American filmmaker Ryan White, director of the acclaimed Netflix mini-series The Keepers, spins a web of riveting, murderous intrigue in his latest documentary Assassins.

As far as dramas of this kind are concerned The Panic in Needle Park is, in my view, without doubt one of the most thought-provoking ever committed to film.

A bold and colourful, but by no means superficial portrait of femininity, Daughter of Mine successfully embodies a set of ideas – and anxieties – about motherhood that eloquently reflect a contemporary need to reevaluate the traditional family unit.

Interstellar may not be perfect, but tent-pole filmmaking with such ambition and grandeur is always worth celebrating.

Ozon is firing on all cylinders here, giving viewers a neat slice of cinematic confection that showcases what he does best: present morally complicated but very human stories that have enough panache to keep all eyes at attention for as long as he desires.

The film is heartfelt and sincere in its concern to understand conflict and the plight of good men when they're forced to make impossible choices.

Tinge Krishnan’s Been So Long is a musical delight of heart-warming songs, sardonic British humour, and fantastic performances.

Though its 60s-inspired, Gilliam-esque animation style is certainly awkward enough to draw the notice of the arthouse and indie crowds, Cryptozoo’s storytelling and themes fail to come up to the complexity of even a middling Pixar effort.

Though the grins, laughter and cheering of the film’s climax is a little too heavy on the sweetness, it’s a harder heart than mine that would fail to be just a little moved by Bunton’s speech about our dependence on one another.

It is, after all, the Baymax show - and he is cute, cuddly, comedy gold. Fortunately, although Big Hero 6 has various flaws, he's generally on hand to patch them.

Dolan is a director who thinks hard about the possibilities of cinema and explores them with verve and ingenuity, but it is in his latest film that everything has come together.

Quemada-Díez filmed The Golden Dream chronologically using natural light and real locations, utilising Super 16 film to give his first feature a documentary shimmer. He also worked as a camera operator on Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams (2003), with whom he shares his penchant for opulent landscapes and narratives, and a sense of beauty amidst unforgiving reality.

Structured in parts like a thriller, Sweat is truly most successful as a character study, while its representation of social media gives rise to a nuanced understanding of contemporary anxieties over isolation and intimacy.

By using the tropes of the coming-of-ager - a rebellious teen and the strained relationship with her mother - as the central touchstone, Bouzid subtly, yet efficiently paints the nascent days of Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution as a force to be reckoned with.

It’s all tasteful and non-sensationalist in approach. However, some will mistake an important topic for great filmmaking. Schrader’s film relies more on the former than displaying the latter.

Beast is rough around the edges but as a feature debut marks out its director as one of the most intriguing new talents in British filmmaking.

An understated but spectacularly mounted drama.

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.

Impressively, Waititi manages to retain his unique brand of humour while fulfilling his obligations to the franchise with Thor: Ragnarok.

Corbine Jr.’s debut is a lean, disconcerting and impressively shot character study. Hovering on a glimmering knife edge, there are flashes of brilliance here.

Queen & Slim is consciously political – powerfully so – but it is simple human survival that drives the two protagonists.

The more conventional thriller element demands that the transformation from enmity to something like love is too swiftly accomplished to be properly convincing.

Fundamentally, On the Rocks understands that the rich complexity of long-term relationships – both paternal and spousal – can never truly be captured, only gestured towards. The result, on screen, is deeply warm, funny and comforting, and among Coppola’s finest work.

It's a curt, nasty and deftly acted chamber piece high on laughs and savagery about frustrated idealism and how little it takes to make society fall to pieces.

Ozon's Frantz is, sadly, an underwhelming tale of a European union that didn't quite make it, its chocolate box sheen belying the emptiness at its heart.

A documentary of tremendous urgency and compassion, The Fight is essential viewing for anybody who wants to understand the present political moment.

Mystify: Michael Hutchence is an impeccably assembled, comprehensive tribute to a rock legend and is entirely worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the aforementioned Winehouse doc.

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.

The screenplay balances the big narrative beats that this kind of broad crowd pleaser demands, along with posing more difficult social questions to which there are no easy answers.

By focusing on the family, James makes Abacus about resilience and humility rather than the mechanics of litigation and in doing so underscores - perhaps more strongly than in other louder films on similar subjects - the injustice of the situation.

An otherwise intelligent piece that favours deftness of touch over bombastic thrills, A Most Wanted Man is an efficient espionage drama that, whilst in no way revelatory, is attuned to its source material's non-heroic and morally ambiguous approach to a well-worn genre.

Spaceship Earth deftly captures the sincere wonder and optimism of those who believed in the project. There’s simply no denying the sheer ambition of the damn thing, let alone that they more or less pulled it off.

In Abigail’s longing to see beyond the high valley walls with the kind of scope of an atlas gifted to her by Tallie, The World to Come envisages a future reality not yet visible over the horizon, but shown as the slightest glimmer of light.

Conceived, written, shot and released all in the early months of the Covid crisis and taking place entirely on a Zoom call, Host is about as contemporary – and chilling – as it gets.

In Farrell and Kidman, he has found two performers who are utterly willing to go the whole hog and their performances are brilliant deadpans.

Though it can't bear too much comparison with Sicario, Wind River is far better than its title suggests and a promising directorial debut.

Precision, energy, and innovation move the components of John Wick, but the synergy that comes from their singular motion transcends mechanistic clockwork into vital, aesthetic flow.

Deladonchamps and Lacoste make for engaging leads and there is warmth and humour here too.

While there is hardship and anguish, Davies' deliberate and treatment of the source material ultimately lessens the dramatic impact even while it retains its splendour.

Full to the brim with sharp wit, emotional sincerity and overflowing with love, Supernova sees the star power of Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci align.

With his first big screen endeavour, Patrick, Peaky Blinders director Tim Mielants has crafted as unusual an exploration of grief and loss as you are ever likely to see.

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.

Despite a delicate handling of Kyle's internal struggles on home soil, deeper complexity appears to lie just out of frame throughout.

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

Kline perfectly captures the out-of-jointness of our age, defined by a generation caught by social and economic decline in a state of permanent instability.

There is something of Scorsese to this rise and fall of a criminal family and Trapero crams The Clan with life.

The funniest Spider-Man film yet, Homecoming is a true teen flick, its visuals full of colour and exuberant movement.

It's a film that prompts an overwhelming emotional response as it weaves its dark magic.

Few American directors capture the contemporary urban nightscape as well as Fincher: a supreme genre filmmaker, which makes this perfectly fine film so disappointing.

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.

Most importantly, Appropriate Behaviour is funny, and not just sporadically entertaining, the film is a riotous series of mishaps from start to finish.

For all the glib élan on display, there is very little being said, above and beyond the slickness of a well-tuned melodrama. The plot always risks revealing its essential silliness and there isn't much wit or humour to alleviate the mood.

This biopic is a well-mounted and handsomely shot study of men obsessed by their work, but never fully hits top gear.

Girl is an extraordinarily moving film.

There is much to enjoy here - especially at the beginning - and Östlund's ambition and vision are to be applauded. However, The Square would have been greatly improved had the director taken his scalpel and his demanding critical eye and applied it to the film itself.

The Club is an enthralling parable that's calibrated to shock and amuse in equal measure.

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

Louis Black and Karen Bernstein pay warm tribute to the filmmaker in what is a fitting ode to independent spirit more than a penetrating portrait.

Andrésen became an overnight worldwide sensation and, through the lens of documentarians Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri, an object lesson in the exploitation of children by the entertainment industry.

Ghost Protocol is action fluff, and on that level alone it works well enough.

First-time writer-director Blerta Basholli’s feature is an expertly crafted, compassionate testament to the perseverance and defiance of its courageous female collective.

Though not without merit, Cold In July finds Mickle happily stalled in front of the drive-in cinema screens of his youth. Let's just hope he can find the exit.

Through this absorbing, sometimes disturbing documentary, Spender reveals much about Italy's underworld, as well as the people's passion for spectacle, their machismo, pride and their rivalry.

Zlotowski's Grand Central is a fascinating film on an urgent and seldom-explored situation.

Despite its bland paperback title, French writer-director Stéphane Demoustier proves hasty assumptions wrong with his gripping, thoughtful third feature, courtroom drama The Girl with a Bracelet.

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

As you'd expect from an actor-director of Amalric's pedigree, the performances are brilliant throughout and Mathieu himself has a wonderful eye for the telling tick and/or the revealing gesture.

Chief in CODA’s achievements are the dynamics of the very close unit at its core. Coming away from the film, there is the sense that this could very well be a real family.

The Wakhan Front's script is finely-balanced, allowing the possibly supernatural to slowly impinge without resorting to genre clichés.

It’s an important moment for representation on-screen and surprisingly political in nature.

Given its place and time, Ammonite’s coldness is perhaps apt, but its stiff upper lip may well not do enough to make yours quiver, either.

The film can't be faulted for its attempt to argue for some kind of humane kinship and reconciliation, even if this attempt ends up dissolving the enmity in a sentimentality that, given what has come before, strains credibility.

Straight Outta Compton proves as infectiously entertaining as it is educational thanks to F. Gary Gray's richly textured direction and a thumping soundtrack that confirms rap as the protest music of its time.

With starkly enigmatic, but beautifully wrought and filigree imagery, with a dark cutting humour which is bleak rather than ironic, Garrone is not interested in touching our hearts or giving us a comfortable moral.

Captain Fantastic is a slickly made comedy with a witty, politically articulate script and some wonderful cinematography by former Jacques Audiard regular Stéphane Fontaine.

The film uses the Troubles and Brexit to frame its understanding of the past and the present. Brady suggests a liminal psychological space – much like the liminal political space that Brexit created – through which Lauren and Kelly’s traumas move and, perhaps, can be understood.

Journeyman is not a pleasurable watch, but as a quietly devastating and heartfelt approach to trauma and those affected by it, it’s a winner.

The grimy, crime-ridden cesspool of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s is a well-worn cinematic setting, but in her debut 1982 feature Smithereens, indie director Susan Seidelman used guerilla filmmaking techniques and a faux-documentary style to unearth the vitality and the verve of urban life at the bottom.

Featuring two outstanding lead performances from bright young talents Lika Babluani and Mariam Bokeria, Ekvtimishvili and Groß immerse their audience in the detritus of a country in tatters, whilst at the same time delicately nurturing two intertwining female maturation tales - with all that entails.

Just over fifty years after A Man for All Seasons won six Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor for Paul Scofield, Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of Robert Bolt’s stage play has found unique points of modern relevance.

Thompson's strikingly assured and unflinching debut pumps new life into a well-trodden genre.

Happy End may be something of a greatest hits mixtape, but it's also an arresting offering.

Kahn floats the idea that it’s not simply God who has enraptured Thomas’ soul, but his desire to exist within a society that accepts him. Sadly the mechanical aspects of the film’s plotting mean these ideas never manage to bubble to the surface

A superb character study of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

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

While it is serious, Hogg also manages to insert some oddball humour and a little hopeful levity into the proceedings. The fractures provide the absolutely riveting subject matter, but Exhibition shows the potential for healing and confirms its director's place at the forefront of intriguing British filmmakers.

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.

If the overall plot is a little two-dimensional, a little ‘tell me something I don’t know’ in its mining of upper-middle-class callousness, it’s hard to fault the magnetic craft of this exquisitely unpleasant picture, like a broiling jacuzzi of hallucinatory sex and violence that you might briefly dip a toe into, if you dare.

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.

When I Saw You too closely resembles a Children Film Foundation treatise on a subject that deserves (and needs and demands) better treatment; something that will focus people's gaze on the horror and displacement of exile and all that entails.

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

The measured narrative and anti-climactic finale do mean that Mystery Road doesn’t pander to all tastes, and it never conforms to thriller conventions, but Sen has undoubtedly succeeded in fashioning a thoroughly engrossing journey into a modern Australian wilderness that’s well worth seeking out.

It is Hall for which this film will be sought out and remembered, and she elicits such a great deal of empathy as to make the inevitable climax all the more gut-wrenching.

Essentially a caper movie, Dope defies the wearisome social realism that is often used to depict lives at the bottom of the social ladder. The script is verbally smart and the various contrivances and tangles of the plot are amusingly played out.

An uneasy and messy union of genre and arthouse, Possessor disturbs, thrills and eludes us in equal measure.

There is no doubt that Alice is an empowering watch. It skillfully combines narrative realism with compelling character development and whip-smart dialogue to produce an engrossing look into a subject matter that is all too frequently over-sexed and sensationalised.