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.

The ultimate message may be a little fuzzy, but Mundruczó has crafted a incredibly cinematic canine parable that remains gripping and inventive from its nose to its tail.

The film isn't just bad - it's awful - ineptly directed (Olivier Dahan), terribly written (Arash Amel) and bafflingly acted by an assortment of miscast faces.

This is the kind of oddball midnight movie that could easily gain a cult following and there are delights to be had in the midst.

Sissako's film is at turns funny, poetic and deeply moving.

A fluid, dreamlike tone poem of mothers and fathers, death and continuance.

There's no doubting Hazanavicius' sincerity in trying to bring the Chechen conflict, the war crimes committed against the civilian community and the indifference of the international community to light, but it's this righteousness that gets in the way of The Search working as a film first and foremost.

The characters of Jimmy's Hall aren't really characters as much as archetypes: the saintly mother, the sweetheart, the hero, the villain. This is the kind of film where people don't argue - they debate - speaking in lines from manifestos and creating an incongruity.

With The Homesman, Jones has produced an original and cantankerously offbeat western which becomes increasingly beguiling as the road stretches on.

Both actresses are excellent, with Binoche given more to do and she flips between attempting to get into the skin of her character and back to her normal self. Stewart, on the other hand, has an easy naturalism as she moves from devotion to rebellion without ever being able to fully express herself.

The trajectory of success and excess followed by last act redemption is familiar to the point of parody, and the ploys with time come over as gimmicky attempt to inject an element of surprise into the otherwise predictable narrative.

As we pass from one story to another the relentless savagery does get a bit grinding. In addition, at two hours in length, Szifron's film is perhaps one skit too long. Regardless, Wild Tales is an inventive, occasionally hysterical ride.

Two Days, One Night is well made, and Cotillard and the rest of the cast give assured performances, but its optimism is desperate. By no means the Dardennes' best work, one wonders if they shouldn't perhaps stray outside of their comfort zone.

Not exciting enough to be taken as straightforward thriller and not engaging enough for a dramatic character piece, Egoyan's The Captive is held back by its own lame script and a distinct lack of necessity.

A brutal, crackling and savage Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars knows exactly where it's going, carefully breaking every rule in the book. After carefully constructing his crystal kingdom, Cronenberg launches his stones with dark, mischievous joy.

In arguably a career-topping performance, Timothy Spall plays the cantankerous painter as a complex, grunting, snarling and utterly single-minded creature.

Zvyagintsev's pessimism is leavened both by his comedy and his sense of beauty. Mikhail Krichman's cinematography captures the sublime grandeur of the landscape against which the nasty, brutish and short lives are played out.

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.

The Wonders is a complex and nuanced illustration of a family trying to live by their own standards - whilst only partly failing. Rohrwacher's vision is tactful and restrained, with so much we don't ever know. The characters' histories are there to be guessed rather than spelled out.

With a richness of characterisation usually reserved for hefty novels, each shot in Winter Sleep glows like a symbol, whilst each digression is almost a short story in itself.

Nothing quite competes with the blistering opening scene, but The Salvation's cast of characters mean it's never less than a fun watch.

For most post-apocalyptic films, the nightmare is really a disguised fantasy. In Michôd's excellent The Rover, the nightmare is real.

Carell, in a rare but not unique departure into drama, proves himself as accomplished at tragedy as he is at comedy.

Despite a liberal dose of full frontal nudity, The Canyons fails to fully revel in its sleaze, struggling to even work as a deadpan satire on the kind of vacuous and deadened Hollywood types Easton Ellis brought to life in the pages of his debut novel, Less Than Zero.

With Frank, Abrahamson cultivates a mystical hour of prog-based shenanigans before he - and his film - begin to lose their collective heads in a muddled final third.

Tender, charming and made with substantial care, Next Goal Wins celebrates the cliché that it's not about winning, but the taking part.

Arnie completists will enjoy seeing the Austrian Oak in good form, but as a whodunit thriller Sabotage is found severely wanting.

Unlike many of Miyazaki's previous works, The Wind Rises is a film rooted far more firmly in realism. Although it does have its fair share of fantastical dream sequences and magical flying machines.