Alex Schaad’s spiky, good-looking debut feature takes a clever concept and develops it into a witty, provocative exploration of identity, gender fluidity, sexuality and the pursuit of happiness.

It’s a shame that Giannoli’s film, while ambitious, confidently executed and more than honourable, nevertheless feels like something of a relic.

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.

Although Nitram is a thoughtful exploration of mental illness, highlighted by a strong cast, Kurzel can’t fully transcend what is familiar about this handwringing portrait of a ticking time bomb set to go off.

Carried by a magnetic performance from Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir in a dual role (she plays both Halla and her identical twin sister Asa), Benedikt Erlingsson’s enjoyable follow up to Of Horses And Men is elevated by wryly idiosyncratic flourishes in its execution.

A deft and satisfying police procedural in command of its unusual tone, The Night of the 12th (La Nuit du 12) is perfectly cast and constructed with quietly thrilling rigour.

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.

There’s an element of playfulness here – Hong challenges us to identify the subtle shifts in emphasis and interplay between the two versions of the story. The narrative expands into an intricate game of spot the difference.

The boundaries between fiction and reality are permeable throughout, with some shots juxtaposing actors against phone camera footage of the real life characters that they portray. For the most part, it works very effectively, although the snippets of real life phone footage are a little distracting, jolting us out of the nervy chokehold of the story.

On paper, The Mitchells appears to be a disjointed mashup of genres — the road movie, the father-daughter drama and the man-versus-machine sci-fi thriller — but the filmmakers nicely integrate all the elements with consistently funny jokes and the careful development of the Mitchell family members.

None of the interactions come across as a sham or an empty formality. Patients are treated with respect, at least in the hearings room.... There’s also genuine and inadvertent humor in the midst of sadness and administrative formalities.

Propelled by a superb central performance by Natalia Solian, the film’s potential excesses are held under tight control as it takes us, like a Mexican riff on Rosemary’s Baby, on a nightmare journey through the dark side of motherhood involving gaslighting, body horror, and the occult.

Michael Thomas’ imposing performance will be the hook for a film that, while executed with Seidl’s typical steely control, might strike his followers as being a touch too familiar – while non-adepts will find its darker dimensions altogether too bleak for comfort.

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

Rockwell respects her audience enough to trust that we’ll be invested in Inez and Terry’s odyssey because of the nuanced performances.

Tantura makes for a fascinating, troubling watch, although it doesn’t altogether come across as rigorously objective, given rhetorical touches in both music (ominous ambient drones, ironically boisterous kibbutz songs) and visuals (thriller-style close-ups of Katz’s cassettes playing, a pointed insert of a see-no-evil monkey statuette).

Bold, bloody and blisteringly brutal, this exhilarating follow-up to last year’s 28 Years Later grabs its audience by the throat from the off and never loosens its grip.

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

Sometimes Shults’ reach exceeds his grasp, resulting in a self-conscious epic that wants to hammer home its characters’ emotional wreckage. Nevertheless, Waves is also powerfully immersive, investing so passionately in these individuals that it’s hard not to do the same.

Visually spectacular and consistently entertaining, Ridley Scott’s space rescue procedural The Martian suffers only from a failure to hit its emotional beats with the amount of force and feeling usually required to make this kind of life-and-death adventure really take off.

Nowhere Special is a tender story of a life which is ending and another which is beginning.

Amidst Wake Up Dead Man’s more sombre atmosphere and grimmer sense of humour, Craig and O’Connor add additional emotional shading to a film that, like the series as a whole, is still primarily meant to be an entertaining puzzle.

The Dardennes’ typically no-frills approach means that these glimpses of young lives feel unvarnished and honest. There is, however, a degree of predictability to some of the plotting.

It’s a frayed fabric of a story that contains moments of daring artistry and beauty, but doesn’t always knit together into something satisfying and solid.

There are some tremendous misdirects, effective jump scares, and literal piles of gore. There just happens to be plenty of brains to go with all that blood.

Accentuated by smart insights from collaborators, celebrity fans and fellow musicians, the documentary is as deeply affectionate as Sparks’ songs are catchy and offbeat.

Working with Carbunariu, Jude offers a spare, visually striking evocation of the methods of Ceausescu’s secret police, the Securitate, in its pursuit and punishment of a young dissident.

Diem’s intimate access and sensitive approach, together with editor Swann Dubus’ keen eye for texture and detail, make for a compelling and eye-opening drama.

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On manages to harness enough of what initially made this diminutive protagonist such an unexpected treat; in particular, Slate’s endearing vocal performance.

Plenty of films revolve around heists gone wrong, but few have the desperate, grungy velocity of Good Time.

Josh O’Connor is marvelous as this sputtering soul with no aptitude for illegality — or, frankly, anything else — as he drifts through an unremarkable life that’s slowly slipping through his fingers.

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.

Writer-director Glasner’s control of tone in a potential misery fest that – believe it or not – contains a bunch of laugh-out-loud moments is pitch perfect, most of the time.

For all its poetic charm, this is a slender work that comes across as something of a ’mindfulness movie’, in a faintly self-satisfied vein.

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.

An engaging, authentic, moving film about the way society persists in seeing monsters where there are none.

Its dramatic heft and its stars’ upfront audacity make it a sexy proposition in every respect.

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

If there’s one quibble with this nimble entertainment, it’s that Bird’s eye-popping flair outpaces his story’s emotional resonance. Incredibles 2 is such a fleet treat that it doesn’t always stop for its characters’ pathos to really connect.

Though principally a meditative experience, Ad Astra also makes room for some superb suspense sequences, resulting in a thought-provoking film with life-or-death stakes.

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

The multiple scenes featuring family fights feel raw and authentic, sometimes painfully so, because they seem part-improvised: but at times they drag on too long, a sign of a larger problem with pacing and rhythm. What brings it all back from the edge are the performances.

Costa Brava, Lebanon is a terrific feature debut from Mounia Akl which works both as a compelling domestic drama and an elegant political allegory.

While American Honey exudes ample energy, this episodic piece doesn’t muster much narrative drive over its daunting running time of two and three quarter hours. There’s probably a stronger, tighter film in here, but fair game at least to Arnold in her commitment to following the winding back roads of filmic experiment rather than the well-mapped highway of storytelling.

While Holofcener doesn’t ultimately dispute that it’s nice to be nice, she does suggest that it’s worth remembering constant positivity has its own negatives.

Built around excerpts from Armstrong’s home audio recordings, which he made in private over the decades, the documentary is far from exhaustive and yet, as a primer for why Armstrong remains influential, this inquisitive portrait successfully manages to render him as both a titan and a nuanced human being.

In its austere way, this is classic Wiseman, a film that takes us into the heart of a community and reveals its inner workings, comforts, fractures and traumas. It’s also a fine example of the way the director sculpts and moulds his material to create an arc that is both dramatic and poetic.

Terrence Malick often wrestles with the cosmic, the spiritual and the eternal, but with A Hidden Life, the meditative writer-director attacks his usual themes from a rewardingly timely and urgent perspective.

With The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected), filmmaker Noah Baumbach writes a new, richly warm variation on a favourite theme: the maddening impossibility of family.

Stolevski’s handling of the balance between jostling high spirits and the creeping dread of loss is supremely confident; his storytelling is fresh, authentic and genuinely exciting.

Robustly entertaining while carrying the weight of impossible audience expectations, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a fascinating, often satisfying mixture of rollicking mythmaking and fan service.

Given the recent debates about British identity and the spike in race hatred and racially motivated crime – all as a result of Brexit – the timing of White Riot couldn’t be more apt.

Editing is clearly complex given the variable footage, but each emergency call and every character is successfully individualised and identifiable, and several arcs snap into the overall narrative drive.

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

Union is a solid work about an important subject. Yet, while the observational approach gives the picture an urgency and immediacy, it’s a film that might have benefitted from the addition of more contextual background information about Amazon’s labour practices.

Marked by strong, reserved performances — and deeply compassionate to its soulsick characters — this quietly absorbing drama has secrets in store, each of them revealed with uncommon elegance.

There’s a wistful quality to the storytelling which softens some of the sharper edges of tragedy and hardship in this undeniably affecting picture.

Undoubtedly the film’s charm comes from the performances of Kim and Huppert, and scenes involving the pair and their tangible chemistry resonate the strongest.

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

It’s a film made with honesty, integrity and a certain grace, but it can’t quite overcome an earnestness that was never a problem in Hansen-Love’s best films, which carried their literary and cinematic inspirations lightly.

While Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach may couch this self-discovery narrative in powder pinks and unrelenting pep, their message is authentic and acerbic: an urgent feminist call to arms wrapped up in a hugely entertaining popcorn movie.

For all its deft style and sympathetic characters, there’s still something missing in We,The Animals. In its efforts to evoke a young boy’s inner-world, it falls short of fully capturing his emotional reality. Jonah’s story should be heartbreaking, but when we see images of him flying over the forest, it’s just picturesque and lyrical.

It is the viewer who feels the injustice and outrage on his behalf, deepening the emotional connection to events.

An engaging documentary that’s perhaps too enchanted by its own “stranger than fiction” oddness to delve deeply enough into the human drama on display.

The Eternal Daughter is at its most poignant when it plunges into the personal – in Swinton’s retreating mother and faltering daughter, you can sense the director’s power growing as she continues to acknowledge herself.

The Settlers shows promise: it’s the work of a daring director intent on developing a distinctive and original voice.

Each of the film’s three strands has its own dramatic flaws and virtues. But what is most intriguing is the way that the stories are braided, both in editor Anita Roth’s intercutting and in the establishing of visual parallels.

It’s as cosy as Mr Rogers’ trademark zip-up cardigan, but the sweetness of this film about the beloved US children’s television personality is tempered by the inventive eccentricity of its approach.

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

Compartment No. 6 is something of a minimalist shaggy dog story, ending on a bittersweet low-key note.

This impressive feature from Alexandre Moratto takes the topic of modern-day enslavement as a jumping-off point for a morality tale which gets increasingly knotty and satisfying as it goes on.

What the film does brilliantly is compose a symphony of social awkwardness, with Anne as its virtuoso focus.

For all that it dances on familiar ground, Firecrackers ends on a pleasingly opaque note. It’s attractively shot by Catherine Lutes, and smartly cast with unknowns, making it more than just a calling card for its young writer/director. There’s much to take note of here foom Mozaffari and her all-female crew.

The downside to the film is Kossakovsky’s feeling that he had to include people in the mix.

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

In the gripping, inspiring — and, ultimately, dispiriting — documentary The Force, a troubled police force tries to redeem itself, only to learn how nearly impossible the task may be.

It is a premise that facilitates a forensic examination of China’s family planning model within the quasi-futuristic trappings of its urbanised present. It is also paradoxically highly specific in its subject yet incredibly difficult to pin down in terms of its broader identity, as it skilfully skirts genre lines.

It’s a halfway house between reality and the desires and dreams and disappointments of a 40 year-old woman, and should be appreciated as such by Francophone audiences everywhere.

Midi Z’s control of mood, pace and performance builds an engrossing drama that works on the intimate level of a moving human tragedy whilst also providing an insight into the much bigger picture of the problems and heartaches facing the people of Burma.

The feature debut from Swedish writer/director Isabella Eklöf is an uncompromisingly tough and unforgiving study of social standing and market forces.

The film crafts a framework of superstition and ritual, onto which is hung a vividly realised, if somewhat enigmatic portrait of a child’s life.

Shot from inside its community, Rocks is more than simply a polemic, though, and is careful to root its message in sequences of day-to-day reality.

The results are often revelatory, offering an unvarnished look at being young, free and unsettled, with the individuals they meet being almost as important as the journey itself.

Hadzihalilovic is a director who refuses to compromise her very distinctive vision and that is the case here, even if The Ice Tower, which bows in Berlin Competition, is her biggest film to date; utterly beautiful in every frame with a breakout lead performance by young French actress Clara Pacini.

A saga of complicated relationships, longings and heartbreak sometimes strains to fully develop all its disparate elements. Yet this is still an ambitious feat of storytelling delivered with a sensitivity to mood and emotion.

This Quebecois romantic comedy is as sharp and perceptive as it is funny.

The Endless is a demanding, rewarding picture with moments of unusual terror and awe, offering a science fiction/horror scenario on a literally cosmic scale which boils down to a study of a complicated sibling relationship.

Indivisible peers and probes, offering a sensitive, insightful and sometimes even dream-like rumination on the cost of seeking and subverting normality.

This highly accomplished first feature from Eva Trobisch finds nuance and complexity in a subject which tends to lend itself to extreme depictions; it’s an arresting and candid portrait of a woman whose weakness is her refusal to see herself as a victim.

Redford has rarely been this commanding in his recent work, playing Tucker with a mischievousness in his eyes but also so much soul that his thieving feels more like an expression of some sad longing than a chronic criminal mind-set.

La Caja is a canny blend of detective story, political drama and rites of passage vignette, and is the sort of film that comes across as so simple and direct that it’s easy to miss how meticulously conceived and constructed it is.

It’s a safe bet that many contemporary viewers will find the film confusing, abrasive, pretentious and antediluvian in its sexual politics. But there’s no denying the audacity of Welles’s undertaking, and of the reconstruction project. What can be said with certainty is that this version of Wind is perplexing, sometimes exhausting but never less than fascinating.

There remains something unknowable about Luma, but while that proves a limitation, Cow also turns it into a strength. We wonder what’s she thinking, and then we put ourselves in her place — and realise it’s not a great place to be.

As a director, Dano prefers static camera setups and uncluttered frames, emphasising the mundane nature of the drama, which only allows the increasing darkness of this tale to become more upsetting.

Has value as a cultural document as well as a riotously entertaining film.

Ali’s anger and frustration is the engine which gives this heartfelt drama its energy; Bessa’s terrific performance, a thunderous scowl masking his rising anguish, is a considerable asset.

It’s an uncomfortable watch, but a extremely effective one.

The entertaining blend of quirky absurdism and behavioural neuroscience echoes Baumane’s approach to her family’s history of depression in her previous film. It’s a successful and distinctive formula, albeit one which falters slightly at the film’s uncertain conclusion.