Simran Hans

The film’s sometimes tiresome sense of humour is laddish in its embrace of viscera (blood, boils, vomit and live spiders all feature), but as the narrative trots (or, rather, plods) along, its men are revealed to be endearingly less so.

The gravitational pull of sex, death and the void is palpable.

Sudanese film-maker Amjad Abu Alala’s radiant drama dares to wonder if death could inspire courage rather than fear.

Film-maker Jamila Wignot pays particular attention to the specificity of Ailey’s black influences: the church, blues music and his southern upbringing, all of which informed his best-known work, Revelations (1960).

Favier is smart on the mechanics of abuse, and the sobering inevitability of her heroine’s downhill skid.

The relatively scant highlights include the film’s sunset pastels, shoals of fish in penguin waiter uniforms, a homage to Atlantis (the Las Vegas one) and a plot point involving the power of the Macarena.

Eye-popping is one way to describe the prolific Japanese director’s 103rd film, a cheerfully pulpy Tokyo-set noir.

Gibney struggles to psychologically penetrate his cold antihero.

More than 70 civil and criminal charges have been lodged against the family. Marcos flaunted her wealth while her country’s living standards plummeted, and Greenfield’s portrait is damning.

The parallels drawn between Fabienne’s life and the stories she’s drawn to are a little on the nose. “What matters most is personality! Presence!” she declares, determined not to fade into obscurity. Deneuve’s luminous performance ensures she won’t.

What’s interesting and unexpected is the film’s subtle acknowledgement of culturally specific generational trauma and displacement.

There are three sides to every story in Ekwa Msangi’s vivid and carefully observed feature debut, and so she cleverly splits the film into thirds, replaying the action but changing the vantage point with each chapter.

Rafeea, a non-professional actor and Syrian refugee, is the film’s secret weapon. At times, the tragedy unfolding on screen feels borderline unwatchable, but his strange, fascinating, eerily adult face offers a litany of minute expressions. There is a wisdom, a soulfulness, and an icy, angry candour that feels lived rather than performed.

There’s just enough magic and mystery to tease out a supernatural reading of the film, though Petzold encourages viewers to find pleasure in puzzling out his femme fatale for themselves.

Rosi’s broader critique of violence is implied through footage of a play performed by patients in a psychiatric hospital, and of a children’s art therapy class. He is more interested in the reverberations of conflict than the source, focusing on those who have suffered its effects directly.

The ratcheting tension is sadly punctured by unintentionally hilarious scenes of ambitious “research” by journalist Amy (Valene Kane), mostly involving frantic Googling and YouTube tutorials on “how to look younger”.

This harrowing retelling of Norwegian rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 terrorist attack on the island of Utøya is less exploitative than Paul Greengrass’s brutal, Netflix-bound, English-language version, but the question remains: does a tragedy have to be turned into cinema for people to engage with it?

This intimate observational documentary explores poverty in Sicily from two different vantage points, drawing poetic connections between lives that don’t appear to touch.

Kenneth Branagh’s unabashedly feelgood memoir of growing up in Belfast as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s suffers from a problem of perspective.

There’s perhaps an over-reliance on voiceover by way of letters and emails, though the film’s unvarnished formal directness is a good thing, given the sensitive material.

If writing is a democratic art and social leveller, Marcello indicts the celebrity author as a sellout, steamrolling their way to success.

There is an incandescence and a buoyancy to the animation that elevates the formula.

Kasbe makes the most of his extraordinary access by presenting the film vérité style, preferring to immerse the audience in his characters’ lives to better make the case for each of their choices.

This Kelly is motivated by an oedipal complex and wears dresses to distract his opponents; The Babadook’s Essie Davis is equal parts fearsome and magnetic as his enterprising sex worker mother. More enjoyable still are the film’s corrupt policemen; the louche, stockinged, pipe-smoking Constable Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult) and virile cartoon villain Sergeant O’Neil (Charlie Hunnam).

This thoughtful documentary about Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win Wimbledon in 1975, understands that representation is only one step towards equality.

Like Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Todd Haynes’s Carol, Ashe takes the form of the 50s melodrama and recentres it on characters the genre has tended to ignore. This isn’t as politically restless as those films – it’s less interested in subverting the “woman’s picture” than establishing itself as one.

Perhaps wisely, Ryan White’s slick documentary chooses not to mine the bizarre scene for comic potential. Instead, he spins the arrest of Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong – economic migrants from Indonesia and Vietnam respectively – into a parable about political corruption.

To evaluate it solely on the basis of representation is to do it a disservice and to further narrow the parameters of how we’re allowed to talk about movies that feature “diverse” actors.