Wendy Ide

Like its central character, this film is unconventional, and at times abrasive, but it has a seductive, searching quality and a swell of melancholy which makes for an engaging, if unpredictable journey.

Despite the poisons in the air, the brothers continue their work, mending broken creatures, one by one.

The film is scrupulous about giving voices to men who, as prisoners, were denied them. If there is an overlap in some of the observations and insights that the former inmates bring to the film, they tend to be points which bear repeating.

There’s such tenderness to the storytelling, such empathy and emotional depth, that it broadens the film’s potential audience from kids, who will respond to the cute characters and gentle wit, to adolescents and adults, who will recognise the angst and awkwardness of trying to function alone once again.

Nyoni’s Zambia-set film, using the Bemba language and English, deftly juggles humour with pathos, domestic drama with surreal fantasy flourishes. It’s dizzyingly creative and rather special.

What’s perhaps unexpected, in a film that has the look of a brooding fable by Carl Theodore Dreyer, is how funny it is at times.

A supremely accomplished debut feature from writer-director Georgia Oakley, Blue Jean captures a specific moment in British history with almost uncanny accuracy.

It’s hard to imagine the courage which went into the making of this highly personal documentary. ... With its unflinching candour about both the nature of the abuse and the effect that it had on its victims, the film is a difficult and upsetting watch.

It is piercingly insightful without ever labouring the point.

Ultimately, one of the key pleasures of the picture is its uncertainty – the niggling doubts that remain, and the sense that a crucial piece of the puzzle is tantalisingly out of reach.

There’s not a frame of this rich, kaleidoscopically detailed animation that isn’t dazzling.

While The Lego Movie is all about creativity and invention, Playmobil shamelessly steals ideas.

To call it horror seems reductive. With its shapeshifting disquiet, I Saw the TV Glow is too languidly weird, too unmoored from genre conventions to be neatly categorised. But there’s not a frame in Jane Schoenbrun’s suffocating second feature that isn’t drenched in dread and unease.

The performances, from Moore and in particular Portman, are sublime: both bracingly unsympathetic and wildly enjoyable.

April is a formidable, defiantly esoteric work. It demands considerable investment from the audience, but does repay it.

Happening is a visceral, confronting experience.

Ultimately what makes this an unusually rewarding picture about motherhood is the fact that it shatters the binary distinction between the good mother and the bad one.

Lady is a vivid, bracingly energetic examination of sisterhood and female bonds in an unequal society.

This female-led triptych of stories, with its deft, empathetic camerawork and intimate, intricately crafted character sketches, is a minor masterpiece in its own right.

Remarkable access and nerves of steel (on the part of both the subjects and of filmmaker Hogir Hirori) makes for a riveting documentary which is as tense as it is revealing.

While the crime spree may be inept, Park’s filmmaking is as elegant as ever, in a wildly enjoyable picture that balances psychological tension against giddily hilarious comic set pieces.

The child’s eye view of a seismic time of political upheaval is not an entirely new storytelling approach, but Davies breathes fresh life into the device.

It’s silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.

It’s a wisp of a thing, clocking in at barely over an hour. But the agile poetry and formal playfulness of Mati Diop’s exquisite hybrid documentary belies the weight and wealth of ideas within.

It’s a gloriously punk spin on the historical documentary genre, channeling the humour and rebellious spirit of a people who have been part of “eight or nine different countries” during the 20th century, who have spoken multiple languages, but who have managed to maintain their own distinct identity nonetheless.

Notwithstanding the bleak trajectory down which any film about blood feuds must spiral, this is an engrossing narco-thriller which deftly balances the storytelling tradition of the Wayuu with the genre conventions of the crime movie and the western .

Like much of her digital work in the twentieth century, Varda’s approach here is a kind of expansive introspection; it’s a film which looks both inwards and outwards at the same time. And like Varda herself, it pulls off the combination of a trundling, amiable pace with a biting intellectual acuity.

It’s a teasing exploration of the cost of freedom and of the dualities of life.