For all the moral degradation of its characters, Graduation is uncompromising in its vision of the cost of parental responsibility.

The Favourite has ribaldry and intelligence to burn, a deliciously entertaining period piece that feels liberated by its period, rather than restrained and invigorates like a glass of wine thrown violently in your face.

The whole set-up risks being all too winsome, but Jarmusch has always been a quiet punk: his most radical assertion is believing, despite everything, in the essential goodness of people.

Eternal Beauty, whilst it is not entirely devoid of cliché, provides a much-needed, deeply human alternative to the noisy and tragic narratives about hallucinatory derangement, terror, and victimisation that we may have come to expect from films about madness.

Blade Runner 2049 is not a perfect film. The pace occasionally puts the plod in the procedural and some story elements are introduced only to drift away to the land of possible sequels. But Villeneuve has created a genuinely thoughtful piece of sci-fi which escapes the gravitational pull of its inspiration to become something - to paraphrase Dr. Eldon Tyrrell - more Blade Runner than Blade Runner.

Featuring a breakthrough lead turn from Oscar Isaac as a struggling folk singer, the Coens have returned to the high watermark of such classic efforts as Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink.

An ambitious, clever, and inventive psychogenic fugue, Censor is rough around the edges and shot on a shoestring, sure, however Bailey-Bond has compelling and vital comments to make on art, media consumption, politics, and society.

Tsai's Stray Dogs is a masterpiece of social-realism, a distinctive and beguiling study of society's displaced and marginalised that plays to the beat of its own drum and refuses to conform to cinema's own commodification.

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.

Drunk on the visual majesty of Rome, just as Fellini once was, this is arthouse cinema at its most effortlessly entrancing, with life and art blending into one magnificent whole.

Betty Blue, in either of its forms – whether it be the 121-minute theatrical version or the 185-minute director’s cut – takes a bad situation and makes it true-blue and beautiful.

The sumptuous colours, outstanding choreography and toe-tapping tunes are nothing but first-rate.

Elliot explores the film’s central themes of loneliness, mental illness, love and friendship, all with a deft balance of humour, sadness and subtlety.

Girlhood's non-patronising and credible representation of class, race and gender is a rare and perceptive illustration of the intricacies of social inequality.

Pain and Glory is a study of acceptance, revelation and reconciliation; it is about cinema’s relationship with the past and its power to reshape and cohere memory as a means of coming to terms with it.

Snowpiercer evolves steadily, growing richer with every step and slowly feeding us morsels of information - enriching this ludicrous premise with enough magic and wonder to suspend our disbelief entirely.

The delight is in the audacity and surprise of the film.

The total effect of these sequences is the feeling of hanging out with Dylan and his entourage. This is perhaps Don’t Look Back‘s greatest trick – convincing its audience that the Dylan we see here is anything other than a column of air: elusive, shifting and perpetually enigmatic.

The vision of the black American experience might be grim, but it is never miserablist or despairing. The songs, the traditions, the love and the community are still there, even if the world seems to be undeniably on fire.

It's how the film handles grief and alienation which makes Marina's story so compelling.

The two kids are effortlessly real and emotionally complex, but profoundly simple, and Miyazaki’s unique masterpiece embraces that childlike existence.

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

Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is not only his best recent film, but also one of the most vital of the year.

About Dry Grasses is part-Chekovian comedy of yearning and male ego, and part-tragedy of a country which stymies the growth of its own citizens.

Phoenix has created a masterful performance for a film which itself feels like a masterpiece: a cracked masterpiece.

It’s an offbeat masterpiece that reveals the dark heart of Britain through the perennial tension between social progress and the burden of the past.

Nina Forever is a brilliant, intelligent and emotionally rewarding debut feature.

Veteran Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, Parallel Mothers, is as much about his enduring fascination with motherhood as it is the capacity to heal through our connections to the past.