This is a film about the ordinariness of love.

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.

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.

Just as we feel that we have grasped the truth behind the image, it vanishes into thin air: The Real Charlie Chaplin is a Sisyphean task of the directors’ own making.

Petrov’s Flu finds its meaning through sensation, memory and aesthetics, depicting social and political decay in its purest form stripped of the comforting scaffolding of linear narrative.

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

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.

Del Toro’s latest ventures away from fantasy, revealing the monsters in this fable to be all too human.

Gripping and sincerely moving from first to last, Mass is exceptional filmmaking all-round from Kranz and a stellar showcase for the talents of Plimpton, Isaacs, Dowd and Birney.

Told with tenderness and honesty, Cicada is a treatment of trauma that does not judge or preach or take sides, but, in building to its breathless crescendo, goes to show just how much courage it takes to confront the past in order to look to the future.

With wit, grace and a sincere affection for the town of his birth, the writer-director explores the people and stories that populated his childhood.

A near-wordless study of dairy cow Luma’s life and shot from a bovine-eye view, Cow resists the urge to anthropomorphise Luma while eliciting deep empathy for this non-human animal.

Memoria is gloriously weird and it has that most magical quality of making you look at things in a totally different way.

Rooted in the mundane, but told with an imaginative vision, flair and real composure, The Pink Cloud announces Iuli Gerbase as a new creative talent and filmmaker to watch out for.

A joyous, hazy and nostalgia-inflected romantic drama.

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

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.

The film as a whole is neither scary nor particularly interested in the nature of its ‘monster’, though it is undoubtedly strange and often unsettling.

No Way Home feels like a full and complete film in a way that earlier MCU entries failed to. No Way Home takes a cynical corporate elevator pitch and uses it to examine what it means to be Spider-Man in a world where Holland’s Peter isn’t the only hero.

Suffice to say, There Is No Evil is a deeply felt study of the effects of state violence on the individual. While the cost of resistance is high, the price of compliance may well be greater.

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.

The First Wave stands as an honest, hard-hitting and compassionate reminder of loving thy neighbour wherever and whoever they may be.

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.

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.

In the cyclical, ethereal narrative of this inventive, tender story of love and loss, one of the finest filmmakers of our time spins a spellbinding magical web.

Natural Light illuminates the fading glow of humanity amidst horror.

Eternals should be commended for the positive creative decisions it has taken and in allowing at least some of Zhao’s directorial vision to creep in. For all its flaws, it is far from the worst entry in the MCU, but it is, perhaps, the first of Marvel’s films to be less than the sum of its parts.

Exploring the powerlessness an exasperated Diana (Kristen Stewart) must confront when faced with Windsor tradition, expectation and hypocrisy, a single weekend in the country is the epicentre of a far broader story, the shockwaves of which ripple through space, time, mind and soul.