Mark Kermode

Its Oscar-bait earworm tune may be entitled Shallow, but the film itself is as deep and resonant as Bradley Cooper’s drawl, and as bright as Lady Gaga’s screen future.

For all its apparent structural complexities, The Father is not quite as mysterious as its creators would have us believe.

The result is another mesmerising and wholly immersive experience from a film-maker whose love of the medium of cinema – and fierce compassion for Baldwin’s finely drawn characters – shines through every frame.

Tonally, Can You Ever Forgive Me? cuts an elegant path between humour and pathos.

As the title suggests, the result is a tragicomic swirl of heartbreak and joy, slipping dexterously between riotous laughter and piercing sadness. At its heart is Banderas giving the performance of a lifetime in a role that, following his Cannes triumph, surely demands Oscar recognition.

Park’s portrayal of Freddie never misses a beat – an astonishing transformative feat for a first-time actor who seems to arrive on screen as a fully formed, multifaceted performer, inhabiting the film’s kaleidoscopic central character.

The theatrical origins of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom weigh heavy on this film, directed with a stagey air by Tony award winner George C Wolfe.

As is customary, absurdist humour, global history and abject horror sit side by side, all equally weighted and witnessed.

There’s a hardscrabble sense of ordinary ageing folk making the best of a bad deal in often desolate and unforgiving circumstances. Yet whatever hardships they face, it’s the air of community and self-determination that rings throughout Zhao’s empathic film.

It’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.

Perhaps that is this frothy film’s strength: cherrypicking multiplex-friendly elements from a complex and still largely unknown life in a manner that leaves the audience wanting to know much more.

As always, Colman manages to express deep wellsprings of emotion with few words and fewer gestures – her face telegraphing great swathes of anguish beneath polite smiles and annoyed glances.

Hansen-Løve hits a career high note, delivering a quietly thoughtful and ultimately life-affirming portrait of the strange interaction between loss and rebirth. It’s a miraculous balancing act that pretty much took my breath away.

If the result sends viewers scuttling back to Armitage’s uniquely accessible version of the source text, then that would be marvellous indeed. But there is enough here that is dazzling and enthralling for Lowery’s movie to stand proudly as a grand work of poetry in its own right.

Where Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s version comes into its own is in the moments where it dares to find its own distinct voice – nowhere more so than in placing Somewhere in the hands of Rita Moreno.

It’s powerfully affecting fare; elegiac, evocative and profoundly cinematic.

If you’re looking for a film that explains where the Spielbergian tropes you know and love came from, then The Fabelmans is for you.

Yet there are also moments of heart-stopping tenderness and beauty.

Every bit as immersive as Victor Kossakovsky’s recent documentary Gunda, about a sow and her piglets, The Truffle Hunters serves as a timely reminder that the world does not turn to the industrialised rhythms of mankind alone, and that we lose track of its natural heartbeat at our peril.

It’s a credit to Stanfield that he manages to keep these complex contradictions alive throughout his performance, capturing perfectly the uneasy manner that O’Neal exhibited on camera, his eyes darting anxiously as he attempts to read his surroundings, his manner a mix of fearful, furtive and oddly forceful.

It’s an overpowering experience, awe-inspiringly photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, groundbreakingly enhanced by Douglas Trumbull.

Woody and Buzz et al are still wonderful creations, and time spent in their company is rarely wasted. But riffs about new owner Bonnie starting kindergarten and once-favoured toys getting left in the cupboard smack of old ground being retrodden.

That a film with such an apparently familiar narrative can keep us this intrigued is a credit to the film-makers – particularly Patterson, from whom we should expect to hear much more in the future.

Widows is a sinewy treat that seamlessly intertwines close-up character studies, big-picture politics and audaciously reimagined heist-movie riffs.

While Gosling plays everything close to his chest, it’s Foy who invites us into the unfolding drama with her wonderfully empathetic performance.

With this terrific feature debut, Anvari lifts the veil on his heroines’ hidden lives and leaves us all dreaming with our eyes wide open.

It’s a visually sumptuous riot of ideas, pitched somewhere between a playful musical, a divine comedy and a metaphysical drama.

There’s a strong element of Greek tragedy underpinning Rose Plays Julie.