Lee Marshall

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

Kohn constructs a thought-provoking film that is also an entertaining human comedy.

Access is all in Rosi’s documentaries, and the access he achieves, winning the confidence of his subjects so that it’s as if he isn’t there while filming their most intimate moments, is astonishing. But access has its limits. While our hearts open up to these traumatised kids, being there with them in the room at this delicate moment doesn’t feel quite right.

Undemonstrative but at the same time oddly compelling - rather like its eponymous main character - Felicité is a challenging, perhaps overlong, but also quietly resonant slice of new African cinema.

It’s the tone that’s off here, as it is throughout a film which seems to wink at what it perhaps wants us to see as irony – its soft porn tropes like bondage and flagellation, its over-saturated sci-fi view of a comet’s passing, its horror-influenced vision of the plague – while keeping both eyes firmly open.

There are times when the crunch of the gears can almost be heard as the director shifts up to this new expanded allegorical register, moments when we yearn for a little more depth in the film’s exposé of the inner workings of the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta, and scenes in which the freshness of the director’s improvisational work with actors doesn’t quite disguise a lack of character development. But the intensity of Swamy Rotolo’s central performance and the story’s fiery commitment to her character sweep most of these quibbles aside.

Marcello and his committed, compelling lead actor Luca Marinelli deliver an always watchable take on the hoary old story of the struggling artist that is more interesting in its shape-shifting style and texture than in its rather conventional dramatic core.

We never shake off the feeling we’re watching a filmed play, one whose dramatic crescendos and lulls are relentlessly stagey and stylised.

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.

Kidnapped hides a bleak and bracing message inside lovely old costumes and sumptuous set pieces .

Mandibles is far from derivative, and Dupieux goes beyond the usual “Love you bro!” buddy-film clichés to draw something genuine, even heartwarming, out of the friendship between these two idiots.

A slight story that aspires to be a thriller but ends up as a rather flat melodrama about a rock-star generation struggling to deal with its twilight years.

By the end, loving and eating, wanting and devouring are made to converge in ways that are both gruesome and fascinating, thought-provoking and oddly touching.

It is a sentimental journey to redemption but one that Boonnitipat grounds in understanding and empathy.

Making a great documentary is half finding the right story, half knowing what to do with it. Ramin Bahrani hits the jackpot on both counts in this slyly entertaining but also morally and emotionally resonant investigation.

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

An enquiry into the brutal rape of a black woman in 1944 Alabama broadens into an alternative, female-gaze civil rights documentary in Nancy Buirski’s latest.

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

Its old-school charm shades into tired plotting more than once, and the moral lesson concealed in the film’s central story about a gang of tykes’ search for buried treasure can feel a little preachy.

The film also has plenty to say about male stubbornness and the casual misogyny that lurks behind the apparent equality of Lebanese society.

Haneke’s magisterial control of tone, actor and shot is not to be underestimated: there are scenes of quiet, nuanced authority and menace here that, true to form, compel our attention with their glacial brilliance.

Sometimes all a documentary needs to do is to get us in the room with somebody we’re curious about. Laura Poitras did this, and a lot more, in Citizenfour, by taking us to meet US whistleblower Edward Snowden; she pulls off the same trick in Risk.

There is beauty in the 35mm black and white landscapes and framings of this painterly widescreen feature, but it stands in stark contrast with the alienating narrative and tone of a film which, like Kosinski’s book, takes a strange relish in charting the descent of simple country folk of a never-named country into sexual depravity and joyless cruelty.

Miike is on fine form, never losing his sense of humour, or sense of character, even as yet another axe is embedded in yet another skull.

The wry, flamboyant cinematic opera of Paolo Sorrentino reaches new heights of showy, utterly tasteful magnificence in Youth.

There’s plenty to admire in this trim, nearly dialogue-free 97-minute drama, not least Mads Mikkelsen’s raw performance as a downed airman waiting for rescue in the Arctic wastes, and the widescreen majesty of the Icelandic landscapes that stand in for the film’s polar setting.

It’s a nice premise, one grounded and lent empathy not only by a series of strong performances but by the script’s point-of-view shifts.

As with babymaking, the conception is more fun than the delivery, which comes perilously close to turning our knocked-up heroine’s kill list into a series of very dark alt-comedy sketches.