Robbie Collin

Byrne’s film is concerned with the process and practice of myth-making: the way the right person, or action, or face, can capture a moment, or galvanise a movement – and, for both good and ill, transform politics into something like art.

It’s a wholly respectable adaptation, though perhaps a flash or two more of wildness wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Ferrara has come up with something pretty special here: a subtle, seductive, lamp-lit hymn to one artist’s talents from another in the process of rediscovering his own.

While the camaraderie of the Flossy Posse might be raucously imperfect, at least it’s real.

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.

Dogman unfolds its relatively straightforward story with both thrilling style and serious moral force: it’s a sensation judged on either bark or bite.

McQueen’s film is big-picture British cinema, of a scale and depth which hasn’t been seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Both London and the countryside are shot with a classical elegance that calls to mind David Lean, while the sequences portraying the bombings themselves flare with panic and horror.

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

Almodóvar has always been the sole screenwriter of his films – but perhaps in this case, keeping an English assistant in a nearby antechamber might have been a wise move.

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

Theater Camp’s comedy springs entirely from personality: the jokes aren’t really quotable because they depend on you knowing who’s making them to work.

Zemeckis turns the event into a kind of blockbuster Cinéma Pur – an almost avant-garde game of composition, movement and perspective, exhilaratingly attuned to form and space. ("Mad Max": Fury Road did the same.) The camerawork is subtle and meticulous, the 3D head-spinningly well-applied.

The rocker is too mercurial a figure for a biopic to ever fully capture him – but this gorgeous film comes as close as you could hope.

Nichols’ film delivers a grubbily glamorous blast of underworld machismo of the sort that Scorsese himself made a mid-career speciality: think wildly charismatic performances, elegant camerawork, regular jabs of barbarous violence, and a skin-fizzingly sharp jukebox soundtrack.

Rush hurls himself into the film’s star turn with a cantankerous abandon that more than compensates for his slightly unsteady accent. It’s a wildly entertaining performance that feels vividly inhabited both physically and vocally.

Think of The Nice Guys as candy noir: all the key ingredients from mysteries such as Chinatown and The Long Goodbye poured into a tall glass, then topped up with sugar syrup, a spritz of club soda, a sprig of mint and an ironic paper parasol.

The film carries itself like a bright and mischievous character study in the style of Nicole Holofcener, but is ultimately just a dog weepie with airs.

Gloomy? Not even a bit. This is a glossy and sophisticated workplace comedy about the end of a gilded age of sophisticated froth – deftly written by Aline Brosh McKenna and fizzily directed by David Frankel, both returning from the first film.

You can’t help but feel disappointed that a film with a relatively spicy premise becomes, in the end, so risk-averse.

A welcome reissue of the 1984 creature feature in which a Capra-esque idyll is besieged by ravening beasties.

The action always feels rooted in the greater story of the city of Shiraz itself: even a scene as simple as Rahim walking through a shopping centre becomes naturally soundtracked by a musical instrument salesman tuning a dulcimer in his booth.

A terrific, despair-drenched final scene is the viewer’s reward for staying the course: pitilessly cruel, spare and shivery, it’s got everything the rest of this strangely stiff and synthetic film lacks.

The script, co-written by Zvyagintsev and his regular collaborator Oleg Negin, scrupulously extends to each of its characters the dignity of complexity, and both excellent leads repay the favour tenfold, investing what could have easily been petit-bourgeois caricatures – the preening shrew, the oafish office drone – with riveting sincerity and nuance.

Here and elsewhere, you sense the film knows more than it’s prepared to share, which gives it the queasy sheen of a PR exercise.

It’s the sort of film that rattles you in three ways at once: through the grim candour of its themes, the chill precision of its craft, and the nightmarish throb of its images.

Sleekly enjoyable.

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.

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.