The Jackass films measure success by how often they elicit one of three responses from viewers: laughter, wincing or nausea. By that proudly juvenile standard, Best And Last fully accomplishes its objective, offering pummeling slapstick as the popular series’ collection of goofballs get hit, tasered and tortured.

A bombshell medical diagnosis prompts a young man to reflect on life’s precious gifts in Nino, Pauline Loques’ delicately-handled debut feature which builds into a touching drama carried on a soulful, understated central performance from Theodore Pellerin.

With Toy Story 5, Pixar reaffirms what has always made this franchise so beloved, resulting in another delightful adventure that mines fresh emotional terrain while producing plenty of hearty laughs.

Spielberg has long been fascinated with the concept of information (and misinformation) as both weapon and tool, and ultimately gives this science fiction fable the feel of a gritty 1970s conspiracy thriller; a bombastic underdog, truth-to-power tale – albeit one with cosmological consequences.

We Are Aliens remains visually engrossing and, as storytelling, it’s mostly sophisticated and intelligent.

Debut director Kane Parsons assuredly harnesses the creepy, mind-bending potential of this liminal concept, delivering an original horror that has both the scares and the smarts.

Ben’Imana is a film that works by accretion, layering its stories, characters and themes like the colourful textiles seen in robes, scarves, curtains, bedcovers, school uniforms, or, in one devastating scene, the torn clothes of massacred children, unearthed in a garden.

La Gradiva is not about overt bullying but rather an exploration of the mercurial nature of young group dynamics that zeroes in on the bruising pressure points of teenage life – that are as much self-generated as imposed by others.

At a narrative level, it pulls from modern anxieties surrounding surveillance, the unfettered spreading of information and the trauma of contagion (and indeed lockdown), But, as you would expect from the director of 2016’s Train To Busan, Colony’s main draw is its visuals, its carefully choreographed action sequences unfolding at a breakneck pace saturated by lashings of gore.

Here, the impossible appears to occur, but with a grounded psychological precision that more than earns the break with reality and means that the film’s carefully established realism is deepened – reaching almost unbearable levels of emotional resonance, rather than undermined.

Clio Barnard’s adaptation of the novel by Keiran Goddard is, like her previous works, an expertly-observed study of human relationships, how they are shaped by environment and buffeted by opportunity – or lack of it. Featuring a superb ensemble cast, it’s grounded by a gritty, relatable authenticity that pushes it past its more didactic moments.

Without getting too sappy or strident, Jim Queen explores how sexual fluidity can open up exciting possibilities but also break people’s hearts. In the case of this cheeky picture, it can be pretty funny, too.

It’s a handsomely mounted piece that leans more towards psychological warfare than the sword-based bloodshed that fans of Kurosawa’s previous work might expect.

The third feature from Zachary Wigon (following 2023’s Sanctuary and 2014’s The Heart Machine) takes gonzo delight in ratcheting up traditional gothic psychodrama tropes to frenzied heights while also paying striking homage to its literary roots.

Full Phil is a work of art masquerading as a B-movie, a film of depth and strange fascination – one that ends in a moment of body horror that turns strangely tender. It’s difficult to think of many other contemporary cineastes who could pull that off.

Everything is in flux in The Dreamed Adventure, even the genre of a film that shape-shifts between noir, western and romance. At its heart is the director’s extraordinary deployment of a cast of non-professionals who seem to carry their own stories with them in every line and gesture.

The Diary Of A Chambermaid’s outward prettiness merely emphasises the melancholy and quiet anger at its core, as Jude reveals his disdain for how rich families (and countries) treat poor immigrant labour. Marguerite and Pierre are never outwardly cruel, but their repeated microaggressions are a comparable torture.

Okonedo and Oyelowo give affecting performances as star-crossed lovers who can’t quite own up to their mistakes . . . Together they give Clarissa a touching guardedness that might not offer the spit and fire of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but certainly understands the permanent heartache and the poeticism of a life deferred.

As a portrait of the man, it’s selective but not so much as to feel shallow. It fleshes out his qualities and weaknesses while preserving much of the enigma. Which is exactly what you imagine Cantona himself would want.

Smoothly executed throughout, Avedon displays some snappy editing allowing for flow. It may be couched in admiring tones but it is persuasive in arguing why the photographer mattered, and why he seemed most at home and in control from behind a camera lens.

It’s an intelligent and involving film that successfully questions Hollywood cliches of war drama, while drawing knowingly on that tradition.

A compassionate, clear-eyed study of a young woman searching for a place to call home, Ashes is driven by Anna Diaz’s evocative performance which expresses a world of discontent through the simplest of glances.

Exhibiting an emotional restraint sometimes missing from his previous films Girl (2018) and Close (2022), Dhont’s latest proves to be an affecting, familiar drama.

More effective as an earnest, cumulative emotional journey than as a viewing experience made up of rather random parts, La Bola Negra does eventually repay some of the batter

There’s much to admire in Emmanuel Marre’s ambitious second fiction: the lighting choices are thrillingly unexpected; the performances are superb across the board. But whether there’s enough there to justify the running time is another question.

The Man I Love doesn’t feel so much like a portrait of a time and place rather than something more essential and human: a portrait of a passionate and loving character caught in a final performance he didn’t ask for, and which he wishes would never end.

Minotaur sees Zvyagintsev set his own deliciously ink-black stamp on Chabrol’s erotic thriller; indeed, for the majority of its runtime, Zvyagintsev deliberately flattens both the eroticism and the thrills – a carefully judged gambit that allows scenes of nudity and murder to land with greater force when they finally arrive.

Nemes takes a much more direct approach in Orphan; a no less challenging film in its own way but one that yields more immediate appeal, even embracing the pleasures of melodrama.

Heroes are often given big speeches and major acts, but heroism is finally defined in Moulin as saying nothing and doing nothing – resisting with the full force of your body and your mind.

It opens no major storytelling doors in the Star Wars universe – and is unlikely to herald a new era of Star Wars in cinemas. Indeed, for fans of the series it could feel like several fresh episodes of the streaming show given a major boost of scale, imagination and budget. Still, as a standalone film, it’s perky and good-looking, with rousing set pieces.

Exarchopoulos’s performance is remarkable for being so undemonstratively naturalistic, perfectly in tune with the film’s anti-sensationalistic presentation of its theme.

Its cold precision thaws in a way that is uncharacteristic for Mungiu, leaving us with a thought-provoking drama about conflicting values that feels, in the end, a little bloodless and underpowered.

The running time might prove challenging – there’s only so many handbrake turns, high-powered automatic weapons and skewered supporting cast members you can take before it starts getting repetitive. But then Na flips the perspective, making us question our allegiances and ask who the real monsters are.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s superbly acted and dramatically compelling study of generational rifts, gender divides and the deep, unhealing scars in a father-daughter relationship has a muscular, propulsive momentum.

As is often the case with this writer-director, Gray’s film has a dim view of the American Dream but, if some of the script’s contours are familiar, Paper Tiger’s quiet intensity and growing sibling tension make it a compelling experience.

Jordan Firstman’s crowdpleasing queer family drama is a triumph – an acidic, spikily funny portrait of New York’s hedonistic gay scene which celebrates empathy, community and the unconditional love between a father and his son.

All Of A Sudden never stoops to treacly melodrama, instead preferring a restrained approach that allows the film’s most emotional scenes to hit with full force.

Alongside its verbal and intellectual content, Fatherland is immersively evocative, genuinely making us feel as if we are visiting the two Germanies in 1949.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s intriguing, modest drama keeps its focus tight on Gabrielle but, thanks to a keenly observed screenplay and Drucker’s finely balanced performance, presents a wider view on the female mid-life experience.

In its unassuming way, the film is a celebration of creativity and of emotional connections forged through art. But Nagi Notes is unassertive in its themes and, at times, gentle almost to a fault.

A dizzyingly ambitious meta-satire about Hollywood, IP, hacky horror, and gender and sexual identity, Teenage Sex And Death cannot help but occasionally misstep, but the rush of ideas and the confidence of the filmmaking never waver.

Curry Barker’s astute horror takes the simple, familiar premise of a love-sick man attempting to win the object of his affections and shapes it into an incisive, entertainingly schlocky study of romantic co-dependency, patriarchal entitlement and the all-too-easy subversion of good intentions.

When Sichel attempted to write his memoirs, the CIA returned the manuscript with endless suggested redactions. They argued that if a journalist had written the book it would have been considered mere speculation, but with his name attached it would have become confirmation. The Last Spy affords him the privilege of having the final word.

Goodman emerges as a passionate advocacy journalist but also a well-navigated professional who is wise to the tricks of the trade and prepared to use them.

As the story travels from bittersweet to comic and back again, The Last One for the Road never feels like it explores new territory in terms of its characters and situations. But the specific setting both in time and place make it a very vivid portrait of a place ravaged, like its characters, by time, but hopeful that one last drink might enable things to be seen in a more positive light.

What it does feel is a little cerebral, rather wary of engaging too deeply with its characters. The effect is both alienating and refreshing.

Alice Winocour’s captivating fashion drama Couture is a quiet, observational picture about creative women finding solace in one another.

Colours of Time nudges its audience a little heavily, if cheerfully so, with its historical references, and self-confessedly (as per an end title) plays fast and loose in its accuracy, but is genially inventive in messing with the codes of period cinema.

It’s a bold, gothic, compelling study of the cult of fame, the creative impulse, the fragile threads that bind. Every aspect of the film is carefully crafted and calibrated in service of Lowery’s distinctive vision, and, while it may prove divisive, it casts a hallucinatory spell.

Unkovski’s film may be singing from a familiar hymn sheet, but he makes that part of its charm.

While the film’s balance of thorny laughs and thought-provoking themes is not always smoothly executed, Borgli’s provocation succeeds thanks to the grounded performances of his stars.

Marczak’s film becomes not just a document of a hunt but a psychological portrait of loss and a family’s attempts to come to terms with that.

BenDavid Grabinski’s time-twisty, sci-fi gangster comedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is brimming with hair-brained schemes and hilarious gags; the kind of unruly one night adventure that isn’t about logic, it’s about stoking delirium.

The film’s simple premise is supported by smart plotting, nimble editing and evocative sound, and lands with frightening force. An engagingly frigid performance by Scott furthers the film’s keen ability to conjure overwhelming anxiety from its many punchy jump scares, combining to make Hokum an exceptionally chilling horror film.

Sierra’s film not only stands as a love letter to peaceful protest but also to intelligent law enforcement that took the opportunity to de-escalate and resolve the situation without violence. Whether audiences agree that it has ’changed the narrative’ or not, it is a powerful testimony to a community’s ability to take control of their part of the story and give it a happy ending.

This Hamlet sticks to the narrative essentials to produce a terse, pitiless retelling.

Though its many narrative twists and amusing turns might wear down less adventurous viewers, this film will be embraced by those who enjoyed the director’s dystopian critique Sorry to Bother You and his equally scathing series I’m a Virgo.

The tonal balance between life-and-death stakes and buddy-comedy bonding is sometimes wobbly, but Ryan Gosling gives an open-hearted performance as our planet’s unlikely saviour.

A rich, densely cinematic film, it is a stunning assured debut from young Filipino filmmaker Rafael Manuel.

It feels like a gorgeous, decidedly dewy-eyed heritage hagiography.

There’s something deeply compelling about this deliberately odd, carefully-calibrated neo-gothic fable, which suggests that rehabilitation can be found in the darkest of places, and that true freedom is simply a matter of trust.

A story which might seem the stuff of high melodrama is given a very different charge by Franco’s characteristic rigour – an uninflected cleanness and clarity in Yves Cape’s cinematography, and a minimum of narrative frills, driving the narrative towards a conclusion that is one of this director’s starkest yet.

Propulsive and entertaining, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man has plenty to keep fans happy and a wider audience engaged.

Ultimately, The Bride! stays the course as exciting, exhilarating filmmaking, a bracing example of creators throwing convention aside and pushing their vision to the absolute limit. Mary Shelley would no doubt approve.

Hardly a second too long despite its almost two-hour running time, this urgent, absorbing documentary should be required viewing for those, inside or outside the United States, who are struggling to make sense of the recent presidential election. It will also speak to anyone interested in the battle over books and gender issues that has been raging for some time now in the American educational sector.

Sometimes the convoluted story forces its emotional beats, but Hoppers is a largely successful animation that introduces a refreshingly darker strain of humour alongside its paeans to the natural world.

Occasionally schematic, albeit only in the service of pricking our consciences, Petra Volpe’s tense drama is a shot in the arm of undiluted empathy for the over-stretched, under-valued nursing profession.

[Teng] certainly succeeds in creating an impassioned triple profile of the men who are, if anything, increasingly determined to make a difference for the civilians and medics of Gaza, while viscerally bringing home the extent of the brutal tragedy on the ground.

What’s perhaps unexpected, in a film that has the look of a brooding fable by Carl Theodore Dreyer, is how funny it is at times.

Catak retains an effectively claustrophobic atmosphere and a tight focus on his characters and their issues.

The fearless lead performance from Ruraridh Mollica really gets under the skin of the complex central figure and should elevate him to rising star status.

The film stands in the shadow of Michael Mann’s influential Southern California pictures, but a cast led by Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo add extra crackle to a story that salutes characters who are very good at their job – no matter what side of the law they are on.

While Frank & Louis is narratively unsurprising, its strong performances and emotional authenticity give it undeniable power.

By illuminating the passion and creativity shared by two Iranian friends, The Friend’s House Is Here both celebrates and worries about an emerging generation of women activists yearning to defy a dictatorship. Its rebellious spirit isn’t fiery but, rather, quiet and confident — and all the more inspiring as a result.

Hanging By a Wire may have all the urgency of a Hollywood disaster movie from the 1970s, but also incorporates an undercurrent of commentary on the neglect of poor rural communities in Pakistan.

Throughout the film, three things stand out: the love between Rushdie and Griffiths; the resilience they had in the face of his catastrophic injuries; and the author’s humanistic attitude and sly sense of humour, which have categorically survived intact.

Lady is a vivid, bracingly energetic examination of sisterhood and female bonds in an unequal society.

[An] absorbing and eye-opening, if somewhat dense, documentary.

The script holds plenty of satire and laugh out loud moments, but Wilson and Huston keep it supple enough to bend protectively around the central love story, while allowing the morality tale element to still have bite.

Padraic McKinley’s feature directorial debut is a hugely confident survivalist tale that’s as bluntly effective as the primitive weapons employed in this bare-knuckle saga.

Filmed across the city’s boroughs, the thriller has a wonderful sense of place as this solitary man must rely on his savvy after one of his victims seeks deadly payback.

Josef Kubota Wladyka’s third feature film is a playful and whimsical confection, a deft blend of escapist kitsch and the real emotional heft that Kikuchi brings to the role.

Letting yourself be loved is not exactly an original message, but here it’s the comedy that counts and Schlesinger is generous with her script, giving even minor characters their fair share of jokes.

A vital cinematic document. ... The conversations could not be more stimulating, offering a glimpse of Black America past and present that is joyous, defiant and sobering.

Throughout, Portman, Ortega and Zeta-Jones bounce the script around like a ping-pong ball, with all three displaying meticulous timing.

The bittersweet realities of being a stranger in a strange land create a complex, thought-provoking human interest film.

In truth, Buddy is not especially scary, its many kill scenes staged for laughs. But if this horror-comedy makes an obvious point — television shows meant for kids sure are weird — Kelly finds enough fresh ways to exploit the idea.

A tentative connection warms to something deeper in a poignant, slow-burn tale of hope and healing.

It all builds to a frenzied, nightmarish climax of greed, desire and full-tilt excess that takes a sharp-toothed bite out of society’s toxic obsession with women’s bodies, and should leave horror audiences hungry for more.

The film refuses to go in predictable directions, unveiling bizarre side characters and travelling down odd narrative backroads. But that occasional bagginess also allows for a richly textured picture bursting with energy.

Exceptional sound design and a superb central performance from The Handmaid’s tale star Nina Kiri, who is almost entirely alone on screen, mean the film casts a compelling spell, even when the narrative begins to succumb to genre cliché in its final reels.

This heartfelt picture can be overly familiar, but Poulter’s intensely interior performance lends the proceedings sufficient edge and fascination.

The picture deftly blends genres to create an arresting snapshot of the ricocheting carnage of sexual violence.

This intriguing feature debut from Bafta-nominated Scottish short filmmaker Louis Paxton makes effective use of its striking location and a trio of strong performances from Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke.

Wilson sometimes struggles to make this feature-length documentary as consistently entertaining as his old series’ half-hour episodes. But he continues to mine surprisingly emotional moments from his wryly comic approach.

Characters longing for connection but simultaneously fearing it provides a strong framework on which Rachel Lambert builds an unpredictable relationship drama that feels both profound and fragile.

The result is a polished horror yarn that leads to a satisfying conclusion, and leaves the impression there is more than enough material here for a potential prequel or an extension of Solveig’s story.

It’s a gloriously punk spin on the historical documentary genre, channeling the humour and rebellious spirit of a people who have been part of “eight or nine different countries” during the 20th century, who have spoken multiple languages, but who have managed to maintain their own distinct identity nonetheless.