Mascaro’s striking aesthetics give the film a texture and atmosphere that aligns the audience firmly with its protagonist; she’s seeking transcendence, and the movie she’s in approximates it one lustrous frame at a time.

The director’s latest has a lot to say about families and generational relationships, but this is also a film of quiet charm, anchored by a scatter of joyful performances.

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

With rigour and clarity of purpose, actor/director Fran Kranz holds the audience in his hands, probing at the unthinkable and daring to keep the faith.

Some people will always want what they do not have, but it is hard to imagine anyone feeling short-changed by such a tonally rich, thematically ambitious film.

It’s a dazzlingly executed, hugely enjoyable act of stylistic homage, but also the poignant story of a dysfunctional marriage and an insightful recreation of a critical and contradiction-ridden period of modern French history.

An iconic comic-book villain gets an appropriately epic origin story in Joker, which allows Joaquin Phoenix’s raw talent its grandest stage yet.

The protagonists are pathetic yet see themselves as bold and daring and in this Bonello has captured something about the present moment that rings absolutely true.

Bread And Roses conveys the full nightmare of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, but it becomes a celebration of resistance rather than a lament for what has been lost.

Quietly, profoundly moving.

Holding Liat is an emotionally rich, politically thought-provoking account of one Israeli-American family’s ordeal in the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

It is a striking, sustained artistic achievement, but one as painful and distressing to watch as it must have been to live through.

About Dry Grasses is a ravishingly cinematic piece of work that seems designed to spark animated, if not acrimonious, debate.

Riveting from start to finish.

This documentary reminds us that justice can be as elusive in the US suburbs as anywhere else, and that having guns keeps people who are born different from getting too close.

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

The film boasts plenty of comic-book action while also making room for a darker tone and emotional resonance rarely matched in previous installments. In a cinematic world stuffed with big-budget movies, Infinity War is a genuine blockbuster.

Co-scripted by Céline Sciamma, director of Water Lilies and Girlhood, Being 17 manifestly benefits from her insight into the problems of young people searching for their social and sexual identities; this, combined with Téchiné’s controlled vision and superb direction of actors, makes the new film a quietly potent proposition.

The Last Showgirl is an achingly vulnerable picture that both catapaults Pamela Anderson into the awards conversation and stands as Gia Coppola’s best film to date.

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

Fascinating and informative, it’s a ‘must-watch’ for film students and fans alike.

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

Kendrick’s measured approach pushes against genre expectations — which will no doubt disappoint viewers accustomed to streamable docuseries. Yet that makes her film an assured subversion which elicits both engrossing chills and surprising humor.

Remarkable access and nerves of steel (on the part of both the subjects and of filmmaker Hogir Hirori) makes for a riveting documentary which is as tense as it is revealing.

The pace, the jokes – never over-stressed – the score and even the sight-gags (such as Gromit reading Virginia Woof) all combine to produce a film which is delightfully light on its paws.

Maria Speth’s study of a veteran teacher and his early teens students lasts three and a half hours, but not a moment is wasted. Anyone who teaches, or has ever been taught, will find something to relish in this serious-minded but quietly celebratory film. just as Bachmann puts the students at ease, the film-makers have managed to do the same – unintrusively catching the pupils’ episodes of vulnerability, or certain telling moments, as when two of them exchange flirtatious taunts.

Unrelenting as its tone may be, the feature proves a delicately layered, deftly shot work that makes an incisive statement about the prevalence of apathy, arrogance and egotism in contemporary China and beyond.

Two strong performances root the film. Prabha’s role is to be the anchor to Anu’s flightiness; they modulate their performances well together, but are equally strong apart.

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.

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.

Jones is a marvel, really, all the more so now that time has refined and enhanced her unflagging lust for life. Fiennes delivers a documentary which captures that spirit in a way that’s cinematic and rousing.

This Dune dwarfs most contemporary sci-fi in its scope and execution, ably juggling multiple characters and settings so that it matches the sprawling drama of the original tome.

those who aren’t put off by the extensive subtitling will find themselves swept away by this family reunion which offers not only a masterful portrait of the contemporary Romanian middle-class but also a whole set of smart, perceptive reflections on the relativity of truth, on the failings of memory, the interpretation of history, the significance of religion and much more.

The striking feature film debut from Andreas Fontana brings a prickly thriller sensibility to the closed world of high finance and a piquancy to the phrase ‘dirty money’.

Finding Dory is a supremely delightful sequel. Although never challenging the original’s high standing within the Pixar pantheon, this follow-up showcases everything the venerated animation company does so well, providing plentiful laughs, ace action sequences and a deep emotional wellspring.

This is a film which fizzes with originality, one which works both as a pacey thriller and a playfully surreal intellectual exercise.

One of the many pleasures of this understated drama is its slow-burn magnetism and lack of flashy genre posturing.

It’s frequently an uncomfortable watch and, at points, prompts prickly ethical questions about the potential for the re-traumatisation of documentary subjects. But, perhaps more unexpectedly, this bold and confrontational film is also joyous, playful and in some ways even empowering.

Perhaps the darkest, most action-packed Star Wars instalment, director Gareth Edwards’ standalone adventure establishes its own rhythm, balancing fan demands with grand, poetic moments unlike anything this cinematic galaxy has previously achieved.

Respectful, frank and moving, this is a small film with a devastating impact.

Tools associated with fiction are used to tell the truth, and an elegant tone is deployed to disguise a righteous fury.

Australian director Simon Stone’s (The Daughter) film delivers strong performances – from Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan in particular – and top-level craft, but with an undercurrent of real emotion which sensitively conveys the fragility of lives and time. To use another of those abused words, it’s captivating.

It’s a richly detailed mosaic of a movie which pays as much attention to emotional authenticity – a dull ache of grief which is the aftermath of the First World War and a smouldering yearning between the two lovers – as it does to the story itself.

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.

It’s a serious message delivered in typically entertaining Lanthimos style and hammered home via a bravura climax which manages to be both gonzo and gut-wrenching in equal measure.

Listen To Me Marlon is an elegy, with scenes of extraordinary beauty throughout – not least the young Brando himself — but Riley has not made a hagiography, nor is this documentary just for Brando fans.

Desplechin delivers with flying colours thanks to an excellent cast and a sometimes serious, sometimes funny story that never lets up or becomes predictable. [Cannes Version]

Writer-directors David Zellner and Nathan Zellner’s fifth feature is easily their finest, a portrait of a Bigfoot community that starts out as an absurdist comedy before slowly transforming into a moving study of survival and loss.

Grass demonstrates a fresh type of playfulness from the prolific filmmaker. It’s a movie filled with his usual intimacy, but it’s also one that’s purposefully more concerned with the bigger picture than the individual details.

Mendes is intent on bringing a sense of breathless derring-do to a war only known for its doomed futility. And he loads onto it a one-take challenge, a rolling-back and slowly-swerving camera, using the sleight of hand which distinguishes the best action cinema of this kind.

Natural Light is a tough, slow film that makes demands on its audience – though much of the real horror is as just-off-screen for us as it is for Corporal Semetka. But it’s also an absorbing, beautifully crafted, thought-provoking addition to the new Hungarian cinematic wave.

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.

The bright sparks and troubled souls of the classroom make for lively, sometimes heartrending company in a film that successfully links individual stories to a broader perspective.

Often very funny, especially in classroom scenes filled with unconventional teachers and unruly pupils, the film also shows real feeling for the tangled workings of the human heart and the way individuals are at their loneliest in a crowd of people.

A dazzling, studious exercise in found footage excavation and reconfiguration, laced with tongue in cheek.

A compact triumph of stop-motion animation in the service of a bittersweet tale, My Life As A Courgette (My Vie de Courgette) is as delightful as it is affecting.

The muted elegance of Passing’s design proves to be a deft feint for a film full of passion and profound longing, highlighted by two controlled but devastating performances.

The funniest thing to come out of Belfast since [fill in the blank if you can], Kneecap is a riot which strains let’s-form-a-band film tropes (they’re the ‘shit Beatles’ via The Commitments), stirs in some Monty Python, sucks up the Young Offenders in all its shell-suited glory and blows it out at audiences in a blast of two-fingered audaciity.

[A] powerful, at times shocking but also intensely human documentary.

An abundance of monologues gives a clear indication as to the stage origins of this Jazz Age-story, but they also add to the fire-and-brimstone feeling accentuated by director George C. Wolfe’s darkly enticing adaptation.

By the time we reach a genuinely unnerving climax, Alper has pulled off something special – a film that works at once as a highly-charged suspenser, a savvy piece of tightly-enclosed world-building and a sharp critique of machismo, populism and their very tangible dangers.

In short, The Velvet Underground is a documentary that meets the Velvet Underground eye-to-eye and enriches it.

A dazzlingly dialectical and daring comedy/drama that skilfully brings past and present together and again challenges Jude’s compatriots to face up to the more unsavoury aspects of their history.

Like much of her digital work in the twentieth century, Varda’s approach here is a kind of expansive introspection; it’s a film which looks both inwards and outwards at the same time. And like Varda herself, it pulls off the combination of a trundling, amiable pace with a biting intellectual acuity.

It is a small film, but one whose subtle touch and generous spirit proves captivating.

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.

Dark River is distinguished by superior film-making and admirable command of tone and pacing. Once again, Barnard delivers an intimate take on a difficult subject, raising anticipation for her future work should she decide to scale up.

As much as BuyBust seems to be engineered for maximum excitement, it’s not without the complexities that are typical of Matti’s ambitious genre pieces.

C’mon C’mon is a gentle drama, but its deep emotional wellspring is mitigated by how wise it is about what impossible little monsters kids can be when they’re acting out.

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.

Kala Azar is something rather special. It’s foetid and atmospheric, a feral scavenger of a film which sniffs around its themes before sinking its teeth into the meat of a beasts’ eye view of the breakdown of civilisation.

Given that it’s about a tequila factory, Mexican drama Dos Estaciones is as sobering as they come – but it’s also a bracingly potent distillation of drama, psychological portraiture and passionate flouting of clichés, both national and sexual.

It seems to encapsulate a generation’s dreams and disappointments, torments and triumphs. Even if it takes place on the other side of the world, it’s still a story we all know when we see it.

Never making an obvious move, like its subject, the end result veers close to avant-garde. That’s a term that Cunningham himself famously and continually shunned; however Kovgan clearly doesn’t share the same concern.

Long and detailed and frequently terrifying, Alex Gibney’s documentary about a 1994 massacre in a pub in Northern Ireland is investigative journalism at its rigorous best.

I Lost My Body (J’ai perdu mon corps) is sit up and take notice animation.

Ultimately what makes this an unusually rewarding picture about motherhood is the fact that it shatters the binary distinction between the good mother and the bad one.

To the outsider, Naples is often seen as a city of colour and life, a place of bubbling exuberance. Not so in Giancarlo Rosi’s strikingly melancholic documentary portrait of the southern Italian metropolis.

The set up promises a high concept romantic comedy, but in execution, Maria Schrader’s immensely enjoyable picture delves rather deeper, touching on philosophy, socio-sexual ethics and humanity’s uneasily symbiotic relationship with technology.

Proceeds without flashy tricks or showy technique, offering the pleasures of captivating storytelling with an irresistible human pulse.

The Fire Inside, in a deceptively brilliant twist on the inspirational sports film, is a humanist story, whose every hard hitting beat and aching emotion is also truly earned.

Women Talking is a challenging work that requires a little patience from the audience, which is rewarded with a troubling, provocative story that lingers in the mind long after the film is over.

This is a documentary that carefully, meticulously builds a case and then blindsides the viewer with revelations, second thoughts and fresh evidence that makes you reconsider everything you thought was certain.

Baldwin’s insights originate from 1979, but they still speak volumes, and Peck makes their observations sting.

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.

Tracey Deer’s feature debut Beans vibrates with ferocious anger and righteous pride.

A gripping crime thriller that also makes a sharp political statement, Just 6.5 paints a bleak picture of Iranian law enforcement’s attempts to deal with the country’s flourishing narcotics trade.

Conjuring up a serving of visual magic is one thing, of course; bringing Kipling’s characters and narrative to life is another.

Peck’s film is a rich chronicling of Cole’s unique career, peerless artistry, political strength and moving end.

Superbly acted and executed, this spare piece of storytelling marks an assertive feature debut for theatre and opera director William Oldroyd.

It’s a beautifully composed ballad that both celebrates and laments the passing of time and resonates long after the credits roll.

The film starts by promising a bourgeois social drama about secrets and lies, suspicions and rivalries, and the troubled waters of juvenile and adult sexuality. What it ultimately becomes is much harder to define, but the result is resonant and haunting – and should spark plenty of post-screening discussions.

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.

Guzman’s heart and soul investment in the film and the snapshots of people power in action make for an emotional and involving documentary.

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

The latest anime from Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) is a beguilingly sweet-natured little gem. The film balances spiralling flights of fancy with glinting observations on parenting and family dynamics.

Abbasi has made an Iranian noir which, even though it dares to poke around the spiritual capital of Iran with its largest mosque in the world, isn’t an assault on the Iranian government per se, but a crime thriller which shows how far fundamentalist morality can be twisted and how banal the face of evil really is.

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.