Robbie Collin

Kaufman and Johnson tease out the possible causes and effects of Michael’s crisis with great imagination, tilting your sympathies so subtly as they do so that you don’t even feel it going on.

This superb debut feature from Andreas Fontana puts an ingenious spin on the paranoid thriller: its main character is determined to behave as if he isn’t in one.

It all makes for soaringly satisfying viewing, yet the satisfaction comes from blistering performances and virtuosic screenwriting, and absolutely nothing else.

Nothing about it should work as a film, yet almost everything does.

This is a beautiful, bold, intently serious film.

The story of A Star Is Born may be as old as show-business, but it is also electrifyingly fresh – a well-known melody given vivid, searching new force.

Maoz’s control of tone is meticulous and his technique swaggeringly assured, making Foxtrot a film that works best in the spine-prickling moment.

Sweet Country is tough, spare and lyrical right down to the bone.... It is also a work of moral conscience that rules out easy answers, with acridly funny moments of black comedy and a sense of awesome natural spectacle that is inseparable from its dramatic impact. It has a power that makes the cinema shake.

Even when Almodóvar plays on easy mode – and nothing about Parallel Mothers could be described as difficult – the results are irresistible.

This triumphant adaptation, which premiered last night at Venice, strip-mines Gray’s book for all its funniest, fizziest and sexiest ideas, and leaves the chewier, more literary stuff on paper, where it belongs. I’d say purists might bridle, but speaking as one of them, I wasn’t just relieved, but overjoyed.

Braga has been presented with an uncommonly dense and multi-faceted role here, and she plunges into it with a kind of glossy-maned, leonine majesty, investing the character with a hard-won dignity that often has you stifling a cheer, but also exploring her flaws in gripping fashion.

The director’s 28th feature is a magnificent slab of dad cinema, with Phoenix a startling emperor and Vanessa Kirby brilliant as his wife.

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.

This is the same wondrous journey on which Apichatpong sends his audience: inwards and downwards, to a place where the simplest rhythms of everyday life become hallowed and mythic.

This is his and Swinton’s first film together: in fact, it is the Spanish master’s first English-language production. But the two are an obviously good creative match, each one well-versed in the interplay of depth and surface, and capable of switching moods from ripe to heartfelt in a blink.

Spectacular, star-powered cinema that makes us ask anew what cinema is for. Call it a "Dark Knight" of the soul.

The Velvet Underground is not the kind of music documentary that dutifully walks the viewer through the greatest hits and bitterest feuds. Instead, it re-conjures the moment that made the hits possible and the feuds inevitable, via a whirl of archive footage and interviews new and old.

Thirty-nine years on, it’s as vivacious as ever.

Romance and cinema are ideal bedfellows for all sorts of obvious reasons, but on screen, the beauty of friendship can be harder to pin down. This wise and wondrous (and wordless) animation does it better than any other film in recent memory – and in ways a six-year-old could effortlessly grasp.

He remains a master of composition, subtly guiding your eye towards details that reveal the kind of stories we might usually overlook – in life as well as in the cinema itself.

The sheer compassion of Zhao's direction is one of the film's most elemental pleasures, while McDormand is one of those rare actors who can somehow make the act of listening as thrilling as a barnstorming speech.

Farhadi’s films are like moral whodunits, and as Sepideh and her friends gradually unearth the truth, he expertly buffets our sympathies in all directions until the very last shot.

The film’s scope is limited, but as far as it goes, All Is Lost is very good indeed: a neat idea, very nimbly executed.

This is an often shoulder-shudderingly funny film, whose comic dialogue is dazzlingly designed and performed. But McDonagh leaves fate itself with the last, black, bone-rattling laugh.

This is categorically not a film that will be universally admired – but even as it cleaves to old formulas, it transports your mind to new terrain that feels genuinely and frighteningly hostile, and leaves you with plenty of mental souvenirs by which to remember the trip.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth may be the best-served by cinema, with terrific, distinctive adaptations over the years from Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, and most recently Justin Kurzel, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Coen’s is something different again – though new would be entirely the wrong word. It resonates with the ancient power of a ritual.

Flow might be a digital confection, but it’s also open, alive, elemental. In every sense, it’s a breath of fresh air.

Like the best bath you’ve ever had, it sends tingles coursing through every part of you that other films don’t reach.