Salles never over-labours the film’s emotional beats, relying instead on Torres’ magnificent, intricately layered performance to drive the picture.

Ratchapoom’s feature debut is a visually ambitious and thematically layered big swing that’s as polarising as it is creative.

[An] unusually direct, moving and deceptively simple exploration of love – and of film – as defences against forgetting.

The film manages the tricky feat of both staying true to Waters breathless, page-turning prose, and creating a wholly persuasive new milieu for the story.

A potent emotional charge, very contemporary eco-consciousness, and film-making that at its best fairly sizzles in its strangeness mark out EO as an animal film that stands defiantly on its own hooves.

Stuffed with gorgeous costumes, vivid choreography and deft tunes, Black Is King doesn’t have the depth or anguish that made Lemonade so epochal, but its more inspirational tenor and consistently high artistry make this a feast for eyes and ears.

While the Chilean-Spanish writer/director weighs down every second of Blanco En Blanco with tension and solemnity, its big moments continually hit their marks – including the devastation and absurdity of its prolonged final sequence.

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.

The film derives a magnetic continuity, and an unsettling range of dynamics, from Haque Badhon’s performance

The structure of The Plains is playful and idiosyncratic, rather than formalist or rigid.

What comes across strongest is the sheer uncertainty gripping both the caregivers and the infected — no one has experienced anything like this, and no one knows what could happen next.

A coming-of-age tale rendered with humour, sensitivity and intelligence, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a marvellous look at adolescence which is frank but also affectionately attuned to the excitement and confusion of being young.

The Truffle Hunters is a film as distinctive and lingering as the scent of the rare tuber that inspires it.

Judas is an explosion of pent-up plotting, as if the film industry itself would only have this one chance to make a film about the Panther movement and it all has to be told in one go. Hopefully, this is not to be the case. As this film rises up to an unthinkable conclusion, there is clearly so much more to tell, and, as always, to learn.

Once Upon A Time….in Hollywood is beautifully made. Beyond all the ‘Tarantino-esque’ touches of the action, the banter, the violence, the constant movie references, there’s a real craft at play here.

Like Kore-eda’s 2008 family drama Still Walking, this is a film which is interested in the architecture, both emotional and physical, of the family home.

Hadi has an eye for detail, echoes and lyrical touches.

Although sometimes a little overstuffed, the picture consistently gets under the skin thanks to its expertly-staged fright sequences that reverberate with insidious societal ills.

Like McQueen’s designs, it is thrilling, troubling and tinged with tragedy.

Earth Mama offers no falsely encouraging happy ending, but its clear-eyed humanity nonetheless feels like a balm. In a society that often tries to sweep the poor away so that they’re out of sight, this film encourages us to see — and to care.

Wilde delivers a confident feature directorial debut, mixing humour, embarrassment and poignancy to crowd-pleasing effect.

Whether the pen is mightier than the sword may be up for debate, but as this engaging and hopeful documentary by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh shows, words have the power to change things when wielded carefully.

Never appearing to judge any situation, Kingdon confidently allows the images to tell a fascinating, universal story of inequality and class division, revealing a country that feels more like a capitalist society than anyone’s idea of a Communist state.

Sweeney never lets you forget that Reality Leigh Winner was just a young woman who believed she needed to act, which is why the picture works so well: her ordinariness makes her seem all the more helpless, and also more relatable. She could be any of us.

Bellocchio’s motives for making the film are in part to make sense of the events, in part, one suspects, to exorcise a lingering sense of survivor’s guilt. Yet for all the laudable intentions, Camillo still gets slightly lost in the rambling anecdotes, padding and extraneous details.

Arrestingly plotted and bracingly acted, this story about the biting hardships faced by refugees who have left the danger of their homeland only to be left nationless could hardly be more relevant.

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.

Laxe maintains rising tension throughout, although to frustratingly inconclusve effect and somewhat at the cost of conventional dramatic satisfactions, but the boldness of the undertaking will appeal mightily to cinephiles hungry for movies that take real risks.

The film is uneven: gripping when it maps out psychological stresses in a claustrophobic domestic setting, less so in the final stretches when it incongruously morphs into a women-in-peril thriller.

Andrea Riseborough gives a guttural and reliably first-rate performance as the titular Leslie in Michael Morris’ painfully earnest feature debut about the limits of control.

The film’s insights into the isolation evident in the relationships most take for granted — marriages, parent-child connections and long-term friendships — don’t merely hit their targets; they smash them with a sledgehammer.

This sequel may not be as buoyant as previous chapters, but the filmmakers’ continued commitment to honouring these characters — and to understanding what is so universal about their quest to love and be loved — is worth treasuring.

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.

Armin seems to get less interesting as a character rather than more as his quest for survival takes priority. Ultimately you wonder whether, dramatically speaking, it was worth wiping out a planet full of people just so that one useless bloke could finally get his act together.

It’s an appealing little charmer of a film, captured with a pleasingly lithe and lively animation style.

In The Heights’ boisterous tone — its uplifting mix of defiance and perseverance — deftly communicates the sense of scraping by but dreaming of more, facing discrimination but refusing to be silenced.

The Seer And The Unseen director Sara Dosa has fashioned this documentary with modesty and sensitivity, in some ways as awed by the strange beauty and destructive power of the volcanos as she is by the nonchalant willingness of the Kraffts to put themselves at risk in the name of science.

A delicate exploration of how art can address (but never fully heal) personal pain, Hamnet is a potent love story anchored by Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal’s expertly modulated performances.

The Witch’s greatest asset is its precisely controlled menace, and so even when nothing terrifying is happening, it feels like something ominous could be unleashed at any moment.

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

Ramsay elevates the material way beyond the conventional by sheer filmmaking craft.

David Lowery’s beautifully conceived riff on the haunted-house movie emits an extra glow thanks to challenging but resonant performances from Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara.

The distinguishing, and perhaps unsurprising element - given McQueen’s strong characterisation in the past – is that each of the film’s many characters comes fully-formed.

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

The result is mixed: buoyantly energetic at times, manically unamusing at others and decidedly overstretched.

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

The result is that rare documentary that works equally effectively on the head and the heart, only making Murad’s heroism more remarkable in the process.

It’s a beautifully made film, with an impeccable lead performance from Ryan Gosling as the sober, sensitive astronaut. Yet it’s also a film which takes elegant flight but stalls across its extended closing sequences; a project which, in its probing of Armstrong’s emotional mechanisms, neglects the development of other characters who might have anchored it more securely.

Baseball is just a game, but Lund recognises why some need it so badly. On the diamond, these ageing men feel young again – if only for a few hours.

Hard Times, as the name title suggests, is not an easy film to watch, nor is it intended to be.

Our Time Machine is very carefully balanced between the personal and the professional. An elegant, focused piece of storytelling finds the space to explore the family history revealing the way in which these lives are inextricably linked with the history of China itself.

Writer-director Megan Park’s unassuming feature debut sensitively argues that young people should never have to face such horrific circumstances — but, given enough time, they can prove stronger than their concerned parents imagine.

The latest picture from husband and wife team Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji is an engrossing and thoughtful, if slightly meandering, portrait of contemporary China which straddles the impact of Tik Tok, the self-commodification of a whole generation of ambitious young people and the social and shadow of the pandemic.

The storytelling is so deft and slick, it almost feels scripted at times. But there are certain elements that you can’t dictate in advance, like the almost spiritual connection that grows between Nikola and the gangly, damaged bird that he rescues from the dump, and which, in turn, reaffirms Nikola’s bond with the land.

The space battles and lightsaber duels are appropriately exciting, but Johnson keeps a close eye on the human element that girds this galactic odyssey. Rather than simply regurgitating Star Wars’ past, The Last Jedi emphatically builds on it.

Free Solo wife and husband directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are forensic in the detail they provide and the range of testimonies they have assembled; the result is a tense, absorbing documentary with a strong emotional charge.

You could call it whimsical. Absurdist. Contrived. Or an unexpectedly unusual concept album that doesn’t quite come off but was worth the effort. And you would be correct every time.

Once the Seven-Samurai-style band of brothers is assembled, 13 Assassins is pure pleasure: and it culminates in a magnificent 45-minute showdown that has to be the best final battle sequence in cinema since, oh, Kill Bill at least.

The Blue Caftan is a keenly tuned, non-judgmental exploration of an enduring relationship that has thrived despite the stresses of conflicting desires and the pressures of social norms.

There’s something strangely beautiful about short filmmaker Elizabeth Lo’s concise, allegorical debut feature documentary, which starts off as a fly-on-the-fur exploration of Istanbul’s stray dog epidemic and becomes a lament about the difficulties of finding somewhere to belong in an increasingly fractured, and fractious, world.

A very basic formula, executed in bare-bones fashion, works a treat because this set of interviews with Brian De Palma on his life and films is so revealing, and entertaining, that little is needed here other than the man, his opinions and some telling illustrations.

The heartbreaking plunge into sisterhood and grief that is His Three Daughters is an intensely composed elegy about the devastating effect of saying goodbye to a parent.

An almost unbearably-tense, no-holds-barred drive through the nightmare of domestic terrorism, Custody is a can’t-look-away hybrid of gruelling reality and heightened cinematic technique. The mix is jarring, as intended, and this wrenching, heart-stopping film illustrates domestic violence and obsession in a way that makes the fear real.

The culturally specific elements that Iran-born, British-based first time writer-director Babak Anvari brings to the picture makes this a distinctive spin on a familiar premise.

The Forbidden Room is a tour de force that takes Maddin’s ambition through a maze of magical melodrama.

What’s most interesting, although it gets slightly buried under a few too many almost identical musical performances, is the film’s account of the fractious symbiosis of the guru-disciple relationship.

The Latasters rarely put a foot wrong - from their static opening shot in the town of Hapert to the final frames of Miss Kiet in her classroom, this is a beautifully-judged piece.

There’s a discourse going on here about family and memory, about what we lose if we turn ourselves into work machines who can “pull a 48” (go for 48 hours without sleep) that leeches subtly into the fabric of Kreutzer’s psycho-drama, buoyed by a fine use of setting, camera focus and colour.

Farsi’s film now stands as a powerful memorial to someone who was both ordinary and extraordinary.

There’s a lightness of touch to the performances, with Silver encouraging his actors to improvise on-set. Events may have made Ben something of a sadsack, but Schwartzman ensures there is still a glimmer in his eye, a hint that his lust for life is simply dormant.

The poignancy and low-key desperation of the situation in which the men find themselves is balanced by the film’s warmth and gentle humour. In a market crowded with migrant stories, this is something special.

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

Visually glorious, frequently very funny and genuinely profound, this is a picture which cries out to be seen on the big screen.

While there is no doubting the filmmakers’ admirably humanistic and progressive intentions, however, the picture itself somehow ends up less than the sum of its often-impressive parts.

Expertly paced, Glory builds to a cleverly staged off-camera climax that perfectly caps everything that has gone before.

[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.

It’s clear that waters need to be calmed or someone will be hurt, but The Librarians also shows that won’t happen unless people stand up and take action. So it’s a call to arms, then. But, be warned: a horror story too.

The Perfect Neighbor’s sombrely objective approach invites audiences to discover how this tragedy unfolded and speculate what, if anything, could have prevented it.

Kwedar never denies the harsh realities of the penitentiary system but, by preferring an ultimately hopeful tone, he eventually falls victim to some of the tropes of the prison drama which his thoughtful picture had, until that point, mostly sidestepped.

Ultimately, Chernov’s film is a compelling record of senseless destruction and death, and a salute to the enduring resilience of a people who refuse to surrender their home.

Turning Red is often very funny thanks to the fact that Shi lets her main character be smart and three-dimensional — the filmmaker doesn’t talk down to her adolescent audience by burdening the script with juvenile jokes.

Better Days may slide into somewhat hollow artfulness, but it’s hard not to be moved by its genuine concerns.

In its own rather clunky way, the film strikes a blow for feminism in central Africa, and Amina, who strikes several literal blows on the man who impregnated her daughter, ends the film unexpectedly empowered by the experience.

Office is first and foremost about enjoying cinema’s capacity to entertain and have fun, which Johnnie To certainly seems to have had himself in making it.

Loznitsa creates a fascinating and quietly devastating chronicle of invasion, occupation and slaughter. As ever, the Ukrainian director doesn’t labour his film with voiceover or overt authorial steers. Yet this is close to home, and it’s impossible not to feel that he’s holding his country to account; for while this was a Nazi extermination, it came with a degree of collusion.

With a terse 85-minute running time, The Guilty illustrates Möller’s confidence with the craft of film-making.

Huezo’s picture, which is loosely adapted from a novel by Jennifer Climent, is distinctive in its child’s-eye-view of this most abnormal of normalities.

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.

Precisely observed but somewhat aloof in tone, The Girl And The Spider builds into a symphony of separation and solitude.

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.

Though it centres human rights and environmental themes, The Territory is more than just an issues doc. It is moving precisely because it goes right to the heart of what filmmaking can be – a tool to capture, control and explicate a unique world view.

Predators may not find all the answers, but it offers a thought-provoking exploration of the questions and should attract audiences fascinated by the morality of the media and the complexities of crime and punishment.

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

The Lighthouse provides a marvellous chamber-drama platform for two actors, Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, who seize the opportunity with gusto.

Viet And Nam may studiously occupy a certain world cinema niche, but Truong’s flourishes ensure that it offers a richly personal blend of the authentic and the abstract.

Layering its fairly straightforward story of an adopted Irish girl who tracks down her birth mother with immersive visual and aural motifs, it plays more like modern operatic tragedy than run-of-the-mill social drama.

It may not know where to end, and it makes a surprising late-in-the-game play for sentimentality where it has previously been bracingly crisp about hot topics including abortion and post-natal depression, but it’s mostly a wry plea for tolerance when the world is most disposed to hear it.

A sensuous swath of striking imagery and otherworldly atmosphere, Mandy is a hypnotic, bloody pleasure.