Robbie Collin

This is a resounding return to form for Payne: there are moments that recall his earlier road movies About Schmidt and Sideways, but it has a wistful, shuffling, grizzly-bearish rhythm all of its own.

Luck contains all the warmth and ingenuity that was nowhere to be found in Pixar’s own recent Lightyear, and has the attitude – if not always the supreme clarity and craftsmanship – of his old studio’s vintage productions.

Blonde is severe and serious-minded almost to a fault: you rather wonder how many viewers at home will soldier on to the end when it lands on Netflix after a limited theatrical release. In the cinema, though, it swallows you up like an uneasy dream, at once all too familiar and pricklingly unreal.

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.

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

In all kinds of ways, Luca is the smallest film that Pixar has made, but it’s also unquestionably one of the studio’s loveliest.

This cracking campaigning documentary makes a galvanising case for action – and without lobbing its audience overboard with an anchor weight of hopelessness yoked to their heels.

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.

Risk doesn’t burnish the Assange myth – it injects you into the bloodstream of the Assange story.

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.

Everything that works in Nocturnal Animals is intoxicating, provocative, delicious – and happily, so is everything that doesn’t.

After the subterranean sluggishness of the last film, too thinly spun out from the first third of Suzanne Collins’s final book, Mockingjay – Part 2 returns the series to its characteristic high gear.

For this usually understated filmmaker, it’s a madcap outlier, and often resembles an early Steven Spielberg film having a nervous breakdown.

Love is All You Need has been made for an audience rarely catered for by the film industry: intelligent adults who enjoy perceptive and good-hearted drama.

François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful is, in the very best sense, a film that won't add up.

It’s a necessarily tough watch, with an engrossing performance from Seydoux that makes Lucy’s every flicker of hope and stab of dread feel like your own.

Paradise: Love flits nimbly between humour and sadness, and treats potentially ponderous themes such as sex, race and the rancid legacy of colonialism with a welcome light touch.

“A person’s a person, no matter how small,” Dr. Seuss once memorably counselled – and that’s as good a binding philosophy as any for Alexander Payne’s exhilaratingly odd new film.

Fill the Void is a real collector’s item: a film in which the forces of religion and tradition are shown to be working together, however haltingly and imperfectly, for the good.

Guiraudie’s film is acutely brilliant on the funny, scary machinery of desire, and how easily humans can get caught up in its cogwheels.

It’s a film that creaks as reassuringly as leather.

Modest as it may look, this is boundary-pushing cinema in all the best ways, and what a thrill it is to hear those boundaries creak.

The film is earnest yet hopeful, with crisply drawn characters - but perhaps its full grandeur won’t be fully realised until part two.

The slotting together of songs and plot is often done with a spark of inspiration.

Gray’s film is itself no paper tiger – yes, it’s a fondly conceived throwback, but its claws are real.