John Bleasdale

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

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.

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

Like the Barry Lyndon of martial arts movies, every shot has been composed, lit and executed with such care and attention by Hou and his cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing that The Assassin is totally absorbing in its spectacle, from the meticulous details of the interiors to the astonishing, breathtaking locations, from forests and waterfalls, to mountainsides and in one unforgettable moment cliff tops.

Nothing particularly unusual or dramatic happens for the first hour of the film, and yet it is so beautifully done and engaging that the whole thing is riveting to watch.

In one truly magic moment, Buster Keaton – who had fallen on hard times and was largely forgotten – joins Calvero for his final gala performance. It is a cinematic meeting to be cherished and makes up for the maudlin and wordy melodrama that precedes it.

Behemoth is a stunning and moving denunciation of the situation in Inner Mongolia, where the mining industry is permanently changing the landscape.

The film’s strongest element and most necessary comes with Luca Marinelli’s performance.

It is remarkably good.

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

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

Bright Sunshine In is a pithily precise portrait of the love life of an artist.

The film reveals its twists and turns with a delicate hand and always manages to stay one step ahead of the audience, even as most of those watching will surrender to the hypnotic erotic charge that runs through the film.

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

Dean doubles as cinematographer and his ability to unobtrusively capture moments of village life is matched for an eye for the natural beauty the tribe lives amidst. But it's a beauty which never drowns the film. There's also room for jokes and gossip, nastiness and fun.

In Farrell and Kidman, he has found two performers who are utterly willing to go the whole hog and their performances are brilliant deadpans.

Fukunaga and his actors - especially the two leads - have managed to create a riveting drama which is suitably appalling.

With a richness of characterisation usually reserved for hefty novels, each shot in Winter Sleep glows like a symbol, whilst each digression is almost a short story in itself.

Following the disappointing period dalliance of Jimmy's Hall, Ken Loach's latest I, Daniel Blake is something of a return to form. It stands as a succinct and furious raging against the dying of the light, or more accurately the snuffing of the light by a privatised and punitive system more intent on lowering the figures than caring for those in need.

[Bahrani's] created a complex and thoughtful political drama with the speed and tension of a good thriller.

Goldin’s career and Poitras’ latest asserts the primacy of the artist as a participant in the world. Something which will make us see the world differently starting from the very walls from which the art might hang: the rooms in which the films are seen.

Saturday Fiction certainly demands patience, shrouded at first in a smog of exposition.

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.

Alongside The Wrestler, The Whale is Aronofsky at his most compassionate. It’s a gargantuan invitation to empathy and understanding.

The Wonders is a complex and nuanced illustration of a family trying to live by their own standards - whilst only partly failing. Rohrwacher's vision is tactful and restrained, with so much we don't ever know. The characters' histories are there to be guessed rather than spelled out.

Although Tamhane's film recalls Franz Kafka in its nightmarish vision of inhumane bureaucracy, Court is neither faceless nor surreal. Rather, the absurdity and numbness are all too human and as such even more frightening.

Whereas Senna had that one moment of horrible impact, this latest tale is the story of one long car crash.

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