Peter Bradshaw

Disclosure Day does give us once again a very Spielbergian primal scene of suburban childhood, though not with the devastating reality of his autobiographical The Fabelmans; rather, it is that aliens give Spielberg his way of defying the old maxim about not being able to go home.

Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.

Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure.

An absorbingly intimate, novelistically detailed procedural about the day-to-day, moment-by-moment lives of the Vichy administrators after the fall of France, mostly shot conventionally, sometimes jolting into an anachronistic dreamlike scenario on video.

Teaching scenes in films always have a fascination for me, and these are tremendous; Mercier patiently, sometimes angrily, tries to get the students to appreciate the complexity, nuance, eroticism and social commentary in the frescoes and artwork.

With warmth and heartfelt passion, and a quintet of outstanding performances from young actors shot in looming closeup for so much of the time, Clio Barnard has created an absorbing and moving social-realist picture.

The Esiris have created a seductive, mesmeric picture.

The Black Ball is handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed, bringing the puzzle pieces together in the edit and contriving an elegant, poignant cameo for Lorca himself, a kind of incidental choric figure who seems to intuit all the future triumphs and disasters of love and war. It is a rich and rewarding movie.

Fares’s gaunt, handsome face so eloquently conveys vanity, but also a poignant emotional woundedness, anxiety and self-pity.

The performances from Mazurov and Lebedeva are outstanding, and Zvyagintsev’s direction is superb with his cold daylit compositions and scenes in grim streets and housing estates. Everything here looks like a crime scene.

Her Private Hell resists interpretation, like so many of Refn’s recent films, but executes a slow dervish swirl of hypnotic strangeness.

There is some top-quality entertainment value on offer here from a movie which can only intensify the world’s K-obsession.

It’s a meaty drama with big scenes and big but carefully considered performances: a really substantial piece of work from Gray.

It is a fierce rejection of anything starry-eyed about movie-making and a quietly gripping psychological study of a painful confrontation between father and daughter.

This is a bleak, pessimistic film with two excellent lead performances.

Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.

On the face of it, the film contains a soap-opera’s worth of secret feelings and tumultuous events, including the teenage lovers’ sensational escape from the town during a heavy storm. And yet Fukada maintains a cool distance.

The double act of McKellen and Coel has the onscreen chemistry of the year.

Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink.

What is fascinating about northern soul is the way it survived under the media-cultural radar and appears to resist larger interpretive analysis.

Ramblers are justified in keeping the pressure up and the take-home message is: opening up the glories of the countryside and nature itself to everyone is a universal good.

Although no amount of revisionist gallantry can conceal how terrible Yoko Ono’s vocals are, this has a historical fascination as they were Lennon’s only full-length concert performances after the Beatles’ split.

The emphasis is more largely upon discipline and commitment in the service of art, a vocational self-immolation in which the transformation of pain into beauty is the whole point.

It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

This is an elegant, chilly dream of despair.

It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.

François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.

It offers us a provocation, a jeu d’ésprit of outrage, a psychological meltdown that is more astutely articulated than in many other more solemnly intended films. And it gives us what it promises in the title.