Phil Hoad

How Herbig fails to capitalise on the sheer physical terror of their flight – the balloon’s basket is more a flimsily strung boxing ring – makes you wish someone like Werner Herzog had mounted this mad escapade for real.

Too many scenes of sub-vaudeville witchy cavorting suggest Kramer hasn’t completely mastered her own poetic register. But it is bracing to watch her reach for the stylised impact needed to carry her ideas about social identity; exactly the kind of the expressive messiness this wing of the post-#MeToo film industry should be engaging in if the old order isn’t going to reimpose itself.

With Hewlett Jr often chronicling events in cool monochrome, shooting in close proximity if not exactly total intimacy, this snappy scrapbook tips the hat to the infectious creativity of Albarn’s travelling circus.

What this solemn and enlivening documentary plunge into the history of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic reiterates is the idea of film as a collective art form – not just the wider circle of writers, performers and technicians beyond the director, but in the case of the truly great films, serendipitous access to a deeper collective unconscious to which we all have the keys – even if few know how to use them.

You will no doubt bail out at some point – but that’s part of the deal. Llinás has done enough to make sure we come back.

Kōsaka keeps Okko’s quest light and perky, not fully drilling into the vein of childhood trauma-induced fantasy that the best of Ghibli and Pixar hit upon. It proposes attentiveness to others as a means of self-care, but it has the same brisk impatience with real inner conflict that the grandmother has towards Okko’s outbursts.

This intelligently performed film is still a welcome look at a vital and underappreciated duty of state.

Castillo’s talent for spiritually attuned atmospherics could be her USP among Chile’s current crop of directors with idiosyncratic slants on their country’s recent past.

The finale is more of a schmaltzy salute to the guide-dog ethos than intimate documentation of the new owners’ stories. The street training sequences, though – shot in swooping knee-high Steadicam – are thrilling; mini kerbside action movies.

Gavras has seized his chance, staging this uptempo, carnivalesque crime pic with panache and wit.

Hu provides no easy resolutions, and evidently found none himself. This epic of futility will have to stand as an epitaph for an extremely promising career cut short.

While Knight and team duck origin-story slavishness that has dogged so much recent franchise work, they succeed in reviving the playful Saturday-morning-serial spirit of the original 80s Transformers.

Wang’s film is a vital excavation of history in danger of being eroded away.

Hosoda’s delicate, painterly style is perfect for capturing Kun’s evanescent imaginary haven – and conveying the message about the moral courage needed to leave it.

Despite possessing unusually detailed context for a thriller, it’s a bit like diplomatic efforts in the region: the same old story.