Xan Brooks

John Huston's hellfire burlesque is one of the great lost films of the 1970s and a movie to stand alongside his Maltese Falcon or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

I wish that I enjoyed The Disciple as much as I admired it. The film is a labour of love insofar as it feels overthought and overburdened, with all the rough edges planed down.

A gorgeous yet ultimately frustrating tribute to the Japanese airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi.

Under the Skin is perhaps best viewed as an icy parable of love, sex and loneliness.

Full credit to Hardy and Knight for making a film such as Locke. Low-budget film-makers could learn a lot from their method. And yet – having stripped away all but the bare necessities, having reduced the components to a car and a man – they make a classic error of overcompensation.

It’s a film that understands that humour and horror are not always mutually exclusive and that even the worst moments in life carry an air of the absurd.

Richard Linklater’s latest is a jaunty action comedy that spins its machine-tooled high concept like a bicycle wheel – sometimes with shrewd intent, sometimes for pure fun.

Noé’s extraordinary film unfolds as a tale of murmured terrors and nameless dread, creeping softly around a cramped Paris apartment like a cinematic Grim Reaper.

The film is at its most grimly compelling when it puts her on stage, pinned down by her accusers and fielding questions with a mix of wary contempt and sudden explosions of incandescent rage.

Danish director Tobias Lindholm spins an exacting drama out of a crisis on this deft, verite-style account of Somali piracy in the Indian ocean. Full credit to A Hijacking for resisting the siren-call of Hollywood histrionics in favour of the nuts-and-bolts.

Small Things Like These casts a powerful spell.

Its line of attack is remorseless, an ongoing rain of hammer blows, and yet it never feels especially dour or heavy. If anything, Chupov and Merkulova’s handling of the material is almost playful, choosing to frame Stalin’s Russia as nightmarish deadpan comedy.

You'd need a heart of stone not to be won over by Wadjda, a rebel yell with a spoonful of sugar and a pungent sense of a Riyadh society split between the home, the madrasa and the shopping mall.

A sweet yet suspect romantic drama.

What a bold, beguiling and utterly unclassifiable director Andersson is. He thinks life is a comedy and feels it’s a tragedy, and is able to wrestle these conflicting impulses into a gorgeous, deadpan deadlock.

Anderson has all manner of fun with the tale's whirling, blurring trajectory. His film is like a jubilant spin painting in which the characters have been scattered and splattered to the furthest reaches of the frame.

One watches Chalamet’s performance here with a simmering unease, willing him on but wondering if he is entirely fit for the task.

All of which works terrifically well up to a point.

It’s a work of startling maturity from this incorrigible tearaway, a minor-key dream that finally turns towards darkness.

It’s an extraordinary picture, steely and unbending and assembled with an unmistakable air of wild-eyed zealotry. Ad Astra, be warned, is going all the way - and it double-dares us to buckle up for the trip.

Lean on Pete is at its potent, stirring best during the opening furlough, when it focuses on this makeshift hobo family as it criss-crosses the Pacific Northwest from one racetrack to the next.

It’s too skimpy and self-conscious, more a series of gestures than an organic whole. But Ortega frames his action with a delicious high style, interspersing tense standoffs with formal dance sequences. He gives the impression that all his characters are locked in a bizarre hothouse romance, even when they are chasing or attempting to kill one another.

Vigas’s direction is efficient, pedestrian, entirely built for purpose. But he manages to keep the audience on-board throughout the tale’s twists and turns.

Babygirl rolls off the track looking almost as neat and anonymous as a box from Tensile’s upstate delivery warehouse.

JC Chandor’s period crime drama is rigorous, resourceful and as smart as a whip...But its canny tactical struggle remains a joy to behold.

Gone Girl, finally, may be no more than a storm in a teacup. But what an elegant, bone-china teacup this is. And what a fearsome force-10 gale we have brewing inside.

Buckle up; it's quite a ride.

Dumont’s secular crisis-of-faith drama has much to say about the corrosive effect of our 24-hour news culture. But it is also indecisive and compromised and plays out as a prolonged admission of defeat.