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

Make Up taps into a rich Gothic tradition where repressed emotions find their vent in uncanny space and sexual awakening is realised through the imagination.

It’s a fiery mix of ambition, mother-daughter love, female empowerment and childhood dreams – the gravities of each masterfully held together in the film, like planets in the canvas of space, revolving harmoniously around the sun.

Calm with Horses’ driving concern – the corrosive nature of violence on the self – is rendered in brutal, empathic precision, while the recovery of its protagonist’s humanity as it teeters on the cliff edge is simply heartbreaking.

Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency is a sombre, layered study of the human cost of capital punishment. One of this era’s most powerful actors, Alfre Woodard, leads with one of her best, most understated performances yet.

Benjamin is a charming metropolitan rom-com which is ultimately too lightweight to escape the gravity of its influences.

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.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’ vérité style belies a quasi-staged reality that challenges the distinction between fiction and documentary, studying the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world.

A White, White Day is Ingimundur’s film through and through, centred on Sigurdsson’s intensely gruff, brooding performance. But Hlynsdóttir’s Salka gives him a run for his money.

Herzog doesn’t quite hit the mark here: Family Romance’s denouement is certainly moving but its depiction of Ishii’s emotional conflict is undercooked and perhaps even a little trite. Nevertheless, on a formal level, it’s a fascinating study of the artifice of the genre, a deconstruction of the comforting contract between artist and viewer that guides us towards a particular kind of emotional or intellectual engagement.

On the Record is at once a heartbreaking account of the survival of a group of courageous women, an analysis of the structural and cultural intersections between racism and misogyny, and an indictment of an industry happy to ignore and condone sexual violence.

Bad 25 is primarily a film about an album and not about a life; a tribute to the master craftsman and musical talent that was Jackson and not a penetrative investigation of the man who made the music.

Buried underneath the convolutions, the mistaking of melodramatic sensationalism over psychological reality, there really is something of a real emotional centre that just about makes enduring the rest worth it.

As in thrall to its fantasy as its characters, On a Magical Night confuses what is admittedly a charming conceit for depth. Nevertheless, that charm is enough to sustain the picture across its 90-minute runtime, even if its effects quickly recede into memory.

The visual aspects of the film cannot override the sometimes cumbersome dialogue that orientates political scenes of this subject matter.

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

Not great, not hilarious, but not terrible or awful either.

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.

A jolting cinematic experience, Wake in Fright bites like a dingo and kicks like a mule.

A stylish and fitfully engaging crime thriller with a great concept, let down by incoherent plotting and impenetrable characterisation.

Quietly raging, The Assistant is a bleakly precise study of complicity in workplace abuse.

Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy is an affectionate and reverential look at a remarkable figure and a testament to her achievements within the Mexican culinary landscape.

There’s so much to enjoy in Ema that it comes as a surprise that there’s so little there.

Ultimately, though it hints at moments of wit, Cuck never feels serious enough to be a convincing character study and not garish enough to head into genre territory. Ultimately, this sordid tale feels both real and inconsequential.

While Binoche is reliably magnetic and the fitfully pretty visuals match a ripped-from-the-headlines script, Who You Think I Am’s pot never quite comes to the boil.

For fans of Mack’s juxtapositions of natural and synthetic imagery and of her fascination with repetition and patterns, The Grand Bizarre is surely the artist’s most accomplished work.

Aside from the film’s more immediate pleasures, what is perhaps most intriguing about Why Don’t You Just Die! is Sokolov’s almost visible attempt to find his own voice: among this melange of film-school influences, it’s undoubtedly there, though perhaps it hasn’t quite formed yet.

The tributes paid to Yauch throughout by both Horovitz and Diamond are genuinely touching, and it’s here that Beastie Boys Story breaks through its inherent – often distracting – staginess. While there is still a definitive, impartial Beastie Boys film in the offing, devout fans should be more than satisfied by this nostalgic oddity.