Dave Calhoun

As a storyteller, writer-director Hafsia Herzi is not coy, but she’s careful, allowing intimacy to emerge with the same tentativeness as it does for Fatima.

It’s as interesting for what it doesn’t show as for what it does.

It’s a deeply raw and honest film. It’s bleak, but it also has a musical, black-comic, big-hearted spirit that pulls you through the despair.

Away has the mild rush of a coming-of-age dream, the sort that lodges in your memory as symbolic and significant as you pass from one stage of life to the next.

It’s a film of deep empathy, but a tough one, too.

It shouldn’t all be so funny, but it is, and it’s to Baker’s huge credit that he’s able to inspire laughs and huge enjoyment from this madcap story without leaving you feeling that the woman at the heart of this mess has been short-changed and exploited for our pleasure.

Caught by the Tides is more a montage of music and miscellaneous episodes than anything representing a traditional drama. It’s strongly propelled by music – from Chinese classical music to techno to rock – and it’s a heady visual mix of styles and formats: from grainy, phone-like footage in a documentary style, to much more pristine and considered imagery.

If ever a film puts its arm round a kid and says: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got you’, that’s Bird and Bailey. She’s a character you feel Arnold would lie on railtracks to protect – and that’s a powerful, moving instinct to share.

Wang’s film feels less like an exposé than an eye-opener; a portrait of a reality that feels almost otherworldly in its distance and difference.

It finds genuine humour in its characters’ almost down-and-out lot, but it’s fully on their side – the side of those trampled on by modern times.

It’s a stunning film – thoughtful, challenging and disturbing.

As you’d expect from Kore-eda, it’s all told with the utmost detail and care, and a gentle score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto only adds to the overarching air of thoughtfulness and empathy.

It’s impossible entirely to recreate the effect of being in the room with this play, but this ear for eye is still essential for the art and power and relevance of tucker green’s unique wordplay.

This is some flu: it plunges us into a deeply strange and unsettling version of reality. It’s undeniably confusing, but it leaves you with a powerful, if imprecise, feeling of a society that’s sick from something far worse than a passing virus.

This film is about wonder, not balance, and it turns us delirious in the white heat of this pair’s chaotic, unflinching passion.

Only Pedro Almodóvar could wrap a cry of pain about Spain’s inability to come to terms with its recent dark history into a gorgeous-looking melodrama about two mothers drawn by fate into a complicated, painful and ultimately nourishing relationship.

What unites the interlocking stories are their flashes of love and longing – often painfully, tragically unreturned. The film’s emotional side is well-handled, helped by strong performances across the board. But it’s the storytelling puzzle – the pile-up of different perspectives and gradual reveal of the facts – that makes it most worthwhile.

It’s a visual feast that’s served with enormous respect for the essence of Shakespeare’s words, even though Coen has shaved the text so that it moves at a furious pace, with a sudden slap of an ending that feels entirely fitting. It’s a creepy, bone-shaking triumph.

It’s a film that oozes clear-eyed empathy and has the lived-in feel of a story, director and cast working in strong harmony.

Although Binoche is the film’s star, her presence is smartly muted, allowing us time and space to discover the world as she does, and providing room for complexity in considering the ethics of his character’s work and of Carrère’s film itself.

It’s a superb morality play that immerses us deeply in a society’s values and rituals and keeps us guessing right to its powerful final shot.

The performances, the writing and the direction all conspire to make it feel fresh and specific, and as bleak as the settings may be, it has a delicious black comic streak and shares the buzz of personal re-awakening without ever feeling obvious or cheap. It turns out to be a beacon of warmth amid a frozen wasteland.

It’s a simple, angry work, determined to get across its point with force and with few distractions.

There’s nothing cloying or corny about the way Arnold depicts these beasts. What she gives us is a straightforward slice of a cow’s relentless life of muck, milk, breeding and feeding.

This is a story about the importance of making mistakes, of learning, of pulling yourself up and trying again – whether in love, sex, art or friendship. It’s a delirious ‘making of’ film: the making of an artist and the making of a life in all its messy glory.

It’s a daring spin on history and the power, or otherwise, of the individual: a puzzle that is well worth trying to solve.

The film offers little relief to the nerves, but it’s a surprising, curious drama, consistently thoughtful, artful and provocative.

It’s smaller in scale than his last two, 2014’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and 2007’s You, the Living. It also has a more maudlin air to it overall than those others – which, if you’ve experienced their bleak absurdity, you’ll know is saying something.

It’s uncompromising. It’s disturbing. But it’s also deeply human, allowing for many glimpses of human kindness and human frailty beyond a wall of anonymity and pain.

Politics, music, fashion, history, religion – this is one of those super-smart cultural documentaries that has entry points from all sides, but one thing’s for sure: this magical, essential event is forgotten no more.

The story passes from summer to winter, seasonally and tonally, and Hall’s chief allies in bringing her smart script to screen are Edu Grau’s stunning black-and-white photography (reason alone to see the film), Dev Hynes’s piano jazz score and two extraordinarily thoughtful central performances from Negga and Thompson.

This captivating adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, which unfolds among the wild contrasts and contradictions of modern India, offers style, energy and bursts of goofy fish-out-of-water humour before landing on a vicious, dark streak of black-hearted cynicism.

It wins you over with its scrappy underdog antics and then, later, bowls you over with its heavyweight insights.

The film is a beguiling window into a distant world – one that at times evokes such claustrophobia as to feel more like a peephole.

Young Ahmed might not have answers, but it asks pertinent questions and makes acute observations. Its ending is hopeful, yet open. It’s a wise and sensitive contribution to a timely debate.

What’s different is the detail with which Loach and his collaborators examine the effects of work and society on the nuclear family.

It’s deeply romantic and also deeply thoughtful – an electric combination.

It’s rare for a movie to combine cinematic fireworks and social commentary in quite the thrilling and mischievous way that Korean director Bong Joon-ho manages with Parasite.

It sits at the mature end of Tarantino’s work, bringing his tongue-in-cheek storytelling together with exquisite craft and killer lead performances from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, it’s still very much a Tarantino film, trading in genuine emotion one minute, unapolegetically silly the next.

The story itself, a twisty, hard-to-keep-track-of tale of revenge and double and triples crosses, is not especially remarkable. But that barely matters when there’s such virtuoso image-making on display.

It's impossible not to see Son of Saul as a corrective to past stories that have imposed a neat order (or worse) on such incomprehensible events. Nemes does that too, of course, simply by making this film – but he does so in a way that makes us think of these events afresh.

It’s no heroic tale; ‘The Mercy’ is thoughtful, uncomfortable viewing.

Kubrick himself rarely spoke about his work – which means this is a valuable insight into Kubrick's character and filmmaking process, as well as a frank look at what it means to give up your life to work at the side of a difficult creative genius.

One of the many powerful things about The Image Book is how it so aggressively rejects any sort of gloss or neat packaging. The telling is the story.

It's a road movie where the origin feels more interesting than the destination, but it's never less than warm and likeable.

Bloodlight and Bami defiantly reflects the experimental whirlwind of Jones’s existence: her ability to look and feel relevant decades since she started out.

Happy End is more meandering and less contained, though, and it doesn’t have a central, gripping mystery like The White Ribbon to make you lean in more than you recoil. Rather, it’s a more diffuse film, and a more despairing one, although there are flashes of gallows humor to lighten the pileup of downers. As for the happy end? Happy hunting.

Quietly epic and sad but never sentimental.

If anything, this doc reminds you that all relationships are strange, hopeful experiments in intimacy. And it’s that same hope the filmmakers lend to Dina and Scott’s story: you find yourself willing them along, wanting their marriage to work. You end up feeling honoured to have shared these special moments with them.

This is Tavernier’s own film story so don’t expect a linear, full history of the cinema of the time. However, it’s anything but dry, as the film swoons with passion for Gallic films and filmmaking.

It’s full of sharp dialogue and entertaining characters and fuelled by a wryly enlightened view of our world and how it can be at once cruel and caring. For a story built on such dark foundations, it’s weirdly reassuring. It’s also enormous fun.

Human Flow is rooted in specific current national and political situations, yet it offers a portrait of forced human movement and suffering that feels almost timeless.

Pattinson is great in what is surely his best post-Twilight performance to date.

The action is the attraction. If that means some of the film feels a little distant and chilly, it’s in the admirable service of avoiding simplistic drama or easy sentiment.

The Beguiled has its jolts and its laughs, but mostly this glides along like a mildly saucy yet poetically made parable, well-dressed, well-designed and well-performed.

There’s great energy to this film: quick dialogue, snappy performances and a lived-in feel make us quickly believe this world, its characters and their hang-ups.

It’s a deeply humane film, as well as a quietly hilarious one.

The talk is pointed and careful in a household that savours the power and meaning of words, but it’s as much the imagery that makes this film such a painterly joy.

Commentary on a changing Europe – and especially a socially and economically forlorn Spain – underpins ‘The Olive Tree’, but the human relationships are most poignant here.

It’s a teasing celebration of outsiderdom without being a full-on endorsement

It’s easy to throw accusations of staginess at film adaptations of theatre like this, which honour the limitations of theatre and make only limited attempts to open up the play. But there’s a hothouse atmosphere to this domestic drama that works well on screen.

Like the original, T2 Trainspotting is a winning mix of low living and high jinx, a stylized spin on real life.

The animation itself might not be the most inventive out there (this isn’t Pixar), but where Sing soars is in its one-by-one attention to its ensemble of beasts and its obvious passion for music: It’s nearly impossible to watch this film and not be humming the Beatles’ "Golden Slumbers" for days afterward.

This is an imperfect film, bold but occasionally baffling, and one that in its final act grows into something much more exciting than you might initially expect.

Along with the film’s hippy-ish musings on the relationship between humans and the elements, it gives the film a moving, supernatural touch.

It's a spare film, muted in colour and unflashy – and it's all the more powerful and urgent for it.

It’s a small, successful sketch of now-great lives.

The Lovers and the Despot is compelling as a Cold War-era thriller, but it also offers a small window on life in the higher echelons of power in North Korea at that time.

The Clan shouldn’t be as enjoyable as it is. But it’s a delight to be in the hands of a storyteller who can impress you with his stylistic bravado (one sequence cuts together a nasty death with ecstatic sex) while never losing sight of the suffering at the story’s heart.

The absence of George and John is felt keenly, but Paul and Ringo are a pleasure to listen to as ageing raconteurs.

Overall, there aren’t many shades of gray in Hacksaw Ridge, but it’s a movie that fulfills its purpose with vigor, confidence and swagger, and those battle scenes are impossible to take your eyes off.

What Dominik gives us is a portrait of an artist and a man and a family at a low. He doesn’t try to understand, but he does find some beauty and truth among the chaos and despair.

The film’s no-nonsense, visually plain documentary-style of shooting feels utterly appropriate to its sly evocation of the absurdities and banalities of modern life. Just brilliant.

[Chazelle's] soaring, romantic, extremely stylish and endlessly inventive La La Land is that rare beast: a grown-up movie musical that's not kitschy, a joke or a Bollywood film. Instead, it's a swooning, beautifully crafted ode to the likes of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain.

Cat lovers (and possibly fans of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’) will appreciate the role of an ageing black feline as a symbol of the sudden changes in Nathalie’s life. Everyone else should warm to the way that Hansen-Løve distils the chaos of life and the life of the mind into such a warm, thoughtful, surprising drama.

‘Childhood’ is not always a subtle film, and some of the writing and acting feel like a bit of a slog. But its very spooky mood leaves a strong impression.

The film’s pleasures are simple – soaring landscapes, old-school DIY adventure and some sweet performances by the child actors. It makes for a charmingly old-fashioned family adventure.

In the end, the characters are more lasting than the story, which is a standard save-the-city-from-destruction yarn. But this crew is a riot, and their world is intriguing and even a little meaningful.

It’s not a happy watch – but it’s an essential one if you want better to understand the city and people around you.

It’s enthralling and haunting.

Hull clearly had a profound and lucid response to his blindness, and this thoughtful, illuminating film goes some way to inhabiting his thoughts.

An intimate, warm embrace of a film, it radiates joy and harmony despite playing out entirely in the shadow of a difficult father's death.

The film's quietly angry plea is for compassion, understanding and more than one eye open on this modern horror.

As a storyteller, Farr is bold enough to keep us guessing until the film’s final moments, but a late need to explain lets the film down a little.

It’s not a despairing movie – Mungiu even suggests that a new generation might put things right – but it’s a brutally honest one.

It might be familiar territory for Almodóvar, but only a master of his art could make it look so easy.

Flaws aside, this is a superior, inventive kids' film, and one that's bound to make Rylance's giant a favourite with younger audiences.

Once you get past some bumps in the road of believability, Our Kind of Traitor turns into a brisk, energetic drama, with Anthony Dod Mantle’s photography adding interesting layers to a fairly straightforward plot.

It's a heady brew, awkwardly told, but smartly provocative.

What’s most winning about ‘The Club’ is how Larrain manages to allude to the wider structures, behaviour and corruption of the church without ever making this claustrophobic, moody and very local story feel anything but crucial, thrilling and disturbing.

The connections might be a little more strained and diffuse than in "Nostalgia for the Light", but their cumulative power is strong nonetheless.

This is sombre, artful and winningly ambiguous.

The world that Zootropolis creates is intelligent and fascinatingly detailed – it feels more like a movie by Disney-owned Pixar than a straight Disney film.

Brand is a winning – cuddly even – bridge between his film’s ideology and the wider world.

What makes this more than just a punishing, fearful, expertly crafted thriller focused on one man’s endurance is heavily down to Emmanuel Lubezki’s attractive, thoughtful photography.

This is a simple, sweet tale about the basic pleasures of home and hearth, rendered unflashily in a delightful style of hand-drawn animation that employs a beautiful array of warm pastel colours.

David Sington (In the Shadow of the Moon) shows extreme confidence in his subject by revealing the deeper truth in fragments, essentially allowing Nick to deliver a monologue or one man show, drawing us deeper and deeper into his story.

Skyfall is a highly distinctive Bond movie. It has some stunning visual touches.... Also, it mostly manages to convince us that there’s something at stake by giving a hint of Bond’s emotional life beyond this story.