John Bleasdale

Glazer’s film is richly daring. It is both meticulous and brutal; aloof and involved; ferocious and cool. It is poetry and cinema, but it is also guilty and it knows that it is.

The whole set-up risks being all too winsome, but Jarmusch has always been a quiet punk: his most radical assertion is believing, despite everything, in the essential goodness of people.

Blade Runner 2049 is not a perfect film. The pace occasionally puts the plod in the procedural and some story elements are introduced only to drift away to the land of possible sequels. But Villeneuve has created a genuinely thoughtful piece of sci-fi which escapes the gravitational pull of its inspiration to become something - to paraphrase Dr. Eldon Tyrrell - more Blade Runner than Blade Runner.

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

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.

About Dry Grasses is part-Chekovian comedy of yearning and male ego, and part-tragedy of a country which stymies the growth of its own citizens.

Phoenix has created a masterful performance for a film which itself feels like a masterpiece: a cracked masterpiece.

Birdman is a rich, startlingly clever and multi-layered collage, with Iñárritu creating a meta-universe of mirrors and performances upon performances.

Over the years, Phoenix has given us some of the most memorable portraits of dark flawed men from Commodus to Johnny Cash. Here, he is excellent, utterly convincing as a man who has been hammered by the world and so has decided to hammer it back.

The two-part The Souvenir can be seen very much as one whole, and as such is one of the very best achievements in recent British cinema.

Although Goodfellas doesn’t aspire to the grandeur of Coppola’s mob, Scorsese’s New Yorkers have their own vitality, even if – or perhaps because – the threat of violence is never far away.

It seems ridiculous to call a film that is only 73-minutes long an epic, but that is what The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet feels like. Though it should be made clear, by epic there’s nothing grandiose; there is nary a special effect to be seen and hardly a cast of thousands. But at the same time, Argentine filmmaker Ana Katz’s sixth feature encompasses a life and very nearly the end of the world.

Barry Lyndon is a rich cinematic experience which fully deserves to once more be seen on the big screen and enjoy its status as one of Stanley Kubrick’s greatest achievements.

The Favourite has ribaldry and intelligence to burn, a deliciously entertaining period piece that feels liberated by its period, rather than restrained and invigorates like a glass of wine thrown violently in your face.

At the heart of Marriage Story are two career-best performances from Driver and Johansson. There is sensitivity, wit and intelligence in abundance, and in one barnstorming scene the kind of raw emotional nudity that’s rarely captured on screen: it’s the painful core of the movie which the laughter might ease but can’t erase.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is bold, beautiful and brutal. It’s Tarantino’s best film since Kill Bill, perhaps even since Pulp Fiction.

Carell, in a rare but not unique departure into drama, proves himself as accomplished at tragedy as he is at comedy.

This is Barbie on absinthe.

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.

Although a couple of narrative twists late on threaten to drum us into melodrama, Chazelle never misses a beat and the film builds to a cathartic crescendo.

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.

Made up of a series of related but not necessarily connected vignettes, each filmed with a static camera, they resemble New Yorker cartoons scripted by Samuel Beckett.

A fluid, dreamlike tone poem of mothers and fathers, death and continuance.

It should confirm Nichols' reputation as a mature filmmaker of great tact and intelligence.

With its epic scale and global reach, Human Flow is a powerful testament to a shameful crime against humanity.

Sissako's film is at turns funny, poetic and deeply moving.

The Age of Shadows is a bloody and breathtaking piece of filmmaking which confirms that Kim can do pretty much anything.

The Son, though perhaps not as original and accomplished as The Father, is nevertheless an affecting, empathetic and intelligent drama.