Dave Calhoun

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

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.

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.

Full of Anderson’s visual signatures – cameras that swerve, quick zooms, speedy montages – it’s familiar in style, refreshing in tone and one of Anderson’s very best films.

When the film gets outdoors, it soars, and Ceylan continues to dig with acute intelligence into the dark corners of everyday human behaviour.

Citizenfour is at its most eye-opening and essential simply as a portrait of the then 29-year-old Snowden at a point of absolute no-return in his life as he spends almost a week hiding out in Hong Kong before disappearing into an entirely new existence.

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.

The wit is sharp . . . and the lament to times past, friendships gone and experiences lost is affecting.

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

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.

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.

The writing and direction lean towards the obvious, but there’s much to chew on regarding tradition, progress and the power of the white lie.

It’s not all doom, gloom and personal disasters — the film also offers lucid insights on the links between the man and his movies.

The film’s real success is that Puiu impresses both with his compassion for human behaviour and his tight grip on realist, documentary-style filmmaking.

Well worth visiting, not least for its similarities to The Third Man.

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.

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 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.

More than ever Payne allows the humour to rise up gently from his story rather than burst through it.

It’s an exploration of all things surface, yes, but it has soul too.

It’s a heartbreaking work. Its cast are phenomenal; its songs flow through the film like blood; and Davies is unflinching in his hunt for truth and full of nothing but love and understanding for his characters. A masterpiece.

As drama, The Salesman wanders, meanders and searches, mostly pleasurably, until it hits an over-engineered final chapter.

Anyone with a beating heart will be forgiven for allowing it to break during this unflinching and thoughtful account of the life and death of the soul singer Amy Winehouse.

The original footage – devastatingly intimate; familiar yet alien – still stops us in our tracks more than six decades later.

Alongside archive material and new footage of Chet shot in his signature romantic, B&W style, Weber elicits frank reminiscences from his subject and a host of ex-lovers and friends.

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.

Writer-director Francis Lee has drawn on his own farming background and his film is full of convincing detail. The lack of chat feels especially truthful.

It’s intricate and often mature as drama, but it’s also meandering and at times heavy-handed, even melodramatic, and the tight control of time, place and action which made ‘A Separation’ so gripping is just not there.