John Bleasdale

There is much to enjoy here - especially at the beginning - and Östlund's ambition and vision are to be applauded. However, The Square would have been greatly improved had the director taken his scalpel and his demanding critical eye and applied it to the film itself.

Zlotowski's Grand Central is a fascinating film on an urgent and seldom-explored situation.

As you'd expect from an actor-director of Amalric's pedigree, the performances are brilliant throughout and Mathieu himself has a wonderful eye for the telling tick and/or the revealing gesture.

The Wakhan Front's script is finely-balanced, allowing the possibly supernatural to slowly impinge without resorting to genre clichés.

The film can't be faulted for its attempt to argue for some kind of humane kinship and reconciliation, even if this attempt ends up dissolving the enmity in a sentimentality that, given what has come before, strains credibility.

With starkly enigmatic, but beautifully wrought and filigree imagery, with a dark cutting humour which is bleak rather than ironic, Garrone is not interested in touching our hearts or giving us a comfortable moral.

Captain Fantastic is a slickly made comedy with a witty, politically articulate script and some wonderful cinematography by former Jacques Audiard regular Stéphane Fontaine.

Happy End may be something of a greatest hits mixtape, but it's also an arresting offering.

A superb character study of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Is The Painted Bird exaggerated? Does it go too far? Does it break the limits of taste? “Yes” on all counts. Walking out is an understandable and valid reaction but watching, getting angry, suffering and approaching understanding is also important too.

Essentially a caper movie, Dope defies the wearisome social realism that is often used to depict lives at the bottom of the social ladder. The script is verbally smart and the various contrivances and tangles of the plot are amusingly played out.

The Untamed is an examination of the strange otherworldly nature of desire, the way sex is often out of joint with our desires and expectations, even with our identities.

The film itself is fairly conventional given the wildness of its subject matter and Jim Jarmusch's pedigree.

As fascism in South America, North America and Europe is rising from the grave, it needs a properly-aimed and delivered stake, rather than complacent sniggering

The film is often remarkable, gorgeous even - many of the shots in Youth would make excellent closing shots, including the opening shot - and funny. It's a work of wonderful moments, but it's less than momentous and, significantly, you'll never believe a single word of it. This is a pity as the performances are excellent.

An expertly handled and brilliantly performed feel-good comedy with an original twist.

Everything builds to a brilliantly over the top finale that becomes almost mesmeric with its use of colour, music, movement and panting.

Plá's film is a caustic, genuine swipe at a selfish and insincere society which is content to make money from the suffering of ordinary people.

There’s so much to enjoy in Ema that it comes as a surprise that there’s so little there.

The fraudulent nature of the mystery makes Wonderstruck feel like a technical exercise: albeit one which is enlivened by some great visuals and excellent performances, particularly the wonderful Millicent Simmonds.

There's no getting away from it, Gibson has produced another bombastic, crowd-pleasing and obviously blood-soaked movie which expertly glorifies that which its hero was against.

Artfully, his films tracks the tragic decline of a good man gone bad, who finds murder too insignificant not to do again and again, a worthy addition to William Shakespeare's ever growing filmography.

Francofonia is a chatty and occasionally brilliant rumination on art, history and death.

Osborne, who initially got his kicks with Kung Fu Panda, doesn't trust his source material and the film becomes about collecting the pages of the story and the effect the story might have on the people who hear it, rather than the telling of the story itself.

Mia Madre is an intimate and sincerely made family portrait, which ends up betraying its own indifference to anything beyond the confines of the family.

This is not just a biopic, or a bunch of worthies singing the praises of the King of Rock and Roll and hoping thereby to get a dribble of the blue suede limelight. Rather, it is a thought experiment, an argument, an essay in the true sense of that word, which is truly revealing.

The Offence is almost the definition of murk, unrelenting and unforgiving.

An effective thriller, Sisters is an intense tightly executed slasher, which fans of the directors later work will revel in.

Benjamin is a charming metropolitan rom-com which is ultimately too lightweight to escape the gravity of its influences.

Men is a hallucinatory provocative work which will provoke laughs and yelps and not a little self-reckoning.

Adapting Melanie Joosten's novel, Shaun Grant has been unable to recapture the grimey darkness of everyday evil of his previous script Snowtown. Instead, we get a sojourn in place of trauma.

As the family resolves problems of the film's own making, the satisfaction gleaned is relatively minor. The threatened and/or promised explosions fizzle out frustratingly, leaving behind the lurking impression of Louder Than Bombs as a well-crafted, well-played, slickly-written misfire.

Once beyond the babble of the Mindfulness merchants, the latter half of the documentary, however, is far more interesting and compelling as Shen has his experts round on the noise pollution that so disrupts our lives.

Party Girl may tread familiar ground but Theis-Litzemburger is utterly convincing as the self-absorbed, beguilingly unaware lead.

At its very best his Venus in Fur is a clever and often comical two-hander, with Amalric and Seigner both giving tour de force performances.

An unnecessarily loud ending is an unwelcome jolt that will likely divide audiences down the middle, but Chronic is an otherwise unique character study of endearing depth.

The first forty minutes or so are – as you would expect – a harrowing recreation of the bombing and the crime.

The vision of the black American experience might be grim, but it is never miserablist or despairing. The songs, the traditions, the love and the community are still there, even if the world seems to be undeniably on fire.

With The Homesman, Jones has produced an original and cantankerously offbeat western which becomes increasingly beguiling as the road stretches on.

The performances are pitch perfect, particularly that of Marceau, who is superb in riding through the conflicts of the situation and the moments when the strong emotions riding over the niceties finally come to the fore.

Black Mass is ultimately a decent film with some great parts, but unfortunately it falls short of the canon to which it aspires.

There are moments in the film that just feel wrong, sometimes complex and wrong and sometimes just plain wrong.

This affectionate portrait in failure is more in the tone of Darren Aronofky's Venice winner The Wrestler, carried mainly by a brilliantly swollen performance by Schrieber, full of humour and bluff and yet with an intelligence to learn his lessons, slowly, but learn them.

The Childhood of a Leader is a dark, enigmatic piece of work that hovers between visionary greatness and petty domestic triviality. Corbet's inaugural stint behind the camera marks a stunning debut.

Even at ninety minutes Popstar feels too long. The funniest moments are the songs.

Kore-eda has unquestionably added a new, intriguing angle to his meditation on family life in contemporary Japan.

A brutal, crackling and savage Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars knows exactly where it's going, carefully breaking every rule in the book. After carefully constructing his crystal kingdom, Cronenberg launches his stones with dark, mischievous joy.

Paradoxically, the wide-eyed awe produces a narrow vision, heavy on the photogenic, with modern life corralled onto a SIM card and loaded with a platitudinous inquisition.

Crimes of the Future still has its strengths. Howard Shore’s score lends a tragic, almost stately emotional counterpoint to the steel of the wit.

Seidl is a filmmaker of both talent and merit, but the blatant manipulation of his subjects and the nakedness of his own intentions and dribbling fascination make In the Basement irrelevant as a comment on Austrian society as a whole, and only passingly interesting as an unsurprising picture of what some very odd people do in the privacy of their own homes.

The President has an urgent relevance to all too many countries around the world, including those touched by the Arab Spring; a darkly comic and poignant portrait of an Ozymandian fall from grace and the subsequent damage that ensues.

With Vox Lux, Corbet has delivered a towering film, a unique uncompromising vision that reveals the darkness on the edge of town that lurks in the depths of the spotlight. It’s funny, thrilling, deadly serious and achieves genuine depth.

It's gorgeous, lush and fun, but there's an underlying silliness to the endeavour which, despite occasional archness, constantly threatens to trivialise events.

The delight is in the audacity and surprise of the film.

The acting throughout is supremely naturalistic, and the social milieu of both family life and the theatre are carefully observed and lightly rendered.

The House By the Sea is ultimately a deeply satisfying and occasionally moving experience.

An earnest, forensic examination into the slaying of the Israeli Prime Minister.

There are moments of real wonder and delight and Quentin Blake's original illustrations are occasionally glimpsed in the set ups. This isn't an epic of visual wizardry and there's zero irony or clever wit. Rather, Spielberg's latest is an old-fashioned children's tale told simply and with plenty of heart.

The Danish Girl is as handsome yet disappointingly flat as a painting on a chocolate box. It should certainly be applauded for bringing to light an unsung hero of the transgenderism, but in its unremitting tastefulness and sentimentality - even a beating has beautiful setting and a lovely bit of blood - it ultimately left this reviewer as cold as a dip in a Danish bog.

A neat little thriller which unfortunately never achieves plausibility.

Though the farce is occasionally funny, it's as bloated and windy as its comedy policeman Inspector Machin.

This could be seen as a smug, empty exercise in satirical excoriation – and as a smug, empty exercise in satirical excoriation, it’d be one of the best – but there is a genuine heart to the film, as well as intellect. Cheadle, Gerwig and Driver are all superb, while Sam Nivola and Raffey Cassidy give their smart-mouth, role reversal kids an impossible likeability.

Guiraudie's humour is self-referential and at times hilarious. His tendency to shock might seem adolescent but he's also careful to identify taboos that perhaps shouldn't be taboos at all.

It isn't that it's hard going: it simply can't decide what it wants to be. [Cannes Version]

A well-behaved and unashamedly populist film, the kind that could be shown in schools and community centres, Akin's The Cut remains an undeniably important film regardless. What it does extremely well is to movingly illustrate a terrible moment in history which has been sadly neglected in the West and actively suppressed in other parts of the world.

Ultimately, Memphis is a bold and bewildering conjuring act, that might mean nothing at all, but the sleight of hand is worth the price of admission.

Côté employs a methodical reticence that often leaves the viewer guessing as to the significance of the images we are seeing.

With a filmmaker as intelligent and controlled as Nemes, Sunset has the assurance that everything has a place and the confusion is intended. But even this has a paradoxical effect.

The tone is mournfully serious and this contrasts with the inherent silliness of vampires. Milo, with his glazed expression and apparent absence of affect utterings, is a compellingly dour presence but doesn't prove quite enough to prop the film up alone.

There's something highly familiar about the material and although it is artful and occasionally powerful, Akin and co-screenwriter Hark Bohm have constructed their story without straying far from countless other versions of the same thing.

A run-of-the-mill, plodding drama, the 'social realism' of which never feels particularly real.

For most post-apocalyptic films, the nightmare is really a disguised fantasy. In Michôd's excellent The Rover, the nightmare is real.

There’s no revolutionary moment of success in which the meanies are ousted and hip-hop declared godly. Music is like education in this: it’s all about the movement, not the destination.