The challenge, such as it is, of watching a Mike Leigh movie is simply the challenge of being a person in the world – the challenge of paying sustained attention to others – and Pansy is among his most demanding and rewarding tests.

The result is a melancholic, Terrence Malick-ian vision of a place that is brutal, beautiful and forever lost to time.

A painfully real portrait of racism in Australia.

Every shot, every narrative beat, every decision exudes not merely confidence, but the touch of a master.

Poor Things showcases the director at his most playful and comedic, weaving his otherwise evident political critique into the complex character of Bella: a new kind of woman, a tabula rasa. How pleasurable it is to witness an evolution like Bella’s, with wonder and admiration.

A riveting and awe-inspiring tribute to one of mankind’s great achievements.

Through disrupting linear time, Kapadia’s speculative, poetic rumination on memory, political reality and personal association transforms the viewing experience into something transcendent.

The film isn’t inconclusive but its time and continent-sweeping structure is anything but conventional: and that’s what makes the mercurial Return to Seoul, in the end, so remarkable.

As with both Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There, Haynes finds an enthralling middle ground between hero worship and ambivalence. There’s no thrill, no intrigue in hagiography. It’s the music, and where it takes you, what it opens up for you, that’s the thing.

The film is not only an enjoyably unique exploration of coming to terms with illness and mortality but a snapshot of the French capital circa 1962, and even its cinematic culture.

Robot Dreams is Berger’s first fling with animation, and he takes to the new artform with evident and infectious enthusiasm.

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.

Farhadi never misses a beat, taking his tale into increasingly gripping territory.

Its delicate blend of wryly observed humanity and thoughtful, understated visuals mean that the more dramatic beats hit harder. Even the occasional moments of gore feel shocking for the sparsity with which McDonagh chooses to deploy them.

Anchored by Susan Chardy’s restrained performance, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl might touch on hot-button themes of sexual violence, misogyny and familial cycles of abuse, but Rungano Nyoni finds her own intriguing language to explore them.

More than a retrospective of his own work, Caught by the Tides is a loving tribute by Jia to his most meaningful collaborator.

Even if the dry wit and cherrypickable allusions may be absent, the technical virtuosity on display marks this as the work of a master. Visceral, haunted, and severe, Coen’s vision coaxes out not just the intensity in the play – every “gritty” take has done this, from Roman Polanski to Justin Kurzel – but in its older renderings.

Despite being an obvious meditation on the potential for impending climate catastrophe, the film is never cloying or condescending – instead Flow feels warm and delicate, like the fur of a cat who’s been lying in a sun spot all morning.

With such a moving ode to the symbiotic relationship between dreams and film, a nightmare would be if this is his final word on the matter.

Wandel displays her clear skill as a director of actors in this exercise, but there is the sense that this could have been a painfully visceral short film instead of elongated into a feature where it begins to feel overdone.

It’s confident, classical filmmaking, yet despite its many formal and thematic pleasures, doesn’t offer a whole lot that’s new.

It’s a wonderful film with not an ounce of fat on the bone, and Kaurismäki still manages to thread the needle between a style of ironic detachment and emotions that are big, bold and instantly affecting.

The sequel has everything that made the first film so special, but most thrillingly, it puts away childish things. There’s moral ambiguity, meaningful stakes and commentary on race, capitalism and the state of cinema that have matured alongside its protagonist.

Based on Stephen King’s first published novel, from 1974, and in fact the first cinematic adaptation of that well-read author, Carrie dramatises all manner of first times, as Carrie gets her period, falls in love, and is ultimately penetrated, killing – and maybe dy(e)ing – in deep, deep red.

The director has described his film as a poem, but its rhythms feel more abstract, like recalling the best concert of your life in a dream. Brilliantly forgoing nostalgia to frame Elvis in the present, Luhrmann offers the closest experience of a live Elvis show that we may ever see. And like the Vegas residency, EPiC deserves a standing ovation when Luhrmann’s curtain falls.

I Saw The TV Glow creeps up on you, holding your focus so intently you hardly notice when it begins to fray at the margins.

This is by far Haynes’ funniest film to date, with shades of Almodóvar in its dramatic zooms and heightened domestic tension.

Poitras questions him on the less glorious moments of his career, too, so that he emerges as a flawed human rather than a bastion of perfect judgement. This is not a perfect documentary either, with the breathless dash through his post My Lai journalism sometimes feeling overwhelming. Yet perfection is not the point when something impossible has been bottled: it’s something called the truth.