Jonathan Romney

At moments, however, the pacing treads a fine line between stately and somnolent. What consistently mesmerises, however, is the lead performance by Krieps.

Mixing often horrifying war footage with testimonies from a wide range of Ukrainians of varying ages, Freedom on Fire is an urgent, somewhat hectic, at times cluttered film – but that’s partly explained by the fact that Afineevsky has been able to assemble it so rapidly, only six months after the invasion began.

Tantura makes for a fascinating, troubling watch, although it doesn’t altogether come across as rigorously objective, given rhetorical touches in both music (ominous ambient drones, ironically boisterous kibbutz songs) and visuals (thriller-style close-ups of Katz’s cassettes playing, a pointed insert of a see-no-evil monkey statuette).

Above all, there is the generous, often mischievous performance by Cámara, with a promisingly vivid juvenile lead from Nicolas Reyes as young Quinín, and a nice ensemble buzz from other family members, including Patricia Tamayo as mother Cecilia; otherwise it all comes across as a fondly soft-focus blur.

For all the film’s provocations, both serious and mischievous, it’s a remarkably elegant, subtle piece.

A complex work of novelistic density, this is among the boldest and most accomplished statements from one of the world’s exemplary filmmakers.

There’s more than a hint of other-worldly tragedy here, limned in parallel with the allusions to political conflict whose root causes no-one can quite remember.

Given that it’s about a tequila factory, Mexican drama Dos Estaciones is as sobering as they come – but it’s also a bracingly potent distillation of drama, psychological portraiture and passionate flouting of clichés, both national and sexual.

The Blue Caftan is a keenly tuned, non-judgmental exploration of an enduring relationship that has thrived despite the stresses of conflicting desires and the pressures of social norms.

British director Joe Hunting has made a tender, affecting documentary about love, friendship and people finding a place where they can be themselves.

By the time we reach a genuinely unnerving climax, Alper has pulled off something special – a film that works at once as a highly-charged suspenser, a savvy piece of tightly-enclosed world-building and a sharp critique of machismo, populism and their very tangible dangers.

[Quivoron] emerges as a formidably kinetic director, who could easily have a career making pedal-to-the-metal action movies - although her way with character and deep-dive exploration of working-class subculture suggest that she is way too individual to take a straight generic path.

It’s a shame that Giannoli’s film, while ambitious, confidently executed and more than honourable, nevertheless feels like something of a relic.

Moving, politically committed and with an absolute ring of hard-researched reality, this is at the very least their finest since 2011’s The Kid With The Bike, and arguably one of their very best.

The result – something like a female-fronted version of Antonioni’s The Passenger - isn’t likely to entirely satisfy anyone in either the arthouse or mainstream camps. But if taken as an oblique tropical reverie, the film definitely has pleasures to offer – not least an oddball but often riveting lead performance by Margaret Qualley.

A potent emotional charge, very contemporary eco-consciousness, and film-making that at its best fairly sizzles in its strangeness mark out EO as an animal film that stands defiantly on its own hooves.

There are flashes of the incisive, caustic insight of his Force Majeure and Palme d’Or-winning art-world satire The Square. But this rather laborious take on the excesses of capitalism, depicted as a luxury yacht headed inexorably for farcical disaster, lacks the pitiless ironic cool that made those two films so memorable.

A sometimes mesmerisingly intense lead performance by Alena Mikhailova is the trump card of this sprawling, sumptuously mounted revisionist drama ... But for all its sometimes-crazed energies, it feels ponderous and overwrought.

This deviously constructed puzzle film plays cat and mouse (or to be exact, pet rat) with the viewer, yields subtly disconcerting insights into the fault lines of bourgeois life, and features terrific lead performances from Sabine Timoteo and Mark Waschke.

This small, engaging film doesn’t offer much in the way of introduction to Birkin for non-initiates - there’s nothing about her acting career, for example. But for the devoted audience of a star who can – for once – genuinely be called an icon, the film offers a tender and quite illuminating portrait of a mother-daughter relationship seen both within, and far away from, the public sphere of celebrity.

Muntean leads us into a playfully caustic realm of social satire, as his characters find themselves in unknown territory without either GPS or a clear moral compass.

Some small-scale but surprising formal twists, and much playfulness, will keep his admirers happy.

Michael Thomas’ imposing performance will be the hook for a film that, while executed with Seidl’s typical steely control, might strike his followers as being a touch too familiar – while non-adepts will find its darker dimensions altogether too bleak for comfort.

Both homage and critique, Peter von Kant astutely gets under the skin of the lesbian-themed original, ekes out new resonances and proves both authentically Fassbinderian and altogether Ozonesque in its ironic sensibilities.

The film unpacks few surprises, although Argentophiles may applaud a ludicrous and copiously gory climax.

Some viewers may find it hard to credit the emotional extremes on display here, which seem more to do with the codes of French psychological drama than with the way people might actually behave in real relationships. Indeed, Binoche has not always convinced in conventional terms when playing women in a psychosexual fluster. Nevertheless, it’s something that she specialises in, and she pushes that register a lot further here – and far more compellingly - than in Denis’s Sunshine.

Gerbase’s insightful, quietly unsettling picture may, right now, be too close to the bone to attract viewers desperate for hard times distraction; but it deserves exposure, and should attract niche sales both on the strength of newsworthiness and on its considerable cinematic achievement.

The film plays with and deconstructs the familiar repertoire of Diana myths and images, to offer an empathetic, intelligent insight into the prison of fame and privilege, with Kristen Stewart offering a lead performance that is brittle, tender, sometimes playful and not a little uncanny.

Working with Carbunariu, Jude offers a spare, visually striking evocation of the methods of Ceausescu’s secret police, the Securitate, in its pursuit and punishment of a young dissident.

Rather like the butterfly wings that are its central metaphor, Son of Monarchs is deceptively fragile-seeming, yet robust, structurally complex and vibrantly hued.

The film derives a magnetic continuity, and an unsettling range of dynamics, from Haque Badhon’s performance

There’s plenty to gawk at, and to argue over, in this episode - yet No Time To Die is oddly lacking in pleasure or real wit.

A promising and emotionally mature romantic drama from British writer-director Harry Wootliff.

Essentially a frothy bagatelle, and sometimes overworking the slightest of jokes, nevertheless this lively, sleekly executed farce from the Argentinian makers of black comedy The Distinguished Citizen offers comic and visual pleasures alike, plus crisp acting from its lead trio.

La Caja is a canny blend of detective story, political drama and rites of passage vignette, and is the sort of film that comes across as so simple and direct that it’s easy to miss how meticulously conceived and constructed it is.

A powerful and troubling drama about the Stalin era. ... This is a film to revel in, and to argue about – and for some, no doubt, to recoil from – but it’s one of the most original works of the year, and a stand-out of what is proving a rich spell in Russian cinema.

Provocative Italian feature Bad Tales is one of those films that aren’t afraid to confront you with the grimmest aspects of the human condition, but yet leave you feeling strangely exalted by the sheer cinematic invention involved.

An all-star cast and some showstoppingly horrible hair can’t save Ridley Scott’s medieval epic.

Forty years after John Carpenter made the defining slasher movie, director David Gordon Green has made a creditable stab, as it were, at reanimating the title.

The boisterousness remains, as does the unreconstructed maleness that has often been a jarring mannerism in his work. But new intimacy also yields a lightness and tenderness that are a welcome addition to Sorrentino’s palette.

If The Power Of The Dog isn’t the absolute killer coup that Campionites might have hoped, this is her most thoroughly conceived, consistently involving drama for years: taken all in all, pretty much the full visual, dramatic and, indeed sonic package.

What gives the film a force that balances out the delicacy is a commanding, charismatic lead by Wendy Chinchilla Araya, best known as a dancer, whose highly physical presence in turn evokes Clara’s sensitivity, isolation, vulnerability, fury and – despite the pressure to keep it hidden – powerful sexuality.

In all fairness, the film is hard to enjoy, not least because its handful of intriguing ideas are so self-indulgently gussied up with ostentatious visual execution.

It’s his most mature film, an unabashedly and audaciously experimental work.

Paris is more than just a setting here, but absolutely defines the way that the characters live and connect, the rhythms and pressures of their existence.

This satire about media, emotional alienation and – need it be said? – the state of the nation makes its point quickly and forcefully before going on to make it again and again, with different modulations, for over two hours. It’s a shame, because somewhere within this sprawling piece is something audacious and playful.

Even though it sometimes feels as if Corsini is trying to keep too many plates spinning, the whole risky exercise pays off to provocative effect.

By the time we reach an apocalyptic payoff, Titane has skated on and off the rails several times, with insouciant abandon. You miss the combination of bravado and control that made Raw work so well, but the deranged cocktail of outrage, excess, conceptual ferocity and sheer silliness on display here will make you gasp – and occasionally flinch.

It’s a film made with honesty, integrity and a certain grace, but it can’t quite overcome an earnestness that was never a problem in Hansen-Love’s best films, which carried their literary and cinematic inspirations lightly.

Compartment No. 6 is something of a minimalist shaggy dog story, ending on a bittersweet low-key note.

A beautifully executed, intellectually searching and sometimes droll futuristic drama.

The ultimate problem with this flamboyant, yet oddly oppressive-feeling film is Carax’s bleakly Romantic world view – even working with exuberant wits like the Maels, he’s unavoidably committed to the dark abyss himself.

Loznitsa’s essay raises questions about the nature and ideological mechanisms of totalitarian myth-making, and the nature of public grief as propagandist display.

This film is an informative, polished and bracingly upbeat production.

Enfant Terrible is somewhat repetitive – ever more shouting, more hedonism, more tainted glory – but it’s never boring. It’s just not very insightful – full marks for the style, but the substance is best found in the books, and in the various documentaries about the man.

A work that is uneven in form but arresting in content and especially vital as a commentary on contemporary African society, human rights and disability issues.

You just wish that director Park had managed to execute the film as a whole with the crisp efficacy of some of his individual sequences.

Maria Speth’s study of a veteran teacher and his early teens students lasts three and a half hours, but not a moment is wasted. Anyone who teaches, or has ever been taught, will find something to relish in this serious-minded but quietly celebratory film. just as Bachmann puts the students at ease, the film-makers have managed to do the same – unintrusively catching the pupils’ episodes of vulnerability, or certain telling moments, as when two of them exchange flirtatious taunts.

In the sheer exuberance of its exploratory spirit, Koberidze’s film is very much of benefit to cinema – and any who feared that the art form was running out of new ways to find poetry in the real.

The film’s freewheeling dynamism and stylistic elasticity allow Fabian to shake off the stuffier tropes of historical drama.

Whatever the film’s flaws, this is certainly the most unrepentantly confrontational work we’ve yet seen from Jude - and perhaps from any Romanian director. And, as the beleaguered, improbable figure of scandal at the centre of it all, stage actress Pascariu impresses with a crisply reserved performance.

A well-researched, sharply organised exposition of a strange and disturbing set of alliances.

By the time Wheatley, who also edited, concludes with a full-on eye-searing weird-out, it’s hard not to feel that he is retreading old ground – that this isn’t a more arboreally lavish A Field in England 2.0.

You don’t have to be an animal lover to appreciate the craft and the genuine poetic vision of a film which, though strictly unsentimental, is intensely moving, transfixing and quite genuinely unique.

In its narrative tautness, this documentary can hold its own alongside the best of Romania’s contemporary fiction.

The film offers an engrossing overview of the painstaking, insightful investigations carried out over the years by Lewis and associates.

By Allen’s lamentable recent standards, this fitfully entertaining film could be called adventurous, while the reliably cranky Shawn and a stately, vampish Gershon are clearly having a good time and letting us in on it.

Not so much bleeding edge as screeching edge, Gia Coppola’s Mainstream is a frenetic piece of pop-art social satire that strives to be super-current but feels oddly traditional beneath its eye-searing, pixel-popping surface.

An unapologetic old-school exploiter going full on for thrills and suspense, it’s undeniably polished and energetic, and features a couple of strong performances from young stars Isabel May and Eli Brown – but it feels fundamentally tasteless, indeed just plain wrong.

Personal and committed as the film clearly is, it won’t come across as a revelation for adepts of this pensive brand of slow-burning visual poetry - of which this seems a reticent and somewhat old-fashioned example.

While this is essentially a fireside chat atmospherically shot, Hopper/Welles is recommended viewing for anyone remotely interested in either personality, or in the history of American cinema.

Scripted with heightened literary cadences by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, the film is well crafted in every respect, and marks an acting career high for Katherine Waterston, as well as a fine showcase for the ever more impressive Vanessa Kirby.

A film of sober elegance and control, Wife Of A Spy never quite delivers on the tautness of its build-up, but it is beautifully executed and features a number of teasingly ambivalent performances, notably from lead Yu Aoi.

The film’s magnetic centre is a strong performance from Vysotskaya, working from a base line of initial testiness to rising anxiety and terror in face of the oppression that she realises she has been enabling.

This is undeniably a very theatrical film, but it never hides that – indeed, it makes the most of a certain claustrophobia. It’s an immensely watchable evocation of a moment when black America was on the verge of an upheaval that continues to resonate, in 2020 as strongly as ever. It absolutely puts you – to coin a phrase of the time – in the room where it happened.

It’s basically espionage adventure, but with a science fiction backbone: Nolan ups the ante on “Mission: Impossible” by making the impossibility not just physical but quantum physical. And he goes about it expertly, bullishly and with giddily perverse intent to bewilder.

Gagarine’s increasingly wayward trajectory demands of its audience not just a leap of faith but a vault into the stratosphere, and its tone of naïve romanticism could rankle with more jaded viewers. Still, conviction and chutzpah, plus often dazzling execution, will chime with younger adult audiences.

Those in the ‘for’ camp are likely to find Garrel’s The Salt of Tears one of the most finely tuned and richly achieved of his recent works .

Altogether solemn in tone, the film is undeniably handsome, with DoP Benoît Delhomme steeping the Japanese landscape in melancholy atmospherics, but Minimata tends to over-aestheticise its material, not least in the too-elegant recreations of Smith’s black and white imagery.

For all its directorial mastery, this austere cine-symposium feels like an artistic blind alley, and one that recklessly presumes an audience of committed chin-strokers with a preternatural attention span.

Natasha certainly proves that Khrzhanovsky is a risk-taker, and his actors even more so. But it’s a puzzling, inconclusive drama that doesn’t quite hold its own outside the parameters of the overall project.

The film shows plenty of ambition and imagination delivered with considerable visual elegance, yet still ends up feeling somewhat airlessly conceptual.

Shirley will find an eager audience at a cultural moment which increasingly values emotional expression. But many will find the film an over-rich brew that arguably stresses Jackson’s visionary inspiration at the expense of the craft, canniness and lucidity of a writer whose work was characterised by supreme control, even if her troubled life wasn’t.

Tibetan road movie Jinpa is a playful, gently perplexing and distinctly stylish fifth feature from director Pema Tseden.

The result is a cheerfully lurid mess that goes goofily off the rails after a slow build, and will offer few surprises for adepts of Lovecraft or of screen schlock.

Hers’s stamp as a contemplative miniaturist with an eye for the inner life is unmistakeably on display in this involving, typically graceful piece.

Garver’s film is above all a celebration of the pleasure of intellectual and emotional response to art (“To be paid for thinking is a marvellous way to live,” Kael says), and a picture of a style of thinking that might be seen as distinctively but non-stereotypically female.

A compelling drama that transcends its generic roots.

An elegant, sometimes eerie film, Celebration does not editorialise: its only implicit commentary is a futuristic electronic score, which suggests that Saint-Laurent is something of an extra-terrestrial being. A tender, more melancholic work than its title would imply, Celebration should not be construed as a debunking of its subject, more as a gentle lament for an institution fading into the sunset.

Featuring a terrific performance from Jennifer Ehle and a bold, quietly nerve-shredding lead from Morfydd Clark, this is a hugely individual, distinctly British piece of genre-tweaking with a strong female focus and clear potential to cross borders between arthouse and upmarket horror sectors.

Despite meticulous visuals and a strong central performance by Mark Rylance, the film feels dramatically ponderous and emotionally inert.

The narrative would be sufficiently daunting to follow if the film didn’t make such heavy play on the thin line between fiction and reality; the frequent blurring between the two Saturday Fictions – Lou Ye’s and Tan Na’s – is muddily executed to begin with, without the play being so unconvincing as a piece of stage drama.

While the emotional intensity and somewhat protracted narrative can be exhausting, in visual terms the film is a tour de force, steeped in blood, dust and squalor.

Andersson’s consistency may have made him a director for acolytes above all, but they will find this a satisfying and richly resonant lesson in obliqueness and sometimes opacity.

At once a visually expressionistic hymn to female agency and liberation, a psychological thriller that always stays one step ahead of the viewer and a flamboyant reggaeton dance musical, Ema will strike some as a heady celebration of a movie, while leaving others bemused by stylistics that sometimes overpower narrative and psychological plausibility.

The film is sometimes stylishly executed, but its hyper-aesthetic, even rarefied approach, together with a confusing dream-tinged narrative and a general sense of narcotised sluggishness, will make for limited appeal beyond Asian markets and the fanbase for traditional drawn animation.

Michôd’s film is a determinedly solemn and violent affair, which makes a sober political point at the end – but not before it has treated us to two hours of bleakly realistic historical reconstruction and some lugubrious drama.

The film never entirely transcends its nature as a polemical pamphlet - and despite strong presence in those scenes where Maryam speaks truth to power, Alzahrani doesn’t quite have the charisma to make her substantially more than a representative figure.