their vent in uncanny space and sexual awakening is realised through the imagination.

Calm with Horses’ driving concern – the corrosive nature of violence on the self – is rendered in brutal, empathic precision, while the recovery of its protagonist’s humanity as it teeters on the cliff edge is simply heartbreaking.

Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency is a sombre, layered study of the human cost of capital punishment. One of this era’s most powerful actors, Alfre Woodard, leads with one of her best, most understated performances yet.

Spaceship Earth deftly captures the sincere wonder and optimism of those who believed in the project. There’s simply no denying the sheer ambition of the damn thing, let alone that they more or less pulled it off.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’ vérité style belies a quasi-staged reality that challenges the distinction between fiction and documentary, studying the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world.

A White, White Day is Ingimundur’s film through and through, centred on Sigurdsson’s intensely gruff, brooding performance. But Hlynsdóttir’s Salka gives him a run for his money.

Herzog doesn’t quite hit the mark here: Family Romance’s denouement is certainly moving but its depiction of Ishii’s emotional conflict is undercooked and perhaps even a little trite. Nevertheless, on a formal level, it’s a fascinating study of the artifice of the genre, a deconstruction of the comforting contract between artist and viewer that guides us towards a particular kind of emotional or intellectual engagement.

On the Record is at once a heartbreaking account of the survival of a group of courageous women, an analysis of the structural and cultural intersections between racism and misogyny, and an indictment of an industry happy to ignore and condone sexual violence.

Buried underneath the convolutions, the mistaking of melodramatic sensationalism over psychological reality, there really is something of a real emotional centre that just about makes enduring the rest worth it.

As in thrall to its fantasy as its characters, On a Magical Night confuses what is admittedly a charming conceit for depth. Nevertheless, that charm is enough to sustain the picture across its 90-minute runtime, even if its effects quickly recede into memory.

Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is not only his best recent film, but also one of the most vital of the year.

A stylish and fitfully engaging crime thriller with a great concept, let down by incoherent plotting and impenetrable characterisation.

Quietly raging, The Assistant is a bleakly precise study of complicity in workplace abuse.

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.

For fans of Mack’s juxtapositions of natural and synthetic imagery and of her fascination with repetition and patterns, The Grand Bizarre is surely the artist’s most accomplished work.

Aside from the film’s more immediate pleasures, what is perhaps most intriguing about Why Don’t You Just Die! is Sokolov’s almost visible attempt to find his own voice: among this melange of film-school influences, it’s undoubtedly there, though perhaps it hasn’t quite formed yet.

Sea Fever proves better in concept than in execution, let down by a second act of fumbled editing and slackened tension.

A visceral, Atwoodian journey, The Other Lamb is as much an examination of narcissism and the existing structures of gendered power as it is of the limits of faith.

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

A work of astonishing aesthetic beauty, made up of static compositions and use of chiaroscuro that recalls the Dutch masters.

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.

Read as a loose adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Little Joe is a gripping and visually striking satire of essentialist maternal instinct and the contemporary anxiety of wellbeing.

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.

One of Birds of Prey’s great pleasures is that it tells a Gotham story without having to tell the Gotham story: the adventures of Harley Quinn and associates are not at the centre of some grand narrative, and they are all the better for it.