Lee Marshall

Moretti has once again found a way to make a picture that creates edgy comedy out of a process of self-therapy. Some will find the exercise wearyingly self-centred, but that’s to miss the point of a film which turns one man’s obsessions into a comedie humaine.

There’s an air of well-oiled, made-for-TV efficiency about the exercise that extends from Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra’s safe hand on the tiller to Stephen Goldblatt’s golden-light photography.

Babyteeth is a funny, affecting group portrait, a comedy-tinged family drama.

A very European film of charm and wit that hits the occasional emotional high note, and sees Catherine Deneuve embracing her tastiest role since Potiche with verve and gusto.

Staying just on the serious side of funny, Feng’s Mr Six is a fine, savoury creation.

The result is a fascinating but also in some ways frustrating film, a game of tag that looks resoundingly cinematic but feels like more of a cable or VOD prospect - not least because it lacks the killer punch, the Bannon stumble or revelation that would make American Dharma newsworthy.

If the film doesn’t always mesh its two main strands – tough family drama and reflections on the state of a nation – it does so often enough and passionately enough to impress.

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

Shot and edited with Wiseman’s customary poetry and precision, Ex Libris is structured as a series of forays from the Library’s Fifth Avenue heart to its orbiting satellites, and back again.

Like the film, the soundtrack doesn’t quite know where it’s going, but it takes us on a curious and often engaging stroll.

Although it breaks no new ground, there’s heart, humour, charm and even a little healthy mischief in a film that re-imagines the rapprochement between the two former foes.

There’s a nicely intimate side to Ducornau’s urge to dig beneath the flesh here, a ‘soft body horror’ simulacrum of the hormonal changes this adolescent girl is going through.

Singh busts rhymes with the best of them in this energetic, entertaining film that smuggles some urgent social themes in under the cover of a hoary old fable about a handsome pauper who gets the stardom and the girl.

For resilient audiences, it provides a truly original cinematic experience. ‘Cinematic’ is a key word: the film was lavishly shot using three 4K Canon Black Magic Pocket cameras and comes with a rich soundscape that pushes the oneiric envelope and takes certain scenes into paranoid-thriller genre territory.

A welcome return ... The Book of Solutions is an ode to time-wasting distractions and shelved projects, one that suggests that perhaps it’s here, rather than in the boring finished stuff, that you can find an artist’s soul.

Lovingly shot in warm natural light, and accompanied by a gentle, lilting soundtrack, Holy Cow is shot through with compassion for its rascally yet vulnerable protagonist.

In the end, this is a film that is more emotionally than sexually voyeuristic.

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.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to say what A Private Life is trying to say, but remarriage comedies don’t really need to be anything more than that – and the ending is winsome enough to make up for that second-act wobble.

This affectionate homage to a slice of urban French cool that has rarely been equalled is also a nostalgic tribute to a time and place of extraordinary creative ferment and cinematic sex appeal.

A minor but still fun-in-parts addition to his wacky oeuvre.

The pleasure of watching five fine actors feed on each other’s crackling dramatic energy drives this sensitive if not exactly groundbreaking Swiss cancer drama.

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.

Kechiche has developed an almost unique ability to give surfaces depth through his manipulation of dramatic beats and a quality of empathy that seems built into the roving camera eye.

Rambling but strangely compelling, Oh Mercy!’s documentary bedrock gives the investigation at the heart of the film a real authenticity. From around its midpoint, this uneven film becomes a riveting, compassionate interrogation drama.

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.

Dead for a Dollar is a revisionist western served up in a traditional twine-tied package.

In the end, there’s something just a little too neatly constructed about Monster, something just a little trite about the message delivered after so many narrative twists and turns. Yet there is an emotional delicacy here too that keeps sentiment at bay, at least most of the time.