Cactus Pears is a subdued, sensitive study of bereavement and the quietly radical act of being queer in a rural, lower-class Indian community.

The film manages to illuminate precisely what makes Dylan’s opaqueness so captivating.

The film benefits from Pugh’s charismatic performance and writer-director Stephen Merchant’s cheery mixture of crowd-pleasing sentiment, wry laughs and genuine sweetness.

The shifting loyalties and treacherous power plays that go on in Triple 9 are engaging, but Hillcoat especially shines in a series of three taut life-or-death sequences — one at the start of the film, one near the middle, and one at the end — that articulate more about who these characters are than anything they say.

It’s eye-opening and rather depressing stuff, but while it stops short of being a rallying call to arms, the film delivers a stark message about the unsustainability of this kind of untrammeled ’progress’ in India.

It’s a propulsively intense piece of filmmaking – at times a bit like watching a highwire chainsaw juggling act about to go horribly and catastrophically wrong.

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.

Wilde’s mighty struggle with himself, with his heavenly talent and earthly lusts, and the meaning of it all resonates so strongly with the direction and performance that The Happy Prince is easily elevated past period Victoriana (and that wallpaper) to move and engage in equal parts.

The plotting gets confusing, but what’s crystal-clear is the filmmaker’s skill at concocting a grippingly pessimistic worldview that permeates his den of thieves. No Sudden Move makes an impact, even when it doesn’t always make sense.

A multi-layered and thought-provoking work of art.

Meyers’s drama depends mostly on what it doesn’t show you, and it works.

It’s a bruisingly effective piece of entertainment carried by comedy, which hits its targets rather more successfully than the wildly strafing bullets.

What’s best about the film is how Cedar and Gere have dreamed up a character who’s equally desperate and preternaturally ingratiating.

Through both parts, and this is Bellocchio’s admirable achievement, he has life itself impetuously claiming its rights.

As a meticulously coiled study of nasty doings under one roof, Bring Her Back convincingly argues that terror starts at home.

Deep down, Nineteen is a comedy, with a profound sympathy for its confused protagonist, who is left alone to struggle with identity issues that could so easily turn into mental health issues. But the film stays limber, hopeful and affectionate.

With its impressive array of hundreds of film clips, frenetic editing and whip-smart narrators, Lynch/Oz offers an exciting prism through which to view Lynch’s oeuvre.

Often, stories with terrific narrative hooks run out of steam, but Lábrèche and Léonard keep coming up with satisfying plot twists which take the film into unexpectedly deep emotional waters.

Fallen Leaves may not set the film world on fire, but is guaranteed to cast a warm glow.

As a born writer, Annie’s commentary is a time capsule of her life half a century ago but also, by extension, of fascinating changes afoot in France itself.

Like her Lewis Carroll namesake, the protagonist of writer/director Krystin Ver Linden’s bold and enlightening feature debut hurtles down a rabbit hole — but the alternative reality in which she finds herself is certainly no fairy tale.

While the film recounts events three decades ago, it couldn’t be more relevant today.

With the consistently playful, often delightful and frequently funny God fantasy The Brand New Testament, the Belgian auteur delivers his most substantially enjoyable film since 1991’s Toto The Hero.

Gitai’s personal knowledge of his people and their deep-rooted issues lends West Of The Jordan River a powerful intimacy.

Perhaps Us stumbles near the end while straining for an operatic, shattering finale that explains everything that preceded it but, after capturing the zeitgeist his first time out, Peele avoids the sophomore slump by methodically laying out his riveting tale.

It’s a film that rises above a few heavy-handed directorial touches to weave, over its admirably lean running time, a tapestry of sisterly bonds and fissures that also has plenty to say about the film’s setting, the dense, oppressive urban Palermo.

Writer-director Bogdan Mirica makes a very assured feature debut, juggling an accretion of sinister clues and slow-burn allegiances at a low-key pace kept humming thanks to attention-getting widescreen panache.

Consisting of three non-fiction segments and four narrative instalments, the film is refreshing in its understated modesty. If anything, the shorter running time seems to energise the directors, who tell miniature stories with a minimum of fuss but careful attention to the emotional fallout of life under quarantine.

All the micro-motivations and manipulations of life are present, from the desire to be loved and look after others to the urge to tear down a carefully constructed emotional wall.

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

A superb performance by Affleck, who constructs a touching and believable rapport with his 11 year-old co-star, grounds his low-key directorial and feature-writing debut.

With strong performances and an arresting tone, Black Conflux doesn’t offer anything groundbreaking in terms of its narrative, but is nevertheless a striking calling card for its talented maker.

Amy is a cautionary tale - she was the Janis Joplin of our age, and as it’s the media age, we get to see the full price of fame this time as a fragile talent self-combusts. It’s not a pretty picture.

By depicting Coppola simply as a diligent director at work, Megadoc is ennobling without being hagiographic.

It’s a terrific feature debut from British-Indian documentary filmmaker Sandhya Suri – a propulsive neo-noir that holds up a mirror to contemporary India.

As much as is possible considering all the Dark Knight films that came before, The Batman feels like its own creation, not beholden to past instalments while still honouring what remains riveting about this character’s milieu.

The film is scrupulous about giving voices to men who, as prisoners, were denied them. If there is an overlap in some of the observations and insights that the former inmates bring to the film, they tend to be points which bear repeating.

It’s intelligent and clever scripting, and except for a few moments where the dialogue is overly expository, as if Burns doesn’t trust his audience, The Report pulls back the curtain on America’s political machinations and one of its most appalling policy decisions and attempted cover-ups with startling clarity.

The controversy might be Accepted’s secret weapon, but much of its power comes from an astute choice of central characters.

Its relatively tranquil surface, its small amusements (many of them revolving around a tasty turn by John Turturro as a histrionically insecure American leading man), its moments of touching, almost Sirkian melodrama, above all its ability to tease resonant themes out of seemingly inconsequential scenes or lines of dialogue, make for a film that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Rambunctious and playful, writer-director Nida Manzoor’s feature debut radiates fizzy delight, showing audiences a breezy good time.

Newcomer Hall strikes a real presence. She’s posed a lot, it’s true – against the sun, the rust-coloured sheets of Diddi’s bedroom, the doggedly brown bar in which she works – but she’s as bright as the light of summer in Iceland, and her character seems just as likely to survive this problematic present.

At a time when comic-book films have become formulaic and interchangeable, James Gunn’s third instalment of Guardians Of The Galaxy feels refreshingly vivid and distinct – a rousing space adventure which is dedicated to delivering both gorgeous spectacle and an emotional wallop.

This is a film which handles its high concept with confidence, and a winning balance of comedy and emotional punch.

Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechnyi’s debut feature is a sensitive, nuanced meditation on war and its effects on the psyche of individuals and nations.

Observational yet authoritative in its approach, Li’s film first paints an inspiring picture, then a dispiriting one.

Faithful to his title, Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan) deivers a cruel, desolate, unforgiving image of Russia’s new middle class, ruled by selfishness, greed, frustration, envy, anger and anxiety in Loveless.

While Wilson stays resolutely — and perhaps for some frustratingly — neutral about whether that link is forged by lived experience or spiritual ability, her film can be read as a celebration of human empathy and the power of shared connection.

An eye-opening, moving and often shocking film, Motherland is a serious-minded documentary without talking heads, music, or narrative structure.

Australian director Cate Shortland (Somersault, Lore) takes a horror movie premise and imbues it with the knotty emotional complexity of a dysfunctional relationship psychodrama.

Often, the randomness of the jokes is as sparkling as the execution, creating the sense that the filmmakers will try just about anything for a laugh — and the more shocking the better.

After four hours, there’s no sense you know the city, present or past, or that you ever will understand it. Would maps and timelines make it any more ‘satisfying’? Instead, you are haunted by it..

Thanks to the tight team-work between Carreira and her intuitive lead actor, On Falling will grow to become an intense, enveloping experience.

Uneven, sometimes repetitive but also powerfully moving and thought-provoking, Silence is an imperfect movie that’s very hard to shake.

The ‘I could have been a contender’ brand of sports movie gets a twist in this tasty, if minor-key, biopic.

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.

Following the siege month by month through 2016, the film has a gripping narrative drive, with many sequences that work to variously harrowing and cathartic effect.

The film’s freewheeling dynamism and stylistic elasticity allow Fabian to shake off the stuffier tropes of historical drama.

Writer-director Sara Colangelo’s intimate, slender drama withholds much about its main character, which allows Gyllenhaal to sketch the outline of a fractured soul.

Leave The World Behind draws from familiar elements, but this adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel stands apart thanks to its excellent performances and slow, superb escalation of tension.

There are wonderful, quintessentially French flourishes scattered throughout.

Focused and thought-provoking, it should be welcomed as a return to form after the disappointment of The Unknown Girl.

A superbly silly sendup of the modern musical landscape, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is as thimble-deep as the throwaway hits it’s satirising, but also just as lively.

Non-professional Sangare is magnetic throughout, whether on the saddle or an interview hot seat.

Julia Roberts blasts through this family reunion drama-turned-thriller with one of the most forceful performances of her career.

It is as visually extraordinary as its predecessors and, while the film contains some of those earlier pictures’ weaknesses, the deficiencies are starting to feel like charming quirks in an otherwise transporting series.

The accomplished third film from Emanuel Parvu, Three Kilometers To The End Of The World is a disaster unfolding in slow motion. Superbly acted and deliberately paced, the film is a compulsive account of the shattering of a family, and of a life changed forever.

All Will Be Well is undoubtedly an old-fashioned drama, but it is no less effective for that classic structure.

Courage becomes not so much a study of a brave political theatre troupe but a portrait of a country at the crossroads, one that is likely to resonate with audiences worldwide.

Uncle Howard begins as a slightly tentative film about a nephew’s quest to discover more about his adored film-maker uncle, Howard Brookner. But it grows into a perceptive, poignant documentary which looks at many things.

How does where we are from impact on the kind of love we feel? López Riera’s answer, which can be summed up as boy meets girls meets magical realism meets women’s solidarity, is both intimate and ambitious in scope, thought-provoking and emotionally engaging.

Featuring superb turns from Vicky Krieps and the late Gaspard Ulliel - in his final role - as a couple facing the most difficult of choices, More Than Ever persuades, rather than forces, its audience to stare death in the face, and proves surprisingly life affirming in the process.

An unassuming character study set to poetic rhythms makes for an empathetic study of Black life, full of resolve.

Even when the lines uttered sound more like a statement than an actual conversation, Sen remains a master of everything he controls as Goldstone slowly inches towards its bullet-riddled finale.

It would be unsporting to say more but, simply put, there are moments of unalloyed terror (juxtaposed with a crowd-pleasing giddiness) that make Nope worth not just seeing on the big screen but with as huge a crowd as possible.

It is often very funny, unsettling and yet still proves illuminating on the character of Neruda and the battle for Chile in the 1940s.

The narrative may have familiar contours, but Ford’s close attention to the have-nots’ desire to transcend their circumstances gives the proceedings a gripping emotional undercurrent.

The only thing that’s clear from start to finish is that Hadžihalilovic is in absolute command of her unsettling cinematic realm.

Krieps is terrific in a role which depicts Elisabeth as both a victim of her gilded cage circumstances and a chain-smoking self-absorbed uber-bitch.

Goat is a potent reminder that even traditional gender roles can be rife with angst, anxiety and devastating social pressures.

The well-drawn characters, clever plotting and sting of social commentary in a tale of pride and property create an entertaining film that could follow in the wake of Parasite, Squid Game and other South Korean success stories.

The situation of Israel’s Arab population is treated with poised satirical acidity in Let It Be Morning, a film mixing social comedy with a touch of absurdism that, though rooted in real-world conflict, has distinct echoes of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.

A suffocating slipknot drama, it embeds violence and extortion in a destructive ecosystem, showing that every favour is loaded, every gift poisoned, every debt unpayable. Brutality never cleanses in Kim’s impressive debut; it simply engenders more brutality.

What gives the film a force that balances out the delicacy is a commanding, charismatic lead by Wendy Chinchilla Araya, best known as a dancer, whose highly physical presence in turn evokes Clara’s sensitivity, isolation, vulnerability, fury and – despite the pressure to keep it hidden – powerful sexuality.

Structurally inventive, if not downright format-twisting, it takes a Jacob’s Ladder to 1990s China, where a beleaguered police detective tries so hard to unravel a killing that he spins himself into seeming madness.

The combination of a unique personality and a fascinating place makes for a beguiling and poetic film, which blurs the lines between science and art.

Watching The Tale Of King Crab feels like watching the stories on which all later stories have been based. You also get brooding intensity and slippery, dreamlike atmospherics and dialogues that strip things back to their essentials.

Dancing across multiple themes and frequently upending expectations, Barbarian keeps us wonderfully uncertain about where it’s going — or even what it’s ultimately about — which only makes the picture that much more gripping.

It would take a hard heart not to break at the sight of Alex Wheatle (now a much-loved children’s author in the UK), sitting frozen on the sofa as his friend’s mother prepares his first-ever Christmas meal.

An old-fashioned, beautifully crafted nature documentary for family audiences.

Like taking a dip in alluring yet choppy surf, as its characters do often, it’s equally vivid and calm, swelling with emotion yet still in its approach.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is an impressive achievement, a piece of storytelling which balances moments of flighty whimsy against deeper existential questions, marking Foldes as a talent to watch in the world of adult-skewed animation.

Fizzing with ideas, as difficult to pin down as its heroine, Divines keeps generating electricity long after the lights have gone down.

Sarah Snook turns in a terrific performance which is always true to the character at every point of a complex arc.

Fascinating, mind-expanding, infuriating and bewildering, this is a bracingly ambitious documentary which embraces the artificiality of the computer generated animation which constitutes a large part of its approach.

Ziba is a genuine intellectual heroine, and Hekmat conveys a sense of how her introversion and seriousness might set her apart in a hedonistic high-school culture.

BPM (Beats Per Minute) is a moving, lump-in-the-throat love story but should also resonate on a political level as a testimony to the power of activism to awaken an indifferent world.

Its blend of styles and sensibilities may be occasionally confounding, but Full River Red is certainly never less than entertaining in its richly inventive mining of history.