The script is so economical, and the acting so beautifully natural (especially by Dambrine, a remarkable discovery), that Close feels less like a drama than a tapestry of fragments from a candid documentary.

Klute still perhaps stands as Pakula's finest moment. Informed in part by the conventions of film noir - duplicitous female, ambitious private investigator, and murky goings on of the sexual variety - Klute manages to distill them all into something highly original and distinctly unsettling.

It's such an entertaining film that it's easy to overlook the fact that the comedy only works because it depicts structural racism in such an exaggerated black-and-white manner.

Craig's performance is wily and joyful, and the film's biggest flaw is that there is too little of him, as Johnson often turns the spotlight from Blanc to other characters.

Tom Cruise's seventh Mission: Impossible film is an unusual mix of high-tech and low-tech, of ultra-modern and defiantly traditional.

No other film this year will get more people talking, or more people crying.

If more attention had been paid to plot and characterisation, this would have been a great rather than a good movie. Even so, it stands as a cinematic landmark. Without it there may well have been no Dirty Harry or The French Connection.

With its Gothic atmosphere and deeper themes, Wake Up Dead Man has a darker tone than the previous Knives Out films. Yet it is also the funniest and most playful so far.

It may be a comedy about a mass-produced plastic doll, but Barbie breaks the mould.

As bleak as it is hard and viciously uncompromising, Get Carter is one of those films that has become increasingly interesting over time.

The lurching rhythm of their relationship keeps you on edge, but it's also moving to see how tearful and confused Romy can be, and it's darkly funny to see how she bluffs her way through her double life. Ultimately, though, Babygirl comes to seem genuinely romantic, because Romy and Samuel are fumbling their way towards a deeper understanding of each other. As uncomfortable as the film may be, it's clear that Reijn loves and respects her damaged characters, even if they're not sure of how they feel about themselves.

Parts of Dune: Part 2 seem just as monumental, lavishly bizarre and downright disturbing as anything that Jodorowsky and Giger can have had in mind.

The deliberate pacing and sometimes confusing narrative make Monster less engrossing than some of Kore-eda's work, and less likely to win prizes. But it is still a marvel: a minutely observed, profoundly compassionate chronicle of untidy contemporary lives. It's a Hirokazu Kore-eda film, in other words.

With all due respect to Miller's bonkers vision, and his incredible ability to put that vision on screen, Furiosa seems like one of those spin-off graphic novels that plug the gaps between two films in a franchise, but which don't quite match up to the films themselves.

Perhaps the film could have done with a little more conversation and a little more action, but it's still a quietly affecting, sympathetic tribute to the kind of person who is a supporting character in most biopics.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things draws constant attention to its own artifice, and to the things that can only happen in films. But it seems completely sincere in its concern about ageing, illness, pain, regret, and the connections we make to art and other people. Whichever universe it may be set in, it has a lot to say about our own.

The new film improves on the old one in every respect. The story is cleverer and more gripping, the dialogue is sharper and funnier, the relationships are richer, the aerial stunts are more likely to make you queasy.

Together, Garland's virtuosity and Mendoza's first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more important, emotionally harrowing.

Running at 2 hours and 49 minutes, it is bigger than the previous films in every way ­– not better or worse, just more.

For many of us, especially in the West, the film is likely to be confusing here and there. It would have been helpful, for example, if the subtitles had let us know who's speaking Russian and who's speaking Ukrainian. But it is worth a bit of confusion for a film so powerful and immediate, and made with such a lucid artistic vision.

Perhaps no film can capture the enormity of that war, which left around 17 million dead, and generations to grieve. Director Sam Mendes wisely takes the opposite approach, personalising the experience through two young British soldiers sent on a harrowing, high-stakes, night-long mission, he creates a film that is tense, exhilarating and profoundly moving.

For some viewers, this frenzied finale will be reason enough to treasure The Substance; for others, it will be reason enough to steer well clear. But no one who sees Fargeat's film will forget it. If she had taken it to its magnificently tasteless extreme 15 or 20 minutes sooner, it would have been a cult classic.

As Eggers proceeds steadily and methodically through the events in Murnau's masterpiece, you may admire the intelligence and painstaking craft that has gone into it, but you may also have the feeling that you're watching actors playing time-honoured roles rather than real people in mortal danger. Horror fans needn't worry, though: Nosferatu has its share of gruesome shocks.

And as always in Peele films, clues and echoes are so detailed and carefully planted that it's hard to spot everything the first time through. He is still a master filmmaker, and even a mediocre Jordan Peele film is better than the strongest film of an ordinary director. Nope is that mediocre film.

Broker keeps on getting funnier and knottier as secret motives are revealed, sympathies shift, mysteries deepen and dangers multiply. It is, on one level, a farcical crime caper, but it is so elegantly plotted that it never seems contrived.

Although developing from a small, insightful, character-based beginning to a more Hollywood-friendly feel-good climax, this intelligent, atmospheric, and well-crafted family movie seldom loses its way.

Certainly the youngsters in Children of Heaven respond well to the direction of Majid Majidi and give off emotions and thoughts in such an unmannered way that many proper actors could learn loads.

Maestro is a warm yet melancholy portrait of someone who is the life and soul of every party not just because he loves company but because he fears being alone.