Stephen Dalton

As a piece of investigative journalism it feels a little too fuzzy, but as an imaginative exercise in non-fiction cinema, it is consistently interesting and often hauntingly beautiful.

Strip away the Middle East backdrop and Bethlehem is a fairly routine thriller about good cops, corrupt bureaucrats and armed criminal gangs.

The Dance of Reality is a rich pageant of nostalgic narcissism laced with New Age mysticism and fortune-cookie wisdom.

For Anderson fans, Asteroid City will be a pure guiltless pleasure, a full sensory immersion in his dazzling Day-Glo Pop Art toybox. For agnostics, this is still one of the director’s finer efforts, low on the childlike whimsy and forced eccentricity that mars his minor works.

A Hard Day offers a masterclass in throat-squeezing, stomach-knotting suspense.

Absolutely Anything is a flabby misfire full of labored slapstick, broad caricatures and groaningly absurd plot twists.

Hong has a distinctive voice and an interesting track record, but his latest exercise in flimsy whimsy is for indulgent hardcore fans only.

As a timely yarn about the mistreatment of minorities, both in Sweden and worldwide, Border is rich in allegorical layers. But as a thriller at least partially rooted in supernatural genre conventions, its relentlessly dour Nordic glumness drags a little. Social realism and magical realism make uneasy bedfellows.

This well-intentioned meditation of the banality of evil packs a modest emotional punch, but it might have been more powerful if it had shown us a little less banality and a little more evil.

While the fuzzy take-home message of peaceful coexistence is something most viewers can get behind, it is also too simplistic and banal to sustain an entire movie.

Leap of Faith is an easy, entertaining watch, but it feels like a smaller film than its two predecessors, chiefly because it features just a single long interview with Friedkin rather than a rich chorus of insider insights.

The State Against Mandela and the Others adds little essential to the vast library of documentaries about Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle. All the same, this is a heartfelt, humane and visually inventive tribute to a fading generation of giants whose principled sacrifices ended up changing history.

Big on atmosphere but low on drama, DAU. Natasha is fascinating conceptually but weak cinematically.

After 90 years and more than 50 films, Wajda has earned the right to make stagey period pieces like Afterimage, minor codas to a gloriously symphonic career.

British director Sophie Fiennes certainly finds Jones a spellbinding subject in Bloodlight and Bami, securing intimate access to the veteran diva over several years without ever quite managing to spill her secrets.

Like the cumbersome hybrid animal at its heart, this beast is no beauty. But it is a technically impressive and boldly original statement.

Glossy and gripping, Czech director Robert Hloz’s ambitious and impressively polished debut feature boasts high-calibre production design and a dense, twist-heavy, techno-dystopian plot that feels at times like an extended episode of the cult Netflix series Black Mirror.

Dolan's fifth feature feels like a strong step forward, striking his most considered balance yet between style and substance, drama-queen posturing and real heartfelt depth.

The humor is broad, the satirical targets many, the overall effect mixed.

A charming little tragicomedy which flirts with savage social satire but never fully embraces it.

A Field in England is a rich, strange, hauntingly intense work from a highly original writer-director team.

Despite its relatively unusual setting, Crystal Swan is a largely conventional fish-out-of-water story at heart. But it is elevated above the routine by its excellent cast, especially Nassibulina, and plenty of visual flair.

A minor but touchingly human subplot to the financial crash, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is both an affirmation and an indictment of the American Dream.

The screenplay to The World Is Yours is sporadically hilarious though rarely subtle, relying a little too heavily on boorish stereotypes and slapstick violence for its broad humor.

A key joy of Karl Marx City is its strong, arty aesthetic.

Plenty to admire here, if only this tasteful tearjerker lived up to its title with a few more explosive fireworks instead of settling for timid twinkles, ending not with a bang but a whimper.

It looks and feels far more substantial than most indie debuts, confidently bending genre rules with its minimalist dialogue and hallucinatory plot, which owes more to David Lynch or Lars von Trier than to more orthodox horror maestros.

Beautifully shot with an acute eye for crisp composition, this intimate mood piece explores the subtle intricacies and low-level power struggles of long-term love in forensic detail.