Dave Calhoun

This Pan is loud, colourful, busy and full of ideas. Not all those ideas work in sync – but most are bold and some are winningly eccentric.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Any film that can combine questions of mortality with funny, fully alive scenes of sex, social awkwardness, professional screw-ups and throwaway fun is a rich one. Its brilliant, full-on performance from Reinsve deserves to be celebrated far and wide.

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.

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

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.

Hitchcock breezes through a tongue-in-cheek, nightmarish plot with a lightness of touch that’s equalled by a charming performance from Grant (below), who copes effortlessly with the script’s dash between claustrophobia and intrigue on one hand and romance and comedy on the other.

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

The Program offers no obvious new revelations and Armstrong remains elusive – but it has an unsettling air that carries us through its more pedestrian patches.

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 a deeply humane film, as well as a quietly hilarious one.

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

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

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.

This is a whale of a movie, grotesque and a little bloated but impossible to ignore. Its power and its horrors sneak up on you.

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

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

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

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.

We’re never far from Von Trier, and both Skarsgård and Gainsbourg appear to offer different versions of the author himself.

The Assassin is a beautiful, beguiling film; it's impossible not to get fully lost in its rarefied world.

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.