Robbie Collin

Its control of tone can be a little uncertain, particularly during the ambitious epilogue – and I wish it had allowed itself a little more freakiness in its most savage moments. But at its best, it could be Bergerac reimagined by Nicolas Roeg, with its tangled character psychologies and great shudders of dread that seem to ring through the soil underfoot.

Joe represents a return to the independent-spirited storytelling that characterised Green’s early career.

The greatest trick this studio wants to pull, at this point, is to make more of the same feel either exhilaratingly fresh, or sufficiently retro-inflected to qualify as a nostalgia trip. As both, Thor: Ragnarok counts as some kind of double peak.

While writers Lena Waithe and James Frey make Queen and Slim’s initial decision to flee convincing, and dramatically spiky – it’s striking that even a lawyer doesn’t fancy her chances on the legal route – their screenplay is rather less good at coming up with excuses for the string of colourful and picturesque pit-stops the two keep making afterwards.

There may be no more fitting snack for a film that exudes casual bon-vivant allure, but is fundamentally nibbles and froth.

Every frame has been composed with cerebral coolness, and the hotel and its surrounding forests are shot with a dream-like lucidity. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before, and I’m still not sure that I have even now. This is the kind of film you have to go back to and check it really happened.

Frantz is the work of a rascal, but a rascal in an unusually reflective frame of mind. Even with its mysteries solved, you can’t help but keep turning it over.

Kore-eda has crafted a piercing, tender poem about the bittersweet ebb and flow of paternal love, and his status as Ozu's heir becomes ever more assured.

First-time writer-director Chloe Domont beats a sly, perceptive path across this tricky psychological turf.

Put simply, you care about the Katwe kids because he does, and in the same way, too – not with high-strung melodramatic concern, but a warm glow of empathy in your gut. That’s stoked up in part by the film’s keen eye for telling, truthful-feeling detail.

Wheatley’s extraordinary film shakes you back and forth with a rare ferocity, but the net result is stillness.

Director Chris Smith builds the film around Ridgeley’s mother’s scrapbooks of photographs and memorabilia – and perhaps partly because of that, it ends up feeling like little more than a leaf through the milestones. It’s been made for the fans, but they’ll know every last detail already: it’s pop history as singalong.

Crucially, Kelsey Mann’s film, co-written by returning screenwriter Meg LeFauve, gets Pixar back to doing what they always did best: juggling big concepts in fun and ingenious but also surprisingly wise and moving ways.

Even with the steady supply of clichés and occasional leaps of logic, the dramatic scenes smoulder away nicely.

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo don’t come close to defying gravity in this bloated, beige screen adaptation of the Wizard of Oz prequel.

It's as simultaneously chilling and warming as a slug of ice-cold vodka, and just as liable to make your mind swim and eyes prick.

When absurdism feels this wrong, you know it’s being done right.

Wind River confirms the director as a rising talent who can be trusted to beat his own enticing path through inhospitable ground.

It’s absorbing and well-acted enough that at times you could almost forget you were being asked to emotionally invest in which company gets to slide its wares onto a rich young sportsman’s feet.

Though the film resists easy categorisation, it often tumbles along like queer screwball, which chimes with its original French title: Plaire, Aimer et Courir Vite, or Give Pleasure, Love and Run Fast. It’s a fine manifesto, and Honoré’s film excels at all three.

If you want to watch an elaborate metaphor being wrung out like a bathing suit for an hour and a half, The Platform might be the film for you.

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

Eastwood doesn’t care about the legend. Instead, he shows us Kyle much as he saw his targets: with that strange combination of extreme intimacy and extreme remove that a long-range sight confers.

Effortless tracking shots, spasms of sickening violence and a perfectly pitched jukebox soundtrack are all conspicuously and stylishly deployed, sometimes all at once.

A little of the new Spider-Man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade, spun off from an initially intriguing premise that deflates around you with a low whine as you watch, like a punctured bouncy castle.

There’s an entire pick ’n’ mix stand of eye candy here – more than enough to satisfy younger viewers. But alas, it’s all empty calories.

As a filmmaker, Baumbach is sharp enough to call out the clichés of his trade, but also generous enough to put them to good use anyway.

Much of the pleasure of the film is in procedure: watching someone work diligently and knowledgeably towards a goal that just happens to be murder. But a darkly fun tension emerges between its anti-hero’s internalised principles and how he actually behaves when pressed.

The crash scenes have a horrible heart-in-mouth quality: it’s as if you can feel the tumble of gravity working on your own insides. And the same goes for the racing itself, which like the vehicles is somehow sleek and crunchy all at once – inches from disaster at any given moment, and all the more beautiful for it.

Unusually for a contemporary western, News of the World makes no attempt to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it hammers it diligently back onto the axle, before striking out on a journey whose contours and pitfalls we already know well. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to experience it once more with companions like these.

Östlund’s film is a sleek rejoinder to Christian’s disastrous PR team, who believe cutting through the noise of modern life requires short, sharp shocks. The Square shows that slow burn, when it’s kindled just right, has a cumulative heat that makes you wilt in your seat.

It’s an engaging, sometimes touching, slightly narrow depiction of a great filmmaker in the winter of his career who’s intent on somehow recapturing the spring of it.

Dead Pigs’s intermingling of grit and polish is hugely satisfying: a potent combination of pearls and swine.

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.

Confronting the horrors of history head-on can make for cinema that’s impossible to shake, but Katabuchi’s painterly, introspective film proves a sideways approach can be just as indelible.

The shape of its story is ultimately conventional, and the way in which it’s told can sometimes feel familiar – like a Sunday evening drama smuggling in big ideas. But the line it draws between the earthy and the ethereal stays with you: it’s a well-timed double dose of consolation and escape.

One of the finest films of the year: a shiveringly passionate period piece.

Tale of Tales dances on a razor’s edge between funny and unnerving, with sequences of shadow-spun horror rubbing up against moments of searing baroque beauty. The result is a fabulously sexy, defiantly unfashionable readymade cult item.

It’s an astonishing achievement. Linklater and his cast, who helped refine the director’s script, perfectly execute how long it takes us to become the lead characters in our own lives, and how fumblingly the role is first assumed.

Mandy exists in its own supremely unnerving horror dimension.

As ever with Scott, the film unfolds in a richly realised world and moves with an addictive, free-wheeling swagger. And his four main actors – Williams, Wahlberg and the Plummers old and young – have all been astutely cast.

A wild and righteous provocation.

Considine resists the usual narrative urges to bring down any kind of judgement or redemption, or to “make sense” of Matty’s story beyond the sense he himself can make of it. The film is not looking for a scapegoat. It just lets its characters live.

Mickey 17, about a hapless clone’s misadventures on a colonising mission, is a throwback to blockbusters as the late 20th century made ’em: a $100m boisterous sci-fi satire that neither belongs to a franchise nor cares to start one, but instead jams as many eggs as it can into one increasingly precarious basket.

Risk doesn’t burnish the Assange myth – it injects you into the bloodstream of the Assange story.

Hogg withholds the specifics, and lets you decode things for yourself. Her camera rarely moves, but every shot is composed with total artistry, building to a final image that’s somehow both joyful and devastating.

Though Weathering With You tells a story of a makeshift family enduring uncertain times, its dominant emotion is amazement – at the power and persistence of first love, and the everyday wonders of the world in which it flourishes against the odds.

Beneath the charming sparkly wrap, there’s just more of the same underneath: an endless round of pass-the-parcel that never actually coughs up a gift.

This is an all-singing, all-sobbing weepie with sequins, featuring comedy, uproarious choreography, and a suite of soul R&B and gospel numbers that will have you bopping along in your seat.

A large portion of Star Trek’s audience may well be satisfied by a film that amounts to not much more than an incredibly pretty and sporadically funny in-joke. But think back to the corny romance of that original mission statement, recited by William Shatner on many a rainy school night. Strange new worlds. New life. New civilisations. Boldly going where no man has gone before. That pioneer spirit? It’s gone.

Queer doesn’t scrimp on provocation and pleasure, but it’s also a beautiful film about male loneliness, and the way a solitary life can so easily shade into a life sentence.

Stone and Plemons prove ideal co-conspirators, with carefully balanced performances that have them taking turns as hero and villain without ever quite annihilating our sympathies or winning them outright.

This is a fascinating and outrageous next step for Escalante, with a strong central concept and some oozily plausible special effects. It’s just a pity that its human side doesn’t measure up to its inhuman one.

It’s the comedy of British middle-class embarrassment, executed here as deftly as anything in peak Richard Curtis. Like me, you may be surprised by how much you’ve missed it.

As portraiture, it’s also unapologetically (and therefore unfashionably) complex: the unsavoury aspects of his personal life are frankly addressed, but never used as a stick with which to beat the work. Rather, the signature tone of the narration – nicely delivered by the Doctor Who actress Pearl Mackie – is one of curiosity. And the fascination proves infectious.

El Conde is a visual feast as much as a visceral one, but its artful poise belies its bloodlust. Larraín is making his points here not with fang-like precision, but a gleeful crocodilian chomp.

There are lightning-flashes of pure, ornamental brilliance throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, although there’s not much happening on the landscape they illuminate.

Its conclusions rarely make your head spin, but it meticulously shows its working out. (If it was an exam paper, it’d be impossible to dock it any marks.)

The scares are mostly very scary indeed, and that means the film does its job.

The Suicide Squad (note the definite article) is such a drastic improvement in every respect that you almost – almost – feel sorry for the earlier version: it’s dazzlingly colourful and riotously crass, but also emotionally alive

Geostorm’s disasters are just barrages of drab, anonymous digi-porridge, with a very occasional unhinged flourish thrown in, such as a stadium that’s struck by lightning and immediately explodes.

Serraille, whose debut feature Jeune Femme won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2017, has returned with a film that feels like a jewellery box of telling moments: there is precious stuff here, and real sparkle too.

Beneath the mousy indie stylings of Rachel Lambert’s new film, adapted from a 2013 play by Kevin Armento, beats a proudly mushy romantic-comedy heart.

Leigh Whannell’s film – one of the smartest and scariest yet to roll off the production line at horror specialists Blumhouse.

The two stars generate an astonishing sensual charge in a brilliant addition to the Batman canon that refuses to behave like a blockbuster

This is Penna’s debut feature, and he has set himself a high bar which he just about scrapes over, with Mikkelsen giving the entire project a super-strength leg up.

Dispassionate engagement won't fly here. You either stagger out early or plunge in up to your elbows.

It’s a brawny, inventive action romp that’s as happy firing rockets at helicopters as it is contemplating the Cartesian model of mind-body dualism, which gives it a satisfying, sweet-and-sour tang of its own.

In all kinds of ways, Luca is the smallest film that Pixar has made, but it’s also unquestionably one of the studio’s loveliest.

Parts of The Menu taste familiar. There’s a dash of Michael Haneke’s winking mercilessness; a soupçon of Midsommar’s black-hearted mischief; the sheeny satire of super-wealth comes straight from Succession. But the cast and filmmakers’ commitment to nasty delight is unswerving, while the dinner ends in the most gratifying way imaginable: just deserts.

One of the great pleasures of the collection is watching human ingenuity at work almost in real time, as each filmmaker in turn fathoms what’s possible, then keeps pushing, to regularly thrilling effect.

It is what these films always are – source material for its own advertising campaign – but in this instance, it’s little more, which might have been a problem if said campaign hadn’t already proven such a roaring success.

Hacksaw Ridge is a fantastically moving and bruising war film that hits you like a raw topside of beef in the face – a kind of primary-coloured Guernica that flourishes on a big screen with a crowd.

Goro Miyazaki’s film is about the point at which we decide not what we want to be when we grow up, but who, and the way the tiniest moments in our lives often have the most far-reaching effect.

The film passes the time with breezy good cheer and the odd well-wrangled cringe, but fades from memory in much the same way. There’s just nothing about this guy that gives you cause to remember him.

You could hardly ask for a sharper reminder of blockbuster cinema’s charms than the crescendo from swelling dread to snappily choreographed chaos that comprises the film’s tremendous 10-minute prologue.

The Sheep Detectives is a profoundly odd viewing experience – entirely pleasant, lightly funny and easily absorbed, yet every so often you find yourself thinking hang on a minute, I am watching a flock of sheep investigate a murder, and feel like you are having a stroke.

For a series that has always torn through technical boundaries at speed but whose storytelling stays scrupulously between the lines, it’s business as usual to the last.

Justin Kurzel’s blistering, blood-sticky new screen version of Macbeth unseams the famous Shakespearean tragedy open from the nave to the chops, letting its insides spill out across the rock underfoot.

Byrne’s film is concerned with the process and practice of myth-making: the way the right person, or action, or face, can capture a moment, or galvanise a movement – and, for both good and ill, transform politics into something like art.

It’s a wholly respectable adaptation, though perhaps a flash or two more of wildness wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Ferrara has come up with something pretty special here: a subtle, seductive, lamp-lit hymn to one artist’s talents from another in the process of rediscovering his own.

While the camaraderie of the Flossy Posse might be raucously imperfect, at least it’s real.

The mood’s often as fun as it is funereal, and though the film occasionally feels clever in a way that isn’t necessarily a compliment, Sokurov’s ideas have a philosophical depth and richness that are found almost nowhere else in cinema.

Dogman unfolds its relatively straightforward story with both thrilling style and serious moral force: it’s a sensation judged on either bark or bite.

McQueen’s film is big-picture British cinema, of a scale and depth which hasn’t been seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Both London and the countryside are shot with a classical elegance that calls to mind David Lean, while the sequences portraying the bombings themselves flare with panic and horror.

Casting is a strong suit here, and even the incidental characters are distinctive and precise.

Almodóvar has always been the sole screenwriter of his films – but perhaps in this case, keeping an English assistant in a nearby antechamber might have been a wise move.

For all its decorative twists and curls, this is a sophisticated, searching work.

Theater Camp’s comedy springs entirely from personality: the jokes aren’t really quotable because they depend on you knowing who’s making them to work.

Zemeckis turns the event into a kind of blockbuster Cinéma Pur – an almost avant-garde game of composition, movement and perspective, exhilaratingly attuned to form and space. ("Mad Max": Fury Road did the same.) The camerawork is subtle and meticulous, the 3D head-spinningly well-applied.

The rocker is too mercurial a figure for a biopic to ever fully capture him – but this gorgeous film comes as close as you could hope.

Nichols’ film delivers a grubbily glamorous blast of underworld machismo of the sort that Scorsese himself made a mid-career speciality: think wildly charismatic performances, elegant camerawork, regular jabs of barbarous violence, and a skin-fizzingly sharp jukebox soundtrack.

Rush hurls himself into the film’s star turn with a cantankerous abandon that more than compensates for his slightly unsteady accent. It’s a wildly entertaining performance that feels vividly inhabited both physically and vocally.

Think of The Nice Guys as candy noir: all the key ingredients from mysteries such as Chinatown and The Long Goodbye poured into a tall glass, then topped up with sugar syrup, a spritz of club soda, a sprig of mint and an ironic paper parasol.

The film carries itself like a bright and mischievous character study in the style of Nicole Holofcener, but is ultimately just a dog weepie with airs.

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.

You can’t help but feel disappointed that a film with a relatively spicy premise becomes, in the end, so risk-averse.