This is a compelling and rich documentary that captivates and inspires in a similar fashion to some of his best work behind the camera.

Touch of Evil proceeds with one of the most celebrated long-takes in screen history. The sequence is a marvel of technical virtuosity and staged action. From the very start, Orson Welles’s grubby and sweaty noir classic has us in its grip with a gloriously devised piece of showmanship emblematic of the director’s audaciously talented spirit.

Drive My Car is not most films, its story told in minute, passing details that cannot help but grip the attention to the point that the emotional tension and catharsis feel so effortless that hours seem to pass in an instant. That very little happens in the way of narrative action speaks to how brilliantly Hamaguchi harnesses the emotions of his characters into compelling drama.

Bold in ambition and delicate in execution, it will break your heart and then piece it back together.

Perhaps given the ostensibly bookish subject matter, Waking Life has seldom been acknowledged as a legitimate innovator of the medium.

Capturing the agony and ecstasy of young love, Call Me by Your Name is a major addition to the queer cinema canon - a deeply felt movie that's bittersweet, tender and true.

Four decades after its release, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre still justifies its place in the pantheon of all-time horror greats.

Barry Lyndon is a rich cinematic experience which fully deserves to once more be seen on the big screen and enjoy its status as one of Stanley Kubrick’s greatest achievements.

At the heart of Marriage Story are two career-best performances from Driver and Johansson. There is sensitivity, wit and intelligence in abundance, and in one barnstorming scene the kind of raw emotional nudity that’s rarely captured on screen: it’s the painful core of the movie which the laughter might ease but can’t erase.

For prickly cynicism and choppy one-liners, Nothing Sacred is simply unbeatable.

Lucy feels like the work of a filmmaker who has recovered his mojo.

Director James Wan has delivered what should rightfully be considered his masterpiece. There is a breadth and scale of ambition at work, which really tops anything he's tried in the genre before. Most importantly: it's a resounding success.

All Light, Everywhere is, most importantly, a history of our technological attempts to offer objective views of the world. But instead of charting our striving to capture of reality, what is revealed is its fabrication.

No film of Lee’s would be cut without portraits, cross cutting, dual images or his iconic double dolly shot. All featuring heavily, these practises of his style come to elevate the genre filmmaking to new heights.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is bold, beautiful and brutal. It’s Tarantino’s best film since Kill Bill, perhaps even since Pulp Fiction.

One of the major successes of A Place in the Sun is the way it delicately obfuscates the distinction between romantic longing and personal ambition.

Although 12 Angry Men dismays at human weakness, it is fundamentally an optimistic film, celebrating reason and basic human decency in equal measure. In an era when both seem in short supply, Lumet’s film is a reminder that there is never a bad time to stand up for what is right.

Carell, in a rare but not unique departure into drama, proves himself as accomplished at tragedy as he is at comedy.

Tati’s second film, Les Vacances de M. Hulot sees the birth of the everlasting character of Monsieur Hulot, he of the trademark pipe and umbrella.

This is Barbie on absinthe.

Nomadland, with its beautiful simplicity, and wonderful performances, manages to be an elegant, profoundly moving film which shows the real value of living, rather than just surviving.

With The Irishman, Scorsese offers us his first truly autumnal film – a picture about age’s slow, inevitable decline. There are the signature dolly shots, the period pop music, the bursts of brutality, but there is also a frail melancholy we have rarely glimpsed in even his statelier films.

An exercise in assigning valuable historical context to scenes of brutality, Concerning Violence is a lesson in understanding a continuing colonial condition, the roots and complexities of which are often concealed and simplified by news coverage of poverty and conflict.

Rian Johnson’s film is the real deal, a bold, risky venture unafraid to tell its own story, freed from the weight of nostalgia and formula.

Apollo 11 exceeds all expectations of a seemingly rudimentary documentary on a well-trodden subject. Sitting at a neat 93 minutes, its balance of wonder towards our scientific achievements, whilst maintaining a present tense format, leaves one feeling you have witnessed it all in a wondrous experience.

At 82 minutes, this is a brisk but hugely powerful work that is cinema of the oppressed par excellence.

Sachs' extraordinarily humane knack for emotional restraint echoes throughout Little Men. And it is all the more profound for it.

Throughout, Ozu strikes a touchingly profound note whilst imbuing proceedings with his usual playfulness.

The Driver is a film of types and trends; a cinematic expression of our basest narrative impulses. Directed with remarkable economy, the seasoned Hill keeps everything as tight as possible.

Asbæk is towering as Claus, never less than believable as the leader of his platoon, and standout as he comes to terms with the cracks in his own story.

In his astonishingly assured debut feature, French playwright-turned-director Florian Zeller handles the mental decline of an elderly man with sensitivity and insight.

Fire Will Come is of an enigmatic and poetic cinema, borne of fierce, barely-contained vision.

Even at a hefty 140 minutes, Bridge of Spies maintains a solid pace. Spielberg's mise-en-scène and the streamlined editing of long-time collaborator Michael Kahn are tremendous.

Fox and Bogarde bounce sharp dialogue back and forth and are captivating as the psychosexual tension increases between them. Through subtle visual clues Losey artfully blurs sexual boundaries to create one of cinema’s most memorable relationships.

Wang's film is as bewildering and heartbreaking as it is insightful, in its depiction of the daily existence of the institution's residents.

An unmitigated masterpiece from start to finish, Carné’s epic love story through Parisian theatreland feels as fresh and effervescent today as it must have done on its initial release, brimming with perfectly-sculpted heroes, villains and wildly imaginative set-pieces.

Panahi’s courageousness as an agitator is matched only by his inventiveness as a filmmaker.

A joyous, hazy and nostalgia-inflected romantic drama.

Telling the story of women bound by oppression, Lingui, The Sacred Bonds is an astonishing film of female resistance and survival.

Meet Me in St. Louis, made when Garland was still on a career high from the phenomenal success of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, despite being a product of its time still manages to feel as fresh as when it first aired over sixty years ago.

A captivating film of deep emotional power; like weeds slowly cracking the pavement above, its movements in isolation are barely felt but its effects are profound.

[An] astonishing feature debut.

With Vox Lux, Corbet has delivered a towering film, a unique uncompromising vision that reveals the darkness on the edge of town that lurks in the depths of the spotlight. It’s funny, thrilling, deadly serious and achieves genuine depth.

At once a searing, affirming and defiant portrayal of race, poverty and frustrated aspiration in America.

Bombach’s camera captures Murad’s extreme courage, her dignity, humility and sorrow – she is wise beyond her years and the weight of her loss hangs heavily on her.

A searing indictment of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism. Inherit the Wind’s relevance continues beyond its immediate parallels with McCarthyism.

A work of astonishing aesthetic beauty, made up of static compositions and use of chiaroscuro that recalls the Dutch masters.

Rape scene aside, Nowhere is stunningly beautiful to watch. There’s not one frame that hasn’t been intricately stylised. Araki brings his trilogy to a head in a bundle of celluloid confusion that encapsulates nihilistic teenage mentality and delivers an expressionistic banquet for your eyes to devour (and your brain to decipher). It’s a wild, enjoyable teenage riot.

Although a couple of narrative twists late on threaten to drum us into melodrama, Chazelle never misses a beat and the film builds to a cathartic crescendo.

Kubrick’s film is the most accurate and timeless portrayal of a world facing mutually assured nuclear destruction, and paradoxically accomplishes this feat not through a realistic study but through the blackest surrealism.

The Punk Singer is a rewarding and positive experience. Anderson delivers a fascinating account of the grunge era and an influential story of a role model who has the guts and spunk to hopefully inspire a whole new generation of Riot Grrls and Boys.

Visually striking and audibly arresting from its opening number until the curtain comes down, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan is an affectionate paean to its irascible, impudent frontman.

The Ivory Game depicts humankind both at its deplorable worst and at its best. Its burning images will sear through conscience and consciousness but there is faint hope in the lasting hoof-print they leave.

The deft and highly emotive handling of his condition and the wider ramifications of his story make The Dark Horse a lot more than merely the against-the-odds chess story that it may initially appear to be.

Nothing is too much, and whilst there is the danger that some will find the unremitting havoc tiresome, Miller's endless innovation keeps things fresh despite the surrounding wasteland.

Rarely has China's explosive economic growth been captured with such grace and with such a heavy heart.

We can all look forward to Hollywood completely dropping the ball with its inevitable remake, but until then, Train to Busan is the year's best genre offering by a zombie mile.

Is The Painted Bird exaggerated? Does it go too far? Does it break the limits of taste? “Yes” on all counts. Walking out is an understandable and valid reaction but watching, getting angry, suffering and approaching understanding is also important too.

Made up of a series of related but not necessarily connected vignettes, each filmed with a static camera, they resemble New Yorker cartoons scripted by Samuel Beckett.

A fluid, dreamlike tone poem of mothers and fathers, death and continuance.

This is a brilliantly contained and sublimely ridiculous send-up of competitive male egos from a refreshing female perspective.

It should confirm Nichols' reputation as a mature filmmaker of great tact and intelligence.

The haunting supernatural forces at work in Never Gonna Snow Again are elusive, inexplicable and yet perfectly in sync with reality.

Among all the violence, body horror and Giger-esque sexuality, Titane’s most surprising quality is its tenderness.

While Duarte and Stockler’s deeply-felt turns anchor the film from drifting into simplistic sentimentality, Hélène Louvart’s sumptuous cinematography elevates the script’s high-flung emotion with spaces that are often dreamlike; light is tangible like a haze, colours deep and tactile, and characters are glimpsed and doubled through screens, glass and mirrors, and Benedikt Schiefer’s classical score tenderly fills out and gives detail to the broader emotional brushstrokes.

The rage that fuels Singleton's film is harnessed to great effect, he shows the reality, and while it builds to a melodramatic conclusion, it depicts life at its most raw.

It’s an assuredly thought-provoking film that’s earnestness doesn’t drag it into the weeds, concluding with a wholly deserved, humanely warm resolution.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’ vérité style belies a quasi-staged reality that challenges the distinction between fiction and documentary, studying the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world.

From Pteranodon's dive-fishing to Raptors pack-hunting, Jurassic World is in its element when it's using its assets, and though they can't recreate that awe of twenty-two years ago, this is finally a sequel worthy of the title.

With its epic scale and global reach, Human Flow is a powerful testament to a shameful crime against humanity.

As a purely aesthetic cinematic experience, Beginning will surely number among the best of the year.

This film throws toxic male aggression right back at them.

The film doesn't simply work, it trumps expectation and lingers long in the mind.

An assured and captivating debut feature, von Horn weaves a moral tale of guilt, redemption and revenge with a disquieting restraint that catapults his film towards the territory of Malick or Haneke.

The film is packed with laugh-out-loud moments, full of deadpan observations – a quintessential Anderson touch – and exciting sequences.

Sissako's film is at turns funny, poetic and deeply moving.

Great Freedom’s non-linear narrative is a worthy device for character development, allowing us to piece together a friendship that begins in suspicion and homophobia but develops over decades into something approaching love. But more than that, it is an expression of the shadows that the past casts over the present, the way that time and place weave themselves together, and their inevitable inescapability as well as how to resist them.

Uncovering the man behind the mask, Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story is a deeply compassionate documentary. Created thanks to the tireless efforts of its filmmakers in sourcing crowdfunding to produce the feature, a communal spirit lingers over the film.

Dragged Across Concrete is a unique take on ultraviolence in an age whether the production of films is becoming increasingly polarising. Imbued with a particular stand out performance by Gibson breathes life into Zahler’s mature approach to genre filmmaking.

Striking visual metaphors may be as blunt as stakes in the hard ground, as brutal as rusty, bloodied blades or as free-flowing and poetic as waterways and the wind through tall blades of grass, but Campion’s direction is measured, patient and captivating.

Nair gets the very finest from her cast and although like Phiona we can see a number of moves ahead, the director's graceful, heartfelt retelling of this miraculous story makes Queen of Katwe a wondrously uplifting film.

You don't have to like a piece of art to appreciate the artists vision. Terrence Malick has created a beautiful and ambitious meditation on memory, childhood and the nature of being.

A profound meditation on time and mortality, this is probably the most celebrated of the filmmaker’s work and a hypnotically executed piece of cinema.

Its honest and forthright depiction of mental illness, combined with Nicholson’s tour-de-force bull in a china shop performance, mean that it has lost none of its power to provoke and entertain in the four decades since its release.

It's been some time since a drama has tackled the moral complexities of revenge quite so brutally - and so well - with each character offering a different perspective on China's crippling corruption and ethical decay that's depressingly common, yet rarely reported.

For Those in Peril isn't afraid to take risks and is full of ingenuity, but at its core is an emotive piece about overcoming a death in the family - something we can all surely associate with.

This is a sequel that advances on its predecessor in a way that's incredibly satisfying - and not only for the body count and beautifully constructed action scenes it delivers.

The Age of Shadows is a bloody and breathtaking piece of filmmaking which confirms that Kim can do pretty much anything.

Guardians of the Galaxy is undoubtedly a flashy space opera, but if you are on board with that, it's a resounding success that takes a seat at Marvel's top table and suggests there could still be life after The Avengers.

Poignantly reflecting the intimate connections humans can create in a short space of time, Chained for Life is a rich and rewarding experience.

Gerwig has crafted a warm, funny and cinematically rich film – if one whose narrative and political ambitions are far less radical than it would like us to suppose.