Kate Stables

The powerful, vanity-free performances are the real thing in this bittersweet biopic.

Chadwick Boseman gives this muscular film, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, added punch and poignancy.

The drifty, dream-punctuated second half might puzzle younger kids, though its universal themes and visual gags are perfectly all-ages appropriate. As is the film’s sweet, un-snarky tone, free from sly Futurama satire or Bojack Horseman raunch.

Steeped in the bitter political divisions of the Civil War, Spielberg's thrilling film about hardwon freedoms is immersed in its own time, but speaks eloquently to ours.

The tender, tragic vibe Williams tries for via our hero’s forbidden affair with aristo soprano Marie-Josephine (a brittle Samara Weaving) feels too speedily set up to be truly effective.

Mixing a rom-coma into the romcom, this smart, sweet and highly personal love story finds a winning formula.

Despite its hard-scrabble setting, eco-gloominess and dystopian story, this dark fairytale is engagingly vivid and life-affirming. An ambitious love letter to a Louisiana way of life that's being literally washed away.

A heist movie with serious bite, Widows is both brilliantly tense and strikingly relevant.

Touching rather than touchy-feely, it’s a high-stakes story with its fair share of fights, deaths and the jail-or-joy tensions of parole hearings. If it’s also a tad starry-eyed about drama as a cultural cure-all, Kwedar’s empathy for the life-battered inmates makes this a rare, graceful work.

Musing on memory and machine-emotion, it echoes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Her. But despite its fine portraits of loss, it never escapes its stage-play origins.

Coupled with the extraordinary lush visuals and fluid camerawork – moulding the ocean’s many moods and textures till it’s practically a character – Moana essays a rich, vivid feel. It might not be a whole new world, but it’s a fantastic voyage.

Its attempt to cram in both origin story and follow-up adventure makes it a long haul for the target tinies.

Refusing to become a cautionary tale, How to Have Sex explores the pitfalls as well as the pleasures of teen-holiday hook-ups; it also brings an admirably fresh, female POV to the subject of sexual consent.

Based on a true story, it’s directed with beautiful, painterly restraint by Anne Fontaine (best known for pretty pieces such as Gemma Bovery), who lets powerful performances by Agata Buzek (as a nun of faltering faith), and fearsome abbess Agata Kulesza power the story.

Both smart political primer and tense cautionary tale.

First-time writer/director Josh Margolin sharpens the film into a smart senior thriller, giving us tense geriatric POVs of the challenges that ensue (Thelma is seriously old, not the agile seventy-something of The G, another recent granny-get-your-gun outing).

Jean-Pierre Léaud effortlessly summons up the iron ruler inside the failing man.

Gyllenhaal is outstanding in this inspiring warts-and-all story of a Boston bombing survivor’s recovery battle.

Theron is astonishingly good, giving a subtle, vanity-free performance.

There’s a bumpy, wholly unexpected dip into melodrama along the way, but the film’s commitment to its characters, and its sheer emotional heft, carries you along regardless.

Filled with cherry-blossom gorgeousness and sentimental homages to small-town Japanese life, it's a film of quiet, telling moments, even when big revelations surface.

Interviewing key figures in his life, they build an anecdote-rich bio.

What holds everything together and stops the film from sliding into a winking spoof is the intensity of newcomer Kansara’s performance. Her obsessive Ria drives the movie’s frantic pace with sheer willpower and scrappy physical courage

Taraji P. Henson excels in a heart-warming history lesson that proves not only rocket men had The Right Stuff.

If it sometimes feels a bit overstuffed, put that down to Lim’s understandable urge to prove that a gal-centred, globetrotting comedy can offer diversity, sharp social commentary, and dick jokes.

Daniel Kaluuya is the motor for this lyrical but hard-hitting road-movie, fuelled by fury and frustration.

Alongside Turning Red and Orion and the Dark, Inside Out 2 offers a timely reflection of the anxiety epidemic among kids. If it doesn’t have the sparkling originality of its predecessor, it has its big heart, keen to show us how complex and gloriously messy teens can be.

What really elevates this sophisticated sequel is Banderas’ rich voicework, which reveals that, under Puss’ suave bluster, there’s a moody moggie discovering fear for the first time.