Lee Marshall

Another End has a lot going for it, not least its command of audiovisual atmosphere and the way it makes the audience work to join the narrative dots before delivering a sucker punch final twist that will encourage lively post-screening debate.

The resulting film is both warm and reticent at the same time, so keen to cleave to reality that it shuns dramatic fireworks – particularly in its gentle, muted ending.

It’s the empathy Syversen and her lead actress evoke for a free spirit battered into submission that is this tough little film’s greatest achievement.

To reveal much at all about the film’s abrupt change of register around two-thirds of the way in would be unfair. Suffice to say that if The Mountain has been a very austere, mid-life-male variation on Into The Wild up to now, it soon feels like we are watching a Gaspar Noé movie, with a little dose of Miyazaki thrown into the mix.

Can a film be baffling and rewarding at the same time? Can a stimulating cinematic experience co-exist with the suspicion that the filmmaker has deliberately set out to frustrate the audience? For all who believe the answer to those questions can be ‘yes’, then Sunset (Napszállta), second film by Son of Saul director László Nemes provides a rich seam to explore.

There’s a discourse going on here about family and memory, about what we lose if we turn ourselves into work machines who can “pull a 48” (go for 48 hours without sleep) that leeches subtly into the fabric of Kreutzer’s psycho-drama, buoyed by a fine use of setting, camera focus and colour.

Often laugh-out-loud funny, even (or rather especially) as the silliness escalates in the final half hour, this is a cult cineaste’s treat which rampages gleefully through a china shop of genre conventions. Only killjoys who demand narrative coherence will fail to respond.

It’s a lean drama that cuts no slack.

It’s both an elegy for, and triumph of, Hong Kong genre cinema.

Gavagai is refreshingly grown-up in the way it sets up satirical targets and then complicates them – pointing out, for example, that tensions around caste, exclusion of the ‘other’ and the guilt of privilege are not the exclusive preserves of white people.

Bird spreads its wings slowly, but ends up soaring away from its dingy broken-Britain locations in a moving flight of hope and empowerment.

In all its flawed brilliance, The Square remains an original, visceral, uncomfortable and essential viewing experience.

The film’s most rewarding strand is the inventive, pointed way in which clothes and textiles are used as metaphors both for female constraints and female defiance.

This is an atmospherically shot film about African oral culture, about riots, street musicians and storytellers. But it also uses the space and denizens of the prison as a metaphor for the divisions and tensions within Ivorian society.

Reticence is also the keynote of The History of Sound’s two riveting central performances.

It’s a film that rises above a few heavy-handed directorial touches to weave, over its admirably lean running time, a tapestry of sisterly bonds and fissures that also has plenty to say about the film’s setting, the dense, oppressive urban Palermo.

Its relatively tranquil surface, its small amusements (many of them revolving around a tasty turn by John Turturro as a histrionically insecure American leading man), its moments of touching, almost Sirkian melodrama, above all its ability to tease resonant themes out of seemingly inconsequential scenes or lines of dialogue, make for a film that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechnyi’s debut feature is a sensitive, nuanced meditation on war and its effects on the psyche of individuals and nations.

The ‘I could have been a contender’ brand of sports movie gets a twist in this tasty, if minor-key, biopic.

Courage becomes not so much a study of a brave political theatre troupe but a portrait of a country at the crossroads, one that is likely to resonate with audiences worldwide.

A suffocating slipknot drama, it embeds violence and extortion in a destructive ecosystem, showing that every favour is loaded, every gift poisoned, every debt unpayable. Brutality never cleanses in Kim’s impressive debut; it simply engenders more brutality.

An old-fashioned, beautifully crafted nature documentary for family audiences.

Fizzing with ideas, as difficult to pin down as its heroine, Divines keeps generating electricity long after the lights have gone down.

The Truffle Hunters is a film as distinctive and lingering as the scent of the rare tuber that inspires it.

The gritty realism of Io Capitano’s story is leavened throughout by recognizably ‘Garronian’ touches; pools of magic realism, theatrical set pieces of colourful intensity.

Melodrama is a neglected genre, often delivered with a post-modern twist these days. Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz proves in this stirring, heart-wrenching period film that it can be served straight up and still work a treat.

The writer-director’s evident anger is tempered and fragmented by both fatalism, games of truth and lies, self-doubt and frequent reminders, in this Biblical landscape, of the historical and geological long view. Ahed’s Knee also works, perhaps surprisingly, as a drama that crackles with a never-consumed sexual energy.

Shot with grace and sensitivity in black and white using available and natural light, What You Gonna Do is a visual treat, the easiest on the eye of all the director’s films to date. It is also, for all its unevenness, a stirring, committed portrait of black lives at a crossroads in the American South.