John Bleasdale

Efira is a dominant and compelling presence and Sibyl is frequently funny. Ultimately, it never quite squares the circle of the comedy and the pain, but Triet is a sophisticated filmmaker and this – her third feature – is further proof of great talent.

Covino’s brilliant comedy is original and smartly entertaining: a celebration of male friendship in all its ups and downs.

It’s just Huppert on autopilot and like that dry white wine, you can have too much of it.

A masterful dissection of social inequality and the psychology of money.

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.

Not since Jane Campion’s The Piano has a costume drama presented such a gorgeous view of love from a woman’s point of view.

Eggers has created a film of disturbing horror, absurdist comedy and probing psychodrama which defies the generic boundaries as it breaks through them. The Lighthouse is a saltwater gothic masterpiece.

Compared to the sophisticated and nuanced horrors of Black Mirror, Little Joe feels like a fairly straightforward riff on a very familiar idea.

Laverty and Loach have created another hard-hitting, powerful film, spiked with humour and moments of rare but profound humanity.

Jarmusch has opted for a stumbling dead so indulgently pleased with itself that it resembles little more than a precocious home movie filled with familiar faced pals all of whom find the joke funnier than any audience will.

Ultimately, Sorrentino’s sympathies lie with Berlusconi because – in their vacuity and their need to impress – they have something in common.

An urgent and moving plea for action against the illegal trade in shark fins and more generally for the conservation of marine life in our rapidly dirtier and emptier oceans.

The script by Cronin and Stephen Shields blends the familiar with the eerie well and never allows silliness to take over. The performances all round are superb and Seána Kerslake creates a credible heroine – a woman on the edge but who is by no means fragile.

Hill does his best but Jim is woefully underwritten, a shuffling loser who various other characters try to bolster with the dignity of a back story that doesn’t seem to fit his actual behaviour.

It’s difficult given the premise of the film not to come out of The Workshop thinking of alternative directions the story could have gone in.

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.

As the film drifts through dream sequences and diversions, the dramatic power of the chase fizzles in the damp of the woods.

Ultimately, Alverson’s The Mountain is arthouse cinema at its frostiest.

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

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 trademark brutal violence remains effective, and Zahler maintains a pervasive feeling of dread throughout his films, but Dragged Across Concrete shows the limits of taking the game long.

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.

After the profanity-laced Shakespearean barrage of Deadwood, Dewitt and Audiard’s Wild West is a more prosaic place, but it is also sharply intelligent, extremely funny and full of surprises.

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

Even magnificent scenery like this can get dull if there’s no invention or novelty to proceedings, but fortunately the six tales collected in the dusty old hardback book The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the Wild West, complete with colour plates and tracing paper, are packed with originality, poetry and glorious wit.

Bradley Cooper’s soulful exploration of the depredations of fame is an effective melodrama boasting genuine star turns from himself and Lady Gaga.

It is remarkably good.

Alfonso Cuarón returns to his childhood for inspiration with the meticulously beautiful Roma, an autobiographical black and white thank you letter full of warmth and love.