Peter Bradshaw

The film is pitched with insouciant ease and a lightness of touch at both children and adults without any self-conscious shifts in irony or tone: it’s humour with the citrus tang of top-quality thick-cut marmalade.

Euphoric, sad and thoughtful all at once, this strange and wonderful film is rounded off with a gloriously well-crafted apocalyptic vision and a chilling intimation of divine retribution for earthly wrongdoing. The Coens have finished the noughties as America's pre-eminent film-makers.

The Death Of Stalin is superbly cast, and acted with icy and ruthless force by an A-list lineup. There are no weak links. Each has a plum role; each squeezes every gorgeous horrible drop.

This film, so apparently forbidding and opaque the way many Ceylan films initially are, has in fact something engrossing in its garrulous and wide-ranging quality: a literary quality in fact.

Hard Truths is a deeply sober, sombre, compassionate drama about a black British family, with flashes of fun and happiness that are emollient if not exactly redemptive.

It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes.

Greg Kwedar has adapted the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson; the director is Clint Bentley, and they have created a lovely looking, deeply felt film, clearly absorbing the influences of Terrence Malick in some of the low camera positions, sunset-hour compositions, narrative voiceovers, and epiphanically revealed glories of the American landscape.

For one star to get an award, a handful of defeated nominees have to swallow their pain, as the spotlight moves away from them. For one star to deliver the shock of the new, another one has to receive the shock of the old. A Star Is Born turns that transaction into a love story.

Citizenfour is a gripping record of how our rulers are addicted to gaining more and more power and control over us – if we let them.

Its effects are essentially theatrical – but they are powerfully achieved, and the performances from Hopkins and Colman are superb. It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive.

Foxtrot is a movie from Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz that is structurally fascinating yet also structurally flawed: its accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned by a whimsical final reveal.

Clayton brilliantly uses slow dissolves to create ghostly superimpositions, and the harmless squeals of bath-time fun, or squeakings of a pencil, suggest uncanny screams.

This is fiercely powerful storytelling, simple and muscular in one way, but also conveying nuance and sophistication in its depiction of character.

It’s a movie that will live with me for a long time.

McDormand is perfect in the role.

The film allows you to ponder not just the mother-child bond – strong enough to confront fascism – but the way everyone has to let their children be influenced by strangers; the unintended upbringing of being out in the world. What an emotional experience.

It’s an action-thriller with punch; Bridges gives the characterisation ballast and heft and Pine and Foster bring a new, grizzled maturity to their performances.

For its control of narrative, its photography of the vanished suburban California of the 1940s, and for its compelling central performance from Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s noir thriller is utterly gripping.

Everything in it – every frame, every image, every joke, every performance – gets a gasp of excitement.

It’s a richly detailed character study, immersing the audience in the life and mind of its imperious main character.

So Long, My Son is a piercingly, profoundly moving picture that peels and exposes the senses.

Chernov is armed only with a camera, to the astonishment of many soldiers he encounters, and the film was constructed by editing his footage together with that of solders’ helmet cameras and drone material. Chernov shows us how drones are now utterly ubiquitous in war, delivering both the pictures and the assaults.

Phoenix is the key to it all: a performance as robust as the glass of burgundy he knocks back: preening, brooding, seething and triumphing.

The intriguing thing about Black Panther is that it doesn’t look like a superhero film – more a wide-eyed fantasy romance: exciting, subversive and funny.

It is such a strange film in its way, stranger still if you are not accustomed to Weerasethakul’s work, and it needs a real investment of attention. But there is something sublime in it.

Swinton’s delivery has a theatrical style – it very much feels as if we could be watching a stage show – and there is something frozenly despairing about it; it is the voice of someone who is unwilling to relinquish her dignity or rationality and just give in to an aria of sadness.

Without Ronan’s performance, Brooklyn might have left a sugary taste. But she is the ingredient that brings everything together: her calm poise anchors almost every scene and every shot.

Somehow, it doesn’t look like something that happened 50 years ago – but rather an extraordinarily detailed futurist fantasy of what might happen in the years to come, if we could only evolve to some higher degree of verve and hope.