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.

To call the film meditative would be to undersell Kosakovskiy’s instinct for drama and tension.

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.

The film has a cold, abstract beauty.

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.

Frat boy humour is dressed up in an expensive, arthouse jacket.

There are many things to enjoy here, not least the force of Cage’s performance as incensed lumberjack Red (and, it must be said, his scream).

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.

It’s satisfyingly gross – there’s plenty of black bile, crunching bones and half-chewed bodies. Russell, best known for her radiant portrayal of a domestic abuse survivor in Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress, is clever casting too.

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.

Though the film is teed up as a kind of John Wick-style revenge bender, Cage’s star persona is soon smartly subverted.