Robbie Collin

If the action in Wonder Woman comes less frequently than you might expect, it’s also thrillingly designed and staged, with a surging sense of real people, from all sorts of backgrounds, swept up in the wider conflict’s churns and jolts.

The 31-year-old Stewart – who will be instantly and justifiably awards-tipped for this – navigates this perilous terrain with total mastery, getting the voice and mannerisms just right but vamping everything up just a notch, in order to better lean into the film’s melodramatic, paranoiac and absurdist swerves.

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.

A sensationally funny and gently science-fictional German rom-com.

Redemption may have eluded Michael Corleone, but his third film was more fortunate.

It’s lots of fun until you notice it doesn’t quite add up.

Most of the film takes place in this vacuum-packed, Sartrean hell of other people, which Trachtenberg, his cast, writers and crew evoke with chest-tightening efficiency. Every sound and line rings with a tight, tinny echo; every room is felt out to its corners; every knick-knack drily noted.

There are gripping chases and balletic combat scenes, painstakingly realised by Oshii’s animators, but the mood is mostly cold and melancholic, as Kusanagi broods over the fleshly implications of living in a world of data

It’s juicily ambitious stuff: imagine the familial tensions of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited mapped onto an entire nation, but also playing out in multiple close-up vignettes.

It’s a critic’s instinct to auto-praise any blockbuster that tries to do something different, but Catching Fire is so committed to carrying on the fine work started by its predecessor that the applause flows utterly naturally.

Nouvelle Vague stylishly captures and celebrates a certain approach to making cinema – reactive, incautious, free-range – but leaves you wishing there was a little more of it in the film you just saw.

The film defaults to gentle comedy too often, and feels afraid to dig deep enough into its underlying themes to draw blood.

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.

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.

Nothing about the plot or craft astounds, but the qualities above are all far rarer in studio movies these days than they should be, which makes The Amateur remarkable – in its own stonily workmanlike way.

It’s not bad so much as lightly feeble – and Pegg acquits himself respectably in a lead role that, for a change, chimes well to his best comic persona: the beta male under alpha pressure.

At a time when the corporation’s live-action output keeps doubling down on the franchise grind, here from just over the garden fence is a lesson in storytelling that feels at once elegantly classical and zingily fresh.

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.

The Order also works as a gripping procedural in its own right – a long-form game of investigative join-the-dots, built around a series of lethally disciplined action scenes.

A social-realist blockbuster – fired by furious compassion and teeming with sorrow, yet strewn with diamond-shards of beauty, wit and hope.

Like its absurdly named hero, Extraction gets a serious and deeply silly job done in style.

It is eccentric, sad and stirring to the core. Oh yes – and incredibly funny, too.

As hot and wet as freshly butchered meat: every second, every frame of its three-hour running time is virile with a lifetime’s accumulated genius.

Zombi Child is the kind of lithe and lucid dream that gets its tendrils round your brain stem, so that when all hell finally breaks loose, you can’t jolt yourself awake from its grip.

It feels entirely made by committee – the definition of house style, without a personal stamp in sight.

While the film never shocks it almost always compels, and Breillat crafts some images that keep tingling in the mind long after they’ve faded from sight.

This is a film in which one of the more emotionally detailed performances is given by a product-placement Audi.

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