Kate Taylor

One of the things that is admirable about Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea – and there are many admirable things about this quietly moving drama – is the way its initial enigma seems to need no explanation; yet, once deciphered, the film does not falter but moves only deeper into the emotional territory it charts.

With exuberant naturalism from its non-professional actors, and a standout performance from Kosar Ali as Rocks’s best friend, the film covers the highs and lows of female adolescence with compelling sensitivity.

Technically awe-inspiring, narratively inventive and thematically complex, Dunkirk reinvigorates its genre with a war movie that is both harrowing and smart.

Perhaps this multilingual, almost-pre-AIDS idyll does not stretch credulity – the family is surely based on Aciman’s own internationalist clan – but it can try the patience.

As director Maren Ade builds one extended set piece after another, you will gradually spy her brilliant fusion of form and function: the languid pacing reproduces in the audience the feeling of Ines’s excruciating discomfort and desire to see her father shuffle out of the scene.

Avrich was probably wise to avoid lengthy digressions into Middle East politics, but if a great film takes the particular and makes it universal, this is not a great film. Given the war that has followed, this individual story must remain only that, circumscribed by the larger context that perforce it can barely acknowledge.

Unusual for a Holocaust drama, the film offers no false hope of rescue or resurrection, but does insist that our bearing witness matters.

The cast of aliens, led by Matsuda, has great fun playing the humans-in-training, but it's Nagasawa's defeated young wife who really stands out as the performance that elevates the film.

Ridley, full of charming spunk playing a skeptical rebel recruit in The Force Awakens, is the biggest disappointment here. She is less engaging now that she is committed to the fight and plays most of the later action on a single note of earnest desperation; Johnson's script leaves her little else.

Form and content seem oddly divorced, but music – the Polish folk tunes, communist-propaganda anthems and Parisian torch songs – sets the mood and saves the day.

One of the most compelling aspects about Paterson as a film about art is the effortless way in which it declines to ask its audience to judge whether Paterson’s poems are any good: their quality seems immaterial to Jarmusch’s point. It is the act of writing them, both expressing and amplifying Paterson’s sensitivity to his world, that seems important.

For all its cleverness, Elle suffers, like many a thriller, from an unmasking that proves less intriguing than the original mystery and, in its misogyny and its misanthropy, the film ultimately proves less interesting than it believes itself to be. Mainly, it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth long after the credits roll. Like Michèle herself, Elle is a nasty piece of work.

There is exquisite dramatic tension here, built partly by Campion’s deft storytelling and partly by her powerful cast.

This Paddington, so sweetly voiced by Ben Whishaw, is just ursine enough on the one hand and just teddy enough on the other to reproduce the charm of the original.

There is one thing that power can’t stand, and that is to be mocked: The social importance of this topical romp should not be underestimated.

On shifting ground, it is McDormand's fine performance that holds steady here, her wit and her fury eliciting more admiration than pity for the unrelenting Mildred. McDonagh does not always conquer this heartland, but McDormand already owns it.

In the hands of director Mia Hansen-Love and the heart-stopping Huppert, Things to Come (L’Avenir) examines the inevitable losses and possible liberation of late middle age with impressive sensitivity and restraint.

It rejoices in a classic structure in which one upward trajectory and one downward meet for a shining moment in the middle. Under Cooper’s direction – and thanks to his chemistry with his co-star – the movie throbs with the excitement of that meeting, while the downfall of his alcoholic rocker achieves an almost tragic catharsis.

Yes, The Father is a familiar story and a universal one. Yet Zeller has been uniquely inventive in the way he evokes the unreliability of memory and the subjectivity of experience in the senile – and the healthy.

Foxtrot is an admirably precise yet dreamlike film, probing the trap in which contemporary Israel finds itself. It is deliberately designed, superbly filmed and affectingly acted by Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler as the stricken Feldmanns.

The story is both fresh and archetypal; the landscape both hard and delicate – and beautifully observed. Memories and premonitions are intriguingly inserted into the action and the performances...are note perfect.

Jenkins creates many remarkable scenes, particularly as the male characters discuss the racist realities with which they live.

The particularly imaginative handling of the shifts between the human and the more ethereal animal incarnations represent the film’s most rewarding aspect.

Perhaps the bravest thing here is Banderas’ reserved performance: Selfish, hypochondriacal and sadly cocooned, his fictional film director is not a flattering portrait of an aging auteur.

Both Colm’s initial rejection of Padraic and Padraic’s final crazed reaction are not the stuff of realism or reason but of fairy tales and nightmares, yet Gleeson and Farrell make the film a delight.

The ensuing story about life and love is made visually compelling by exquisitely crafted animation, much of it drawn in the bold and refreshing ligne claire style pioneered by the Belgian cartoonist (and Tintin creator) Hergé. That counterintuitive contrast with the mysterious, unspoken tale only makes this unusual film all the more intriguing.

Yet for all that the director's unflinching vision, the cast's excellent performances and Mikhail Krichman's unerring cinematography impress themselves upon the viewer, there is something out of balance in Loveless.

The culminative effect of the cinematography is inconclusive as the character remains trapped in grief.