Dave Calhoun

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.