It’s a harrowing and powerful film that navigates the intricate terrain of going against tradition and longing for freedom, one that aims to extend the personal confines of cultural conflict beyond the fictional characters it portrays.

The mixed media technique cuts through the film’s naturalism to bring forth something felt and ineffable, akin to the rich, vivid worlds within children’s imaginations, as well as the haziness with which we recall childhood memories.

It’s another very special film from this exceptionally gifted and thoughtful (and extremely angry) director.

Guiraudie successfully fashions his own singular cinematic world.

A few behind-the-scenes moments during weekends and holidays depict a more personal side to the otherwise-enigmatic Bachmann, but the picture that Speth paints of him is as someone who is casually fixated with this occupation – that the process of teaching is seeped into his very being and consumes his thoughts.

At only 84 minutes and light on plot, at times this film feels so slight that it might just slip through your fingers. And yet its ethereality is what makes it enchanting.

It’s a film about making art that feels good in the moment, as the act itself can be as rewarding – and possibly even more so – than the delivery of that art to an audience.

Its gnarled, subterranean subject may be shrouded in a biblical halo, but The Truffle Hunters sublime focus on the natural world and both its flora and fauna inhabitants offers calming reassurance for the unwashed.

Soul-stirring. One of the most exceedingly lovely coming-of-age films in a long while.

It culminates in a bold exploration of transness, womanhood, Blackness and the sex industry, providing thoughtful and intimate insight into these material conditions and the breadth of experience that lies behind them.

Like The Last Jedi, The Kid Who Would Be King isn’t concerned about legacy or predecessors, it’s about personal belief regardless of who came before you.

The Fabelmans clearly comes from a place of deep sincerity – while it might not be a particularly “deep” film, it is absolutely the Spielberg film about Becoming Spielberg that we’ve been waiting for, echoing the world of child-like wonder and the tenacity to manifest dreams that his whole career has centred around.

The overarching theme of White Noise – an anxiety around the looming spectre of death – is familiar territory for for the writer/director, as is the psyche of the film’s middle-aged, middle-class white protagonist. This is his most ambitious project in both scale and provenance.

Nobody does tension quite like the Dardenne brothers. As in so many of their films, there’s a moment in Tori and Lokita when a character makes a fateful decision and the narrative suddenly snaps into focus, creating stretches of the drama when you’re holding your breath and feeling a roiling sense of anxiety in the pit of your stomach.

Essential, infuriating viewing.

The film makes for a involving and often mordantly funny three-hander, and Exarchopoulos and Whishaw are both superb despite being given the slightly thankless task of clearing things up in Tomas’s wake.

Wheatley captures the volatility of emotions during the festive period, where every familial anxiety seems to come to a head, and does so with compassion and humour.

The film is beautifully staged and executed, maintaining well-defined emotional contours and never allowing things to descend into mainstream sentimentalism.

The result is incendiary – a lusty romp concerning repressed desire, the seedy underbelly of organised religion and the question of whether it really matters if communion is administered at a church or between a lover’s thighs.

It’s a film with an affection for the past, but one that also acknowledges you can never go back to how things were when you were younger – and that while everything about the holidays seems perfectly exciting and straightforward as a kid, the older you get, the more the fault lines start to appear.

Razooli clearly has ambition and imagination, and this simple but sweet fairytale is an exuberant adventure with charm to spare.

Huezo’s background as a documentary filmmaker is clear in the way this debut narrative feature so solemnly and matter-of-factly observes a community that exists beyond this fictional ‘slice of life’ representation.

It’s not exactly an ambitious plotline for someone like Fincher, but it’s certainly an engaging one, and the cryptic, constantly evasive protagonist is a puzzle that lingers after the credits roll.

What’s interesting about Eternals is how genuinely down to earth most of it is, rejecting the time-honoured duality of the flashy superhero who also has to contend with the banality of domestic life. This is more like reality, in that it is about coming to terms with smallness and impotence in the face of so much cosmic sprawl.

On a moment-by-moment basis, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is as exhilarating and illuminating a history lesson as you’ll ever have.

Better Man works because it is that rare biopic which acknowledges its inherent ridiculousness, poking fun not only at the star machine but Williams himself (who, regardless of your opinion of his music, has always been quite open about his shortcomings).

Beyond the archness and cynicism, there are some profound, self-reflective insights about what it means to make moving images in the 21st century.

The tone never defines the stakes in such grave terms, but that’s the key to the potency of Mills’ cinema: life’s pivotal turns come in idle moments, from inconspicuous sources. All it takes is the willingness to listen.

It is at times chilling, morally reprehensible and frightening, but it also proves to be liberating for the central character.

Babygirl joins a limited canon of films that takes the much-maligned subsect of female sexual desire seriously, while also serving as a compelling psychodrama about the intricacies of trust and understanding, even in a long-standing relationship.

Gavron has used her clout to pull together an inclusive team that goes beyond representational box ticking. She has made a film powered by real empathy and joy. Bakray isn’t a black face in a white story – there is space for cultural nuance.

There’s an ethereal quality to Jolie’s performance that matches Callas’ legendary persona, and despite the deep sense of melancholy that pervades the film like a ghostly veil, this is still a love story – and one where the heroine lives forever.

The 3D aspect is often used to mesmerising effect, and dovetails perfectly with an artist whose work often demands the viewer inspect it from multiple angles and vantages.

Friendship arguably is a horror movie, evident in more than just its score and high wire tension between characters. The excruciating act of being vulnerable with another human being and the sweaty discomfort of realising a new friend is a bit off are mundane but relatable terrors, after all.

Chukwu is a master of show don’t tell, and the deft emotional performances she elicits from Woodard and Hodge make this heavy experience completely worth it.

It’s Sonne’s remarkable, multifarious performance that really lifts this one above the pack. She uses her face with the expressiveness of a silent film actress, so when the big emotions eventually come they hit especially hard.

On the evidence of the astonishingly-assured debut, Earth Mama, we’ll be seeing work from writer-director Savanah Leaf for many years to come.

It is tempting to want people to be one thing or the other: the murderer or the victim. This film reminds us: Highsmith was both.

There’s something curious and pure about the way Leone disassembles bodies, like a child breaking open an old VCR not to see how it works, but to survey and play with the complicated stuff inside.

The important scenes are allowed to play out in a way that allows for a slower, more satisfying reveal of character motivation, as well as adding necessary ballast to the emotional foundations for later in the saga.

The first half of Dune: Part Two is among the best things that Villeneuve has ever done, though the sheer eventfulness of the plot and a bustling retinue of side-players (Austin Butler upgrading Sting’s cod-pieced ninny from the 1984 film into a hairless psychopath is worthy of mention) means that the final act does feel rushed.

It’s a film that simply enhances the feeling that America has been prematurely deprived of one of its finest musical ambassadors. Irrespective of location, however, we’re all poorer without him.

Antlers is a slippery, troubling film whose ambiguities, despite one heavy-handed piece of exposition, remain intact even as the film’s identity keeps metamorphosing and body-swapping. Here, the beast within has always been there, lurking and latent as part of America’s constitution, and just waiting to bite back.

This is breathtaking filmmaking, but would be a little hard to take for two-and-a-half hours. Thankfully, Serebrennikov has more tricks up his sleeve.

There are as many potential ways to approach a parent-child relationship onscreen as there are parent-child relationships on the planet, but Hogg may have just discovered a new one.

Balance is everything, though – this isn’t a saccharine rewriting of history, nor a fully-fledged “fuck you” to those who deserve it. Both Rasmussen and Amin remain aware of tone, opening up about how hard it can be to trust people when your life is spent being “adjusted, retained and suppressed” to fit an image others have created for you.

While heartbreak is imminent as it is a coming-of-age film, the absence of hopelessness brings a lightness to the film not begotten by hollowness, and you may even find yourself with a melancholy smile, as Nora’s metamorphosis is complete: she breaks out of her cocoon.

Hudson’s film makes room to acknowl­edge that this is a fam­i­ly affair. Mol­ly is at the epi­cen­tre, but the rever­ber­a­tions impact every­one around her.

It’s hard not to feel like Sakamoto is in the room with you.

Its emotional power and zany charm linger in the mind much longer than its obvious failings.

It’s a strange, mythically menacing journey through grief and the self-torments of guilt.

The Sweet East takes an admirably measured look at societal fracture in the modern age, and its use of arch provocation becomes a device to represent a highly recognisable vernacular of despair, where obscenity (both verbal and corporeal) is the only language that cuts through the chaff.

The direction by Davies Jr is top-notch, not just in how he is able to capture the fine nuances of the actors on camera, but also in how they are immersed in the chaotic mêlée of Lagos at this powder-keg moment.

This is a high-energy caper with lots of larger-than-life characters circling to kill, and two innocents at its centre about whose fate and very survival, against all odds, we are made genuinely to care.

Director Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst weave the darkest satire. In essence their scenario pushes at the same boundaries between what is acceptable and unacceptable as Anna’s campaign, even as Femke’s vendetta shifts the argument from merely discursive, theoretical terms to the realm of the viscerally physical.

Playing like a Jarmusch – or Amirpour – joint, Sister Midnight is a droll, strange, cool freak of a film, never quite finishing its own sentences or following through on narrative expectation.

Campbell’s fearlessness, in both her abrasion and the fragile humanity behind her chaos, helps strike this delicate balance.

Wild at heart, this quiet epic casts a lingering mystical spell, perfect to usher in the forthcoming autumn nights.

A touching sports drama about the here-and-now, rather than victories or defeats.

The result is a luridly coloured, transgressively queered piece of self-conscious schlock where cutting is the business of lovesick killers as much as filmmakers – and both cut right to the heart.

By replacing one, more earthly transcendence, with another, Pleasure confirms itself as a film that lays bare the paradoxes of complying to a flawed system, and critiques the commercialisation of bodies with orgasmic poeticism.

A striking portrait of Shelly’s life that will have you seeking out her work and wondering what could have been.

In this oneiric oddity, consumerism is everything, ultimately devouring even the consumer – while the real horror is the exploitative means of production, carefully kept underground beyond the sight of bourgeois shoppers above.

This is a grimly refreshing and confident toe-dip into the world of horror, and we hope Duane choses to revisit this atmospherically murky pool.

It’s precision-tooled in terms of structure, almost to the point of airlessness, but you’d be hard-pressed to knock back the final 45-minute showdown as anything less than an impressive feat by a filmmaker orchestrating and charting the fine processes of an epic battle.

No matter what we might think of her, it’s clear that Tammy Faye was one of a kind. Chastain’s mannered plague of tics does right by her in that respect, but she’s been inserted into a template now worn from overuse.

George MacKay is the Record Keeper, in charge of interrogating Faithfull, and she very candidly speaks about her life in her own words in order to decipher the gulf between who she really was and how she was marketed.

The film is ambling, gentle and doesn’t strain too hard to force a point, but allows you to appreciate the multifarious nature of life in a city where the spectre of destruction lurks ominously in the clouds.

There’s nothing subtle about these films, from their Eat The Rich messaging to the just-go-with-it in-world lore, but in all of their schlock they strike a welcome tone between winking self-awareness and retro absurdity.

As a director, von Horn is smart enough to recognise that even the most heinous crimes have a human culprit, and as such his sensitive, unsensational film retains a sense of poise and never strays into soap opera territory.

The feeling of nostalgia is perhaps overstressed, and the pacing is odd. But the tension created as foolish Felice drifts into a trap of his own making is magnetic.

Despite a prioritisation of visual effects over story, Memory Box makes a compelling case for chronicling the big and small parts of your life, if only to share with generations to come.

It’s an intriguing set-up which comes to a surprising head, and while some of the twists are a little contrived, the film as a whole works as a fierce admonishment of western nostalgia for its colonial past.

No two trans stories are the same, and it’s validation, empathy and community, rather than Donna’s achievements, that make up the cornerstones of the film.

The smart, keenly observed and undoubtedly thorny power play of After the Hunt make it an arresting psychodrama, confronting our willingness to swallow our own suffering in the name of self-preservation as well as what we owe to ourselves and each other in an imperfect, cheerfully cutthroat society.

There’s no doubting June Squibb’s charisma, and it’s refreshing to see her in a lead role at the grand age of 94.

This 20th anniversary refit/remaster of 2004’s cult rock- shock-doc Dig! proves that no amount of inadvisable retroactive tinkering can diminish the quality of a core product that’s this good.

My Favourite Cake is a slice-of-life film with considered dialogue and heartfelt performances that unravels a culturally specific repression, one that got the Iranian filmmakers banned from France and Germany to edit and promote this film, but also the more universal loneliness of the elderly who still have more life to live.

Too often here it’s the mouthy ones who get to hold court, which is to be expected, yet the Genoa sequence shows the dramatic dividends from a more focused approach.

Were it not for the transcripts, Reality would be a more straightforward addition to the already-oversaturated true crime genre. Satter’s handling of the material and Sweeney’s performance, however, bring this into a more intriguing space where questions of narrative truth, perception and the punishment for honesty are addressed.

The performances too somehow emulates the game’s awkward, unnatural voice acting, a key contributor to both works’ uncanny dreamlike ambience. Rarely has a film better evoked a PlayStation 2 game.

It’s a crowd-pleasing package, and Gosling is likeable enough to sell even the corniest jokes.

Frost takes a fairly conventional documentary approach, but it serves as a comprehensive introduction to a master of her craft.

On the whole, the live-action How to Train Your Drag­on plays it extreme­ly safe. It’s per­fect­ly pass­able, but only because it close­ly mir­rors a nar­ra­tive that’s already well-loved.

Moments of real desperation in human faces reveal why journalists risk death to report in Syria and beyond, providing a timely reflection on the power of documentary footage. A pity, then, that Martin does not leave their story to stand for itself.

Nothing much happens in Summer 1993, and yet everything changes.

Even if it does eventually crumble to pieces, it’s a really strong thriller for the large majority of its runtime.

With lots of appealing wildlife and landscape photography to keep things lively, there’s much to cherish in this charming little film.

While there are passages of uncertainty and twists that take their good sweet time to arrive, things come together beautifully, and a finale that combines a series of clever emotional call-backs and another heartening plea for human empathy that’s worthy of only the finest John Lewis ad.

It’s encouraging that 10 films in, the Saw franchise has remembered what makes it so great: a potent blend of true horror, twisted imagination, comedic timing, and above all, the legend that is Tobin Bell. Whether or not they can write around Jigsaw’s canonical death to bring Bell back again is another matter…

This is on first impression perhaps a very good, uneven film rather than an unequivocally great one.

It’s a film which man­ages to have its daft thrills and con­vinc­ing­ly piv­ot to wist­ful philo­soph­i­cal intro­spec­tion, and while there are cer­tain­ly some rough edges and unex­plored plot avenues, it prob­a­bly counts as one of Boyle’s strongest works this cen­tu­ry.

The performances at the core of the film are stellar, and it comes as a surprise to no one that Andrea Riseborough gives a pure dynamite turn, contorting every inch of her face and body as the carnivalesque Suze.

There are numerous moments where all the signposts point towards a saccharine dirty bomb, and thankfully, the film seldom allows those to detonate.

Escobar’s go-for-broke handling of the material favours fun outtakes, flip humour and nostalgic hat-tips to the days when the Philippines had real gravitational pull as a hub for maverick genre enthusiasts wanted to parlay the beautiful/desolate surroundings into their scuzzy opus. And just when you reach the point where you think that Escobar has finally lost the plot, she crops up on camera and admits just that.

Sweetheart doesn’t rely on traumatic storylines and narratives of victimhood to make its audience care about AJ. Her journey isn’t straightforward in any way, but it’s instead relevant and reflective of the queer Gen Z experience. Sometimes there is no resolution. Things stay messy, and that’s okay.

Even to a viewer who’s not particularly taken by their idiosyncratic and knowingly difficult sound, it’s a pleasure to be in the company of two people who are so proficient at articulating their inner feelings.

As an account of Hudson the Hollywood party boy and lothario it is comprehensive, though those expecting a more complex account of the star’s inconsistencies may find themselves shortchanged.