Robbie Collin

It’s the interplay between the film’s many different characters, rather than the blow-up-the-world crisis they’re trying to defuse, that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

As with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or Coogler’s 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed, Black Panther isn’t a novelty, but a fresh perspective on a well-worn format. Not to get all Rosa Parks about it, but the film walks into the multiplex like it’s insane that it hasn’t been allowed in there all along. And it is.

The real reason to see this is Swinton and Hiddleston’s sexy, pallid double act: two old souls in hot bodies who have long tired of this Earth, but have nowhere else to make their home.

Only Michael Mann could have made it. And thank goodness he did.

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

Hogg withholds the specifics, and lets you decode things for yourself. Her camera rarely moves, but every shot is composed with total artistry, building to a final image that’s somehow both joyful and devastating.

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.

The film’s signature move is poking around the strange psychological grey space between being kept and being caught.

Café Society isn’t Vonnie’s story, but it’s Stewart’s film.

Far more than his previous films, which tend to unfold in a dream-like daze, Free Fire is a mad contraption, bristling with bravado and black, sardonic wit.

If you are asking an audience to listen to one man talking for an hour and a half, you had better make sure he is worth listening to, and minute-by-minute, Hardy has you spellbound.

Black has an instinctive feel for balancing action set-pieces against the passages of soap-opera that are required to make them matter.

Parts of The Menu taste familiar. There’s a dash of Michael Haneke’s winking mercilessness; a soupçon of Midsommar’s black-hearted mischief; the sheeny satire of super-wealth comes straight from Succession. But the cast and filmmakers’ commitment to nasty delight is unswerving, while the dinner ends in the most gratifying way imaginable: just deserts.

The cast’s performances are all so beautifully observed that you may end up wishing the film had given their characters a few more moments of quiet.

Nikou’s film is wonderfully astute on love’s unruliness: it wants you to both delight in and despair of it, and have fun doing both.

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.

The mood is one of acid-tipped wackiness, and both Stone and Thompson understand exactly what’s required to bring it to life.

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.

Noé has created a churning, repellent, wildly sexy tanztheaterwerk of pure Boschian decadence and derangement. It’s nice to have him back.

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.

Perhaps a Sicario series would make sense after this, though part of me wants to keep this story for cinema: if the market wants franchises, let’s have more like this, please.

A part of me found Todd Phillips’s radical rethinking of the Batman villain Joker thrillingly uncompromising and hair-raisingly timely. Another thinks it should be locked in a strongbox then dropped in the ocean and never released.

A prestige drama it may be, but it’s at its best when it’s a little messy and wild, and content to let the feathers fly.

Though there isn’t a single word of dialogue in the film’s 80-minute running time, the big questions it asks, about ambition, acceptance and the beauty of companionship, ring loud in every heart-melting frame.

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

Unusually for a contemporary western, News of the World makes no attempt to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it hammers it diligently back onto the axle, before striking out on a journey whose contours and pitfalls we already know well. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to experience it once more with companions like these.

It's by no means the Pokémon film anyone would have asked for, but it’s one I’m delighted exists.

[A] stately and ambitious ensemble drama.