Phil de Semlyen

Measured rather than playing to the gallery, The Choral is Brassed Off in a minor key – an elegant, Yorkshire-set exploration of music as a spiritual morale-boost in the darkest times. With Ralph Fiennes gravely essaying the controversial choirmaster at its heart, it does a lovely job of swerving the obvious notes but misplaces its stirring crescendo.

Like Nomadland, another film that maps out rocky terrain with impressionistic grace, Hamnet is a deep-felt ode to loss and resilience. Zhao doesn’t just tell you about the healing power of art, she shows you. Prepare your tear ducts accordingly.

Needless to say, Souleymane’s Story is not an easy watch. It’s a tough, unsparing and often heartbreaking look at life for the migrants who make the online world tick, and a jolt for those of us who use it unthinkingly.

As with the previous Knives Outs, the satire is applied in broad but enjoyable brushstrokes.

Cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s handheld camera work, some really slick editing and canny use of real news footage, combined with impressive CGI, give it all a pulse-raisingly immersive quality, like a plunge into the underworld.

Cheesier than a wheel of Stilton and about as edgy, Downton Abbey bows out with a cosy but loveable final instalment that will leave few dry eyes among long-time fans of Julian Fellowes’ British TV thoroughbred.

Remake is emotionally shattering.

Martel’s forensic doc shatters any sense that, for her fellow Argentinians, the colonial burden has been lifted. It’s an intimate pinhole camera capturing an IMAX-sized story.

The performances are solid, with an excellent Jude Law all inscrutable psychopathy as a younger Vladimir Putin and Alicia Vikander the perfect embodiment of an amoral post-Soviet arrivista, and the chilly world-building works well enough, but there’s a missing ingredient – actual Russians.

Beyond the regular crunch of fist on bone, The Smashing Machine is an unexpectedly gentle, soulful character study that has Johnson undercutting his crowd-pleasing ‘The Rock’ persona with vulnerability and boyish uncertainty.

Those first 40-odd minutes are unbearably tense. Ferguson is a standout in a strong ensemble cast

Not top tier Jarmusch, but still a funny, soulful anthology worth seeking out.

As with The Shape of Water, del Toro makes no secret of where his sympathy lies and who the real monsters are, but there are surprises here. Not least of which is how moved you might feel in the end.

Grab your nan, put the kettle on and enjoy some exceedingly fine thesps hamming it up royally.

There’ll be moans from horrorheads that it’s not scary throughout, but in deepening his exploration of family life in the ‘burbs, Cregger sharpens his twisted scares to a dagger point. And the frights, when they come, really land.

A groundbreaking view of the horror and pity of war, I can’t remember a cinematic experience quite like it. It’s devastating and extraordinary.

For a movie that looks this sleek, there’s a lot of scrappiness around the fringes. Paul Walter Hauser is fun as subterranean mastermind Mole Man, but gets barely a toehold on the plot. Half of whatever Natasha Lyonne’s character, a teacher with a thing for The Thing, was due to be doing is surely on the cutting room floor. The Four’s droid helper H.E.R.B.I.E. doesn’t leave a massive impression.

For Gunn, who has injected superhero movies with a winningly irreverence since his R-rated indie Super, ridding the DCEU of its bombast and self-seriousness is a step in right direction. Whether, like his alien hero, he can arrest the march of time and reinvigorate this tired genre is another matter.

Rebirth knows it needs to make its scaly stars frightening and surprising again and manages it in Spielbergian style.

M3GAN 2.0 continues to offer up a goofy brand of cautionary tale, too: against AI, tech dependence, and Silicon Valley types who want to stick a chip in their brains. You can take that seriously as you want to, just don’t be surprised to find yourself watching it again on your cellphone one day.

There’s so much in Grenfell: Uncovered about the state of modern Britain that Sadiq does brilliantly not to get sidetracked.

Splicing in montage footage of marching soldiers, shots from Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V, and even archers in action, and layering in discordant sound design, Boyle reinvents the zombie movie as a bloody pop-art installation.

It’s hard to draw too much old-school romance from this world of sponsorship, celebrity and sports washing, but F1 manages it on the back of Pitt’s earthy charm. Watch it rev into the canon of great sports movies. Motion sickness tablets recommended.

Unfolding at the American filmmaker’s measured tempo, it’s more droll than LOL-funny, though there are some big laughs along the way.

It takes a steady hand to pull off a horror film as outlandish as Dangerous Animals – a movie, lest we forget, that is literally about dangerous animals – but Byrne has pulled off something slick and confident here. It’ll keep horror fans out of the water for years.

In Saeed Roustayi’s Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family’s slow disintegration, it’s the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion.

South African director Oliver Hermanus finds plenty of deep feeling and sincerity here but his beautiful-looking, measured period piece gets stifled by its own languors – especially in a first half that needs a slug or two of moonshine to inject some life into it.

The director is clearly having a whale of a time taking the piss out of the corruption, cruelty and bribery rife in his country.