Russell is the magnetic epicentre of a much broader contemplation on the nature of being, creation and self-truth at a time of peace and love.

A poignant study of gender politics enshrined within an anthropologically fascinating drama.

Border is a piece of modern gothic, a far out midnight movie which delivers on the WTF-ery while maintaining a surprisingly big and generous heart.

Riccobono neither condemns nor sympathises, maintaining a commendable neutrality, as his subjects frank testimony paves the way to jail cells.

A harrowing but necessary insight into what the first Allied troops met as they stumbled upon the nightmare of the Holocaust.

Sound of Metal is an astonishing accomplishment for both its long-nascent director and its British star, Riz Ahmed, for whom his turn as heavy metal drummer Ruben represents a career-best performance.c

The script is well-paced and packed with twists and turns that offers little in the way of respites to the beautiful mayhem. The characters, too, are wonderfully realised through the performances from the entire cast, each making a big impression no matter how long they're on screen.

I Love You, Daddy is a hilarious, awkward and boundary-pushing comedy about fatherhood, anxiety and the ethics of relationships.

For fans of samurai cinema, 13 Assassins ranks right up there with Yôji Yamada's The Twilight Samurai (2002) and Takeshi Kitano's The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (2003) as one of the finer additions to the sub-genre in recent years.

This is fan service elevated into an art form, transcending winking self-aggrandisement to become something of a reflection on the past eleven years, a chugging, tooting, spectacular train of a franchise, careering indefinitely forward.

It won't be for everyone by any means, but Captain Underpants: The First Movie would be easy to overlook as another kids-only waste of money. But that's not the case. The film subverts this every step of the way and constantly turns in new, unexpected directions in order to surprise and entertain its audience from the start to the end.

The human drama isn't always as compelling as it wants to be, but at its best Godzilla is a hugely entertaining blockbuster that starts strongly and finishes with a mighty roar. The king of the monsters has returned, and it appears he's here to stay.

Jason Lei Howden's directorial debut is primed for unalloyed genre thrills, making you laugh until your sides hurt and subverting the rom-zom-com format.

What Kore-eda wants to convey to his audience is that good and bad are never absolute, and that good and bad themselves have a reality above and beyond that of man-made laws.

Grander in scope than any of Villeneuve’s work yet, Dune is proper, ambitious blockbuster filmmaking for grown-ups.

The Duke of Burgundy lingers long in the mind and cements its director's much-deserved place as one of the most exhilarating currently at work.

Tracing ambivalent pasts and ambiguous futures, Monsoon grows into a brooding portrait of immigrant displacement – one marked by a ceaseless yearning.

Over 60 years since its initial release, On Moonlight Bay remains a fun and charming snapshot of classic Hollywood.

It doesn’t quite click, is too weird, leads to a lurch from one cinematic style to the other and fails to gel as a satisfying whole. Yet the director’s imaginative intention is apparent in the first shot.

Land of Mine serves as a poignant reminder that revenge destroys more than it satisfies and that compassion aids the healing process.

Entertaining from start to finish and wonderfully played by a largely female cast, David Arquette has a small role as an escaped convict, Grant’s film beautifully upends the sexist notion that women are naturally inclined to nurture. It surprises, too, as a tribute to the fortitude of working-class women.

Hosting's film is not for everyone; it is unforgiving and it is relentless. But for those of a certain disposition, The Greasy Strangler offers a great deal of distressing pleasure.

In a way, Michael is an audience surrogate, informing our own understanding of her; his – and the film’s – refusal to pin Stokes down as either a genius or crank (as if they are binary) speaks to her own project’s attempt to capture the totality of a thing and the noble futility in such an endeavour.

Zootropolis is a real delight - an entertaining and endlessly inventive comedy and something with more insight than anyone could have anticipated.

Foregoing breadth in favour of depth, War is at its core a character study disguised as a science fiction epic.

The Leisure Seeker is dry-eyed even at its most moving and a celebration of love even as it reaches its end.

The good news for those not enamoured with Suspiria (2018) is that they’ll always have the original. The even better news for those who do go with this daring, uncompromised reimagining of Argento’s occult opus is that it now has a sleek, satisfying sibling.

Composed entirely of found footage and presented in black and white to lend visual consistency, the film raises important questions about the politics of viewership, the documentary form’s complex ties to reality and about human relationships in a digitally connected world.

The Lodger has rarely been seen as Hitchcock’s crowning glory, but it can be appreciated as a piece of film history marking the genesis of the great director he would become.

Rams is a truly remarkable, eccentric work.

Paul Dano’s directorial debut Wildlife lands not with a thud but a slow caress, to be inhaled and ruminated on, its stagnant images billowing into your lungs, giving kudos to the fact that his switch from acting (There Will Be Blood, Prisoners) to directing has been made with a precision and ease.

Artfully, his films tracks the tragic decline of a good man gone bad, who finds murder too insignificant not to do again and again, a worthy addition to William Shakespeare's ever growing filmography.

Only the Animals remains a highly satisfying and gripping thriller that, like the best of them, finds the time to properly contemplate the depths of its dominoes as they are arranged before the capricious hand of chance gleefully knocks them down, one by one.

Biller is an eccentric talent - always a plus in the world of film - and The Love Witch is a triumph of form and style.

Even if it does occasionally threaten to outstay its welcome with a 111-minute running time, the deeply engaging performances and that freeing and uninhibited Spanish flavour which Marques-Marcet brings to his English-language debut, means it’s the kind of world you really don’t mind lingering in.

It's hokey as hell in parts, and the director sometimes shows an uncertainty in tone (resulting in some performances which are pitched a little too broadly) but those imperfections lend an endearing quality to the film.

Traversing the curiosities that we all yield at an adolescent age where discovering and understanding our bodies is a paramount experience, one cannot help applauding the director in depicting the taboo subject in such a pure fashion.

While comparisons to Moonlight are not without merit, The Last Tree bucks the coming-of-age blueprint in new, specific ways.

Martin’s film is a thoroughly sobering watch and leaves us with tough questions about how the West chose to deal – or rather not deal – with Assad and the refugee crisis.

By situating the film in the context of domestic abuse, Whannel avoids cliché by evoking the way that distressed women are routinely treated as irrational and disreputable – a theme carried through to the film’s inspired conclusion.

Ash Is Purest White’s is an epic spanning decades and vast geography that ultimately gives way to the intimate and personal.

The casting is perfect and the acting uniformly superb. For all its lack of depth, the script is sharp, zippy and only occasionally hokey.

Journey’s End is a worthy adaptation, offering a sombre psychological depiction of innocence lost.

Provocative, despicably playful, and consistently punishing, stitched into the skin of the writer-director’s latest film are a multitude of issues relating to Covid-19 and the anxieties of lockdown, the fragility of our environment, the brutality and arrogance of mankind, and our inability to recognise or truly understand the power of the natural world, or indeed ourselves.

It has a powdery dryness, a sly wit which is indeed beguiling.

The film’s displays of humour give away to harsher scenes of brutality and intense moments where rural calm is suddenly disrupted by mortar explosions and transformed landscapes dotted with corpses.

Positing the question of whether the principal objective of incarceration is punishment, rehabilitation or undue persecution, Garrett Bradley’s Time is another vital addition to a growing canon of films to pointedly critique the US legal and prison systems’ unjust treatment of people of colour.

It’s meditative, beautiful, utterly fascinating, and one of the year’s finest documentary achievements.

As with all of Farhadi's films there's a frailty behind his characters, with their insecurities and moral dilemmas bubbling to the surface as the director slowly raises the temperature in this pressure cooker of domestic strife. Nervous editing and sinuous cinematography also give the impression that Farhadi is choreographing his stars rather than directing them.

There are moments in Bel Canto that stretch credibility but the tension never lets up.

Re-framing more traditional genre choices for representing dementia, the Japanese-Australian filmmaker has crafted a chilling, mysterious horror to communicate the confusion and terror caused by diminishing intellectual acuity.

Brilliant and moving stuff; another hit for Abrahamson.

Testament to both the filmmakers and a great woman now seemingly at peace with her long and difficult past, Tina is a documentary well worthy of its star, an untamed, unparalleled force of nature.

Its enigmatic lustre encourages you to take another look, like Marianne, to try and see what’s really in front of you.

Lanthimos has broadened his scope and has created a marvellously bleak, bizarre comedy.

In his signature style, without talking heads, narration or explanatory context, Wiseman takes us straight into the London gallery itself and the inhabitants inside - both human and paint-form.

The franchise reboot we never knew we needed, Resurrections is a wonderfully strange and baffling film, less of a fourth entry in an ongoing saga and more a personal reflection on the original trilogy.

Sundown is a film full of narrative and emotional surprises, upending the middle-aged bloke having a midlife crisis storyline, with Yves Cape’s cinematography capturing the classy and mundane locations with equally seductive attributes. Roth and Franco’s second rodeo is a melancholic banger.

A charming, deadpan study of national identities, an idiosyncratic love letter to his home and an unvarnished tribute to life’s universal absurdities.

Pre-dating the release of Dennis Hopper’s 1969 American counter-culture classic Easy Rider by two years, Boorman’s Point Blank is also a very trippy, psychedelic affair. Marvin fending off two assailants behind the colourful, swirling backdrop of an avant-garde jazz gig is an evocative snapshot of that period, and just one of the many fetchingly abstract moments this strange and beguiling picture has to offer.

The found footage format has been milked to death of late... but here it's used to fully immerse the viewer, ensuring that the characters speak directly to the audience and, with the removal of the third wall, throws them straight into the lion's den to create maximum discomfort.

At just over three-hours, So Long, My Son is an emotionally wrenching film that’s epic in scope but intimate in feeling.

It's Coogler's confrontational depiction of police brutality and his attempts to represent the society he aims to inspire and inform that makes Fruitvale Station such essential viewing.

Cold War’s main weakness is that despite the political stakes, it fails to make us truly care about Wiktor’s and Zula’s relationship.

A luscious, strangely enchanting watch and terrific fun for those who'll launch themselves into it.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot is a thoroughly enjoyable and sneakily touching oddity which is entirely worthy of a big screen outing.

T.S. Spivet is a dreamlike fairytale, which swims in the romanticism of childhood and the decay of the American Dream.

Kröger manages well with moments of pure cinema in between, and a particularly out-there moment of noise and mayhem which threatens to crush the film and the audience in an audiovisual avalanche. There’s an immersive strangeness that only David Lynch has snuck into mainstream cinema.

Avi Belkin’s Mike Wallace Is Here harvests a vast archive of interviews and b-roll footage to create a fascinating profile of a combative, conflicted figure, who nevertheless substantially changed the face of how news was reported.

Calibre is a thriller, but one that’s rooted in reality rather than the fantastical or absurd; edgy and tragic.

In the way it seamlessly flits between events separated by large stretches of time, Davies seems to have miraculously captured the essence of memory itself in its elliptical, dreamlike quality.

Delighting in the ancient tradition of storytelling as a means of education and understanding as well as entertainment, Nora Twomey's The Breadwinner is a richly animated jewel.

Despite treading some familiar territory, British director David Mackenzie's new film Hell or High Water proves itself a brilliantly executed, sharply written genre gem.

La Mif refuses to proselytise on the moral character of its subjects; Lora’s terrible confession to the girls at the film’s climax is played not for tabloid revelation, but as a final expression of the flaws inherent in ourselves and the systems we depend on to protect us.

It’s often very amusing, sometime surreal, and the script is chock-full of some wonderful zingers, delivered with razor-sharp timing by the magnificent Stephens.

An evocative portrait ... Fiennes utilises a good balance of biography and ballet; emphasising how much Nureyev loved to dance and why, when forced, he chose artistic freedom over love of country.

German director Christian Petzold’s latest is a tense, emotionally fraught drama, layered with smouldering internal conflict that by its incendiary close invariably catches alight.

Aster has concocted a weird mixture of dread, black humour and pathos, conjuring sympathy for the devil in a feverish hallucination.

Garrel’s The Innocent deftly mixes comic family melodrama with genre thrills in this pacy, emotive thriller with a killer cast.

Haigh's latest is an impressive study of a couple haunted by their past. and a potent reminder both of the fragility of love and the need to keep communication open at all times.

Benjamin Ree’s The Painter and the Thief is an art heist film like no other and an arresting documentary of startling, often brutal, emotional honesty.

In examining the reflexive, redemptive power of fiction, Lie with Me is a moving story of love lost to time.

Green Border is a powerful and necessary film.

Told respectfully and far from tarring an entire religion with the same brush, Young Ahmed is an exceptionally crafted and intelligent film.

The acting throughout is superb, with Swinton sitting back and watching with obvious pleasure as Fiennes gnaws up the scenery and beach furniture with genuine vim. Schoenaerts once again proves himself a charismatic and compelling actor alongside the excellent Johnson.

It is a film about a personal grief which gradually, step by step, takes on a mythic resonance. This is a new and vibrant talent to be watched.

After all the awards Varda has received, and the tomes of literature that others have written on her, Varda by Agnès, aptly titled, is a carefree, bold and resounding attempt to self-define and articulate the themes, concerns and intentions of her work.

Nothing else this year can match Another Evil for its expert chills, comic dialogue, Office-level cringe and disturbing themes.

The film isn’t without hope, but it lifts the lid of an ugly truth and asks the tough questions needed.

The performances by the lead cast are exceptional, and alongside a rich script, and Kokotajlo’s almost philosophical directorial approach, Apostasy is an incredibly moving drama offering an authentic glimpse into the Jehovah’s Witness community.

The Untamed is an examination of the strange otherworldly nature of desire, the way sex is often out of joint with our desires and expectations, even with our identities.

A great deal of love, intelligence and effort have gone into crafting a more mature rendering of the Wizarding World, where pertinent themes of segregation, racism, international politics bubble in the narrative cauldron.

The Son of Joseph is nothing short of marvelous. A modernised tale of literal Biblical proportions that will make viewers reconsider what defines paternity, family, and their place in the world. But don't worry: that's a good thing.

Herzog has a knack for extracting pithy, poetic responses from his subjects, but here he outdoes himself.

The Producers is so effusively inappropriate and so damned funny it is one of the highest examples of low comedy.

Bad Luck Banging may appear to be deeply cynical of human nature, but in fact its real targets are the flimsy discourses that we build to obscure and justify our baser urges, couched in illusions of history and morality.

In all this, there is an implicit if undeveloped criticism of the way that power and capital are so often the spoils of posturing masculine insecurity.

Husson’s film is first and foremost an appalling account of stomach-churning misogyny and the sickening horrors Kurdish women met at the hands of their vile captors.