Dave Calhoun

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.

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

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.

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 a joyous film, full of love and warmth but unafraid to admit that with sticking out your neck comes struggle and sorrow. Truly lovely.

This is a thoughtful film, but one that's slightly limited by its own careful restraint.

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.

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.

Only Lovers Left Alive drags its feet and shows serious signs of anaemia as a story.

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.

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.