Tara Brady

A compelling and hopeful insight into the turbulence leading up to the 2021 coup.

There remains a warmth and goofiness in Lehtinen’s performance that harks back to Napoleon Dynamite as much as it recalls such similarly themed bro pics as High Fidelity and Clerks. It’s enough to restore one’s faith in the near-extinct subgenre once known as the teen comedy.

There is a lot to like here, not least Ray Winstone’s Papa Bear. The forests are Skittle-coloured. The set pieces are wild and kinetic. But it is Banderas’s star power that saves the day.

More analysis of the films would have enriched this entertaining chronicle, but it remains a rollicking account of the most important movie partnership since Powell and Pressburger.

Pritz collaborates commendably and sensitively with his subjects.

In Mendonça Filho’s slippery moral universe, revelation offers neither catharsis nor closure, only the squeamish knowledge that some nightmares end, and others are obscured by history.

Fans of the playful meandering of the Romanian auteur Radu Jude will likely enjoy the haphazard storytelling and epic travelling shots.

Pitched somewhere between The Social Network and The Thick of It, BlackBerry brings a welcome touch of anarchy to the corporate drama.

[Hania] carefully sidesteps ethical questions about the use of performance alongside archival evidence with a clear-headed chronicle of a tragedy and of wider Palestinian suffering.

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, for all its razzle-dazzle, never loses sight of its northern working-class roots.

Moratto and Thanyá Montesso’s script is precise and minimal. Christian Malheiros and Tales Ordakji make for a wildly charismatic screen coupling.

Brian and Charles themselves, meanwhile, make for an irresistible two-step in a delightful tale of friendship and loneliness, dramatised and written in beats that make one think of Wallace & Gromit without the clay.

The inclusion of older footage from the Armando Diaz school, where Genoa police kettled protests during the 2001 G8 summit, reminds us that previous generations have equally hoped for change.

Masculinity has seldom been more cartoonishly toxic than in Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s compelling hair-trigger drama.

The strain of absent fathers, generational addiction and the cycle of poverty are carefully countered by resilience, love and the flicker of youthful possibility.

Hardwicke and O’Hara make for forbidding facades with unexpected depths, but impressive newcomer Ollie West, who appears in every scene, shoulders most of the emotional heft.

Working with Gammell, Keough, a granddaughter of Elvis Presley and the compelling star of The House that Jack Built and Daisy Jones & the Six, successfully transitions to the other side of the camera with this respectful take on a community under pressure.

The wild conceit is, against all odds, through smart writing and clever use of CGI and puppets, made palatable. The denouement is pleasingly shocking.

The final scenes, even for those familiar with the real-world outcome, are haunting.

The director and star deftly juggles social commentary, genre tension, spookiness and some fabulous period costumes (courtesy of designer Maïra Ramedhan Levi).

Marder, who co-wrote the script with his brother Abraham, sets out quite a stall with a drama that’s as visceral and hard-hitting as its protagonist’s drum solos.

Just as Youri fashions outsider art – or survivalist dreams – from his doomed banlieue, Liatard and Trouilh craft an imaginative debut feature from the rubble.

Völker’s sensitive film brings together these two wounded families to sit down for tea. It’s a fascinating encounter defined by guilt and unspeakable hurt. There is no sense of absolution or cathartic breakthrough. There is only imperfect reckoning.

Late Night with the Devil is at its best when it colours within the lines of the found-footage genre.

The most anxious Jewish comedy since the Coen brothers visited Jobian trauma on Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man stars Carol Kane as an adult bat-mitzvah student. This alone would justify the admission price, but there’s more.

Working from a blackly comic script by Austin Kolodney, Van Sant fashions a shouty standoff in the tradition of Network and Dog Day Afternoon.

O’Connor, who caused a stir with his breakthrough turn in God’s Own Country, and Catalan actor Costa, share an easy and natural chemistry. They don’t blaze up the screen: they simmer and charm.

Whishaw’s performance is a theatrical masterclass in controlled ramble; Hall’s is the art of listening, with responses that range from concern to a slightly cocked head. Their chemistry enlivens the most throwaway anecdote.

Cultural crises are seldom so entertaining.

Dave Davis’s petrified protagonist is nothing short of star-making.

Dickinson plays a small role as Mike’s antagonistic friend, but everything rests on Dillane’s powerhouse turn and the writer-director’s compassionate, daring script.

If you have ever experienced acute anxiety, panic attacks or any other nervous disorder, then watching Anne at 13,000 Ft – presumably through your fingers – will bring a sense of representation and horror in equal measure.

Every scene, every ride and every development feels dangerous and combustible.

The Card Counter – executive produced by Martin Scorsese – revisits Schrader’s twin preoccupations with despair and salvation, powered along by tart political urgency, a magnetic central performance from Isaac, and no little style.

Writer-director Josh Margolin, making his feature debut, based the eponymous character on his grandmother. The script, accordingly, is never patronising.

The unlikely friendship between Michael and Kensuke is the heart of a film that touches lightly on environmental themes, loss and history.

Jalmari Helander, who previously scored an international hit with his Santa-themed horror, Rare Exports, mines every gory set piece for squeals of delight and revulsion. Styled as a midnight movie, Sisu makes terrific use of limited military hardware and a forbidding Lapland landscape.

Niasari, who writes and produces as well as directing, racks up the tension to match his psychopathy in this sure-footed debut feature.

Forming a Greek chorus, the films are only as disjointed as their context: the obliteration of normal life and the stubborn, miraculous act of carrying on.

McCarthy’s directorial precision is complemented by wit and an imaginative backstory that deserves an expanded universe.

Life in The Villages intersects with the suburbia of Blue Velvet and, in common with that dark dramatic underbelly, there’s a compelling soap opera bubbling under the sterile surface.

Still, this is an intriguing psychological thriller and a carefully calibrated study of maternal mourning, powered by perceived class differences and harsh maternal judgment.

The filmmaker’s technique generally counterpoints any caveats and script imperfections. The ensemble cast is starry and strong. The segue from the end of the second World War into the cold war is marked by a spectacular explosion sequence. “Brilliance makes up for a lot,” Murphy’s Oppenheimer tells us. It sure does.

In his impressive feature-length debut, the Irish documentarian Gar O’Rourke offers an immersive and mesmerising portrait of life in a still recognisably Soviet institution.

Dupieux, as ever, writes, directs, shoots, and orchestrates the madness. This isn’t as conceptually neat as Deerskin nor as playfully intertextual as Rubber, but it’s consistently fun.

The third part in a loose, geographically defined trilogy, as sensitively penned by Loach collaborator Paul Laverty, The Old Oak is a gentler film than the stark austerity painted by I, Daniel Blake or the chilling dissection of the gig economy in Sorry We Missed You. The film is, however, astute in its depiction of a disenfranchised community, ravaged by vulture property speculators and post-industrialisation.

It shouldn’t work, but it’s infectious fun for all of its not inconsiderable run time. The eccentric format double-jobs as a Sparks primer for the novice, and as a greatest hits package for the hardcore fan.

Much of the project’s power is derived from Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning central performance.

The script, by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, tarries for singsongs, dinners and poignant conversations about cinema and the self.

There are no big dramas, save for a call up to the office for skipping a school trip. Reiko Yoshida’s script instead foregrounds sincere friendship and the joyful mechanics of songwriting.

Servants confirms the director as a major talent.

The director of Stranger by the Lake returns to the deadpan, sexually unstable working-class environs that have shaped many of his previous films with this pleasingly confounding tale of displaced characters and desires.

Adam Arkapaw’s dynamic cinematography, the pulsing electronica of the director’s regular composer (and brother) Jed Kurzel, and a snarling script make for a taut and gritty thriller that could pass for a moody, rediscovered early-1970s classic originally shot sometime between The French Connection and Death Wish.

At 118 minutes, Tina – an old-fashioned marriage of talking heads and footage– is long for a music documentary. But there’s plenty to mull over, a fine array of contributors and wonderful archive material.

There are cruising parallels with American contemporaries the Ross Brothers and Halina Reijn, but this daisy chain has an earnest, festive charm unlike any other. It’s a vibe.

The film never lets up. Pieced together from carefully colour-graded archive footage and the contemporaneous testimonies of Khrushchev, Andrée Blouin, In Koli Jean Bofane and Conor Cruise O’Brien (narrated by Patrick Cruise O’Brien), Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat finds an unlikely villain in its propulsive score: jazz.

Morris plays along, but his visuals – shadowy rooms, obfuscated photographs, carefully filleted scenes from adaptations of the novelist’s work – hint that this isn’t the whole story.

At its best, Dreams is intimate and contemplative, anchored by Overbye’s dreamy voiceover and performance. The second half loses some of that purpose.

It’s just a great story, you wonder why nobody thought to make a movie before.

In delicate movements, the miserabilism of Small Things Like These coalesces into a wonderfully understated seasonal catharsis.

The tragic cycle is composed of the same beats that defined such superior films as The Godfather and Animal Kingdom. But the tight focus on Lesia, and her realisation that the men she loves are also capable of monstrous things, reinvigorates the familiar form.

Bentley sometimes leans too heavily on lyricism and voiceover, but the film’s earnestness and restraint cast a strange spell. Train Dreams may mourn a disappearing US, but, more movingly, its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with.

The entire ensemble is remarkable. The drama is so engrossing, it knocks the jaunty Beatles song right out of the viewer’s head.

The most magical moments are the most ordinary, as Claire Mathon’s camera sneaks up on the two little girls in peals of laughter as they make a mess with pancakes or divvying up the parts in the script for (a fantastic-sounding) murder-mystery.

Hang in there and it’s rewardingly novel, touchingly human and agreeably nutty.

Chan-wook Park’s regular cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung trains his camera on dark, snaky corridors and Thatcher and East’s terrified faces as the Mormon girls realise the hopelessness of their predicament. It’s no fun for them, but it’s never dull for us.

Appealing documentary of the Nobel Prize-winning author has fascinating details.

Composed of small gestures and unspoken truths, it’s a bonsai miniature of the vastness of overwhelming grief.

Hassan and Ingar deliver compelling, complementary performances: Hassan is as quiet and vulnerable as Ingar is fiery and charismatic. Clarissa Cappellani’s fluid cinematography and Fiona DeSouza’s stylish edits and inserts keep pace with the youthful exuberance. Judicious use of flashback sets up a gut-punch coda.

It’s not world-building; it’s world-sprawling. Imagine Harry Potter. But with head-stomping.

It is equally a solid genre effort, characterised by gory set-pieces, discombobulating scenarios, and welcome lashings of feminist revenge.

Basholli’s simple, elegantly structured script and Alex Bloom’s cinematography places Gashi’s carefully calibrated performance in almost every frame.

Vogt coaxes impressive, carefully calibrated performances from his creepy young ensemble.

India Donaldson’s Good One is a sneaky revelation, a low-key coming-of-age drama that deftly sidesteps familiar tropes in favour of keen cringe comedy and emotional precision.

With its lurid libidinous action and over-the-top murders, Pearl is a jokey spin-off of a jokey film. Imagine – and we mean this as a compliment – the slasher equivalent of The Naked Gun 2. Offsetting the self-indulgence, Goth sinks her teeth into the goose-killing heroine and spits out all the feathers.

Djukic’s feature debut echoes the sensitivities of Céline Sciamma’s early coming-of-age stories but with a bold, cinematic bent.

Lisa Cortés’ fond, scholarly, starry documentary not only ensures that the innovator behind Tutti Frutti and Good Golly, Miss Molly gets his due but also provides a rip-roaring bow for the artist variously known as the Georgia Peach, the Living Flame and the Southern Child.

This is not horror gussied up as allegory or prestige: it is, pleasingly, a straight ghost story, executed with rigour, a swipe at misogyny and a sly sense of fun.

C’mon C’mon is certainly heartfelt, but it lacks the lovely levity that defined Mills’s earlier films.

A true original and deserving winner of the Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, El Conde’s heart-feasting, sexual subplots and accusatory banter coalesce into an extended and unmissable Grand Guignol finale.

Perry and his editor, Robert Greene (using split screens and collage techniques), build a dizzying kaleidoscope of timelines, earnestness and glee. What emerges is a film that’s as formally adventurous and oddly affecting as the soundtrack.

A deserving winner of the best screenplay at Cannes last year, this nail-biting drama is offset by Barhom’s terrific wide-eyed performance. The gorgon’s knot of political and religious machinations add distinctive hues to a genre piece with shades of All the President’s Men and The Name of the Rose.

Shot in 96-frames-per-second, this is a stunning, thrilling chronicle of nature at its angriest.

Yves Cape’s unfussy, still camerawork never distracts. Chastain and Sarsgaard subtly work every acting muscle. (The latter deservedly took home the Volpi Cup from Venice last September.) Franco is kinder to these characters than he has been to many of his creations, leaving the viewer to parse the moral murk.

Forget the big brand space opera: here’s the season’s pre-eminent work of event cinema.

Against the distress, Chukwu and Deadwyler find purpose in Mamie’s transformation into a hugely influential civil rights activist. This is a woman’s account of striving for racial justice in the era of Jim Crow laws.

Ignore the unassuming title: Ordinary Love is a love story that is extraordinary.

It’s a recipe for an emotional journey to match the trajectory of the title, but director Charlène Favier’s script, co-written with Antoine Lacomblez and Marie Talon, is as chilly as the permacold of its surroundings, and punctuated by DOP Yann Maritaud’s serene, snowy tableaux.

A terrifying reminder that those with absolute power don’t make good retirees.

Gibney is equally fascinated by Putin’s journey from anonymous civil servant to strongman, and the broader political scene’s increasing resemblance to performance art. It makes for an arresting chronicle and many follow-up questions.

With its fast-paced walking, talking and shouting into telephones, A House of Dynamite is a nervy, timely thriller that goes down like Coca-Cola while another US brand – its military – takes centre stage.

The writer-director and his cinematographer, Simone D’Arcangelo, evoke spaghetti westerns with wide-angle vistas of forbidding horizons. Odd moments of Quentin Tarantino-style playfulness add to the unease. The perverse, atonal effect is as discombobulating as Harry Allouche’s plucked, appositely bleak score.

The visual gags are fresh, the jokes are funny, the world-building is disarmingly buoyant, and the musical cues, from Holiday in Cambodia to Carmina Burana, are playful.

It’s Lee Chatametikool’s temporal-jumping edits that define this compelling drama.

The script is as indulgent as it is compelling, which is fair considering its depiction of two riled people who know each other’s weaknesses. Marcell Rév’s crystalline high-contrast black and white cinematography is gorgeous enough to transform a domestic dispute into something wonderfullycinematic.

The script’s wandering and overlapping arcs can feel uneven and tricksy, yet there’s something utterly compelling in how Glasner stages decay not just as a biological inevitability, but a doomy familial legacy.

The oppressively neon musical numbers and ominous pastoral pronouncements that “secular government was a mistake” are more convincing than the film’s late swerve into Giallo terrain. But the writer-director’s ideas about women as religious enforcers, complicit in their own subjugation, are fascinating.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond cares not a jot for the confines of conventional narrative and identification. This is cinema as bombardment, as fetish, as swooning fan collage. Who needs a new Bond film?