Sophie Monks Kaufman

The lure of intense mystery that beguiles you into trying to solve it again and again; the transference of an intoxication that makes you feel physically different afterwards. It sounds hyperbolic to describe art as having such power, but surely the reason we care about art is a belief that such power exists. High Life is too layered, too ambiguous, too potent to be about any one thing.

Faces Places is a subtly self-reflexive documentary that swims against this tide, inviting audiences to see that filmmaking is a process of having conversations with people, and enveloping each individual and their private creativity within the wider collaborative process. Art is a form of social work or, rather, it can be with the right people at the helm.

Driver embodies calmness and stillness. This performance cements his status as an actor whose physical command matches his ability to telegraph inner life. It’s a cliché to say that the greatest actors make the smallest actions magnetic, but it’s true of Driver who makes the non-demonstrative act of listening feel like it means the world.

Poitras questions him on the less glorious moments of his career, too, so that he emerges as a flawed human rather than a bastion of perfect judgement. This is not a perfect documentary either, with the breathless dash through his post My Lai journalism sometimes feeling overwhelming. Yet perfection is not the point when something impossible has been bottled: it’s something called the truth.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta horror-comedy and a whip-smart entertainment industry satire. Still, on a deeper level, in a hole at the bottom of its lake, is a hard-won sexual awakening.

Already a robust director, Laura Poitras has leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power... This is an overwhelming film.

This is Ross’s first fiction feature and its power comes as no surprise to those familiar with his 2018 calling card of a documentary. Hale County, This Morning This Evening announced a gifted photographer driven by sensitivity to his subjects’ dignity. Accordingly, Nickel Boys miraculously goes against the grain of the story’s devastating trajectory by leading with the same loving eye.

The beats of All We Imagine as Light are calibrated with hypnotic grace creating a rhythm that induces pure pleasure.

We are afforded the intimate sight of a man who gave his life to music making a final offering.

Nothing is phoned in here, everything is calibrated to a unique frequency so that even though you can trace the influence of Bette Gordon, Catherine Breillat, and Lucille Hadzhihalillovic, “Piaffe” is its own playful and majestic beast.

Observing a nation’s shortcomings is not typically this fun. Yet — unlike latter-day miserabilist works by the likes of Ken Loach — Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and its barbs stick entirely because Jude trusts his audience to appreciate tonal scope.

Some viewers may be frustrated by the opaque way all threads are resolved. To the end, Mysius retains the sense of her film being a glistening and mysterious object, you can watch but can’t touch. Yet this intact mystery flows from themes too vast to ever be rendered fully transparent: young girls are prescient and love is fate.

Detail is what makes Official Competition a joy to behold.

To a Land Unknown is a tour-de-force of empathic storytelling, with its genre narrative bursting with an overabundance of humanity.

Wiseman has made a vocation out of filming what is right in front of him, and he applies that schematic to a dead woman whose words are all that remain. Her husband did not see her, but we will.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is an invitation to a public mourning.

Hassan doesn’t need to provide a grand framing device. You sense their powerlessness, you are embedded within it. There is no omniscient camera to take the audience away because there is no freedom of movement for the Fazilis.

The humour is merciless.

The result is a gorgeous, layered portrait of a woman determined to put public image ahead of private feelings.

There is too much going on in Manchester by the Sea and still it is among the best films of this or any year. It is too funny, too tragic, and too full of nods to all manner of movie genres.

In this, her first film centring male psychology after a career of female character studies, she makes observations about masculinity and power that defy classification. She has blown these subjects wide open and we can but stand still and try to catch the fragments as they rain down.

The BFG’s greatest strength is its simplicity. This is a film built for children that delights with fantastical details while gently pushing a heartfelt message about the power of dreams.

A Hidden Life is, underneath it all, a love story. The Jägerstätters are a private microcosm imprinted by history. The Nazi regime is almost incidental, as these people could be anywhere opposing any evil regime. The substance of the film is buoyed by unselfish, enlightened love, shaped by a couple’s faith in each other’s morality.

It’s astonishing how early on in her career Denis had a handle on her distinct brand of visual composition. Hers is a genius for showing not telling, for laying out surfaces that are rich with implication and for conducting details until there is a heady picture that is minutely observant with a sweep that reaches from heaven to hell.

Full of throwaway insights into the micro-climate of a particularly hellish economic landscape, At Work is an engaging story about a man trying to write an engaging story with a diamond of hard-won wisdom at its core.

Human Flowers of Flesh becomes stranger and more liminal until one is literally lost at sea. This frustrating condition is not without its pleasures and consolations. The question of what the title is referencing provides a poetic source of intrigue.

A few structural issues threaten to tip the balance from cinematic melodrama into TV soap as the bad news keeps on coming, but Izadyar’s sustained emotional conviction carries the vision onwards.

This may be an offbeat and textured snapshot of history, but it still holds at its core cold anger on behalf of the dictatorship’s victims and interest in how the people will receive updates about their future.