Dave Calhoun

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.

It sits at the mature end of Tarantino’s work, bringing his tongue-in-cheek storytelling together with exquisite craft and killer lead performances from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, it’s still very much a Tarantino film, trading in genuine emotion one minute, unapolegetically silly the next.

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

It’s not a despairing movie – Mungiu even suggests that a new generation might put things right – but it’s a brutally honest one.

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.

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.

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.

French actor-filmmaker Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece still holds up as a feast of subtle sight gags, playful noise and, above all, visual wonders.

The film conceals as much as it reveals, and its beauty is that it pretends to do nothing else. It embraces a mystery and protects it, and it’s thrilling to behold.

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.

It's impossible not to see Son of Saul as a corrective to past stories that have imposed a neat order (or worse) on such incomprehensible events. Nemes does that too, of course, simply by making this film – but he does so in a way that makes us think of these events afresh.

It shouldn’t all be so funny, but it is, and it’s to Baker’s huge credit that he’s able to inspire laughs and huge enjoyment from this madcap story without leaving you feeling that the woman at the heart of this mess has been short-changed and exploited for our pleasure.

It’s both soaringly romantic and truly sad.

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.

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.

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.

Politics, music, fashion, history, religion – this is one of those super-smart cultural documentaries that has entry points from all sides, but one thing’s for sure: this magical, essential event is forgotten no more.

Gestures, looks and touches carry enormous weight, and Blanchett and Mara, both excellent, invite micropscopic readings of their every glance and movement.

It’s a superb morality play that immerses us deeply in a society’s values and rituals and keeps us guessing right to its powerful final shot.

It’s a stunning film – thoughtful, challenging and disturbing.

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

It’s deeply romantic and also deeply thoughtful – an electric combination.

It’s an intoxicating marvel, strange and sublime: it combines sci-fi ideas, gloriously unusual special effects and a sharp atmosphere of horror.

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.

The film’s no-nonsense, visually plain documentary-style of shooting feels utterly appropriate to its sly evocation of the absurdities and banalities of modern life. Just brilliant.

The Coens have given us a melancholic, sometimes cruel, often hilarious counterfactual version of music history. It's a what-if imagining of a cultural also-ran that maybe tells us more about the truth than the facts themselves ever could.

It’s a film of small moments and tiny gestures that leaves a very, very big impression.

That Anderson, the film’s writer-director, whose Boogie Nights was a riot but Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love both noble failures, has come to make this intelligent and enthralling masterpiece is both a little surprising and intensely satisfying.