One of the things that truly impresses about Border is the way Abbasi successfully juggles so many disparate plot elements and then brings them together like a well tuned orchestra.

Rams may sound bleak and unforgiving but it has a generous spirit and wit that make it entirely accessible.

Director Lone Scherfig’s sentimental approach favours easy laughs and warm romance but the film starts to cut a little deeper in its closing stages.

The longer The Lodge rolls along, the sheer skilfulness of the execution — the precise manipulation of the audience’s fears — becomes so impressive that one is tempted to simply succumb to its cold, cruel efficiency.

3 Faces can sometimes feel like a whimsical doodle without much forward momentum. But that placidness belies a certain degree of melancholic resignation on Panahi’s part, for himself and his homeland.

Smart writing and an unflinching relish when it comes to the scenes of violence make for a deftly handled genre piece.

Lindon creates a portrait of first love which is fresh, honest and engaging.

This comfortable armchair of great, old-school cinematic craft is made all the more embracing by Iglesias’s nuanced soundtrack. But we’re jolted out of that seat, and made to stand in admiration, as the film deftly weaves together two tales of removal – one maternal, the other political and historic.

A flesh and blood catalogue of ways to be masculine, from tender with his granddaughter to robustly no-nonsense with a weapon, Ingimundur is a fascinating character, splendidly portrayed.

I’m Fine isn’t dour about its protagonist’s dilemma — nor is it disingenuously upbeat. Kali’s performance is full of attitude and quiet desperation, as if Danny stops rollerskating her anxieties will finally catch up with her.

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.

This is a compulsively watchable drama which taps into some genuinely intriguing themes. A twisted and tangled final act makes heavy weather of some of its reveals, but Binoche is terrific throughout.

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.

Education is everything, and Mangrove, conventional though it may be, is still a radical step on the way to societal self-examination.

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.

Indulgent and meandering, but also very funny and thought-provoking, this film is ultimately about how little we understand about others — as well as ourselves.

The second feature from Nicolas Bedos is a sweet, inventive Richard Curtis-style romantic-comedy crowdpleaser that deftly balances hearty laughs and heartwarming emotion.

An ostensibly old-fashioned family drama that proves, despite an awkward final act, to be one of his most satisfying recent films, and indeed the darkest.

An invigoratingly savage Nordic western, The Promised Land is earthy, enjoyable stuff: an expansive, sweeping epic with hope in its heart and dirt under its nails.

The ending is simultaneously satisfying and slyly subversive, allowing an unravelling of ideas that should lead audiences to think about what they have watched.

The economical, precisely calibrated screenplay is nicely filled with enough simmering conflicts, character flaws and guilty resentments to keep you intrigued by what lies beneath the surface of these comfortable, middle-class lives

The latest picture from Melanie Laurent is a strikingly beautiful production which delves deep into the ugliness at the roots of psychiatric medicine.

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.

Rather like the butterfly wings that are its central metaphor, Son of Monarchs is deceptively fragile-seeming, yet robust, structurally complex and vibrantly hued.

The Dating Game is sustained by the humanity that Du Feng finds in each of the individuals we come to know and understand a little better.

There are moments when, like the gaudy lights of Acapulco, Sundown flickers into something rather special when seen from the right angle, in the right mood: a film about a goodbye to life which is also a film about a kind of afterlife.

Lady is a vivid, bracingly energetic examination of sisterhood and female bonds in an unequal society.

With a running time of four hours, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros is a marathon, even by Wiseman’s leisurely standards. But it is an absorbing film, a forest full of trails for viewers to wander in.

This film is an informative, polished and bracingly upbeat production.

It’s a film that requires considerable investment from the audience, and one that rations its rewards even to those who fully commit to the experience. Still, Schanelec’s approach draws the audience in, even as it holds them at arm’s length; she is uncommonly fond of wide shots. It’s an oddly fascinating endeavour.

An elegant, absorbing piece of storytelling.

Debut director Prano Bailey-Bond crafts a stylish, effective horror that is both an homage to genre cinema of that period and a psychological dive into the combined traumas of grief and guilt.

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.

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

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.

The film expertly blends satirical social commentary and disturbing horror tropes to shine a light on the appalling racial and economic divides that still shape the country 30 years after the end of apartheid.

Luca is undeniably slight. But there’s also relief in its modesty: rather than shoehorning spectacle and stakes into this story, Casarosa gives the film and its easygoing humour room to breathe.

Co-directors Ainsley Gardener and Briar Grace Smith tell a sprawling story of separation and disposession which feels both intimate in terms of its setting and epic in resonance.

La Civil paints a compelling picture of a society in which nobody can be trusted and everyone is complicit in a neverending cyle of violence, intimidation and revenge.

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

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.

Goodman emerges as a passionate advocacy journalist but also a well-navigated professional who is wise to the tricks of the trade and prepared to use them.

Set in Rome’s sprawling Cinecittà studios in their 1950s heyday, Finally Dawn is a rich, shape-shifting fairy tale, an odyssey of empowerment about a vulnerable girl navigating her way through a day and night of enchantments and dangers, using her weakness as a kind of magic shield.

Much of the movie’s success stems from Contreras, his regular cinematographer Tonatiuh Martínez and the rest of the technical team’s handling of its spiritual musings, with a beguiling mood as crucial as the underlying backstory.

Lengthy it may be, but this is light-of-touch fare, provocative and satisfyingly enigmatic, and though it feels like a four-hour MacGuffin, it remains an accomplished, literary and self-referential exercise in narrative deferral.

If the village’s utter isolation feels unlikely, that’s because The Sower is in one sense a dream, the enactment of a myth that goes back to Ancient Greece and beyond.

Underneath the entertaining horror, this is ultimately a story of the toxic trappings of masculinity; a world in which keeping a stiff upper lip and resolutely burying your demons can summon the most terrifying of consequences.

There’s a disconnect between her inventive, impressionistic artistic output – Audrey’s actual work is interspersed throughout the picture – and the film’s flat, rather matter-of-fact look.

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.

A chaotic, unpredictable portrait of a chaotic, unpredictable individual, The Worst Person In The World is a spirited and thrillingly uninhibited piece of filmmaking from Joachim Trier.

Returning director Dean DeBlois (who helmed the animation alongside Chris Sanders, as well as its sequel) has retained the energetic spirit of the original, and he’s helped by some fantastic CGI and a game cast, both of which lean into the fantastical charm of this tale of a hapless young Viking who discovers he is something of a dragon whisperer.

This zig-zagging emotionally perceptive tale of an American writer abroad and the women he has bedded — or perhaps merely written about having bedded — is accomplished French filmmaking the way arthouse denizens like it.

The film’s delicacy of touch comes through not only in the bittersweet love story at its centre, but in a wealth of seemingly marginal details.

Lengthy it may be, but this is light-of-touch fare, provocative and satisfyingly enigmatic, and though it feels like a four-hour MacGuffin, it remains an accomplished, literary and self-referential exercise in narrative deferral.

A 21-film anthology on everyday life under bombing in Gaza, From Ground Zero offers a vivid range of insights into the daily challenges faced by civilians, particularly valuable given the restrictions on news reporting there.

Expertly assisted by a sexy, funny performance from Adèle Haenel, director Pierre Salvadori spins sufficient gold from a contrived storyline and some endearingly flawed characters.

Throughout the film, three things stand out: the love between Rushdie and Griffiths; the resilience they had in the face of his catastrophic injuries; and the author’s humanistic attitude and sly sense of humour, which have categorically survived intact.

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.

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.

New Order may split audiences who require a more conventional approach, but this is dynamic cinema which takes no prisoners outside the hostages on screen: loud and violent, it lures the viewer into a place where there can be no bystanders. In that way, it’s quite magnificent – an outlet for those boiling in our times.

Z For Zachariah’s beauty is its simplicity, Zobel telling the story with a minimum of fuss and resisting easy explanations for his characters’ actions.

There’s a sense of genuinely creative mischief in some of the group’s satanic stunts, as well as a deft understanding of the workings of state legislature.

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.

This is unflinching, but is very much a film of love and understanding

A modest, social realist drama, its air of familiarity does not diminish its impact as a heartbreaker.

Charlie Kaufman is back – with a wistful, resonant film, a bracing, wry, honest dose of cinematic melancholy.

Driven by a compelling performance from non-professional Ubeimar Rios as a man out of time, Mesa Soto’s second feature is simultaneously satisfyingly tragic and hilarious.

It’s a crowdpleasing tale of triumph over adversity which hits its raw highs and gritty lows every bit as emphatically as Turner during her famously electric performances.

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.

2018 wears its heart on its sleeve and succeeds as tense, well-paced popular entertainment.

Timoner’s often-compelling documentary, which is neither an apology nor a hagiography, is an intriguing personal take on a man who turns out to be endlessly intriguing, no matter what you think of his antics.

Landmarks may not strictly be the film that admirers of Martel’s formal radicalism have been waiting for: notwithstanding some eccentricities, it is a relatively conventional work. But it’s very much from the heart, and from the political conscience – a critique of colonial history and the enduring abuse of power in Argentina.

A willfully theatrical, proudly retro yet delectably pertinent confection.

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.

It’s a profoundly uncomfortable piece of filmmaking, a meticulously judged exercise in satirical sadism. But a question mark over the third act climax leaves the audience with a sense of doubt: the ’what’ of the situation is genuinely disturbing, but the ’why’ is more elusive, a niggling inconsistency which undermines some of the picture’s considerable impact.

A heartwarming true story that has been expertly crafted into an irresistible, emotion-charged documentary.

It effectively combines familiar genre tropes with Jenkin’s unique visual style and a resonant message of community.

This story of foolhardy youth and the hell it can unwittingly unleash is a staple of genre cinema, but first time directors Danny and Michael Philippou tell it well and there’s certainly plenty of atmosphere (and effects) to appeal to hardened horror fans.

[A] very entertaining, surprisingly moving film.

Balanced on the tightrope between comedy and pathos, the precision-tooled Mamacruz is essentially a sensitively observed character study, with Spanish veteran Kiti Manver delivering a compelling, nuanced central performance as a religiously-repressed woman in late middle age who comes late – in all senses – to the transformative power of her own sensuality.

Hanging By a Wire may have all the urgency of a Hollywood disaster movie from the 1970s, but also incorporates an undercurrent of commentary on the neglect of poor rural communities in Pakistan.

Featuring uncanny and hugely personable performances by Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel, and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy, and a smart script by Jeff Pope (Coogan’s co-writer on Philomena) that delivers laughs from both familiar and unexpected quarters, this is a fond, frequently very funny homage to an act that has lost none of its genius.

What’s crucial to the film’s success, however is the fact that, despite its candour about Lara’s pain, the film refuses to relinquish a note of hope.

Overall, though, the stylistic consistency and sustained chill of the black comedy make for a satiric focus far keener than, say, the farcical overkill of Triangle Of Sadness.

It may be based on universal human anxieties about love, relationships, compatibility and loneliness, but Filippou’s script takes on a defiant, prickly life of its own, refusing to play as an easy allegory.

A rough-hewn fairytale unfolding against a fully realised world, this is an arresting feature debut for director Laura Samani.

Throwing darts at genre conventions while honouring what is eternally mythic about the milieu, this comedy-drama draws off-kilter performances from Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska that subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) reframe archetypes and consistently set us back on our heels.

This meticulously conceived documentary is both a definitive account of the voyage as well as a creative, cinematic you-are-there unfolding of the events that transpired.

It is a governing sense of restraint that lends the film such an emotional kick, and breathes fresh life into an old classic.

The newness is subtle and gently perplexing, but very satisfying indeed.

Whether Hill’s debut as a writer-director is drawn entirely, or partly, from personal experience seems a moot point: there’s a sufficient clear-eyed skill to the project to elevate it out of the memoir arena and mark the actor out as a directing talent to watch.

Never Look Away is an often moving, thoughtful drama about the correlations between personal experience, politics and art.

A dizzyingly ambitious meta-satire about Hollywood, IP, hacky horror, and gender and sexual identity, Teenage Sex And Death cannot help but occasionally misstep, but the rush of ideas and the confidence of the filmmaking never waver.

The film’s ace card is its intertwining of not one but two mismatched buddy relationships.

Distinctive 2D animation mixes graffiti-strewn, street-level realism with playful stylisation...for an aesthetically striking, instantly immersive and highly memorable end result.

Empire Of Light is a sentimental film – the piano-heavy score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross advertises that from the opening bars – but its message of love, tolerance and finding family wherever you can should make an impact in darkened rooms wherever it plays.

Amrum is something of a departure for Akin, the kind of precision miniature work that can be achieved on a smaller canvas.

Another End has a lot going for it, not least its command of audiovisual atmosphere and the way it makes the audience work to join the narrative dots before delivering a sucker punch final twist that will encourage lively post-screening debate.