Geoffrey Macnab

It is more a film poem, an ode to modernity and a symphony of a city.

Yasujiro Ozu's final film, re-released in a restored version, is a stately, slow-burning but very moving family drama.

All the characters’ feelings here are very deeply sublimated. The fascination of The Power of the Dog lies in its ambiguity and its depth of characterisation. Nothing is obvious here, not even the title.

Stone gives surely the boldest performance of her career so far, in a role that puts upon her heavy physical and psychological demands.

It’s a closely focused character study, galvanised by the tremendous performances from Portman and Moore, which delves into areas more conventional dramas don’t go near.

In its morbid and provocative way, the film is often funny but it’s thought-provoking and very creepy too.

Director George Miller combines speed, grace and explosive violence, emulating Sam Peckinpah westerns and even, at times, the work of Charles Dickens – Furiosa is a bit like a young Artful Dodger, using her wits and courage to stay alive.

In her own coolly analytical way, Coppola makes some trenchant points about the way Priscilla is controlled by the men in her life. She is living in a gilded cage. The wealth and luxury she experiences don’t compensate for her complete loss of freedom.

The Texan auteur’s new film – his 22nd, and the first of two due for release in this year alone – boasts a fine, quirky and courageous performance from Ethan Hawke, but it’s a stagey affair which at times becomes very stilted.

For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.

Cooper shows us his subject’s mix of magnetism, volatility and childlike egotism but he remains a strangely elusive figure. It’s left to Mulligan’s Felicia to crack the film’s sometimes too-shiny facade and to give its story some bruising emotional depth.

Stewart’s febrile, sensitive performance and Larraín’s trademark lyricism give it an emotional kick that such predecessors lacked.

In its own offbeat way, Asteroid City is an Anderson patchwork of Cold War paranoia and American family values in all their often hypocritical glory. It is every bit as arch as his best work, while still managing to tug hard on the heartstrings.

Stanley Donen's 1957 musical represents a triumph of form over content.

A House of Dynamite (which premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival) stands as a grim and timely warning about the renewed dangers of nuclear proliferation. Another way of looking at it, though, is as the most entertaining Hollywood movie on the subject of potential mass destruction since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.

If everything seems familiar from countless other crime dramas, at least the film is very slickly and creatively directed by Lee.

A very cleverly crafted screenplay, co-written by Baumbach and British actor-writer Emily Mortimer, balances the in-jokes with perceptive observations about status anxiety, the vapidity of celebrity culture, and the fragility of family ties.

The filmmaker always shows the same painstaking attention to detail as his homicidal hero does to the logistics of murdering his adversaries. Fassbender is well cast and gives a typically committed performance – one leavened by moments of very deadpan humour. However. The Killer also often drifts into the realm of self-conscious pastiche.

This, then, is everything you expect from a Wes Anderson film. If you like his work, you’ll love it. If you don’t, you’ll probably break out in hives again.

This is a film rich in ideas but with very little tension or passion. At times, it’s more like a cerebral art gallery installation piece than a full-blooded dramatic movie.

It is hard not to wish Wright had made an entire film set in the Soho of the Sixties rather than one that pays tribute to it through the prism of the present day. It is a pity, too, that the magnificent Taylor-Joy’s role wasn’t further foregrounded.

The real way Safdie puts a chokehold on his audience is by examining Mark and Dawn’s physical and emotional weaknesses in such forensic detail. The Smashing Machine may not provide the pay-offs that audiences expect from more conventional sports movies, but this is the most raw and vulnerable that Johnson has ever been on screen. Once you’ve seen him this exposed, you won’t watch his typical action movie stunts in quite the same way ever again.

You could claw together some brilliant short films from the best sequences here, but this 36-years-in-the-making follow-up should make us all question Tim Burton’s modern storytelling sense.

Franco provides a platform for his two leads, Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, to give blisteringly intense performances. But the film would surely have benefitted from a little more nuance and delicacy.

The pathos is laid on very thick. At times, you wonder why a filmmaker as sophisticated as Aronofsky is resorting to such manipulative tactics. Beneath all its blubber, though, this turns out to be a film with a very big heart.

The movie consists of a series of chases and fights linked by ever more improbable plot twists. The action is often very inventively staged. James Mangold, who has taken over directing duties from Steven Spielberg, sets a breakneck tempo.

Alpha has some tremendous moments, but the movie is undermined by its own dense and impenetrable storytelling style. It would surely have worked far better as an immersive installation piece than as a two hour feature.

This is slippery, subversive storytelling that’s very hard to get any firm grasp on – but that is one of its main pleasures.