John Bleasdale

Most importantly, Red Rocket is a humane comedy, a portrait of romantic douchebaggery and an America of flailing last chances.

This isn’t a film about sexual assault as a rare aberration, but about a culture which collectively diminishes any notion of consent and encourages a rush to experience.

Iran is a complex and bureaucratic country, but it is also the role of social media and so-called ‘fake news’ that lend A Hero a contemporary relevance, even as it feels like an ancient morality tale.

It's a feel good movie but also a refreshing blast from the past, expressing a nostalgia for a time when political quietism and apathy had not won the day and a Billy Bragg song made more than historical sense.

Kreutzer employs a variety of subtle anachronisms – servants wearing modern glasses, a concrete wall here and there – to allow herself and Krieps the freedom to introduce a modern sensibility that sticks a middle finger up at the polished production design of most films of this genre as casually as Elisabeth does at the decorum of her courtly life.

The movie is a gas. It moves with, well, dispatch, clattering along in its own eccentric way.

After Yang is a moving, subtle and grounded piece of science fiction that doesn’t necessarily get to the core, but certainly hits the heart.

One More Time with Feeling is a bold poem in itself, a portrait of the artist struggling to understand the essentially incomprehensible.

Youssef himself with his crooked smile and exuberant enthusiasm comes across as someone who in a normal state of affairs would be just another amiably slick joker. But in this context he takes on the bravery and the bearing of a hero.

Though the film tries for ironic detachment – twelve chapters with a prologue and epilogue – it ultimately can’t wink away its own heartfelt compassion and sympathy, even as it refuses to provide any trite solutions.

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

This Is Congo is an angry film, yet one which is never blinded by its anger. McCabe offers no solutions – the UN Peacekeeping Force are rounded on at one point by furious locals – and no grounds for optimism. Yet even in its attempts to understand and to communicate that understanding, there is a defiance against the easy fallback of despair.

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

With The Postman's White Nights, Konchalovsky offers up an intimate and moving pastoral.

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

Okja is exuberant and wild filmmaking.

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.

In arguably a career-topping performance, Timothy Spall plays the cantankerous painter as a complex, grunting, snarling and utterly single-minded creature.

Mulubwa’s performance gives I Am Not a Witch its furious heart, but Nyoni weaves her spells subtly and has produced a film of intensity, satire and grace.

It's witty, smart and brilliantly played, plumbing the sub-aqueous depths of our psyches, our histories and desires.

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

Despite the multiple viewpoints, Monster is actually the anti-Rashomon, a jigsaw puzzle rather than a riddle wrapped in an enigma. The care and empathy with which the director and writer, as well as the performers, extend to all corners of the piece is extraordinary.

Kurzel is a master at building tension of a tragedy foretold.

The final few minutes will baffle some, infuriate others, but it will also be the wildness of the imagination which will have you pondering Evil Does Not Exist long after it has ended.

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.

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.

Memoria is gloriously weird and it has that most magical quality of making you look at things in a totally different way.

Maidan is a stunning piece of political cinema and a documentary of quietly moving power and beauty.