Lee Marshall

The energy and passion of Zbanic’s fresh, new, direct gaze at the conflict comes through in every frame.

Although Sorrentino’s Fellini mash-up adds little of substance to what il maestro showed and said all those years ago, it’s still a remarkable cinematic experience.

Blue Moon, which plays out on the night of the premiere of Rogers and Hammerstein’s first hit, Oklahoma!, is a romantic, funny, moving, life-affirming chamber piece that is itself a great example of a three-way creative collaboration – between director Richard Linklater, writer Robert Kaplow and actor Ethan Hawke.

The director’s latest has a lot to say about families and generational relationships, but this is also a film of quiet charm, anchored by a scatter of joyful performances.

About Dry Grasses is a ravishingly cinematic piece of work that seems designed to spark animated, if not acrimonious, debate.

One of the many pleasures of this understated drama is its slow-burn magnetism and lack of flashy genre posturing.

Tools associated with fiction are used to tell the truth, and an elegant tone is deployed to disguise a righteous fury.

Natural Light is a tough, slow film that makes demands on its audience – though much of the real horror is as just-off-screen for us as it is for Corporal Semetka. But it’s also an absorbing, beautifully crafted, thought-provoking addition to the new Hungarian cinematic wave.

In a film lasting a shade over two hours, consisting of just 46 separate shots, the undisputed emperor of Taiwanese slow cinema crafts a ravishing, wordless story of urban loneliness.

[A] powerful, at times shocking but also intensely human documentary.

To the outsider, Naples is often seen as a city of colour and life, a place of bubbling exuberance. Not so in Giancarlo Rosi’s strikingly melancholic documentary portrait of the southern Italian metropolis.

Much credit too must go the actors, all non-professionals who were discovered by the director via community meetings and theatre workshops. There’s no Brechtian alienation here: these are committed yet unmannered performances that help to flesh out what might otherwise be a thin story.

While the stand-off does have its scripted moments, Clash rises above this for two reasons. Firstly, it’s intensely cinematic.... Secondly, underlying the drama is a rather poignant lament for the unity and energy of Egyptian culture, something which comes through in a wealth of small details.

A spry romp through the seven years leading up to the drafting of the Communist Manifesto, Raoul Peck’s biopic of Karl Marx’s early years feels like a mix between a prestige BBC drama and a Marx For Dummies primer.

This is a ‘minor’ Hong compared to some of the sixteen films he has premiered since 2010 . . . But it’s still a delight, a wistful, smart, chamber piece that gently teases out questions about whether you can love someone without controlling them in some way, whether acting can be sincere or sincerity can be an act, and how much of our life in the present and future is conditioned by our life in the past (a lot, as it turns out – but we knew that already).

Writer-director Glasner’s control of tone in a potential misery fest that – believe it or not – contains a bunch of laugh-out-loud moments is pitch perfect, most of the time.

The subtext of In Viaggio (which translates as ‘Travelling’) is that it is while on the road, away from the close confines of the Vatican, that Pope Francis is at his most uninhibited and, therefore, most revealing.

Petzold’s lean, crisply-shot tale is a deft shape-changer, switching mood and register, interlacing romance with suspense and sudden jabs of humour.

Johnny Depp’s broodingly psychotic turn as convicted Boston crime lord James ‘Whitey’ Bulger is not the only tasty thing about Scott Cooper’s tale of the unholy alliance between a South Boston Irish mobster and the FBI.

This comfortable armchair of great, old-school cinematic craft is made all the more embracing by Iglesias’s nuanced soundtrack. But we’re jolted out of that seat, and made to stand in admiration, as the film deftly weaves together two tales of removal – one maternal, the other political and historic.

Slow-paced but always absorbing, the film features a magnetic central performance by Ia Shugliashvili as one of the strongest, most quietly heroic introverts we’ve seen on screen in a while.

Once the Seven-Samurai-style band of brothers is assembled, 13 Assassins is pure pleasure: and it culminates in a magnificent 45-minute showdown that has to be the best final battle sequence in cinema since, oh, Kill Bill at least.

There are moments when, like the gaudy lights of Acapulco, Sundown flickers into something rather special when seen from the right angle, in the right mood: a film about a goodbye to life which is also a film about a kind of afterlife.

With a running time of four hours, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros is a marathon, even by Wiseman’s leisurely standards. But it is an absorbing film, a forest full of trails for viewers to wander in.

Goodman emerges as a passionate advocacy journalist but also a well-navigated professional who is wise to the tricks of the trade and prepared to use them.

Set in Rome’s sprawling Cinecittà studios in their 1950s heyday, Finally Dawn is a rich, shape-shifting fairy tale, an odyssey of empowerment about a vulnerable girl navigating her way through a day and night of enchantments and dangers, using her weakness as a kind of magic shield.

If the village’s utter isolation feels unlikely, that’s because The Sower is in one sense a dream, the enactment of a myth that goes back to Ancient Greece and beyond.

The film’s delicacy of touch comes through not only in the bittersweet love story at its centre, but in a wealth of seemingly marginal details.