Simran Hans

What could have been a disaster in the hands of a less sensitive film-maker ends up an extraordinary feat of care, collaboration and creativity.

As far as the plot is concerned, almost nothing happens, and yet Andreas Fontana’s sinewy debut teems with unseen threat. He crafts an atmosphere of grubbiness despite all the polished surfaces.

A more conventional director might have chosen to focus on their most famous member, Reed, but Haynes smartly structures the film as a group show, giving space to the women in the ensemble.

Genre convention means it’s a foregone conclusion that this mission is not, in fact, “impossible”, but director Christopher McQuarrie cleverly controls the ticking clock quality that makes these films so much fun.

Inviolata is Italian for “unspoiled”, and the word could apply to its people as much as their straw-gold land.

There’s lots to love here, not least the animation itself, which uses split screens, Ben-Day dots and onomatopoeic text that mimic the tactile experience of reading physical comics – panels, hatching and primary colours intact and ready to leap off the page.

At times, it feels as though we’re watching something we’re not supposed to be seeing, such is the detail of the emotional degradation on show; in this sense, it’s impossible not to read it as something of a nihilistic suicide note.

For a movie about the undead, Japanese director Shin’ichirô Ueda’s horror comedy is certainly lively.

[A] sensitive, frequently harrowing observational documentary.

This one hits its stride somewhere in the middle, bounding confidently towards its hopeless, poetic conclusion.

Though it’s filmed like a romance, the moment feels captured, not staged.

What’s so invigorating is the way she gives each principle equal weighting, discussing her formal decisions, such as Cléo’s editing or the tracking shots that move right to left in 1985’s Vagabond, with the same intensity and enthusiasm as her more existential motivations (she describes her 1965 summer bummer classic Le Bonheur as “a beautiful summer peach with a worm inside”).

The film works as a collage of everyday moments that dovetail seamlessly between the sublime and the banal. Indeed in its most mesmerising scenes, the alchemy of duration and focus elevates these moments to something more profound.

Hall emphasises the moral grey area by shooting in black and white, an ingenious choice that allows her to light Clare as black or white.

No-nonsense beekeper Hatidze Muratova’s face is as weathered and craggy as the cliff face we see her scaling at the start of this gripping, Sundance-winning documentary.

Valadez’s expressionist images give texture to the abstract emotions of rage and pain.

Wilde expertly modulates the giddy highs and bittersweet lows of being a teenager, as demonstrated in the way the film’s house party climax crests and then crashes.

The sense of the watering hole as a haven for lost souls – not to mention the threat of gentrification to civic space – couldn’t be more vérité.

The ensemble cast electrifies Powers’s dialogue, jockeying between black power and integration, activism and commerce, spiritual clarity, pork chops and sex.

The film’s message is a beautiful one: to integrate our real-life vulnerabilities with the persona we project is to become all the more powerful.

Fascinatingly, in this world there are only fascists, making the film’s looming riot police feel like a real and relevant threat.

Crawford is brilliant and bitter as a soon-to-be divorced dad unable to accept his fate.

Talbot’s film is not perfect. A scene set to Joni Mitchell’s Blue makes its point awkwardly, and the narrative, like its characters, is prone to meandering. Yet as a film about place and personal mythology, it’s hugely moving.

Stokes is a fascinating, elusive protagonist – she was a recluse who enjoyed daily martinis and felt a kinship with Steve Jobs. Yet Wolf treats her archive with reverence, rather than writing her off as an eccentric.

The dilemma she presents is ethical: is it fair to ask someone to traumatise (or retraumatise) themselves for the sake of art? Rather boldly, it seems as though Decker is also asking the question of herself.

The film is shrewd on male friendship, suggesting that a lot of men are vulnerable and crave intimacy, but are often too poor at communicating to truly reach for it.

Refreshingly, Farhadi is ambivalent towards his “hero”, and his control over the film’s tone is masterful; what begins as funny and almost farcical, soon shifts into something much sadder and more sobering.

Sci-fi wipe transitions, 70s-style CinemaScope photography, a drone shaped like a UFO, and a cameo from German actor Udo Kier are clever genre flourishes that playfully deliver the film’s anticolonial politics.