John Bleasdale

Not exciting enough to be taken as straightforward thriller and not engaging enough for a dramatic character piece, Egoyan's The Captive is held back by its own lame script and a distinct lack of necessity.

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.

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

Zvyagintsev's pessimism is leavened both by his comedy and his sense of beauty. Mikhail Krichman's cinematography captures the sublime grandeur of the landscape against which the nasty, brutish and short lives are played out.

Dolan is a director who thinks hard about the possibilities of cinema and explores them with verve and ingenuity, but it is in his latest film that everything has come together.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It soon becomes difficult to dismiss the suspicion that Goldthwait had set out to make a comic horror but forgot to insert any laughs.

Foxtrot is a bold and imaginative portrait of the confines of family.

With Custody, Legrand has created a family drama that plays out as social realism, but it is as intense as a thriller and, with no generic get outs, far more terrifying than Kubrick's The Shining.

Una Famiglia is the kind of social realism that isn't realistic and says little about society.

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

It’s the film’s humanity which is at the core of its genius.

Network is an outstanding satire that has become more rather than less relevant with each passing year. It is bitingly funny, whip smart and as mad as hell.

Shines out as a rough diamond, a masterpiece of British cinema undeniably worthy of its classical title.

Danish singer and actress Trine Dyrholm plays the diva with verve and energy, in a portrait which is also something of a reevaluation.

The Producers is so effusively inappropriate and so damned funny it is one of the highest examples of low comedy.

Importantly, Spielberg instinctively knows exactly when to keep his camera still and allow what's in front of it to take precedence.

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.

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

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.

Sadly, the intriguing set up - along with Del and Bonnie - is left behind for a too nakedly state-of-America musing, with everyone Charley happens across having some social ill to portray.

Scorsese’s direction always keeps us uncomfortably close to Travis’ subjectivity, whether we’re prowling night time Manhattan or gazing into a glass of Alka-Seltzer until the whole world disappears into the healing hiss.

Character and psychology aren't really the point here. Bozon's world is one of adult grotesquerie splatting against the wall of youthful hostility.

Mektoub My Love is an often beguiling work, drenched in beauty and humour and an inclusive warmth.