Sweet Country is a hoarsely angry film, a powerful denunciation of the racism and violence on which modern Australia was eventually founded.

Rarely seen but frequently referenced in film studies lecture rooms, Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is a twisted tale of the rise and fall of Kirk Douglas’ ruthless Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields and one of the greatest ‘movies about movies’ to ever come out of Hollywood.

A super sweet, affecting comedy with a magical premise and a terrific central performance from Larson herself.

As historical noir, Martelli’s film is thrilling, but as a document of the comforts of complicity and the terror of resistance, 1976 is visceral.

Where Tan describes the process of making Shirkers as an exorcism (presumably of Georges), the final product is more akin to a séance, a communion with a lost soul keen to still be heard from beyond the veil.

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.

In a just world, Hadžihalilović would be as acclaimed as somebody like Tim Burton, whose greatest films boast a spiritual connection of sorts to the French director.

This film is not just about Franklin, but also the communities that have inspired, guided and celebrated her music.

White Riot is a belligerently hopeful film: Shah vividly depicts the insidious violence of racism, but she also renders its futility in the face of community, and of music’s limitless power to unite and strengthen.

After the profanity-laced Shakespearean barrage of Deadwood, Dewitt and Audiard’s Wild West is a more prosaic place, but it is also sharply intelligent, extremely funny and full of surprises.

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.

No matter what your allegiance, or feelings of antagonism toward the man for Fergie time and defeats doled out by championship-winning sides year after year, it’s impossible not to admire his dedication to the game he loves and the town that made him who he is.

Chaplin built his reputation of finding the poignant humour in poverty, and many screwball comedies of the sound era invariably touched on the Depression, none more so than Gregory La Cava’s 1936 My Man Godfrey.

Bergman Island is at once an ambivalent love-letter to the Swedish master director Ingmar Bergman and a charming study of the complexities of relationships, the creative process, and the ways that one invariably influences the other.

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.

This movie is a slow-burning story of loss and solitude which is also resonant with humanity, dignity, and hope.

Nowhere Special is driven by the primal emotion of its child-parent dynamic and moving performances from both its leads, while the theme of social class resonates throughout.

As a study of injustice and systemic deprivation, and in its description of the conditions necessary for revolution, Ly’s film is in its very being a modern Les Misérables.

Heavenly Creatures is a rare film that can be watched and re-watched, revealing more and more layers of subtext and meaning with each viewing. This is no simple tale of murder – this is a tale of obsession, friendship, imagination, gender politics, family and much, much more, and is almost certainly Jackson’s finest film to date.

Oyate isn’t an extraordinary documentary, but in telling the story of some of the United States’ most marginalised and persecuted people, it is certainly an important one.

The Great Museum is a beautiful love letter to obsession and eccentricity, the love is given and received in equal measure. This, at its nature is what art should do, and what cinema strives for and rarely achieves, with this poetic discourse about the difficult question of what to do with the art of robber barons in relation towards a finality that befits such a collection.

With a fantastic stunt team, a gamely macho star and some wonderful editing, Rollerball is so convincing, urban legend had it there were fatalities during the shoot.

Kaufman’s latest work, a creeping, deeply unsettling, cerebral horror of sorts, is a further addition to his challenging, thought-provoking brand of filmmaking which gets under your skin, and stays there.

With One Fine Morning, celebrated French director Mia Hansen-Løve presents complementary accounts of infatuation, love, and loss in a nuanced, moving study of the ways that love can sustain and consume us.

Inhabiting the space between fact and fiction, where repressed memories often seek refuge, The Pearl Button weaves a fascinating, yet traumatic route through Chile's recent history.

This is vital filmmaking; Blindspotting is undoubtedly part of a new moment in American cinema and is a fierce, complex satire in it own right.

Like the best film noir, with which this in undoubtedly in dialogue, Trenque Lauquen is a film about affect and textural cohesion moreso than logic and catharsis.