Mark Kermode

What it all adds up to, other than a moment-by-moment experiential overload, is uncertain.

After Love constantly foregrounds duality, narratively and stylistically.

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.

It’s that sense of beauty – of the possibility of redemption – that prevents Les Misérables from being crushed by the grim weight of the world it depicts. It’s a world in which Ly grew up, and his love of these neighbourhoods, in all their hardscrabble glory, is tangible.

It’s a terrifically tactile film, full of the kind of deliciously observed detail that lingers in the mind long after the movie has finished.

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 all adds up to a very modern drama about age-old anxieties: the fear of ageing and death; the desire for intimacy and reassurance; the allure of artifice and deceit.

Filtering his immense contribution to cinema through a deceptively incidental lens, he once again reminds us that movie-making can be a profoundly humane endeavour; at once comedic, tragic and truthful.

While the direction may be deceptively unfussy, Deschanel does brilliant work bringing Kurt’s worldview to life, enabling us to understand his progress towards an artistic breakthrough, represented here by paintings conjured by (among others) Richter’s former assistant Andreas Schön.

This deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.

Strickland’s work seems to exist in that strange space between the social-realist tragicomedy of Mike Leigh and the exotic kaleidoscopic imaginings of Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell. It’s a mesmerising place to be, at once familiar yet otherworldly. Try it on for size.

I found myself gripped by a universally accessible tale of a divided soul – a figure whose dual personas are embodied in the two names of the film’s title; Diego and Maradona.

In Time it’s an almost superhuman sense of togetherness that rings through, a refusal to bow down, to be broken or defeated.

Behind it all is an endlessly saddening search for that transformative sacrament evoked by the film’s title – alluring yet elusive.

While subjects as dark as separation and death may be faced head-on (a reading from Philip Larkin’s The Trees had me in tears), there’s a comedic quality that reminded me of Aardman’s sublime Creature Comforts animations – a joyous juxtaposition of quotidian, vérité-style dialogue and fancifully inventive visuals that hits a tragicomic sweet spot.

This crystalline tale of memory, love and brain surgery from writer-director Lili Horvát (who made 2015’s The Wednesday Child) is a treat – sinewy, seductive and beautifully strange.

However dark the narrative may seem, there’s a strong streak of black humour that accompanies the horror, often facilitated by a pointedly chosen tune.

For all its scattershot reference points, however, Last Night in Soho still emerges as Wright’s most personal film – you can feel how much he loves the material. Frankly, I felt the same way.

Miss Juneteenth is a beautifully observed and quietly powerful drama that applies its coming-of-age tropes to children, parents and politics alike.

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

Scenes of faces melting and bodies merging have a satisfyingly tactile feel, harking back to the experimental cinematic trickery of Georges Méliès, albeit with added 21st-century oomph. There’s a real physical depth to Possessor that helps keep the story grounded even during its most outlandish flights of fantasy.

It’s the more deceptively restrained and poetic elements that strike home.

Like all the best evocations of times past, Licorice Pizza has no answers – only an enraptured sense of awe that makes Anderson’s joyous film feel like a very personal memory.

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

This portrayal of imprisonment may be authentically down to earth (Blackbeard’s rival Lass wants inmates to be managed “more rationally”, not as enslaved people but “customers”), but Night of the Kings proves most captivating in evoking the transformative power of the imagination.

When a parishioner leaps to her feet, her spirit clearly moved, you’ll want to do the same. Wholy Holy indeed.

A first-rate B-picture, and a timely reminder of the delights of well-crafted popcorn thrills.

Most modern American film-makers rarely get the chance to conjure frank sex scenes that serve an explicit narrative purpose, so it’s significant that Sachs has cited the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman (along with fellow Europeans Maurice Pialat and Luchino Visconti) as inspirations for this French-German co-production.