Matt Glasby

A film to make your blood run cold, Nemes’ first-person account of life, and death, in a concentration camp contains horrors you can’t – and shouldn’t – unsee.

A minor-key appraisal of modern marriage that manages to be funny, sad and, sadly, true – just don’t watch it on your anniversary.

What emerges is as riveting as it is revelatory.

Like an arthouse Ghost, this is bold, original filmmaking with a pervasive sense of amused detachment.

All politics and posturing, the first two-thirds of the film are stiff and uninvolving, and although the climatic 45-minute free-for-all is genuinely spectacular, it’s clear where the director’s heart lies.

A brutal army thriller that feels like the truth, thanks to take-no-prisoners storytelling and a tell-no-lies performance from Jack O’Connell.

A stark, sinister chamber piece built on atmosphere and performances. Morfydd Clark is a revelation.

A horror film that will haunt your waking hours for weeks. Every frame of It Follows is stamped with nameless dread.

Cleverly making the most of the quiet-LOUD-quiet-LOUD dynamics of most horror films, the sound is the real star.

Pulled from the news but punched up to fever pitch, Sicario represents the perfect mix of cerebral and visceral thrills. Star, director and screenwriter all bring their A-game.

There are some stunning moments, such as the eerily green-screened opener, and an unsettling underwater sequence up there with Dario Argento’s Inferno. But the 145-minute runtime feels increasingly indulgent, and Bonello borrows heavily from Kubrick, Lynch and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Too slow for the mainstream, perhaps, this presents a disgusted worldview thats painstakingly plausible, however much we may wish differently.

Benson and Moorhead’s sophisticated sci-fi/horror features minimal SFX but more ideas than a TED talk. Uncanny, and uncannily good.

A sombre crimer that resists easy thrills, investing instead in grit, intelligence and complex characterisation.

Original, engrossing and extremely confrontational, The Tribe treads the dark path between misery porn and masterpiece.

Like Tonya on the ice, this vicious black comedy is lean, mean and hard to take your eyes off.

More fever dream than film, Love Lies Bleeding shows that Glass is the real deal. Who knows what sights she has to show us next?

Cool as you like one second, camp as Christmas the next, this entertainingly overpumped action-horror will have genre fans (and their mums) grinning from ear to ear.

Gently joyous, from soup to nuts. Take your grandparents and they’ll enjoy it as much as you.

A once-in-a-lifetime subject, sensitively brought to the screen, the Angulos’ story makes the strange seem ordinary and the ordinary, insane.

It’s not without its moments, but more comic dexterity and less brute force would have made a less choppy watch.

Exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure – a decent approximation of how the characters feel – Mommy puts us through every setting on the emotional wringer.

Sheridan directs as well as writes for the first time, and delivers a superb thriller with a powerful chill that gets in your bones. Smart, tense and soulful.

The best sci-fi trilogy you’ve never seen amalgamated into one organic whole. Surprising, exciting and, at times, strangely beautiful.

Deliberately paced and expertly acted by a weathered ensemble including Hugo Weaving, Mystery Road also boasts some of cinema’s most gorgeous magic-hour photography even if, elsewhere, light is in perilously short supply.

The result is so far-fetchedly entertaining it feels like a fantasist’s fevered imaginings. Which, in a way, it is.

Dastmalchian shines as Delroy, mugging to the studio audience as things spiral out of control, all the while rubbing his hands that he has managed to create the TV event of the decade. And along the way, the filmmakers pull off some rather nasty surprises.

Bleak as a morgue, even more brutal than the play, Kurzel’s stark psycho-drama can’t unseat its source, but is still mighty screen Shakespeare.