Robbie Collin

In its own ingenious way, One Cut of the Dead cleaves true to the most important zombie rule of all: survival has always been a team effort.

Why are they are so relentlessly endearing and funny? Comic timing is a big part of it: every skit and pratfall is staged to split-second perfection.

It is unquestionably Nyong’o’s film, and the 12 Years a Slave actress gives a nerve-flaying double performance. As Adelaide, every facial expression seems to embody an emotion in its purest, uncut form, while her evil double has a twisting, buckling physicality that comes close to avant-garde butoh dance.

This foursome’s lives intersect in consistently thrilling and surprising ways, thanks in no small part to the fundamental volatility of contemporary young urban lives.

Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far.

This is an often shoulder-shudderingly funny film, whose comic dialogue is dazzlingly designed and performed. But McDonagh leaves fate itself with the last, black, bone-rattling laugh.

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.

The film wields its intelligence and style with total effortlessness, and its every move holds your gaze like a baton’s quivering tip.

Christopher Nolan’s astonishing new film...is a work of heart-hammering intensity and grandeur that demands to be seen on the best and biggest screen within reach. But its spectacle doesn’t stop at the recreations of Second World War combat. Like all great war films, it’s every bit as transfixing up close.

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.

At the root of that is Civil War’s greatest strength – and the reason it makes all thought of the recent Batman v Superman debacle evaporate on contact. The Russos’ film has an unshakeable faith in these decades-old characters: they’re not wrangled into standing for anything other than who they are, with no gloss or reinterpretation or reach for epic significance required. This is the cinematic superhero showdown you’ve dreamt of since childhood, precisely because that’s everything – and all – it wants to be.

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch feels like four films in one, and contains enough ideas for at least another six.

Moonlight, the new film from Barry Jenkins, is a nuclear-fission-strength heartbreaker. It’s made up of moments so slight and incidental they’re sub-molecular – but they release enough heat and light to swallow whole cities at a stroke.

Stuhlbarg, who’s a treasure throughout, gets a fatherly monologue towards the film’s end that’s so observantly and tenderly performed, you can barely catch your breath. It’s one beautiful moment in a film that’s filled with them – gone in a heartbeat, but leaving the kind of ripples that reach across a lifetime.

This art-form has long been thought to have reached its twilight years, but Yonebayashi’s film brims over with the bounce and spark of childhood.

Strickland has made something uniquely sexy and strange, built on two tremendous central performances and a bone-deep understanding of cinema’s magic and mechanisms.

Chariots of Fire covers arduous ground — faith, conviction and history (both the making of it and the living up to it) — but it does so with the same courage and sincerity that drives the two young men at its heart.

He remains a master of composition, subtly guiding your eye towards details that reveal the kind of stories we might usually overlook – in life as well as in the cinema itself.

A science-fiction thriller of rare and diamond-hard brilliance.

Emotionally, the film operates in a classic Gray area, with barely perceptible eddies that build to a mighty existential wrench. All of which, it should be said, rests on Pitt’s shoulders – which feel like very different shoulders, somehow, to the ones that slouched so appealingly through Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. His performance here is as grippingly inward and tamped down as his work for Tarantino was witty and expansive – it’s true movie stardom, and it fills a star-system-sized canvas.

The premise sounds as though it must invite a satirical reading, and there are many well-aimed ironic jabs at aspects of the leaders’ national character and the box-ticking rigmarole of modern politics. But directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – three beloved cult Canadian experimentalists – also poke fun at the notion that their intentions could be so clean-cut.

The film’s focus may be tight – just a few tangled, formative years – but it encompasses so much.

At the very end of Janicza Bravo’s Zola, just as you’re struggling to comprehend what on earth the film is supposed to amount to, there is a wonderful moment when you realise that’s the entire point.

Every character in Anora might be an utter nightmare, but they’re also a joy to spend time with, and the cast understand them down to their smallest behavioural tells.

As a state-of-the-US historical epic, it boasts all the thematic heft of Once Upon a Time in America or There Will Be Blood. (How did the wave of postwar immigrants remake America in their image – and how did America remake them in return?) But it’s also acted with the colour and fizz of a classical Hollywood comic drama, and shot with the loose, rangy energy of a 90-minute indie cult hit. The tonal mix feels completely unique, but it works.

Not only does Egerton have Elton’s look and mannerisms down to an uncanny degree, he also musters up enough of his subject’s signature showmanship to give a performance that’s joyously at peace with its own preposterousness.

Christopher Nolan's portrait of the father of the nuclear bomb is a triumph, like witnessing history itself being split open.

Kaufman and Johnson tease out the possible causes and effects of Michael’s crisis with great imagination, tilting your sympathies so subtly as they do so that you don’t even feel it going on.