Dave Calhoun

One of the most pleasing things about Blue Jasmine is that it feels truly knotty and never obvious in how it unfolds.

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

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.

There are scenes that grab – Abrahams’s dash round Trinity quad; the chats between Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as dons who dress up prejudice in fine words. But the parallel stories tend to cancel out, rather than complement, each other. Oddly, for a film about triumph over adversity, there’s nothing as uplifting as the opening and closing jogs along a windswept beach.

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.

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.

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.

Baldwin and Toback make a snappy comic duo, and half of their talks with a line-up of luminaries focus on the art of filmmaking rather than the business.

It’s charmingly simple. But it also offers a sharp modern spin on Michael Bond’s London-set stories without being cynical.

Grace of Monaco could have been a camp delight, but it feels too much like a stodgy, outdated television movie to work even as kitsch.

This is a portrait of cycles and change. But the mood of the film suggests that we should be impressed that this ever-growing, ever-changing city of ours is still chasing after new versions of the modern.

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.

It's a terrifically moving film that has a fitting earthbound feel to it.

The Immigrant promises rich territory to explore, but in the execution it’s overly stately, dreary and unconvincing.

Hats off to Dreamworks for offering some bold surprises in a respectable sequel filled with moments of humour and emotion among its ample noise and movement.

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

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.

There are powerful and enlightening scenes, and there’s a catchy energy to the battlefield action. But the immediacy and credibility of the women’s mission feels compromised by one-too-many corny moments, unconvincing dialogue and a sense of uncertainty on Husson’s part over whether she wants to take a poetic or realist approach to her tale.

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.

Rohrwacher draws us into this unusual world with the ease of someone who knows exactly what they’re talking about, neither judging nor celebrating and, at her best, just looking with tenderness and a winning sense of humour.

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.

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 sombre, artful and winningly ambiguous.

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.

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

It’s a winning yarn, but Osmond has to crack the whip to get it over the finishing line.

If the crime element feels like little more than a red herring, it’s the characters that give the film its appeal.

Treat Benedetta as a pile-up of shallow pleasures undercut with a sardonic wink and some fairly obvious comments on power and corruption, and there’s fun to be had. Look for any deeper logic and you’ll be disappointed.

The Invisible Woman is only partly a romance; it’s the tragedy of Nelly’s life that makes itself more powerfully heard.

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.

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

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

The creature effects are charming.... But the pig-chasing antics and cartoonish corporate nastiness that dominate much of the film become seriously grating.

It's an endearingly loopy, occasionally half-cooked but always ambitious film.

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

Beneath the well-tuned atmospherics lurks a schlocky, fairly ludicrous and pretty distasteful yarn that ultimately puts the stress in all the wrong places.

Hogg displays a welcome desire to draw on global film influences and ignore the unwritten rules of what British cinema should or should not seek to achieve, especially in the realm of films about the monied and unsympathetic.

Rush is fast, slippery, stormy and dangerous.

It’s a bold, beautiful cosmic adventure story with a touch of the surreal and the dreamlike, and yet it always feels grounded in its own deadly serious reality.

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.

With Dolan, you feel you're in the company of a truly original voice and one unafraid to make his mistakes right up there on the screen.

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.

Director and co-writer Diego Quemada-Díez condenses many acute observations about life as an emigrant into a sure-footed, credible story.

It’s an uneven work, mysterious in its refusal to tell us much at all about Daniel, but it has a ring a truth to it even when it slips into less enigmatic thriller territory.

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.

Frantz is a slightly over-polite and overly careful, and the black and white palette is unappealingly washed out – more like a collection of greys. But the sense of festering postwar anger and pain is strong, and there are intriguing questions here.

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.

It’s an important story, of course, but only mildly engaging as cinema.

As storytelling, it’s pristine: it moves like a reptile playing the long game. But its cruelty is tough to bear.

It’s lightly played, often very funny and shot all over Paris with energy and wit, and boosted by superb, inquiring turns from Broadbent and Duncan.

It’s a sad project, a testament to lives cut short and stories half-told.

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.

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

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.

In what is surely his finest hour, Tom Hardy plays both brothers. Much more than a gimmick, it’s like watching one side of a mind wrestle with the other – literally, in one explosive, fun-to-unpick fight scene.

Timoner refuses to run fully with Brand’s elevated idea of himself, preferring to offer glimpses of a vulnerability and ruthlessness behind the clownish bluster.

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

Tale of Tales might lack magic in the immediate, flashy sense, but its strange spell is altogether seductive and special.

Scarecrow’ feels like an existential fairytale squarely rooted in the reality of America’s fraying backroads and small towns. It’s all a little rambling and anarchic, but later scenes in a jail have real bite. And when the sadness behind Lion’s smile is revealed, it’s also genuinely moving.

Oldman is brilliant; Molina’s Halliwell less subtle; and the film’s dissection of cottaging quaintly amusing.

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.

Exhibition succeeds in making us feel deeply uncomfortable for peering into other people’s lives.

A stop-gap tale that’s modest, fun and briefly amusing rather than one that breaks new ground or offers hugely memorable set pieces.

Loushy’s project can feel repetitive, a bit too in awe of his admittedly significant sources. Perhaps most striking are their prophecies that this was only the beginning of an intractable conflict that could only get worse, not better.

Visually, it’s never less than arresting. Gently amusing, too, is the relationship between Keitel and Caine, even if the dialogue Sorrentino writes for them often displays a fondness for empty epigrams.

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

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.

As a storyteller Cronenberg usually tells stories with more verve and storytelling power than this.

Its various riffs on codes, whether moral, sexual, societal or German, are plain to see rather than enigmatic or enlightening. Luckily it’s all anchored in a storming performance from Cumberbatch: you’ll be deciphering his work long after the credits roll.

It’s enthralling and haunting.

It ends up as a sweet-enough movie, and one that’s full of joy and invention – but also one that feels like a lot of effort has been put into serving a tale that maybe doesn’t fully deserve it.

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.

There are no great upsets or fireworks here, just a tender sketch of what it means to (probably) be gay as a school kid. The storytelling style is as inoffensive as the music (Arvo Pärt, Belle and Sebastian), and the performances are amiable and relaxed.

The film’s said to be autobiographical, but that’s entirely left to us to guess.

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.

There’s plenty of warmth and compassion here, and the true story is a belter, but this ‘Lion’ doesn’t quite roar.

As the actors move fluidly between various states, shedding one skin while assuming another, Polanski makes this subversive parlour game matter.

It’s Bulger whose grim appearance and even grimmer behaviour ‘Black Mass’ indulges. But it’s the quieter, more complicated Connolly who offers the film’s subtler pleasures.

‘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.

As Farhadi casts his roving, distracted eye over this unhappy community, sharing his story in a choppy, documentary style, it ends up feeling like a curiously detached exercise, more academic than wholly satisfying.

What stops David Cronenberg’s grotesque noir Maps to the Stars, written by LA insider Bruce Wagner, from feeling tired is that it’s deliciously odd.

Wears its heart a little too much on its sleeve. But it also manages to pack a punch, and the lead performances from Bercot and Cassel are strong.

Ayoade tips his hat to so many other filmmakers and writers that he leaves little room to consider anything other than what a good job he’s doing of distilling all his references into an effective Pinterest board of paranoia and alienation.

It's the fashion designer's second movie after his 2009 debut A Single Man, and this is a far more ambitious film, with its sprawling cast, various periods, layered storytelling and musings on life and art. But it's also far less endearing and coherent, and feels almost unbearably cruel and cynical.

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

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 such a loopy endeavour overall that Annette will likely have some audiences running from it screaming as much as it will have others worshipping at its altar. It’s a hard film to adore, but an easy one to thank for its very existence.

It’s a film that moves to the convincing rhythm of real life.

Thematically, White Elephant is a vague animal and its true interest never truly comes into focus.

This is a valuable companion piece to other accounts and a vivid collage of in-the-moment imagery.

Beyond the shocks and games, there's not a great deal to take away in the form of meaty ideas or lingering themes, and its catchy premise doesn't really deliver in the end.

As the determined but fragile son, Reynor has a strong presence, but Collette’s character is too thinly sketched to make much sense.

Dunst handles her sidekick role with a mature ease that’s new to her, but it’s the men you remember: Mortensen in psychological freefall and Isaac always tough to read and hiding something behind a handsome, controlled exterior. It’s a gentle and smart blast from the past.

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

What Hooper fails to do is get to grips with sexual identity in any way that's intellectually or emotionally provocative or surprising. That makes for a cold, pretty, delicate movie – one that too often relies on scene-stealing production design or the overwhelmingly insipid score for its otherwise strikingly absent emotional power.

This is a smart, meaningful first film, with nods all over the place to classics like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby, as well as more recent obvious touch points like Get Out. It’s not all subtle, but then neither is prejudice.

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.

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.