Robbie Collin

It succeeds admirably on its own terms – more so, I think, than his two Sherlock Holmes films – and while it never really transcends pastiche, its ambitions don’t lie in that direction.

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.

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

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

Teen Titans Go! To The Movies may be unflaggingly daft, but outright silliness is rarely this smart.

This is high adventure in safe hands.

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.

This being a Wes Anderson film, it almost goes without saying the details are delectable.

There’s a subtle, astute parable here about the media’s role in the shaping and streamlining of public morality – happily wrapped in a romp.

The director’s 28th feature is a magnificent slab of dad cinema, with Phoenix a startling emperor and Vanessa Kirby brilliant as his wife.

It’s the interplay between the film’s many different characters, rather than the blow-up-the-world crisis they’re trying to defuse, that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

As with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or Coogler’s 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed, Black Panther isn’t a novelty, but a fresh perspective on a well-worn format. Not to get all Rosa Parks about it, but the film walks into the multiplex like it’s insane that it hasn’t been allowed in there all along. And it is.

The real reason to see this is Swinton and Hiddleston’s sexy, pallid double act: two old souls in hot bodies who have long tired of this Earth, but have nowhere else to make their home.

Only Michael Mann could have made it. And thank goodness he did.

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

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.

I’m not sure The Revenant is quite as tough and uncompromising as it thinks it is: it's coffee-table existentialism, with psychological brush-strokes so thick they might as well have been put on with a mop. But there’s no question it’s an extraordinary, blood-summoning, sinew-stiffening ride.

The film’s signature move is poking around the strange psychological grey space between being kept and being caught.

Café Society isn’t Vonnie’s story, but it’s Stewart’s film.

Far more than his previous films, which tend to unfold in a dream-like daze, Free Fire is a mad contraption, bristling with bravado and black, sardonic wit.

If you are asking an audience to listen to one man talking for an hour and a half, you had better make sure he is worth listening to, and minute-by-minute, Hardy has you spellbound.

Black has an instinctive feel for balancing action set-pieces against the passages of soap-opera that are required to make them matter.

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.

The cast’s performances are all so beautifully observed that you may end up wishing the film had given their characters a few more moments of quiet.

Nikou’s film is wonderfully astute on love’s unruliness: it wants you to both delight in and despair of it, and have fun doing both.

The vibe is documentary plus poetry – a little Andrea Arnold, a little Chloé Zhao – with symbolic touches that might have felt a bit much (see: recurring visions of bison) had they not been so carefully leavened with down-to-earth warmth and wit.

The mood is one of acid-tipped wackiness, and both Stone and Thompson understand exactly what’s required to bring it to life.

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.

Noé has created a churning, repellent, wildly sexy tanztheaterwerk of pure Boschian decadence and derangement. It’s nice to have him back.

Having slyly slipped the bonds of the past, Corsage eventually allows its heroine to make a very modern break for it in the film’s (wholly fictional) final act. It’s a fun, coolly outrageous manoeuvre – and the final shot is so freeing, it’s as if the laces on your own invisible corset had suddenly been cut.

Perhaps a Sicario series would make sense after this, though part of me wants to keep this story for cinema: if the market wants franchises, let’s have more like this, please.

A part of me found Todd Phillips’s radical rethinking of the Batman villain Joker thrillingly uncompromising and hair-raisingly timely. Another thinks it should be locked in a strongbox then dropped in the ocean and never released.

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.

Though there isn’t a single word of dialogue in the film’s 80-minute running time, the big questions it asks, about ambition, acceptance and the beauty of companionship, ring loud in every heart-melting frame.

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

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.

It's by no means the Pokémon film anyone would have asked for, but it’s one I’m delighted exists.

[A] stately and ambitious ensemble drama.

If the very best animation feels like nourishment for the soul, think of this adaptation of the beloved Dr Seuss tale as the spiritual equivalent of a double helping of chocolate-flavoured breakfast cereal: not exactly clean eating, but packing an irresistible sugary kick.

“We should be home in about 90 minutes or so,” Wahlberg chirpily informs his passengers just before take-off. That’s the film’s pledge to its audience too: some ups, some downs, then safely into land.

This is a resounding return to form for Payne: there are moments that recall his earlier road movies About Schmidt and Sideways, but it has a wistful, shuffling, grizzly-bearish rhythm all of its own.

Luck contains all the warmth and ingenuity that was nowhere to be found in Pixar’s own recent Lightyear, and has the attitude – if not always the supreme clarity and craftsmanship – of his old studio’s vintage productions.

Blonde is severe and serious-minded almost to a fault: you rather wonder how many viewers at home will soldier on to the end when it lands on Netflix after a limited theatrical release. In the cinema, though, it swallows you up like an uneasy dream, at once all too familiar and pricklingly unreal.

With a fresh joke in almost every line of the script, even if only one in five worked, you’d still be laughing more or less continuously through to the credits – and for me, at least, the hit rate was often considerably higher than that.

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

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.

This cracking campaigning documentary makes a galvanising case for action – and without lobbing its audience overboard with an anchor weight of hopelessness yoked to their heels.

It’s a fantasy not of sexual satisfaction but sexual accomplishment, and perhaps no director other than Ozon would have the imagination and panache to carry it off.

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

In her first outright lead role Goth is straightforwardly tremendous, and gets to move through the considerable breadth of her talent even within individual shots.

Everything that works in Nocturnal Animals is intoxicating, provocative, delicious – and happily, so is everything that doesn’t.

After the subterranean sluggishness of the last film, too thinly spun out from the first third of Suzanne Collins’s final book, Mockingjay – Part 2 returns the series to its characteristic high gear.

For this usually understated filmmaker, it’s a madcap outlier, and often resembles an early Steven Spielberg film having a nervous breakdown.

Love is All You Need has been made for an audience rarely catered for by the film industry: intelligent adults who enjoy perceptive and good-hearted drama.

François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful is, in the very best sense, a film that won't add up.

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.

Paradise: Love flits nimbly between humour and sadness, and treats potentially ponderous themes such as sex, race and the rancid legacy of colonialism with a welcome light touch.

“A person’s a person, no matter how small,” Dr. Seuss once memorably counselled – and that’s as good a binding philosophy as any for Alexander Payne’s exhilaratingly odd new film.

Fill the Void is a real collector’s item: a film in which the forces of religion and tradition are shown to be working together, however haltingly and imperfectly, for the good.

Guiraudie’s film is acutely brilliant on the funny, scary machinery of desire, and how easily humans can get caught up in its cogwheels.

It’s a film that creaks as reassuringly as leather.

Modest as it may look, this is boundary-pushing cinema in all the best ways, and what a thrill it is to hear those boundaries creak.

The film is earnest yet hopeful, with crisply drawn characters - but perhaps its full grandeur won’t be fully realised until part two.

The slotting together of songs and plot is often done with a spark of inspiration.

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