Phil de Semlyen

McQueen isn’t questioning the courage or endurance of the city and its people through these brutal days. But he is probing our relationship with this over-lionised period of our history, though, and finding it hopelessly romanticised. Maybe it’s time, his flawed but hard-hitting film suggests, to lift the curfew on looking it afresh.

As an exploration of what motivates people at work – and what doesn’t – it’s smartly and subtly observed.

Its world is weirdly familiar and yet alien. It’s also darn scary.

It’s wonderfully creepy and unnervingly familiar, like Alan Partridge by way of The Exorcist. If that doesn’t automatically enter it into the pantheon of classic midnight movies, I don’t know what does.

It always keeps you in on the joke – and it’s a killer joke.

As an object lesson in leadership, Maiden is compelling, but its flashbacks to a less enlightened time in sport are the biggest showstoppers – and jaw-droppers.

Spielberg gets the chance to do something he’s never done before and make a miniature high-school film full of giddy subversions and emotional truths.

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.

The hackneyed thieves-with-a-heart-of-gold trope is reinvigorated by the sharpness of the writing and Song’s Basset Hound charms. While Broker occasionally gets close to cloying, especially in its neat ending and jaunty score, Koreeda keeps it the right side of cutesy. It’s best enjoyed as a modern-day fairy tale – only, one where the abandoned baby sparks nothing but enchantment.

Complicated and long but deftly handled adventure/caper/satire that ends up being thoroughly entertaining

Will it polarise moviegoers? Absolutely. But while it’s perhaps not as laser-focused as Raw, once seen Titane is impossible to dislodge – another gut punch from a director who will hopefully be unleashing her pulverising, punky visions on cinema screens for years to come. Strap in.

With The Fall Guy, stuntman-turned-filmmaker David Leitch and his bang-on-form stars, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, have nestled a frisky, winsome romantic comedy inside the framework of an old-school, full-throttle action movie and conjured up a pretty perfect Friday night at the movies in the process.

It might veer towards hagiography at times, but its subject is so entertaining you don't even care.

T​his​ smart and taboo-defying social ​​horror draws you in before abruptly bearing its teeth.

It all makes for an immersive evocation of time and place, and a more sober, if still stylish, filmmaking flex from Wright. Gone are the trademark crash zooms and whip pans, and the hairpin cuts of his recent action thriller Baby Driver. Gone, too, the comforting cameos and goofy banter of the Pegg and Frost trilogy – in ice-cream parlance, this one is more Twister than Cornetto – and that unmooring from the director’s previous work makes this an especially satisfying trip into the unknown. Like its eerie Soho back alleys, you’re never sure what’s around the next corner.

Things in The Hand of God are often funny and sad – all at the same time.

Like its xenomorphs, Romulus is best when it’s single-minded, streamlined and ferocious. See it on IMAX and hold on tight.

It’s anthropology, not violence, that provides the sting in the tail – a thought-provoking coda to an often pulse-pounding survival horror.

Dreamweavers, visionaries, plus actors… filmmaking pair Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s latest DIY sci-fi bubbles with mad ideas and eerie pre-apocalyptic vibes.

If this is the end of the road for a British filmmaking great, it’s a thoughtful, heart-filled finale. British cinema’s old oak still stands tall.

It’s a sensitive, careful film with real emotional intelligence, but no less gripping for swerving dramatic fireworks in favour of quieter, more observational moments.

Plaza, who follows up Black Bear with another darker turn, is great in a role that lets her badass side out for a rampage.

Rather than a bruising marital wipeout drama, Is This Thing On? is a film about how new purpose and a new tribe can help you re-evaluate what was there all along (the title, of course, refers to the marriage as well as the mic). It might make you think about relationships differently; it probably won’t make you want to take up stand-up.

Patricia Clarkson steals the show, but everyone in Potter’s gifted cast gets their moment to shine in a sharp-edged, claustrophobic parlour piece that puts the boot into middle-class mores.

The result is an empathetic, emotionally candid treat – Pixar’s own brains trust back at full capacity.

A deliciously barbed, but wise and ultimately hopeful investigation of female sexual desire, marriage and modern power dynamics that takes a hundred touchpoints, from ’80s erotic thrillers to the indie candour of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Secretary, and does something completely new with them.

As a sequel, it works for the same reasons that make The Empire Strikes Back so many people’s favourite Star Wars film: there’s a darkness, a bleakness, that makes the fist-pumping moments feel all-the-more earned.

[Arcel's] crafted a kind of Danish The Last of the Mohicans that’s full of passion and political conviction. It should stand the test of time almost as well as its rugged hero.