Tim Robey

There's evident patience and intelligence to the filmmaking all over, as well as an engagement with genuine ideas about diplomacy, deterrence, law and leadership. However often it risks monkey-mad silliness, it's impressively un-stupid.

Re-entering Mike Leigh’s stomping ground in Hard Truths is both a solace and, in the best possible way, a slap in the face. It’s also an impressively funny ordeal, in that unmistakably morose way no one has ever mastered better than Leigh.

It would be hard to overpraise Burghardt, a debuting actress on the spectrum whose scenes are so tender, relaxed and generally sweet she deserves at least half the credit.

All is True is a tongue-in-cheek title all the same, for a script which fills in factual gaps with its own blatant leaps of imagination: they’re just far more respectful and illuminating leaps.

Jackson inhabits the film beautifully, if more gently: in the role of peacemaker and sounding board, he’s the least pushy of all these performers, but finds the music in Wilson’s words and wastes none of it.

This is by some measure Anderson’s weirdest concoction ever, in all sorts of good ways. And it probably counts as his most daring, too.

It’s Herzog’s uncertainty as a tourist in the field that gives the film its enticing charge, as surely as his wanderings in the Antarctic, or gropings in the dark to find the world’s oldest cave paintings.

You’ve never seen a documentary like The Act of Killing. If you saw too many like it, your hold on sanity might fray, which is not so much the film’s fault as that of its bloodcurdling subject. This movie is essential.

Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realised piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge.

This is in no way the remorselessly grim film its subject matter might lead you to expect – it’s full of life, irony, poetry and bitter unfairness. It demands respect, but it also earns it.

Novello again, in an underrated road-to-ruin melodrama, plays a public-school rugby champ disgraced when he takes the fall for getting a waitress pregnant. Visual experiments abound and there's a justly famous scene with the curtains of a Paris nightspot being pulled back, exposing its superannuated regulars to the unsparing sunlight. [14 Jul 2012, p.4]

Abi Morgan's script – better, for my money, than her work on either Shameor The Iron Lady – elegantly straddles two timelines to illuminate a deliberately obscured life

This makes a better case that she was the first model everyone found relatable.

It’s really the style and performances, more than the pseudo-experimental structure Layton has chosen, that keep the film grabby.

The further down the film descends, the more transfixing its images tend to get, as if Rohrwacher and Louvart have teamed up on an archaeological dig for their own treasures of texture and light.

Mudbound’s brutal climax is a shock and an affront in all the ways it must be – and though the film is a little wobbly up front, it’s fully worth wading through.

The moral maze of the premise is tautly negotiated. Shrewd casting helps, as does Eastwood’s trump suit: a forensic seriousness of purpose. Grappling with the mechanisms of justice and the workings of a lone conscience, he puts both in the scales, and no one’s off the hook.

This is a grand success – perhaps a new populist benchmark in what to do with a flagging franchise, and a witty, light-on-its-feet prequel.

Anyone interested in animation needs to pay attention to what these films are doing. The writing formula may be crude, but the whiz-bang aesthetic is sensational.

It’s the opposite of a gateway horror for the trepidatious. It beckons in the brave.

Keegan chose a man of few words to make his stand, and Murphy, very much the man of the moment, steps up to play him with a heroic understatement that could move mountains.

The endgame could be… sharper. There’s an elaborate hoax that’s too easy to suss out – even for us, and we’re not the seasoned con artists on the receiving end. At this point, the film’s own confidence seems to falter just a fraction. Then again, the chinks in these crooks’ cynical armour are what give it texture, a mottling of human desperation. Instead of smug gotchas, it traffics in mistakes.

A good cop/bad cop action comedy with the funniest two-women-above-the-title pairing in memory.

The believability of this fractured family is clinched by Machoian’s casting.

Precisely because it’s less emotionally coercive than Kore-eda’s last couple of pictures, it’s even more moving: rather than lunging full-bore for the solar plexus, the truths it’s telling creep up on you.

Christine, which asks a top-notch Rebecca Hall to play out the last days of Chubbuck’s life, dares us to hope that it’s somehow about a different Christine Chubbuck – one who made it out the other side of her own tragedy.

Cinematogapher Dean Semler gets amazing colours as the sun sets, and there’s a bravely avant-garde debut score from Kiwi composer Graeme Revell, pumping up the pulse with sinister breathing sounds. The plot even thrives on a tacit cultural tension between the Australian stars and the arrogant interloper.

As a statement, Benedetta won’t win any awards for coherence, but there’s just Too Much Verhoeven going on here for sensation hunters ever to feel short-changed.