Robbie Collin

As always in Nemes’s films, the period detail is so enveloping it feels utterly natural. But his great gift as a director is his facility for portraying 20th-century European history as a great grinding machine, into the blood-stained cogs of which anyone might have found themselves dragged.

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu has made a slow-burn provocation that knows exactly which buttons it is pressing – yet which also grapples with the thorny issues it raises, from the limits and contradictions of multiculturalism to public sector careerism, with an unflinching moral seriousness.

Gray’s film is itself no paper tiger – yes, it’s a fondly conceived throwback, but its claws are real.

It’s a necessarily tough watch, with an engrossing performance from Seydoux that makes Lucy’s every flicker of hope and stab of dread feel like your own.

Watching that brilliance in action remains a thrill: you can see the angles and vectors align in his mind’s eye before every kick. Tryhorn and Nicholas have pulled off something similar here. Having got every calculation just right, their film soars.

Its central love quadrangle, which straddles two separate time periods with ease, is breezily absorbing thanks to its participants’ plentiful chemistry, while the plot embraces and dodges clichés by turns with quickstepping finesse.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a title so good you feel the film to which it’s attached should really have to earn it: happily it does so within three minutes.

Sharp, exacting, trenchant, and fascinating, it’s a shard of history which uses immense polish to make of itself a mirror.

Gloomy? Not even a bit. This is a glossy and sophisticated workplace comedy about the end of a gilded age of sophisticated froth – deftly written by Aline Brosh McKenna and fizzily directed by David Frankel, both returning from the first film.

The result is spooky, upsetting and revolting. Although it ends up crossing the line from unsettling to punishing, you still have to take your hat off to it, if only because a makeshift sick bag may be required.

Does it have many original ideas of its own? Perhaps not. But its greatest hits mixtape of other people’s has been compiled with such flair – as well as a sound comprehension of why they worked so well the first time – that it’s hard not to be swept up regardless.

In short, the film actually looks funny. Remember when animations always did.

Its title refers to the mythical Islamic bridge across hell, on which one false step leads to certain damnation. The path trodden by the film itself is no less risky, but it styles out the crossing astonishingly.

It is grippingly unpredictable – a film with a glint in its eye and smoke curling from its nostrils and underpants. But you dismiss it, or miss it, at your peril.

Style over substance? Not at all – it’s more that Fennell understands that style can be substance when you do it right. Cathy and Heathcliff’s passions vibrate through their dress, their surroundings, and everything else within reach, and you leave the cinema quivering on their own private frequency.

Like carnival itself, The Secret Agent sucks you in and buffets you along, with every swing and sway making it harder not to submit.

A prestige drama it may be, but it’s at its best when it’s a little messy and wild, and content to let the feathers fly.

A supremely sweet and touching comic drama.

The film’s aim, to my eyes, is not to revel in, score points with or otherwise sensationalise the killing of a five-year-old girl. Rather, it confronts us with the dilemma the taped call itself poses: what are we, as humans, meant to do with it? More to the point, what can we?

In staging the Jimmies’ various acts of violence (to which they refer, horribly, as “charity”), DaCosta may have taken a cue from Kubrick’s own parable of British decay: even toughened horror fans should find it disturbing, if not downright hard to watch.

There is a complex yet recognisable psychological dynamic at work here, and Squibb navigates the muddle of it nimbly.

Goodbye June is a keenly observed, nicely played drama about a family whose members are still working out how to muddle along with one another, despite three of its four adult siblings having long flown the coop.

For its entire two and a half hours – which whips past in what feels like mere minutes – Safdie’s film had me vibrating like a tuning fork. It’s a joyous salute to life’s beautiful cacophony.

Disney, when minded, can still do this stuff as well as anyone – and in the pleasurable spring and snap of its animation, its at-times-unsettlingly comely character design, and set-pieces that swarm with humour and panache, Zootropolis 2 is proof.

While a late twist may potentially dismay, it also allows Mackenzie to raise the stakes in a battle of wits whose participants previously felt more like opponents than foes. It gets personal – nasty, even – and this ice-cool throwback suddenly bursts into flames.

This wintry tale of art blooming in adversity is far from a schematic feel-good jaunt. . . it’s an anthem for doomed youth in a familiar Bennett key: wry, melancholic, sneakily profound.

Nothing about it should work as a film, yet almost everything does.

It’s perhaps Wright’s first feature to feel, in a positive way, like the work of a director for hire: every flourish and trick here isn’t in service of a singular creative vision so much as a great, rumbling excitement machine.