It is the attention to detail and the refusal to compromise that allows Serra to create such a compelling, coherent vision.

Even though there’s an enormous amount to look at and digest, little of this film is truly memorable or thought-provoking.

It is, however, creepy, suspenseful and nerve-wracking - and marks Gillespie and Kostanski as genre auteurs in the making.

Jon Nguyen’s carefully-calibrated ode to Lynch is in itself Lynchian, an essential picture for the director’s legion of fans.

All This Panic has a refreshingly light touch. These girls can make heavy weather of routine situations yet shoulder enormous responsibilities with grace and good humour.

It may be modest in scale but the film is assured in both intention and execution, building successfully towards a quietly moving climax.

I, Olga Hepnarova struggles with its difficult central character, always spiky and occasionally psychotic but never really as intriguing as the filmmakers clearly believe.

A grab bag of vulgarities, sex jokes, slapstick, nudity and chase scenes, the action-comedy CHIPS holds together better than expected, thanks largely to the goofy, dim-bulb rapport between stars Dax Shepard and Michael Peña.

While the bracingly bleak climax will come as a surprise to pretty much nobody, it still comes with an efficiently grisly pay off.

This considered, muted drama can’t escape a fussy tastefulness — not to mention inevitable comparisons to more crackling treatments of similar subject matter.

A teen group therapy session disguised as a superhero movie, Power Rangers is numbingly predictable and cynically made, recycling myriad blockbuster tropes but draining their adolescent pleasures in the process.

The quality of the performances goes some way towards mitigating the navel-gazing tendencies of the dialogue. Seymour, in particular, gives a lovely, textured vulnerability to recovering alcoholic Kate.

The initial promise of a South African Brokeback Mountain broadens into a measured consideration of class, race, self-loathing and self-assertion in a compact but pleasingly complex drama.

Warped visuals and layered dialogue give a sense of Dylan’s psychological battleground, while the use of reflective surfaces underscores Wang’s exploration of identity and perception.

The Devil’s Candy is a masterful slow burn, the horror and violence alluded to rather than seen.

Even if it tells the age-old story of the filthy rich getting richer and the poor going nowhere, Betting on Zero is still rather shocking.

Phillips’ collaborators work in harmony with the natural, nuanced acting; credits across the board are stylish and smooth, with lensing a standout. Also of particular note is the design; a rich, forest-driven colour saturation which suits the hooded houses and shadowy driveways of these traumatised teens.

What might have been a bleak account of not quite trying and therefore never really failing actually becomes an unlikely and engaging missive of hope and of choice, albeit steeped in reality.

The pivotal scenes may be fictionalised, but the prickling, precarious threat is clammily authentic and inspired by the experiences of the film’s writer, director and star, Ana Asensio, as an undocumented Spanish immigrant eking out an existence in New York.

There’s plenty of Lynch-light in dark interiors and empty staircases as Katz’s portrait of hipster La La Land winds through familiar territory. Gemini may not show too much that’s novel about that noir world, but we see new strengths in its lead actress.

Tickling Giants shows how a window of freedom and hope can unleash surges of creativity, like the improbable overnight success of a surgeon satirist.

Best appreciated as a sensory experience whose deeper meanings aren’t nearly as profound as the filmmaker and cast believe, Song To Song demonstrates that Malick remains a singular artist — albeit one in a palpable rut.

Director Nathan Morlando makes a concerted effort to inject dynamism and emotion into the telling of Mean Dreams, but fights a losing battle against the cliched writing and some risible plotting.

The film’s down-and-dirty nastiness does have its merits, but the bloodshed isn’t nearly as interesting when the characters are as exciting as a spreadsheet.

Native New Yorker Michael O’Shea makes an impressively confident directorial debut with The Transfiguration, a vampire movie that looks, feels, walks and talks like a gritty US indie flick.

Hyperactive, oddly premised and never quite as endearing as it should be, The Boss Baby is an animated family comedy that seems to have all the right elements but just doesn’t deliver.

This fragile, frank film chronicles its subjects with stripped-down intimacy, which can sometimes border on feeling like simple gawking. But it’s impossible not to care deeply about these anxious lovebirds, especially as we begin to understand the obstacles threatening their relationship.

A deftly handled cautionary tale, there is a compulsive, creeping horror to this portrait of a man losing all self-respect. That said, it is frequently a tough watch.

What’s lacking here, mostly, is a clarity of vision and control of tone that would give this prestige Euro-Western’s mannerisms a focus.

Childhood is a mystery we endlessly come back to and a place the Leydens have never fully left; Ní Chianáin gives the viewer an intimate view of it in this unusual little story.

Rauniyar handles the socio-political complexities of life post-conflict with a lightness of touch and flashes of absurdist humour. Much more than a photogenic ethnographic postcard from afar, this is a deceptively complex story of muddled allegiances and proscriptive social rules.

More than a quarter of a century later, Beauty and the Beast enchants again as a swirling blend of live-action story, stage, screen and sheer, rococo-spun fantasy.

The film is called, and certainly contains, cries from Syria but in itself Afineevsky’s documentary is more of a shout, a piercing scream.

Save the highly predictable decider, the on-court battles are satisfyingly fast and fierce, but the tension they generate is undercut by the labored Oedipal melodrama that contains them.

It’s a work of undeniable historical significance.

The Settlers is captivating viewing for the most part. But it’s also muddled in its combination of historical and contemporary storytelling.

If the film belongs to anyone, it’s creature designer Carlos Huante. Kong is expressive and impressive, both in hair and full-body movement, and his interaction – with water, humans, other animals – is consistently fluid.

This is a picture with first-rate fight choreography to match the quality of the martial arts talent involved.

Tightly focused and ambitious in its multiple themes, the tale touches on how the death penalty radiates out to affect the living.

Retro horror and racial tension mix to surprisingly entertaining effect in Get Out.

Crowds will be pleased, tears will be shed and audiences should rally to the passion and drama onscreen. The stakes are high in Step.

Liu Jian’s animation Have a Nice Day is at once a bloodthirsty genre thriller; a political statement about China, globalization and capitalism; and a vibrantly witty piece of postmodern pop art.

The message of doom is mitigated by the comraderie of men and women determined to do good, but more so by the wondrous species of coral under threat.

A trim, evenly-paced 80 minutes, XX is one of the more consistent contemporary horror anthologies.

The film is undoubtedly a tour de force, not least by the two actors, who essentially play several characters - or at least, multiple aspects of the two lovers - and who both audaciously shed inhibitions in a film that is at times as exposing sexually as it is psychologically.

A spry romp through the seven years leading up to the drafting of the Communist Manifesto, Raoul Peck’s biopic of Karl Marx’s early years feels like a mix between a prestige BBC drama and a Marx For Dummies primer.

Pondering imbalances of power is always timely, and here, it adds an extra layer of urgency and commentary to an already potent and perceptive offering.

The film’s most considerable achievement, however, is to sustain its drama on a finely poised level of emotional intimacy, while sometimes hitting us with intense imagistic charges, not least the graphic slaughterhouse scenes at the start.

Undemonstrative but at the same time oddly compelling - rather like its eponymous main character - Felicité is a challenging, perhaps overlong, but also quietly resonant slice of new African cinema.

The most enjoyable film yet from a director whose conceptual seriousness has often seemed daunting.

Unimpeachably honest intentions and a solid, laid-back lead performance by star Reda Kateb mean that at least the film won’t be derided as Django Untuned.

In Moverman’s hands, it becomes a contemporary American fable about savagery lurking behind civilised facades, about class and racial divisions in a country that calls itself united, and about ethical vacuums in a connected, online society. It’s also an unbalanced, uneven ride, a distracting hot and cold shower of intense scenes featuring four terrific actors and long, meandering passages of flashback filler.

The style is minimalist and meandering but does eventually add up to an unsettling portrait of three generations connected by blood if not affection.

Boasting a few nifty action sequences and the always-compelling Jackman, Logan self-consciously aspires to retire this iteration of the steel-clawed hero with epic grandeur, and the results are often rousingly bleak. And yet, the risks taken...only make the formulaic redemption story and clichéd emotional underpinnings increasingly frustrating.

As economical in his visual style as he is with his dialogue, Kaurismaki makes the most out of having his actors do the least.

Kim Min-hee, especially, gives another stellar performance.

Effectively a chamber piece spiked with musings on the difficulty of art, the piece is by nature a little stagey as well as talky.

Driven by a powerhouse performance by mesmerising transgender actress Vega, the fifth feature from Sebastián Lelio combines urgent naturalism with occasional flickers of fantasy to impressive, and wrenchingly emotional effect.

Sometimes sexy, sometimes campy, Fifty Shades Darker is a smorgasbord of silliness, its dopey pleasures indistinguishable from its many awkwardly melodramatic moments.

The film is visually arresting, but narratively stale.

A slight but ultimately moving drama.

While this spin-off to 2014’s more consistently inspired The Lego Movie is a decidedly hit-or-miss affair, it boasts enough giddy good humour and manic rambunctiousness to bludgeon the viewer into submission.

A film that, after its initial promise, descends, at times, into TV-historical-drama mannerisms.

Much like its Oscar-winning star, the film coasts along on charm and audience goodwill, although a little more edge might have helped.

The documentary, as it grieves for those losses, points to divisions in American society that are as glaring as ever.

War On Everyone is essentially a clothes hanger for smart one-liners, verbal and visual, and its success will depend partly on how folks like the look of the clothes hanger.

Some zinging dialogue and pungent photography are complemented by the two young leads and the late Anton Yelchin in support.

Debut director Geremy Jasper has said Patti is part-modelled on his own life, and there’s a real empathy on display here for her internal and external struggles, a gift which Mcdonald makes the most of in her own debut.

An initially captivating drama that loses steam once predictability starts to take hold.

Slow-paced but always absorbing, the film features a magnetic central performance by Ia Shugliashvili as one of the strongest, most quietly heroic introverts we’ve seen on screen in a while.

In a bittersweet film like this, you wouldn’t call that magical, but you could call it real, as if the Dardennes came to Brooklyn, only funnier. That mood succeeds thanks to understated performances by Weinstein’s cast of mostly non-professionals, who seem to be working according to a life-script that they know well.

A poetic, though admittedly esoteric piece of cinema.

Unavoidably uneven but fairly engaging throughout, Manifesto is a cavalcade of provocative ideas, arresting visuals and fabulous wigs.

Golden Exits is an idiosyncratic film about little moments of human pain and loneliness. There’s jealousy, sadness, unfulfilled loves and lives, all of it relayed in quiet conversations and glances, rather than big dramatic scenes.

Lee’s love for this hard land and the boy trapped in it – so fully embodied by young British actor Josh O’Connor – is unexpectedly moving and rich.

This is a well crafted and often stylish film but you suspect it could have had a greater impact with more room for the individual elements to breathe.

The mirror it holds up to its subjects — and perhaps the audience — is incredibly, sometimes painfully illuminating.

Chaotic lives can make for a muddled storyline, yet ultimately Hegemann allows her central character some kind of growth.

Sad, proud, loud, funny, energetic and affecting, Kiki the documentary reflects accurately the spirit of kiki, the scene.

Kelly’s film is a competent feature debut – elegantly filmed and paced to keep viewers with Franco on an improbable ride. Yet the script views Glatze from a distance, never really entering his head to penetrate beyond the character’s own apologia for a bizarre life change.

City of Ghosts shows us the power of media to bring the grim truth about life under ISIS to the world, even when under a death sentence. In keeping our eyes on Raqqa, it also reminds us of the limits of that power.

Offering predictably heartfelt messages about seizing the day, The Last Word can be very sweet and funny, but its lightness starts to feel cloying rather than ebullient.

The Polka King, and Jan’s plight, never quite reaches the level of palpable human drama of their previous effort. Black does his best to make Jan a vulnerable and sympathetic character, but neither the script nor the direction allows him to become fully dimensional.

Soft and sweet, Kirsten Tan’s bright and airy debut is also quietly eloquent, speaking of a loss and regret.

The Yellow Birds is a war movie whose outlines may be familiar — but its emotional clarity gives this drama an almost crushing sense of intimacy.

The film’s second act is near spot-on comedy of discomfort.

Fate is a blunt instrument here. Yet you still wind up asking for more depth from the characters for whom Hittman is asking you to feel something.

The film may be short on analysis, but it’s clear that systematic government failures at the local and state level have created a toxic climate, and Whose Streets? displays the seething emotions that resulted.

Some issues, Trophy powerfully conveys, are bigger and broader than they initially appear.

Unfortunately, a glib superficiality hangs heavy over the narrative. Rather than really explore these lost and angry souls who feel destined to be despondent, Wilson settles for simplistic quirkiness, which makes the characters merely bland misanthropic types instead of fleshed-out individuals.

Wind River can be thrilling and it owns the ability to surprise and shock throughout.

Mudbound is full of strong performances, singular moments, and a heavy heart, but it’s an over-ambitious affair that struggles to find the right balance between its many characters.

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

Deutch, who appeared in Beautiful Creatures as well as Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some, delivers a sympathetic lead performance, carrying the film with equal doses of sweetness and grace, strength and vulnerability.

As a satire about L.A. living, the movie delivers its fair share of zingers. With a script that recalls Whit Stillman and TV sitcoms, Morgan’s crisp dialogue sometimes hits its target.

It’s a beautiful, supremely touching performance from Chalamet which gives this surprisingly safe story its moving purity.

An amiable, average-at-best caper-like quest remains just that, even with recognisable talent, and even more so when its combination of elements is clearly stretched.

If you’re looking for more than laughs, this comedy aspiring to drama takes you only so far.