Fionnuala Halligan

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.