Robbie Collin

The thing about Spielberg these days is he makes this stuff look easy.

Some films based on dramatic true events offer us a snapshot of a life: I’m Still Here shows us a life of snapshots.

Bizarre, beautiful, moving and playful, this is an oddity to cherish, with depths that only reveal themselves – entirely aptly – on the hoof.

In some passages, the film abides by the biopic rulebook more carefully than it needs to; its best moments are the ones where King and his cast create some tension then simply let it cook.

There’s a gleeful toxicity here that will launch a thousand think-pieces – Pitt’s character is capital-P problematic, absolutely by design – but the transgressive thrill is undeniable, and the artistry mesmerisingly assured.

No director working today observes family life with such delicacy and care, or is so unstintingly generous with what they find.

In lieu of monologues and soul-baring, Coogler crams the film with proper movie-star performances at every level: by turns glowingly charismatic, sparklingly funny and silkily seductive.

Its title refers to the mythical Islamic bridge across hell, on which one false step leads to certain damnation. The path trodden by the film itself is no less risky, but it styles out the crossing astonishingly.

The film itself is a mesmerisingly gripping and controlled parable-thriller in which the paranoia, misogyny and rage of the Iranian state are mapped seamlessly onto an ordinary family unit.

Toy Story 4 reaffirms that Pixar, at their best, are like no other animation studio around.

It feels like summer on film – the thing radiates Factor 50 good vibes, and boasts a cast so preposterously attractive, and with such sweltering chemistry, that a couple of hours in their company may make you feel as if you’ve had a holiday fling by osmosis.

What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration.

It exists in an eerie cinematic in-between, and is completely unlike anything else you’ll see this year.

Chazelle has always specialised in virtuoso endings, and his sure hand and sharp eye brings this ambitious character study smoothly into land.

Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery; every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip.

There are visual flights of fancy here as glorious as anything Miyazaki’s studio has created, but the story is rooted in a country trudging towards its own destruction.

Great animation can communicate wildly complex ideas with head-spinning clarity and wit, as Docter capably proved with Inside Out – a film which staged the interplay of emotions in an 11-year-old’s head like a vintage sitcom. If anything, Soul pushes this capacity for revelation even further: there are moments of true Blakean mystery and wonder here, expressed with a crispness that feels like a lightbulb snapping on above your head.

It’s a funny, insightful, sensationally acted account of art’s capacity to dissolve walls, and heighten, broaden and deepen the reach of our lives.

It works as beautifully as it does because the film’s comedy has been machined with Swiss precision, and all of its characters written with obvious love.

Everything about The Lighthouse lands with a crash. It’s cinema to make your head and soul ring.

Mandy exists in its own supremely unnerving horror dimension.

For a shot of pure forward-leaping, backward-dreaming animated pleasure, pick brick.

So hauntingly perfect is Barnard’s film, and so skin-pricklingly alive does it make you feel to watch it, that at first you can hardly believe the sum of what you have seen.

King’s fluid direction of her four actors means the snug setting never feels dramatically constricting, while their jostling performance styles make each combination of voices feels like its own distinct treat.

Belle is a beautifully observed, dazzlingly animated sci-fi fairy tale about our online-offline double lives – it’s Hosoda’s finest film since 2012’s Wolf Children, and perhaps his best to date.

A heady hybrid of comedy, polemic and period crime drama, it could have been scattergun stuff, and there are patches of preachy overkill. Much more often, though, there’s a rollicking drive and focus to it.

Glazer’s astonishing film takes you to a place where the everyday becomes suddenly strange, and fear and seduction become one and the same.

Shot and edited by Spielberg and his team in less than six months, The Post is very evidently a strike-while-the-story’s-hot kind of project, and it finds the master filmmaker at his most thrillingly supple and intuitive.