Fionnuala Halligan

The Eternal Daughter is at its most poignant when it plunges into the personal – in Swinton’s retreating mother and faltering daughter, you can sense the director’s power growing as she continues to acknowledge herself.

New Order may split audiences who require a more conventional approach, but this is dynamic cinema which takes no prisoners outside the hostages on screen: loud and violent, it lures the viewer into a place where there can be no bystanders. In that way, it’s quite magnificent – an outlet for those boiling in our times.

Debut director Geremy Jasper has said Patti is part-modelled on his own life, and there’s a real empathy on display here for her internal and external struggles, a gift which Mcdonald makes the most of in her own debut.

Timoner’s often-compelling documentary, which is neither an apology nor a hagiography, is an intriguing personal take on a man who turns out to be endlessly intriguing, no matter what you think of his antics.

Whether Hill’s debut as a writer-director is drawn entirely, or partly, from personal experience seems a moot point: there’s a sufficient clear-eyed skill to the project to elevate it out of the memoir arena and mark the actor out as a directing talent to watch.

Empire Of Light is a sentimental film – the piano-heavy score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross advertises that from the opening bars – but its message of love, tolerance and finding family wherever you can should make an impact in darkened rooms wherever it plays.

Some zinging dialogue and pungent photography are complemented by the two young leads and the late Anton Yelchin in support.

Full of committed performances, particularly from Elba and the impressive young actor Abraham Attah, Beasts Of No Nation is a project of considerable integrity which makes for a consistently-engrossing, if over-long, viewing experience.

House Of Gucci can switch into camp faster than you can swing a bamboo-handled handbag, and will certainly launch a thousand Gaga memes, an element which is accentuated by the random application of chart bangers in the soundtrack. But it’s also unsettling, entertaining, and really quite unusual: like next year’s fashions from a more extreme house, it grows on you.

There’s much here, or in everything we see - which is essentially the film’s subtext - that is hilariously open to interpretation. See how you get on.

Well written, -acted, -cast and -produced, this wholly entertaining yet stingingly relevant story of the 1970 Miss World finals should have been a smash hit when it opened in UK theatres on March 13, but events overtook its release.

Although MEMORY follows some templates of the format, trying to lock Alien into a cultural and political framework, the film itself transcends that obviousness.

Between the highs-and-lows of razzle-dazzle couture there a substantial film here, and a frank portrait of a damaged, evasive man trying to come to terms with what he has done.

Cesar Diaz’s debut feature is both compact and ambitious, distilling its larger themes into the core story of one young man and his secretive mother.

Gitankali Rao’s debut feature is a stunningly realised work of animated film-making.

More than a quarter of a century later, Beauty and the Beast enchants again as a swirling blend of live-action story, stage, screen and sheer, rococo-spun fantasy.

The questing duo has trusted ‘GTA’ and its trigger-happy denizens: they just need to trust the audience a little bit more that this new world can be enjoyed without the same old beats.

Cole, best known for a supporting role in the TV series Peaky Blinders, gives everything to this role. It’s a physical transformation in which he convincingly plays a beaten, battered-to-a-pulp boxer who learns the rules of Muay Thai, but also a deep internal reach to deliver a complex, defiantly self-sabotaging character with depth of understanding.

While the running time can weigh heavily on some of the sub-plots, the overall effect is as strong as Hui intended and the title underlines the bitter irony of the history involved.

This gripping, muscular piece is markedly immediate - like its subject, who lives for the moment, in the constant shadow of his own death.

All of The Big Sick’s power has gone into its script and performances.

It’s only when Baumbach surrenders to the inherent theatricality of what he is creating, that Marriage Story finally takes wing and flies.

Part of what makes Brides so engaging — and not in a passive way – is its closeness to the truth: not just of the Begum story, but life truths.

While it’s a consistently entertaining and often poignant film which addresses a wide range of issues under the stealth cover of humour, I, Tonya also gives Robbie the chance – her first, really – to show her full range as an actress. And she shines.

Kristen Lovell has skin in the game of the story she tells, making The Stroll, an oral/archive history of the trans sex workers of New York’s Meatpacking District, a raw and tender memoir.

To say the performances are authentic is clearly stating the point, but the Blackburn family opens up to give an easily intimate portrait of themselves.

Where some see coincidence, Wardle finds a true-life conspiracy, and pursues it all the way to conclusion after gripping conclusion.

This doc/animation hybrid is an eccentric little gem of a story, a tall tale told with irreverent cheer and considerable charm. Chief amongst its many attractions is the actor Alan Cumming, lip-syncing to an audio tape and delivering a performance that is quite uncanny.

A Nazi Legacy – What Our Fathers Did comes to a climax in Lviv, but the film is a layered examination of brutality, self-deception, guilt and the nature of justice which is compelling throughout.

Served up with star turns from Emma Stone and Steve Carell, Battle Of The Sexes slams a crowdpleaser across the net.

Strong, committed performances and the upsetting ring of reality anchor a highly-personal film which cycles through addiction, relapse and rehab in an episodic way, each high as inevitable as the low which follows.

Arrivals becomes an unexpectedly moving rumination on life’s bigger questions by its end. While it looks to other worlds, its main pleasure turns out to be the most intimate of questions.

A film of a bumpy, brilliant debut novel which was ground-breaking at the time, Bahrami’s propulsive piece dazzles, and quibbles are easily quelled, even over 124 minutes.

Nowhere Special is a tender story of a life which is ending and another which is beginning.

Lee is firing off rounds in all directions here. Some land, some distract, some feel like overkill. For cineastes, it’s a provocative redrawing of the canon; Coming Home or The Deerhunter, and even Stone’s so-called “definitive” work including Platoon now seem only part of the picture.

While attention, fairly, will go to the work’s visual and tonal acuity, Wells’ measured but relentless probing, her careful peeling away of the layers of this intimate piece, mark her out as one of the most promising new voices in British cinema in recent years.

With Spurlock and Takal throwing every horror trope on the screen, Rats is a delectably awful experience which, grimly fun though it may be to watch, hopefully won’t lead to a Cockroach sequel.

Writer-director Emmanuel Mouret’s lengthy but deliciously calibrated Love Affair(s) consists of talk, talk and more talk uttered by attractive protagonists in French settings that range from enviably nice to spectacular. This would fit perfectly in a time capsule under ’Unapologetic French Art Film’.

It may not know where to end, and it makes a surprising late-in-the-game play for sentimentality where it has previously been bracingly crisp about hot topics including abortion and post-natal depression, but it’s mostly a wry plea for tolerance when the world is most disposed to hear it.

Two unrelentingly fascinating performances from Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine Dyrholm, and an exquisite black-and-while aesthetic which moves from leering vaudeville to something filthier and shameful, command attention.

Footage is surprising, and, occasionally heart-breaking; not because of the disabilities onscreen, but because it recalls the idealism of the 1970s, long since gone.

This magnificently-realised film moves from feeling like a long, dry history lesson to becoming an angrily-direct and emotional tribute to the reformers of the past.

Those who can’t understand the tangled battle zones or tragic recent history of Iraq may take some comfort from Nowhere To Hide’s revelation that ordinary citizens of that country don’t understand any of it either.

Childhood is a mystery we endlessly come back to and a place the Leydens have never fully left; Ní Chianáin gives the viewer an intimate view of it in this unusual little story.

The Innocents successfully weds three elements: a strong, original concept distilled through a smart screenplay; excellent young performances; and a mise-en-scene which puts the audience in a child’s circular view of a very small world - tiny by nature of childhood itself, in which the smallest areas are unfathomably large, and also by circumstance on a self-contained housing estate.

It’s a sad, sad film about the tragic loss of a generation, but the thought of Brittain moving through the generations to deliver her message afresh is somehow a consolation in its final, rallying cry.

Wilde’s mighty struggle with himself, with his heavenly talent and earthly lusts, and the meaning of it all resonates so strongly with the direction and performance that The Happy Prince is easily elevated past period Victoriana (and that wallpaper) to move and engage in equal parts.

A superb performance by Affleck, who constructs a touching and believable rapport with his 11 year-old co-star, grounds his low-key directorial and feature-writing debut.

Amy is a cautionary tale - she was the Janis Joplin of our age, and as it’s the media age, we get to see the full price of fame this time as a fragile talent self-combusts. It’s not a pretty picture.

Newcomer Hall strikes a real presence. She’s posed a lot, it’s true – against the sun, the rust-coloured sheets of Diddi’s bedroom, the doggedly brown bar in which she works – but she’s as bright as the light of summer in Iceland, and her character seems just as likely to survive this problematic present.

After four hours, there’s no sense you know the city, present or past, or that you ever will understand it. Would maps and timelines make it any more ‘satisfying’? Instead, you are haunted by it..

Thanks to the tight team-work between Carreira and her intuitive lead actor, On Falling will grow to become an intense, enveloping experience.

All Will Be Well is undoubtedly an old-fashioned drama, but it is no less effective for that classic structure.

Uncle Howard begins as a slightly tentative film about a nephew’s quest to discover more about his adored film-maker uncle, Howard Brookner. But it grows into a perceptive, poignant documentary which looks at many things.

Structurally inventive, if not downright format-twisting, it takes a Jacob’s Ladder to 1990s China, where a beleaguered police detective tries so hard to unravel a killing that he spins himself into seeming madness.

It would take a hard heart not to break at the sight of Alex Wheatle (now a much-loved children’s author in the UK), sitting frozen on the sofa as his friend’s mother prepares his first-ever Christmas meal.

Sarah Snook turns in a terrific performance which is always true to the character at every point of a complex arc.

Magaro, never allowed to explain his character, does a terrific job with internalised anguish, keeping it in check so it’s a presence in the car but not one which prevents him demonstrating his love for his kids, over and over again, in whatever way he can.

With a terse 85-minute running time, The Guilty illustrates Möller’s confidence with the craft of film-making.

National Bird shows that there is indeed a horrible reckoning, but it mostly comes from within. This is a personal film about guilt.

The shame this film provokes – or should provoke – in collective society will make it difficult and distressing viewing. And there’s no beauty to show here, despite former cinematographer Kelly’s accomplished work. There’s always love, though. If only there was more to go around.

A classic, if downbeat, addition to the canon.

A surprisingly demented delight; a crazy, spirited, if simplistic fusion of off-beat adult humour blended with the sensibility of an anarchic toddler.

If Saroo’s story seems out-of-this world, the team behind this film have risen to meet the challenge it sets. There may be a sense of inevitability about Saroo’s ultimate destination, but what counts here is the journey.

Working with writer (and co-editor) Amy Jump again, Wheatley wades into the prescient 1975 text, delivering a complex, fluid interpretation which is respectful and almost-faithful while still being its own beautiful, crazed beast.

Although this doc is slender, it’s also fascinating, playing into nostalgia and current-day politics in equal measure.

Everyone commits to Pirates as if it’s the first time this story has been told, and in a way, that’s true. A joyous feature film centring around British Black and Asian male teenagers whose problems are exactly the same as every other teenager in the country makes it revolutionary within that familiar framework.

The subtle brilliance of its mise-en-scene, from 1980s Ohio boardrooms and rubber-chicken dinners to all-black wait staff and the casual discrimination against women, beds the story in the awful truth.

It’s so doggedly faithful to the show, so emphatically orchestrated and so powered by Cynthia Erivo’s exceptional performance, that resistance to its 169 minutes of theme park magic becomes futile. This is a film that leaves nothing in the wings — except for an entire second act, and a sequel which has already been shot.

An expression of his career-long preoccupations, Jia Zhang-ke’s odyssey through China since the turn of the century has an epic sense within a homespun feel.

As with all its cinematic precedents, there’s a race to a destination, many people involved, and at times the going can be uneven. The payoff, though, is worth it.

It’s inventive enough to surprise, while still bringing with it fond memories of everything from Hammer to The Innocents, Dracula to creepy country house Gothic horror.

Bouquets all round: Stephen Frears goes broad in Florence Foster Jenkins, and the appeal should be wide.

Judas is an explosion of pent-up plotting, as if the film industry itself would only have this one chance to make a film about the Panther movement and it all has to be told in one go. Hopefully, this is not to be the case. As this film rises up to an unthinkable conclusion, there is clearly so much more to tell, and, as always, to learn.

Technically, The Goldman Case is a film to admire for all it achieves in such a structured format – emotionally, too, despite the fact the case is very particular, there is so much to engage.

Riders Of Justice is salty, violent, transgressive, button-pushing, non-PC and laugh-out-loud funny at times – and when you’re not gasping or laughing, it’s only to wonder at the mind which pulled all of this together.

Cinematic essays take many forms: few are as fragile and contemplative as Porcelain War.

Gibney’s story is clearly told and wholly engrossing.

Another Round (Druk) is a funny film which is also desperately sad, a superficially amusing indictment of drinking culture which is much more bitter than sweet.

What emerges is the story of an extremely close and profoundly charming boyhood friendship – but one where the junior partner couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put the genie of his extraordinary talent back in the bottle once his pal had coaxed it out of him.

It’s extraordinary how a work like Nomadland can hold a mirror to society and refract back to the audience the light of their own lives.

The result is engaging, tender film-making which tugs at the heart-strings, spurred by a sympathetic cast and the young lead, newcomer Jude Hill.

These troubled, lovable, prickly, obsessive entertainers, supported by brother-son Todd, invite the viewer into their rackety lives – bright, lived fully in the spotlight, chin-up and completely unsinkable.

In true, blunt Aussie fashion, Last Stop Larrimah takes this wild-west story as it comes, and Tancred tells it well.

Occasionally schematic, albeit only in the service of pricking our consciences, Petra Volpe’s tense drama is a shot in the arm of undiluted empathy for the over-stretched, under-valued nursing profession.

It’s clear that waters need to be calmed or someone will be hurt, but The Librarians also shows that won’t happen unless people stand up and take action. So it’s a call to arms, then. But, be warned: a horror story too.

Resurgence doles out the action and effects work in carefully calculated, incremental doses, which give the film a cumulative tension. Even if it’s hokey and jokey, this is a loud, effects-driven piece, with a driving score. For fans of Roland Emmerich disaster movies, this both hits all the marks, while delivering nothing new.

Glassland is impressive, although Barrett struggles to give this carefully crafted narrative a coherent resolution.

Together Together makes for comfortable viewing elevated by Harrison’s sparky presence.

There’s real magic here, and nothing fake about the emotions which guide it.

The first half of Age of Shadows feels muddy as momentum builds; the latter stages boast a cinetic energy - cutting a violent melee to classical music (in this case Ravel’s Bolero), may be a tribute to John Woo, but it’s stunning nonetheless.

The trouble with a high-stakes “small” British project like this is that everyone involved tends to want to play it safe.

While Bob does slink around some predictable narrative beats, this is still a slyly subversive film with a social point to make as it highlights James’s isolation in a cold, hard-faced London which responds better to animals than its hopeless humans.

A small-scale, covert glimpse of the lives led behind the headlines.

A quietly thoughtful and impressively acted drama.

It’s all glossily camped-up nonsense with an amusingly inappropriate title, but luridly – and ludicrously – entertaining nonetheless.

Despite its vaguely-generic title, this well-crafted close-quarters suspense from British-Iranian director Babak Anvari is firmly-written, -shot and -acted.

Lucy And Desi benefits greatly from a raft of archival footage ... Repeated montages and a schmaltzy score can lessen their effect, but Poehler has strong sense of the couple’s contribution to the entertainment industry, and nobody watching her documentary will emerge anything less than convinced of how outstanding that was.