Jonathan Romney

Precision-tooled, ambitious in scale yet bracingly concise, this is Bigelow’s boldest and most assured film yet.

What you get in these performances is intelligence, emotion and physicality, and when they come together as combustively as they do here, what you get is something extremely rare - a film that catches the messy, hot complexity of life and love.

Following his hugely ambitious period productions Mr Turner and Peterloo, the director returns to what might be considered the quintessential Leigh mode of tightly-framed domestic drama, and does so with exceptional bite.

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

Using techniques of distanciation that sometimes make it an alienating, even confusing experience, László Nemes’s cogent, strikingly confident debut is harrowing, but cinematically rewarding.

It’s a safe bet that many contemporary viewers will find the film confusing, abrasive, pretentious and antediluvian in its sexual politics. But there’s no denying the audacity of Welles’s undertaking, and of the reconstruction project. What can be said with certainty is that this version of Wind is perplexing, sometimes exhausting but never less than fascinating.

The Zone of Interest is a challenging rather than conventionally provocative film but, by any measure, essential viewing and a work that will be a vital focus of discussion both in the cinephile world and beyond.

Into what might have been an alienating, hard-edged setting, human warmth comes from some relishably muted performances.

A challenging narrative structure - withholding key information and skipping between several time frames - makes this film a daunting watch overall. But Wang’s ambition and seriousness, aided by strong ensemble performances, ensure it is a formidable and, for the most part, involving work of novelistic scope.

Even as the film sails insouciantly into a rarefied imaginative stratosphere of its own, it’s anchored to emotional reality by a dazzling performance by Emma Stone – if anything, outdoing her revelatory turn in The Favourite.

Some cinema hits you in the gut – this film places you right inside the gut, and while it’s not always a pleasant place to be, it’s a visit you’re not likely to forget.

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.

Vox Lux is intellectually charged spectacle, with one foot in the Euro-art tradition and the other ankle-deep in the pop zeitgeist.

The film is undoubtedly a tour de force, not least by the two actors, who essentially play several characters - or at least, multiple aspects of the two lovers - and who both audaciously shed inhibitions in a film that is at times as exposing sexually as it is psychologically.

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.

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.

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.

Parasite is a malign delight from start to finish, with a Machiavellian sense of mischief and a cinematic brio that shows Bong revelling in his Hitchcockian control of somewhat Buñuelian material.

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.

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.

While, on one level, it seems to belong to international cinema’s increasingly prevalent strain of climate catastrophe dramas, on another it’s a brittle character piece, a comedy of social embarrassment with a dark and ultimately tragic undertow. Until, that is, a coda ties it off in another register entirely.

At Averroès & Rosa Parks, which premiered in Berlinale Special, is a tougher watch than its predecessor, but an extremely accomplished and compelling work.

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.

Liu Jian’s animation Have a Nice Day is at once a bloodthirsty genre thriller; a political statement about China, globalization and capitalism; and a vibrantly witty piece of postmodern pop art.

Wang’s brutally revealing trilogy presents a challenging statement about working-class life, urban and rural, and urges us to think about economic exploitation and the nature of labour in the globalised world.

As Maria, Burow shines in a phenomenally demanding role that challenges us to tune in empathetically to a character whose actions and motives are rarely less than problematic, but are always limned with a fine brush.

So compellingly directed and acted that for much of the time we could almost be watching a documentary, Life and Nothing More is an involving, quietly moving piece that eschews conventional narrative shape to offer a multi-layered depiction of exactly what the title promises.

Tótem embraces chaos and bustle in an ensemble drama of a family living through crisis. This thematically rich piece offers a set of vivid character studies, while musing on life, death and time – largely from a child’s perspective.