In terms of filmed stage entertainment, Hamilton is a cut above (literally, as there’s an overhead camera, as well as one from the back of the stage). Hamilton is a technically difficult, fast and extremely complex stage show to perform: this film puts the viewer up close but also backs out when appropriate and makes strong strategic decisions on how to frame and move.

In a way, the film is its own genre – the found-footage documentary. There are no interviews with other people, no self-described experts. Just Hoon, who – adding to the film’s melancholy sense of waste – comes across as an unspoiled, charismatic and mostly amiable young man.

Weisse puts her own, distinctive spin on this film, keeping the audience guessing about whose story this really is, feeling its way slowly towards a bracing, risky dramatic conclusion that suddenly reshuffles the cards we’ve been dealt.

As a snapshot of a time, a talent and an album, Spike Lee’s absorbing, moving and resolutely toe-tapping documentary about the music and impact of Michael Jackson’s album Bad, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, is a wonderfully complex look into the creative genius of Jackson.

From the very beginning of Athlete A, Cohen and Shenk (Audrie & Daisy and An Inconvenient Sequel) visually confront the audience with the clear physical evidence that their documentary is about abused children and they never let that image fade away.

Compact, edge-of-the-seat storytelling that makes good use of Joseph Gordon Levitt’s decent, appealing everyman persona, 7500 may have its flaws but it still marks an impressive feature debut for Vollrath.

His fans will probably adore it, think it cute and original, the rest of the audience will sigh again in resignation and wonder whether this game of cinema riddles does have anything significant to say behind its smiling, insouciant wrapping.

This is an earnest, half-baked fairy story drenched in a thick soup of CGI. It’s awkwardly staged, with turgid, expository dialogue that is appreciably tricky for a palpably ill-at-ease young cast to deliver

Lee is firing off rounds in all directions here. Some land, some distract, some feel like overkill. For cineastes, it’s a provocative redrawing of the canon; Coming Home or The Deerhunter, and even Stone’s so-called “definitive” work including Platoon now seem only part of the picture.

Like protagonist Pete Davidson, on whose life it is loosely based, The King Of Staten Island is a loping, amiable, sweetly-funny film, and yet you sometimes wish there was a bit less of it.

There’s a savage, sometimes surreal wit to this anarchic tale of violence and revenge; it’s an eye catching first feature from actress Mirrah Foulkes, and an intriguingly eccentric addition to an already offbeat CV for Wasikowska.

The approach is scrupulously even-handed. The film is just as interested in mild-mannered Sue’s journey as it is in Daniel’s coming of age. The screenplay, adapted by Lisa Owens (Bird’s wife) from an award winning graphic novel by Joff Winterhart, is wryly low key, with a keen eye for the subtle stabs and small daily humiliations that gradually mount.

The film’s most rewarding strand is the inventive, pointed way in which clothes and textiles are used as metaphors both for female constraints and female defiance.

All the lavish sets and gorgeous costumes in the world – and they are here – can’t quite cover over the cracks in Friedkin’s canvas, constructed by three writers from a non-fiction book.

There’s an oddball intrigue and a dry absurdist humour to this journey which largely transcends the uneven pacing

This gentle comedy trades heavily on Tsai Chin’s deliciously abrasive central performance, but stumbles when it comes to the execution of the action sequences

The debut feature by Belarus-born, US-educated Darya Zhuk may be set in the mid-90s, but with a plot founded on a young Belarussian’s obsessive desire for an American visa, and a sting in the tale that chimes with the #metoo movement, it has a remarkably topical ring to it.

Quietly, profoundly moving.

This Paris-set debut feature from Australian director Josephine Mackerras negotiates morally complex territory and the minefield of society’s double standards with an admirably light step.

As fascinating as the film’s production process proves, it’s the results of their creative labours that entrance and enchant.

The film-making itself can stumble - this isn’t always a smooth watch; and such heartfelt sentiment sets it apart from more savvily sophisticated similar dramas.

Cesar Diaz’s debut feature is both compact and ambitious, distilling its larger themes into the core story of one young man and his secretive mother.

It is a grim, gruelling two hours that might benefit from some editing but Balagov is clearly a talent to watch and festivals championing new discoveries will want to take note.

Jonze’s film (his first full-length feature since 2013’s Her) sits in an awkward gap between live performance and event cinema.

As cheery as the whole affair can be, no amount of razzle-dazzle can distract from World Tour’s meagre storytelling — or the gnawing suspicion that the proceedings are targeting overstimulated young viewers who just want nonstop sensation.

There’s a great deal of fun to be had watching Hardiman play out her cards; we know the hand she’s holding, but it’s a nice-looking deck nonetheless.

A simple story celebrating the importance of showing resilience and goodness in the face of intolerance, To The Stars never shouts to make its points. All the better that it forces you to lean in so you can really hear.

Szumowska’s command of craft and a torrent of unsettling imagery will enhance her reputation as a visionary director.

The movie sometimes overstates its ideas, but Poots keeps Vivarium from being just a coy, chilly intellectual exercise. She adds flesh and soul to what might be the film’s most disturbing notion: In some ways, we all become encased in the lives we have stumbled into.

With an ambition that far exceeds its relatively small on-screen scale, Atlantis is a remarkable piece of filmmaking from an exciting emerging Eastern European voice.

Although the story’s point is clear, the plotting is thin, and it can be easy at times for viewers to feel as confined as the prisoners. But the production design – all grey cement walls, with that platform cutting through the center of the screen like an infernal dumbwaiter – is superb.

For a film so tied to a thoroughbred showcase, this broad crowd-pleaser blatantly relies on well-worn parts.

The Hunt is the cinematic equivalent of watching strangers argue on the internet about politics: It’s fleetingly amusing but, ultimately, not the best use of anyone’s time.

Its quiet humanism and painstaking attention to detail are sure to appeal to the core audience which has faithfully followed her for more than a decade.

Often in sports, teams run the same plays over and over again, simply because they work. That’s true of The Way Back as well: We appreciate the expert skill, even if we know almost every move by heart.

In a film lasting a shade over two hours, consisting of just 46 separate shots, the undisputed emperor of Taiwanese slow cinema crafts a ravishing, wordless story of urban loneliness.

Although There Is No Evil is a brave and impassioned work, the seams show.

Those in the ‘for’ camp are likely to find Garrel’s The Salt of Tears one of the most finely tuned and richly achieved of his recent works .

Two bravura performances can’t disguise the thinness of a script that exposes just how uninteresting this ‘sliding doors’ game can be. The Roads Not Taken redeems itself, partly, through the compassion and sensitivity with which it deals with the mind-ravaging illness at its core.

Despite Willem Dafoe bringing gnarled gravitas to a screenplay which pinballs between oblique portent and grotesque shock tactics, this is an incoherent indulgence.

Meditative and meandering, this handsomely shot but unfocused picture might present something of a challenge to all but the most dedicated students of Chinese cultural history.

Petzold’s lean, crisply-shot tale is a deft shape-changer, switching mood and register, interlacing romance with suspense and sudden jabs of humour.

Although perhaps on the enigmatic end of the Hong spectrum, The Woman Who Ran touches rewardingly on themes such as relationship dynamics and gender roles. The delicacy of the predominantly female-driven storytelling is unassuming but beguiling. And Hong goes so far as to skewer his own tendency to indulge monologuing windbag male characters in previous films.

The pleasure of watching five fine actors feed on each other’s crackling dramatic energy drives this sensitive if not exactly groundbreaking Swiss cancer drama.

While the picture doesn’t quite maintain its vigorous energy through to the very end, it is still a satisfyingly knotty exploration of the bi-cultural experience.

Altogether solemn in tone, the film is undeniably handsome, with DoP Benoît Delhomme steeping the Japanese landscape in melancholy atmospherics, but Minimata tends to over-aestheticise its material, not least in the too-elegant recreations of Smith’s black and white imagery.

The film might not be doing anything revolutionary with the gay coming of age story, but it is heartfelt and honest. And at times, unexpectedly hot.

For all its directorial mastery, this austere cine-symposium feels like an artistic blind alley, and one that recklessly presumes an audience of committed chin-strokers with a preternatural attention span.

Last And First Men is a stunning work of beauty and horror.

In its most poignant, resonant moments, the film feels both devastatingly personal and affectingly revelatory: a simultaneously forceful and tender piece of existential contemplation that’s intricately tied to Wilczynski’s life but still universal in its themes. But when it meanders, which is perhaps more often than it should, it requires serious commitment from its audience.

The second film from Natalia Meta is a slippery thing to pin down. Like the ragged mental state of its main character, it unravels as it goes on. But it is also never less than stridently entertaining, in part thanks to a brittle central performance from Erica Rivas.

Natasha certainly proves that Khrzhanovsky is a risk-taker, and his actors even more so. But it’s a puzzling, inconclusive drama that doesn’t quite hold its own outside the parameters of the overall project.

The film shows plenty of ambition and imagination delivered with considerable visual elegance, yet still ends up feeling somewhat airlessly conceptual.

Tim Sutton’s idiosyncratic outsider romance contains moments of haunting oddness, but has a tendency to stab home its points and issues rather emphatically.

The transporting power of art is a difficult thing to capture in cinema at the best of times, and this film struggles to do so, leaning heavily on a score which signposts the emotional content of each scene a little too emphatically.

Shirley will find an eager audience at a cultural moment which increasingly values emotional expression. But many will find the film an over-rich brew that arguably stresses Jackson’s visionary inspiration at the expense of the craft, canniness and lucidity of a writer whose work was characterised by supreme control, even if her troubled life wasn’t.

Whannell is so invested in unloading juicy surprises that this initially realistic story becomes increasingly preposterous, but Moss keeps the film anchored in plausibility; although sometimes just barely.

Burdened with a drab quest narrative and populated by sweet but unmemorable characters, the studio’s 22nd feature still delivers glorious animation and the occasional tear-jerking sequence. But whether it’s the pedestrian design of this mythical realm or the simplistic story of squabbling brothers in search of their long-lost father, Onward never feels like much of an advancement.

Tibetan road movie Jinpa is a playful, gently perplexing and distinctly stylish fifth feature from director Pema Tseden.

Distinguished by a cast in which the trans characters are played by trans actors, the film effectively uses the trials of an individual life to illuminate the prejudices faced by a wider community.

The people interviewed are sharp and witty, carrying their heroism lightly and revealing a strength of character that sustained them through lengthy imprisonment and beyond.

Call Of The Wild isn’t animation, it isn’t live action, it isn’t fish, fowl or dog and somewhere in between it falls off its sled. Mankind can always benefit from some digital enhancement; man’s best friend, not so much.

Fantasy Island is the sort of inept, forgettable disaster that doesn’t even induce so-bad-it’s-good chuckles.

Although the film sometimes dips into muddled melodrama, those occasional setbacks can’t derail a story filled with warm, resonant characters trying to fathom their own hearts.

Despite some sweetness and playful absurdity, this big-screen outing feels mostly like derivative, fussed-over product.

An instantly engaging tale of a young male dancer’s sexual awakening in contemporary Tbilisi, And Then We Danced is personal and political, romantic and educational.

The movie is delightfully odd but not consistently inspired, often straining to rewrite the rules of superhero cinema, a mixture of good and bad ideas all mashed together. Where other comic-book movies lumber along with self-importance, this film is a breezy, amoral lark, which proves somewhat refreshing. But that’s not enough to allow Birds’ hit-or-miss pleasure to soar.

While the story’s sturdy, familiar structure remains resonant, this version never feels particularly inspired or revelatory, despite some lovely moments scattered throughout.

Built on a potent mixture of quiet bravery and hard-won access, David France’s new documentary, Welcome to Chechnya, puts audiences in the middle of the literally life-or-death struggle of an already endangered minority.

It can be a challenge to get on this movie’s frequency, but the strange signals Tesla emits are nonetheless fascinating.

Dramatising Steinem’s life during different periods, and with different actresses, Taymor has crafted an exceedingly thoughtful portrait of a leader and the women’s movement she championed.

All in all, Nine Days is a stellar feature debut, with strong filmmaking, from its assured compositions to its superb dimly lit frames, where shafts of outside light or wall lamps illuminate slivers of the sets. And Winston Duke, who appears in just about every scene in the film, offers a complex portrait of a wounded man.

On the whole, The Father incorporates what could have just been a storytelling gimmick and infuses it with such sorrow, grace and even the occasional dark joke that it becomes a profound exploration of how we say goodbye to someone dear to us — even though they have not yet really gone.

Director Euros Lyn overdoes the feel-good trappings, but it’s hard to deny the genuine sentiment that the movie stirs up.

Sure, the motorcycle wheelies are cool, but there’s nothing more intense than the raw emotion that comes from a mother trying to protect her child.

The Assistant is inspired by potentially scandalous material but subverts expectations, asking the audience to consider the broader societal implications of the crime.

A compelling political campaign chronicle and an incisive allegory of American democracy, Boys State is also much more fun that you’d expect.

Like the book, Reed Morano’s film is long on atmosphere and short on the kind of detail a spy thriller needs to be credible.

The result is a deeply touching tapestry that celebrates the diversity and cultural richness of LA, while at the same time exploring the hopes and fears of a generation heading into an uncertain adulthood.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the movie works better as a free-floating societal critique — of materialism, of so-called domestic tranquillity — than as an incisive commentary on any of the topics it brushes up against. But The Nest’s atmosphere of animosity is palpable enough that it’s wicked fun simply watching the O’Haras become unglued.

Minari is never downbeat, despite the challenges the characters face. Chung’s love for his characters—and the Arkansas farmland where he grew up—always shines through.

Proficiently directed by Sara Colangelo (The Kindergarten Teacher), well-acted by Keaton and co-star Amy Ryan as Feinberg’s deputy Camille Biros, and made with the respect and reverence that its subject deserves, Worth nevertheless remains a bit too stolid and too on-the-nose.

It’s not simply that Uncle Frank becomes just another road-trip comedy — it’s that Ball resorts to clichéd or contrived narrative devices to keep the story going.

Wendy casts a powerful spell — the movie has the potency of a dusty folktale brought to vivid life — but it can be frustrating that Zeitlin doesn’t have much interesting to say beyond his stylistic flourishes and evocative atmosphere.

It’s a commercially marketable prospect, sure, thanks to a committed performance from Julia-Louis Dreyfus (who also produces), but Downhill has also groomed out the subtlety from the original Swedish-language source material in some wincing stabs at cross-cultural comedy.

The overly busy story provides countless opportunities to create imaginative worlds and strange characters, but it also tends to feel like a string of set pieces rather than something that builds dramatic tension or momentum.

Promising Young Woman builds to a truly shocking climax that delivers Fennell’s themes with a dark and twisted sense of humour—and justice. It’s a clever and unexpected turn in a film full of surprises.

Possessor is ultra stylish and uber violent, but, despite a top tier cast, it’s not always entirely clear what is going on and who is in control of the finger on the trigger.

Revelatory, moving, and honest, it is essentially the story of one brave woman’s decision to publicly accuse the rap mogul Russell Simmons of harassment and rape. But it’s also a painful, parsed education on the subject of black women and abuse.

A beautifully bizarre film whose considerable strangeness allows for sharp observations about family, loneliness and the terror of emotional intimacy, Kajillionaire is further proof of writer-director Miranda July’s ability to bend reality to her will.

Wittock has neatly sketched out her subject and a groovy neon palette for scenes involving Jumbo “himself”, but the story and general characterisation remains broad and thinly developed.

Blank’s lively debut feels liberated by its maker’s creative freedom.

Whenever Herself settles into predictability, the strength of Dunne’s performance pulls that comfortable rug away. And if her screenplay and her acting helps audiences understand what it is to be homeless, to be vulnerable in this way, Herself will have been a A-grade build by an A-list team.

This spy drama is bolstered by Benedict Cumberbatch’s stripped-down performance, and there’s plenty of pungent Cold War suspense to savour. And yet, Ironbark feels like a bit of a missed opportunity: The earnestness doesn’t necessarily do justice to the inherently absorbing material.

The Dissident holds few new revelations but presents its case with enough infuriating evidence and storytelling power to make it worthwhile.

A film to respect for its audacity, admire for its lead female performance perhaps, but also view as dramatically contrived.

Footage is surprising, and, occasionally heart-breaking; not because of the disabilities onscreen, but because it recalls the idealism of the 1970s, long since gone.

The film is a unique, albeit rarefied example of hybrid cinema that reveals emotional truths through staged reality.