Gerwig’s filmmaking enriches our world, earnest and joyous and thoughtful. Even under the guise of a piece of massive IP, she maintains that spirit where others have failed.

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.

This is the western as a dried, coruscating corpse, left out for the buzzards to feed on.

Although the first 40 minutes in the buttoned-up period setting do drag a little, once The Beast finds its groove, its imaginative and melodramatic spirit are hard to resist. It’s a big swing for the fences from a singular French filmmaker, and one that absolutely pays off.

Seidi Haarla gives a winning, intelligent performance as a naturally very clever person made to feel small and helpless in a strange land. But Yuriy Borisov pops from the first moments you see him: his hunched-shoulders posture; his abrupt, agitated movements and boxer’s duck-and-weave walk; the animalistic way he tears into food, impatiently and avidly.

Despite sleepiness being part of its premise, the pacing of Yu’s film is propulsive, and the deft detours into dark comedy – especially a reveal involving PowerPoint slides – are a highlight. But it’s Jung and Lee’s work that lingers the most, their thoroughly charming, lively performances enhancing the tragedy and dread of something awful happening to them.

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

As a follow-up to her exceptional – and sadly underseen – An Easy Girl from 2019, Other People’s Children could and should finally cement Zlotowski’s place in the top class of European auteurs.

It amounts to more than just ‘a heap of broken images’ – it’s a warming depiction of friendship as family.

The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as dark as a winter’s night. For it is a shadowy frío-noir, complete with femme fatale, even as its elusive, edgy narrative is passed down, like keepsake beads or diffracting crystals, from generation to generation.

Playful in its blocking and heavy on Altmanesque zooms, the movie’s textured visual language complements the script’s comedic and dramatic concerns, enhancing their impact rather than being an excessive distraction.

Its observational mode keeps it from being didactic or manipulative in any way, and it adopts an intimacy that evokes the deepest empathy. Luma’s pain is never spectacle.

By capturing the culture of fetish, party and riot, feminism, sex and politics, this unique blend of styles offers a fitting representation of a punk subculture that gave ’80s queer and feminist activism its vibrancy.

The rightful rage of its commentary is articulated with such clarity and specificity that it circumvents any accusations of ‘misery porn’.

Blending courtroom drama and claustrophobic tech-tinged nightmare, Red Rooms is a striking and austere examination of the true-crime industrial complex that benefits from its formality and disturbingly removed protagonist.

Orlando: My Political Biography is a dive into the collective trans consciousness, a discussion between Orlandos across time and place, an attempt to discover new ways to understand and express ourselves.

The film’s thesis is often a little obvious, yearning for a return to a brand of architecture whose half-life isn’t so slim, but ignoring the arduous and exploitative construction methods that were used to produce those grandiose structures of yore.

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.

Hassan doesn’t need to provide a grand framing device. You sense their powerlessness, you are embedded within it. There is no omniscient camera to take the audience away because there is no freedom of movement for the Fazilis.

Guzmán wistfully laments his long absence from his homeland and the circumstances that led him to flee, imbuing his reflections with a tangible sense of mourning.

An Easy Girl reads not as the male sexual frustration of the Nouvelle Vague, but as a celebration of women’s sexual agency.

The superb casting of the two lead co-stars, who were only told the outcome of their characters storylines on the day of shooting, really buoys the film.

It’s a compelling and immersive drama which attains a contemporary relevance without ever really trying too hard.

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

There’s quite a lot to digest, and not all of it goes down easy, but it’s hard to fault Strickland’s ambition and imagination.

It’s a brilliant showcase of both McKellen and Coel’s talents. The contrast between them is rich and layered, down to the detail of costume designer Eleanor Baker’s choice of knitwear and corduroys in warm and cool tones.

By changing the cautionary tale to be against assimilation and categorisation, plus its invigorating update of traditional technique, the film carves out a space not just as the best Pinocchio film of this year, but among the finest films the director has made.

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.