Peter Bradshaw

Its fervency and its eroticism give the film its currency.

The pure strangeness of the movie commands attention and there is a charismatic lead performance by Japanese actor-musician Mitsuki Kimura, or Kôki.

Vie Privée canters along to a faintly silly, slightly anticlimactic conclusion and audiences might have been expecting a bigger and more sensational twist. Yet Foster’s natural charisma sells it.

It’s a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives – and how they come to love and understand him just at the moment when they come to see his flaws and his weaknesses.

With icy provocation, Israel’s ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of 7 October.

There is such simplicity and clarity here, an honest apportioning of dignity and intelligence to everyone on screen: every scene and every character portrait is unforced and unembellished. The straightforward assertion of hope through giving help and asking for help is very powerful.

The dreary details of post-heist calamity are as pertinent as the main event. It is this that attracts Reichardt’s observing eye and makes The Mastermind so quietly gripping.

This is a story about the randomness of life in the big city, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV soap feel to its succession of escalating crises.

More than any comedy or even film I’ve seen recently, this is movie driven by the line-by-line need for fierce, nasty, funny punched-up stuff in the dialogue, and narrative arcs and character development aren’t the point. But as with Succession, this does a really good job of persuading you that, yes, this is what our overlords are really like.

Simón has an instinctive and almost miraculous way of just immersing herself within extended freewheeling family scenes – her camera moving unobtrusively in the group, like another teenager at the party, quietly noticing everything.

Its riddling quality, combined with its spectacular visual effects, may leave some audiences agnostic – and I myself wasn’t sure about the silent-movie type effects. Yet it’s a work of real artistry.

Everything here is out of the top drawer of production value: but it never really comes to passionate life.

It’s a baggy comedy, sentimental in ways that are not entirely intentional, but there is value, too.

This frankly odd film is misjudged and naive about the implications of its Holocaust theme. Its bland, TV-movie tone of sentimentality fails to accommodate the existential nightmare of the main plot strand, or indeed the subordinate question of when and whether to put your elderly parent in a care home.

It is burdened by a trite and naive sentimentality that it doesn’t know how to make realistically plausible or transform into romanticism or idealism.

It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema.

It is another powerful, absorbing picture from Campillo and a fitting swan song for Laurent Cantet.

It is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side.

It’s an elegant directorial performance from Herzi.

It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.

This movie, visually and dramatically superb in every way, moves with unhurried confidence across the screen, pausing to savour every bizarre bit of comedy or erotic byway, or note of pathos, on its circuitous path to the violent finale.

It’s high-minded, valuable work.

The madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can’t overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant.

This is a big, muscular picture which aspires to the crowd-pleasing athleticism of Spike Lee’s sports icons; it’s very enjoyable and there’s a great turn from Washington.

It is engaging and sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory setpiece sequences, and is challengingly incorrect thoughts about the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.

A deeply humane and emotionally literate piece of work.

The house is just there and the characters waft through it. Gray admirers might prefer Gray Matters, Marco Antonio Orsini’s documentary on the subject.

It is always entertaining, and delivered with the usual conviction and force but with less of the romantic extravagance than we’ve seen before, less of the childlike loneliness that has been detectable in his greatest movies.