Robbie Collin

It’s here to burnish one performer’s legend while laying the foundations of another’s. But there’s still lots of fun to be had in its twisting, telescoping hall of mirrors.

That strange, conflicted tone of "operatic realism" that the critic and essayist Phillip Lopate found in the films of Luchino Visconti also runs through the core of Munzi’s film: there’s an almost theatrical grandeur to the plot, which was adapted from a novel by Gioacchino Criaco, but moment-to-moment it zings with realism.

Love Lies Bleeding’s total lack of filter is its greatest strength. It’s the sort of film you instinctively want to tuck under a mattress: hot, nasty and mouth-wateringly disreputable, this is cinema with nothing to lose.

Mikkelsen, who is not given to sympathetic roles, has never been better. This is cinema that sinks its claws into your back.

[A] stately and ambitious ensemble drama.

It’s every inch a group achievement, and the film’s best scenes are its ensemble ones: prayers before bedtime, musical recitals, meals by candlelight.

This is a heartbreaking story – how could it not be? But Frears’ film breaks your heart and then repairs it.

Dialogue aside, the craftsmanship is unimpeachable, and Gray takes a timeless approach to pacing and camerawork: even the sunlight is sepia-tinted. But the grand themes of loyalty and ambition never catch fire, and the film’s few truly memorable moments are invariably its smallest.

Once the significant shock of the film fades, what stays with you are its implications – the way it shows division digging in and self-perpetuating like cancer in bone, with each flare-up making the next more grimly probable. This is history retold in the blistering present tense.

A sick joke, an urgent warning and a roar into the abyss, Mother! earns its exclamation mark three times over and more.

Logan is a film for people, like me, who thought the only good bit of X-Men: Apocalypse was Michael Fassbender crying in the woods, and left the cinema wishing that had been the whole thing. It’s something no-one could have expected: a creatively risky superhero movie. And it deserves to pay off.

This follow-up doesn’t re-take the temperature of British society one generation on so much as vivisect its twitching remains.

The action sequences here are armrest-gripping fun, and you only wish DeBlois and his animators had been even more confident; held their shots even longer; allowed us to enjoy the whistle of the wind and the curve of the dragons’ flight paths without hurriedly cutting away to another angle, and another, and another. When the film flies, it soars.

The film is nearly two hours long and passes in what feels like 45 seconds. It is wildly entertaining and blaringly ridiculous, and I want to watch it every night for a week.

Don’t underestimate the knitwear in Maggie’s Plan. This comedy from Rebecca Miller says more about the human condition through its cardigans than most films this summer have managed in their scripts.

Like Someone in Love, is another miracle at close quarters. Its subject is the impossibility of intimacy in the modern world: chewy stuff, to be sure, but Kiarostami explores it with a depth and delicacy that recalls the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu.

The fun of it – and Guardians of the Galaxy specialises in fun, served by the sugar-sprinkled ice-cream-scoopload – is in seeing this odd quintet bluster through space battles and alien brawls that would have defeated anyone smarter and better-equipped. Just as the team makes do with the junk they find around them, the film feels like a mound of gems culled from decades of pop-culture scavenging.

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.

It’s the kind of handsome, rousing, rigorous entertainment you can’t help but play along with.

It’s a punchy, propulsive watch, blown along by snappy editing and a hip-hop-driven soundtrack that stresses that there’s still much fun to be had when hefty themes of inequality and geopolitics are being tackled. And honestly? There really is.

It’s an intimate film with a roomy embrace.

A timely, terrifically acted moral nail-biter.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is both a courtroom drama for the ages and an urgent shot across the bows.

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.

For the most part, sound and image are irreconcilable, so you find yourself either listening in horror or watching with pleasure, only for the spell to be broken by some eye or ear-catching detail in the other temporal strand.

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

Sorrentino and his cast make these teenage recollections twinge with freshness. Like our own sharpest memories of adolescence, the haze of nostalgia doesn’t dull their edge.

Perry somehow allows his cast enough space in this meticulously authored environment to work creative wonders of their own.