Robbie Collin

Carlyle shoots the story with a propulsive, page-turning energy that’s enjoyably at odds with the Glasgow backdrop, which is dilapidated to the point of timelessness.

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.

For all the placidity of its cud-chewing subject, Cow has a thrillingly alien charge.

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.

This wintry tale of art blooming in adversity is far from a schematic feel-good jaunt. . . it’s an anthem for doomed youth in a familiar Bennett key: wry, melancholic, sneakily profound.

As a toy-advert movie full of artistry and heart, it’s as slyly progressive as it is shamelessly nostalgic.

While a late twist may potentially dismay, it also allows Mackenzie to raise the stakes in a battle of wits whose participants previously felt more like opponents than foes. It gets personal – nasty, even – and this ice-cool throwback suddenly bursts into flames.

Varda by Agnès is unquestionably one for the fans ... But this film also serves as a tantalising crash-course for newcomers.

It’s a nocturnal fantasy, seductive and ablaze with threat.

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.

“We have to be able to enter the 1930s with our heads held high,” Dockery says – another hint that further Downtons may just keep roaring down the road, Fast & Furious-style. But it’s hard to believe that any could serve as a better send-off than this.

It’s written, shot and acted with a hot-blooded urgency that reminds you the struggle it depicts is an ongoing one – and which shakes up this most well-behaved of genres with a surge of civil disobedience.

This is a film as delicate as dripping water, with depths that are quietly waiting to be plumbed.

It’s testament to the artfulness of Moore and Johnathan McClain’s screenplay that your suspicions flit constantly between all four parties, and the denouement – which takes a surprising yet just about merited turn for the macabre – still manages to surprise.

Kim rattles you with this family’s bizarre and pitiful plight, and only then, from a place of agonised discomfort, does the laughter follow, in great whoops and roars.

The result is spooky, upsetting and revolting. Although it ends up crossing the line from unsettling to punishing, you still have to take your hat off to it, if only because a makeshift sick bag may be required.

Thanks to one of the most indestructible poster campaigns ever designed, the words Les Misérables can’t help but call a child’s face to mind.

When it’s in the mood, horror can be a sexually subversive genre; it can also be a flagrantly non-PC one. Freaky treads a treacherous line between the two with aplomb.

Metro Manila is so spellbound by its setting that it is a good hour before we discover what kind of film it is going to be. It begins as a swirling drama of survival in the Filipino capital — but then suddenly it slips off down an alleyway, only to emerge a scrupulously engineered, Christopher Nolan-ish crime thriller.

A wild and righteous provocation.

Occasionally things get a little overcrowded, particularly during a sticky final act, but Pan has a certain timeless buoyancy that keeps it bouncing back.

The film’s aim, to my eyes, is not to revel in, score points with or otherwise sensationalise the killing of a five-year-old girl. Rather, it confronts us with the dilemma the taped call itself poses: what are we, as humans, meant to do with it? More to the point, what can we?

Kormákur captures the action in a series of long, prowling, hold-your-breath takes, which both convey a vivid sense of place (the whole thing was shot on location in South Africa) and afford the viewer endless opportunities to anxiously scan the background for lion-shaped ripples in the long grass.

Cooke’s sturdy, old-fashioned approach to staging and shooting pairs well with his leading actor’s precise, engaging performance, and makes scenes like this anxious backstreet exchange – or Greville and Penkovsky’s two visits to the ballet, each one serving as a clever psychological pivot-point – all the more fun and absorbing.

Denis Villeneuve's sequel to his 2021 sci-fi epic is a bold and visually astonishing piece of filmmaking.

Its jokes, effects and sparkler-bright cast chemistry need nothing to fall back on.

A supremely sweet and touching comic drama.

Serious as Paddington is about meaning something, it’s even more serious about the business of having fun.