Mike McCahill

It always finds new, invariably cinematic ways to nudge us towards its final leap into the abyss. Cronin feels like a real find for our especially insecure moment.

You emerge from this brutally unsentimental education with your chest pounding and your ears ringing – its radical empathy extends to putting us in not just the same room as its subjects, but the same helpless, despairing position. Some films are made to leave you speechless; for some experiences, there can be no words.

The movie’s a great night out, but you sense it’ll also become a priceless resource.

Like José Luis Guerín's brilliant 2007 curio "In the City of Sylvia," this is one of those rare films that may change the way you view the world.

The debutant director applies himself with the same quiet assurance and attention to detail he’s displayed in his acting projects.

After India decriminalised homosexuality last September, many wondered anew: what would a Bollywood romcom look and sound like with a non-straight protagonist? The answer, it transpires, is: much the same as any other Bollywood romcom.

At its best – in a boundless chase round a hackers’ hangout, and a high-speed freeway pursuit – Upgrade is as fluid and exhilarating as anything the Wachowskis signed their names to in the days when they were brothers: the kind of nifty, sometimes nasty surprise our multiplexes sorely need.

For all The Falling’s period trimmings, its uncanny power resides in these ellipses and blackouts – in elements that cannot be easily rationalised.

An unexpected joy.

The good news is that it remains terrific: punchy, old-school stunt work, crisply uncluttered cutting, and varied, inventive baddie-splattering from the moment Aatami deploys one of those beams to take down a jet fighter.

This production’s triumph is the room it’s granted Rajamouli to head into the fields and dream up endlessly expressive ways to frame bodies in motion.

It may wind up as the year's most significant horror film; it's certainly among the most original.

Unimprovably brisk at 91 minutes, Watcher is not messing around – and probably won’t hang around long in cinemas with starry awards fare in the offing. But a few more of these nifty diversions, and the multiplexes might once again be a viable night out.

Baahubali demonstrates the pleasing, straight-ahead simplicity of certain videogames: whenever our hero accomplishes a task, some new challenge presents itself.

The film’s insidious crawl away from comedy into sweaty waking nightmare is arresting indeed. As is, finally, its insistence that some elements of American life remain too serious to joke about.

What this exceptionally lucid film-survey reveals is what has to go on at ground level, and beneath the surface, in order to power a powerhouse.

A social conscience movie with real cinematic bite.

You’ll shed a tear or two, possibly more.

It’s a film of few frills or flourishes, which never tries to dress up its subject or soften its blows. Yet in its rage and its pain, in the wire-brush scrub it gives to the movies’ woozily romantic notions of alcoholism, Glassland feels wholly honest and true.

Uncommonly alert to small, telling details, while more expansive in its attitudes, the result proves far richer and worldlier than anything previously observed coming down the Khyber Pass.

If the plot’s familiar, no imagination or expense has been spared in mapping the kingdom it winds through.

Railing against rising tides, Gore emerges as a cannier performer and a more compelling subject than he was in 2006; a message that sounded critical then has become no less urgent with time.

Longinotto and editor Ollie Huddleston stitch it, with lightness and dexterity, into a wholly edifying, often stirring tapestry of survivors’ stories.

The film remains fascinatingly warped: an extended study in decaying flesh, set to a score mordantly trying to break into Hooray for Hollywood.

McEnroe makes a fascinating focal point.

Considering these characters are bounced round like pinballs, it’s amazing Hawke and the hitherto unknown Snook gain the emotional traction they do: even those struggling to keep up can’t fail to notice how these two are burnt, figuratively and literally, by their experiences.

It’s spry, stirring entertainment foremost – arguably indulging its star with one drunk number too many – but also evidence of a country beginning to tell its own stories with confidence and justifiable pride.

While it’s unfolding before us, it provides – whatever else the courts insist we call it – stirring, seductive spectacle.

As an antidote to Premier League cynicism, it couldn't be bettered.

The film finds the subtle tells that suggest these free-roaming girls might themselves have become prisoners of war, while enveloping its heroines in a persuasive turbulence: unpredictable, never forced, and forever compelling.

Funny, oddly affecting and cherishably personal.

Post-Slumdog, Hollywood and Bollywood have repeatedly attempted to collaborate, with mixed results: here, they’ve produced a properly expansive and enthralling afternoon matinee.

A mixed bag, but one that comes good in its closing stretch, working its way towards a place of quiet power.

This apocalypse isn’t a nightmare so much as the ultimate bromantic fantasy, one in which – with the removal of any responsibility – the boys are free to bicker, banter, and bed down together.

Boseman hits his key scenes out of the park, making a swell couple with Shame's Nicole Beharie, while Helgeland stages Robinson's signature base-stealing with undeniable aplomb.

The director's background in online shorts manifests itself in an occasional, montage-heavy scattiness, and the broadly conventional closing act can't quite maintain the laugh rate, but there's a lot of warm-hearted and commendably daft business along the way.

Headland has comic smarts enough to venture both filthily revisionist readings of My So-Called Life and riffs on the Potsdam conference, while refusing her audience any comforting safety nets.

It is perhaps too much the acquired taste (and smell) to appeal to everyone, but it’s distinctive, never dull and – much like its most noxious niffs – difficult to shake.

Robertson gives himself and his actors time to ponder the board and build convincing relationships and tensions: he’s especially deft around his younger performers, allowing them to register as distinct, often defiant personalities.

Chaganty’s tab-toggling is pacy enough, but he gets pedantic about tying up unfinished digital business, and Unfriended’s pulse-raising wildness is beyond him.

Director Susanna White favours a generic spy-movie look: those chilly blue filters surely need resting now. Yet she works smartly with her actors: while Skarsgård wolfs down great handfuls of scenery, McGregor effectuates a thoughtful transformation from ineffectual tourist to man in the field.

As the narrative approaches its desired fusion of Gallic and Indian cuisine, so too Hallstrom looks to have hit his sweet spot: the very middle of middlebrow.

Kass and Minahan combine old and new while rubbing suggestively against the grain: the familiar pleasures of watching charismatic young actors meet the novelty of seeing them plugged into situations our period dramas have historically overlooked.

A star vehicle that functions like a runaway train, Jawan covers a lot of ground in surprising fashion at full throttle – but that’s also a polite way of admitting it’s utterly all over the place.

This thoroughly emo body-swap fantasia, a sizable hit on home turf, demonstrates that [Makoto Shinkai] inherited much of his [Hayao Miyazaki's] artistry and charm, but not yet his narrative mastery – nor, crucially, that magic that distinguishes lasting artworks from well-drawn ’toons for teens.

Assiduously replicating its predecessor’s strengths and weaknesses, the one thing it risks is that a three-word summary – Hindi Forrest Gump – would tell you all you ever needed to know about it.

The actors lend it a sick heft, and there are droll, region-specific footnotes...but one senses the sniggering film-makers playing variably funny games with our phobia of pedophiles, rather than having anything lasting to say about it.

What’s crucial is how Senese and cinematographer Andy Duensing film these elements: patiently, attentively, with a feel for space and ambient atmosphere, and a reluctance to offer easy explanations that invites tantalising metaphorical readings, and counts as recognisably Carruthian.

Every other scene showcases a northern treasure (Coogan, Thomson, Tomlinson, Stansfield) and looks, feels and – crucially – sounds true to its sweaty-hazy, slightly cramped corner of history.

Gradually, the simplicity yields an idiosyncratic charm.

It makes the text feel newly alive, bristly, radical. A palpable hit, in any language.

Crehan knits it together like a well-worn onesie: you know exactly what shape it’s going to be once you’re wrapped up in it, but that doesn’t mean it lacks for comfort and warmth.

Under Slee’s direction, even the teensiest creepy crawlies find themselves noted and taxonomized; it’s encouraging to see a format that generally sets audiences to non-specific gawping attempting to focus and refine our gaze.

The gusto and pace put many of 2019’s American blockbusters to shame, and – right through to a wildly overcranked final act that throws up surprises like spindrift – Lee balances vertiginous, windswept set-pieces with satisfying character beats.

Only a film as big as Africa could have done Adichie’s novel full justice; the treatment it gets here, equally honourable and hurried, reduces it to Nigerian soap with BAFTA-level acting.

With its clifftop bullfights, expansive Pritam songs and squillion-rupee budget, nobody is likely to come out feeling short-changed. Yet the sight of multigenerational superstars navigating a messily unravelling plot suggests Kalank’s lasting value may be as a carefully colour-graded selfie of an industry – and, in this election year, perhaps an entire nation – in flux.

The knowing tone again feels like Hollywood confessing to trading in material few could take seriously, yet a certain sincerity is evident in Moner’s winning performance.

Offering a set-piece every 10 minutes, a twist every 30, it’s pure pulp, but Vega knows how to sell it, and there are pearls of wisdom amid the nastiness. You’ll flinch, you’ll squirm, you’ll learn how to increase your survival chances should you be doused in gasoline and set alight.

Very soon, O’Doherty will be the headline act in comedies like these, but this good-natured crowdpleaser generously lets her steal whole stretches.

ABCD2 is the latest film to recognise that – however you gender your gaze – there is an abiding pleasure in watching bodies in motion, and choreographer-turned-director Remo d’Souza keeps nudging more of them on.

Solid first and third acts can’t disguise a so-so middle section stuffed with conventional story beats.

BellBottom always feels more movie than propaganda – a mission undertaken to offer audiences a good time after the longest and worst time.

Eid proves a dolefully expressive lead, and Wolfgang Thaler’s ever eloquent camerawork is as fascinated by the discovery of bullet shells in the sand – a clue, and a warning – as it is by the punishingly craggy landscape.

Fortunately, the animators get stuck in: the foodscape Flint's party passes through is again wittily realised, each frame sprinkled with colourful hybrid creations, from "flamangos" to "shrimpanzees".

Vengeance has powered countless movies over the years, but rarely can it have been given such a thorough – and thoroughly entertaining – showcase as it gets in Wild Tales.

It’s been compiled with enthusiasm, flashes of skill, and a certain devil-may-care cheek – an infusion of newish blood for a Brazilian film industry that’s been badly drained in recent years.

[Jason Statham] has some nice, relaxed moments with onscreen daughter Izabela Vidovic, and gets to fulfil half his audience's fantasies in wiping the smirk from James Franco's face.

Another broad, sitcom-bright crowdpleaser, prone to abusing the wacky sound effect button, this latest Mehta comedy has nevertheless been packaged with a professionalism that’s hard to deny.

Compared with Mia Hansen-Løve’s resonant French house drama Eden, or Michael Winterbottom’s kaleidoscopic 24 Hour Party People, these beats sound tinny.

Whether its spitballing silliness will linger when the lights come up is debatable, but it’s a solid SpongeBob movie.

It’s a solid evening’s entertainment, assembled with an assurance rare at this budgetary level.

The arrestingly fierce Cooke, in particular, is surely a star in the making.

A handful of jokes in this minipop Ragnarok, like the crack at Gene Hackman’s role in the 1978 Superman, land at the exact sweet spot where fond fanboy scholarship meets sublime goofiness.

The film is never less than amiable, and rather more spirited and nonconformist than the Transformers movies.

Wan remains a crafty enough director to draw your eye warily across the frame. You shouldn't feel so daft for flinching this time.

Their singing is robustly and winningly performed, and the whole thing is heartfelt. Nice also to see Maggie Steed as the local pub’s landlady. It’s pretty goofy but fun.

If the shark-versus-Statham bout doesn’t tickle you, the shark-versus-Pekinese sidebar might. Not quite killer, but it’s rare to see a 21st-century blockbuster having this much fun – right through to its sign-off – with its own premise.

Mukerji’s biggest achievement is getting this relationship to flourish, Kapoor and Bhatt being among the precious few real-life couples with palpable onscreen chemistry.

If October feels more tentative than Piku, which had rock-solid star turns to ground it, its emotion is at the last earned honestly: any structural wobbles will be nothing compared with the audience’s lower lips come the finale.

Yes, the franchise's appeal lies in watching very ordinary boys making prats of themselves – but couldn't the vehicles transporting them to the wider world display slightly more ambition?

It’s Akhavan’s presence that elevates it above a crowded field. Her film’s a little bit different from the norm, and that – for now – is promising enough.

Sy is such an attentive listener in close-up that you instantly grasp the frazzled Alice’s attraction; if she’s less well defined, Gainsbourg’s nervy intelligence and clenched-jaw resistance to sentimentality hold the interest nevertheless.

We’re mostly watching Allam scowling at the eccentrics passing through his eyeline – but it’s still a pleasure, and often a joy, to watch the star measuring out and savouring Fry’s rich wordplay like fingers of scotch.

It’s still no scarier than any branded content, and perhaps only the most lukewarm slumber party would truly need it. Yet if you were to ask whether Origin of Evil offers a better quality of timewasting than its predecessor, my finger would hover inexorably over YES.

Levine succeeds in giving some genre tropes renewed sheen. Even a rote-seeming, Rogen-initiated drug trip pays off with the cherishable sight of Theron conducting state business with glitter in her hair.

If it’s far from bleeding edge – within days, it’ll look as dated as Tron and The Lawnmower Man do today – it’s a modest upgrade on all those killer-website movies that popped up a decade ago, keeping us at least semi-interested as to who stands and falls.

Strange as it sounds – and is – Kumiko comprises a lingering display of empathy for its heroine, marching stridently on through her own peculiar headspace.

Very solid, very sound entertainment, with thumpingly good Pritam songs that make Eye of the Tiger seem like pipsqueakery.

This offshoot is essentially a well-produced, easily accessed B-movie. Still, it wouldn’t kill you to watch it, and it does more than expected to reinvent its particular wheel.

Too much chaos ultimately prevails, but the rehearsal sequences at least forsake vapid luvvie-isms for close, instructive study of how to pull the best out of actors and text alike.

Set it against the shiny blandishments that have passed for family fun this season, and it starts to look vaguely radical.

Nooshin holds on to a strain of logic that doesn't often survive at this level of filmmaking.

It’s not as focused as its predecessor, but its best sequences rehydrate the mind.

It has that rare and unmistakable look of an event movie that was huge fun to assemble. Whether you’re watching in Hindi, Tamil or Telugu – or reliant on English subtitles – much of that enjoyment does translate.

The weakness is in the material: these are second-string Miller yarns... But the vision remains uncompromising and it dazzles far more than any sequel should.

Its success may depend on how alert you’re feeling, but for once you can’t complain that a movie hasn’t given your synapses a thorough workout.

A debut of unarguable promise, though – plenty to build on if Elba can resist the adolescent lure of running round with 007’s PPK.

Instant Family retains the obvious appeal of watching basically nice people attempt a fundamentally decent thing for a few hours. The shamelessly optimistic finale may even leave you with something in your eye, dammit.