Olly Richards

A film that’s at once light, joyful and emotionally devastating, with deeply affecting central performances. A full-hearted romantic masterpiece.

It’s a moving, challenging watch.

Sum up the plot and it sounds interminable. Watch the film and it will spit you out elated, exhausted and cheering for an encore.

Paddington 2 is every bit as enchanting as the first, perhaps even more so, but it feels arbitrary to pick a winner. The film is a pure delight, as sweet and sharp as, well, marmalade, really.

Describe it and this sounds completely weird and a bit creepy, like some extremely niche fetish porn with a budget. Watch it and it’s magical; fantastic in all senses. It’s the biggest risk of del Toro’s career and it could not have paid off more.

You don't need to understand anything of baseball to get behind this, a chest-swelling story about second chances and flipping a finger up (even a giant foam one) to The Man.

Tough, but resilience is amply rewarded. If last year’s larky Frank suggested Abrahamson was a director to watch, this makes him a director to be cherished.

Taut, clever, and fronted with two excellent performances, this is a clever choice for Jackson's first step into mainstream filmmaking.

The movie that brought a hip new sensibility to animated features and which still stands up in the age of Pixar and DreamWorks thanks largely to a blistering improv turn from Robin Williams.

To call it the most important movie of the year so far makes it sound possibly rather worthy. That’s not true at all. Get Out is a comment on a highly complex situation that’s also a total blast.

A gift of great storytelling, this is the best film Chris Sanders has made.

In trying to tell an enormous amount of story it can spread itself too thin and leave some strands feeling unfinished, but when it’s at its best, this is beautiful and bold filmmaking.

The Lego Movie is bursting out of its box with enthusiasm and excitement for the possibilities of a little pile of nubby plastic.

There are films to see on huge screens, but this is one that almost cries out for a small cinema, surrounded by total blackness. It’s a daring experiment brilliantly executed, with Tom Hardy giving one of the performances of his career.

The animation initially looks like something produced on an early Nintendo console, but what it lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in feeling. It makes sense of how a small child sees the world, saturated and magical but not yet subtly detailed.

Jackie does what the very best biopics should: it makes you view someone you’ve seen countless times as if you were seeing them anew.

The boys (now in blue) have done it again.

It’s a riveting, complex film that asks one simple question: what do you do when there’s no right answer?

Simpler, but also bolder and bloodier, than its predecessor, The Bone Temple is a more-than-worthy sequel.

Eddie The Eagle turns a long-running joke of British sport into a crowd-pleasing story of inspiration. It’s a solid gold winner.

Made absolutely for grown-up fans, this is the Muppets as you fondly remember them: funny, smart and gleefully insane. Kermit, it's great to have you back.

To produce a coherent film from Martel's tricky novel would be achievement enough, but Ang Lee has extracted something beautiful, wise and, at times, miraculous.

Just as with "Once" and "Begin Again," Sing Street will make you laugh, cry and leave you humming its songs for days.

There are strong shades of Bo Burnham’s 2018 movie Eighth Grade here. That’s not to call Dídi derivative at all, but to say that it nails that high-school yearning to be cool and complete lack of any idea how to get there, making things worse for yourself with every attempt.

This is very effective, experimental filmmaking – and at 85 minutes it never becomes indulgent – and the most exciting thing Soderbergh’s done in quite some time.

A Molotov cocktail of laughs and anger, Chi-Raq is a powerful state of a nation address. The result is the most creatively exciting Lee has been in a decade.

A very strong debut by writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig deals with all the usual teenage concerns — dating, family, school — in a way that tries to go beyond genre cliché, with a heroine who is often unlikeable but always believable.

The story has a good dose of hokum, but the execution has an oppressive and sometimes feral quality that doesn’t just make the hairs on your neck stand up, it puts your whole body in fight-or-flight mode. An extremely impressive first film.