Technically immaculate and marked by sensorial storytelling, it’s also a film whose undeniable style can overwork the simple message it wants to tell.

The Lost Leonardo is one of those rare documentaries in which almost everyone involved volunteers their loose-lipped testimony, seemingly unconcerned as to the dubious light in which it may place them, and Koefoed turns it in at a snappy 96 minutes with all the bells and whistles of a doc crowd-pleaser.

A film of sober elegance and control, Wife Of A Spy never quite delivers on the tautness of its build-up, but it is beautifully executed and features a number of teasingly ambivalent performances, notably from lead Yu Aoi.

The dialogue in Mank is fabulously fast, hard and quippy throughout, a real tribute to the man himself. If sometimes all that detail obscures the bigger picture, Mank is still a treat; for those looking for more, we always have Citizen Kane to fall back on, after all.

More like the testimony of an enthusiastic, fully committed supporter watching, in close-up, a populatoon reclaiming its rights, Afineevsky’s film accepts as a basic premise that Yanukevych is the villain. Anyone who differs should look elsewhere.

Able to generate dread and awe with equal skill, Annihilation is an absorbing amalgam of genres and influences, all coming together to produce a dazzling creation as vivid as the hybrid life forms our heroes encounter on their perilous journey.

The main thing with a rousing cinematic experience like Architecton is that it wins the emotional argument.

Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson are excellent as these carnal combatants, each of their characters jockeying for control. But the writer-director’s larger ideas — about sexism in the workplace and the feelings of shame surrounding sexual kinks — fail to burn as hot as the two leads’ fiery chemistry.

There’s a great deal of charm and humour to Paik’s work, and to this film, but it’s anchored by his perceptiveness and ability to contemplate weighty themes – and, yes, to anticipate the future.

The suffering, fear and humiliation that they experience is balanced by moments of warmth and an artist’s magpie eye for unexpected glimpses of beauty. It’s a remarkable achievement.

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.

As a double act, McKellen and Coel are a charming pairing, combining a classic wit and neo-soul cool to delightful results.

Hugh Jackman commits fully to his role as a vain superintendent trying to stay two steps ahead of his lies and self-delusion. Ultimately, though, the character and themes feel a little too simplistic — a movie’s paltry attempt to explain the inscrutability of human nature, which is so interesting precisely because it’s so mysterious.

The film can feel slight at times. But it’s eminently watchable.

The gritty realism of Io Capitano’s story is leavened throughout by recognizably ‘Garronian’ touches; pools of magic realism, theatrical set pieces of colourful intensity.

Using his characters as pawns on the chessboard of history, Mountains May Depart culminates in a nostalgic future where the Chinese look back for the identity they have lost.

Technically, The Goldman Case is a film to admire for all it achieves in such a structured format – emotionally, too, despite the fact the case is very particular, there is so much to engage.

It’s a lean drama that cuts no slack.

The film refrains from diagnosing or analysing – either Keiko’s psyche or her condition – but describes and evokes her world with subtle detached insight. It does so on a miniature scale that some might find frustrating or non-committal, but that allows director Miyake to give us Keiko in close-up, yet in a manner that’s scrupulously non-intrusive too.

The funniest of his films to date, it’s a fully realised, immaculately tailored creation which conceals a slow-burning sense of mischief under its deliberate oddness and ornately deadpan dialogue.

While this expansion of Frett’s 2023 short of the same name may, at times, feel like it’s being cornered into making a political statement, the nuanced central performance from Stephan James largely prevents the message from overwhelming the story.

Copa 71 may have a packaged air to it, but the story speaks – loudly – for itself.

The writer-director’s evident anger is tempered and fragmented by both fatalism, games of truth and lies, self-doubt and frequent reminders, in this Biblical landscape, of the historical and geological long view. Ahed’s Knee also works, perhaps surprisingly, as a drama that crackles with a never-consumed sexual energy.

Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga play the Lovings as refreshingly ordinary people caught up in the swirl of history, but a benign tastefulness overcomes Loving, smothering chances of a meaningful engagement with the material.

Uneven, sometimes repetitive but also powerfully moving and thought-provoking, Silence is an imperfect movie that’s very hard to shake.

Hitchcock Truffaut is of undeniable appeal to those with even a passing interest in the history of cinema. There’s nothing rarified about the air the project breathes, either – this features passionate people who have made their own iconic cinema talking about two giants of our film age with an enthusiasm which is infectious.

Aurora’s Sunrise is notable not so much for its use of animation, which is effective but not especially creative or technically groundbreaking, but for the dramatic sweep of Aurora’s incredible tale.

The forlorn feel of Hotel By The River becomes increasingly endearing, and there is a strain of bone dry humour that lightens the mood.

A film which doesn’t sugar-coat the ache of bereavement, the futility of war or the manifold failures of mankind, but which manages to balance the darkness with sparks of hope, humour and humanity.

This taut, accomplished film recounts a dark episode in Guatemala’s history as a suspense-laden ghost story based on a myth deeply rooted in indigenous Latin American culture.

As Hans Zimmer’s propulsive score juices the drama and thrill of Paul’s quest, Part Two achieves the sort of big-screen momentousness that is too rarely dared in contemporary cinema. Anyone swept away by the 2021 film will hunger to return for a second helping — and be richly rewarded.

Judy Blume Forever boasts a lively score — as well as impassioned testimonials from famous admirers, such as Lena Dunham — and proves to be an enjoyable, highly polished production that offers a compelling overview of Blume’s literary achievements and lasting legacy.

Full of committed performances, particularly from Elba and the impressive young actor Abraham Attah, Beasts Of No Nation is a project of considerable integrity which makes for a consistently-engrossing, if over-long, viewing experience.

By this point, the 1960s have been sufficiently chronicled and celebrated, but the specificity of Linklater’s portrait nevertheless has a poignancy to it.

While Wilson stays resolutely — and perhaps for some frustratingly — neutral about whether that link is forged by lived experience or spiritual ability, her film can be read as a celebration of human empathy and the power of shared connection.

It’s the shocking disjunct between his religion and the rabid nationalism of his sermons, writings and declarations that powers Schroeder’s conventional but nevertheless effective long hard stare into the eyes of intolerance.

At its best, it’s signature Serebrennikov: ambitious, eccentrically amusing, visually flamboyant. But the film’s radical potential is ultimately diluted by its freewheeling nature.

Giving her characters shading and the story space to breathe, Talati has created a quietly captivating, sharply observed film.

All These Sons finds universal truths in individual lives, and it is impossible not to be moved by these young men, what they represent and the glimmer of hope they are offered.

In the end, there’s something just a little too neatly constructed about Monster, something just a little trite about the message delivered after so many narrative twists and turns. Yet there is an emotional delicacy here too that keeps sentiment at bay, at least most of the time.

Ballad doesn’t reinvent the Coens’ sardonic, measured aesthetic, but the anthology’s looser structure allows them a friskiness that is welcome from such masterful veterans.

There may not be a lot of depth to Green Room, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t sufficient thought and care.

The film has much to say about peer pressure and male rites of passage, although Polinger’s points can become repetitive and his insights not especially deep. Still, this uneven mixture of coming-of-age drama and psychological horror suggests a filmmaker with a flair for unsettling atmosphere.

Narratively spare ... Less substantial and approachable than Hong’s 2022 features The Novelist’s Film and Walk Up, the fragile, fragmentary In Our Day won’t earn Hong any new fans, but avid followers will enjoy its elusive felicities and love puzzling over its enigmatic gaps.

The writing is sharp throughout: Manning Walker has an acute ear for teen vernacular and a sly sense of humour. But some of the film’s most powerful moments are wordless, playing out in tight shots of Mckenna Bruce’s face.

A rollicking historical romp with nary a dull moment, The Three Musketeers - D’Artagnan (Les Trois Mousquetaires — D’Artagnan) offers all the sprightly action, jaunty repartee and sumptuous settings a contemporary movie-goer could possibly want.

An elegant, sometimes eerie film, Celebration does not editorialise: its only implicit commentary is a futuristic electronic score, which suggests that Saint-Laurent is something of an extra-terrestrial being. A tender, more melancholic work than its title would imply, Celebration should not be construed as a debunking of its subject, more as a gentle lament for an institution fading into the sunset.

Sequences depicting the Selma marches – the first of which led to violent police attacks that were seen on national TV and helped change the mood of the country – are fairly understated, when a more visceral approach might have given the film more emotional heft.

While any narrative nuance is left in the dust by the film’s singular focus on bloody retribution at all costs, it is one hell of a ride.

The aim was to create something “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true”. The Scriver brothers succeed in pretty much all of this and, with the film’s quirky, psychedelic style of computer animation, create something genuinely unexpected and visually playful.

There’s considerable cumulative power to these intimate glimpses of kids, from primary school tiddlers to high school graduates, all facing an uncertain future.

The Assistant is inspired by potentially scandalous material but subverts expectations, asking the audience to consider the broader societal implications of the crime.

Shaun exists simply to entertain children and he fulfils his brief.

As with a lot of first-time feature filmmakers, Smith shows a tendency to want to throw everything a her film stylistically – including, at one point, the random use of bright yellow subtitles – which makes certain sections feel unnecessarily skittish.

Like the sequinned, simpering erotic dancers it spotlights, Hustlers is a lot smarter than it initially looks. Given a story about a gang of larcenous strippers, audiences might expect little more than dirty jokes and steamy sex. But this slyly feminist movie pushes empowerment, too; it’s a film about being in control, not losing it.

Rather than a chic bagatelle, this proves an acutely intelligent, finely acted and – despite its cerebral edge - emotionally rich piece.

It packs a quiet emotional punch.

Fences is a deeply affecting treatise on marriage, poverty and the struggles of sons to confront the long shadow of the man who brought them into this world.

It’s not just the structure of the film that is clever, Sweeney varies his joke delivery, so that there is a mix of one-liners and more slow-burn humour alongside a raft of sight gags.

Conclave is most effective when it’s as shamelessly entertaining as its ambitious characters.

Another Round (Druk) is a funny film which is also desperately sad, a superficially amusing indictment of drinking culture which is much more bitter than sweet.

There’s much here, or in everything we see - which is essentially the film’s subtext - that is hilariously open to interpretation. See how you get on.

John Carney’s 1980s-set Sing Street is like a barnstorming tribute group. It’s crowd-pleasing, heart-warming, hits all the right notes, and is eager to please.

Vaughn brings a tenderness to the role of a man forced into animal violence for the sake of love and the miracle of birth, and the rangy anarchy of Zahler’s deeply kooky film gets under the skin at times. But in the end, you wish some big bad studio boss had been there to cut this director’s cut.

Essentially a frothy bagatelle, and sometimes overworking the slightest of jokes, nevertheless this lively, sleekly executed farce from the Argentinian makers of black comedy The Distinguished Citizen offers comic and visual pleasures alike, plus crisp acting from its lead trio.

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.

On the surface, Not Alone Anymore is a solid, sweet-natured celebration of a unique artist, but it gradually provides a deeper perspective.

It is a unique story, told in a distinct way.

The Innocents successfully weds three elements: a strong, original concept distilled through a smart screenplay; excellent young performances; and a mise-en-scene which puts the audience in a child’s circular view of a very small world - tiny by nature of childhood itself, in which the smallest areas are unfathomably large, and also by circumstance on a self-contained housing estate.

While it’s a remarkable feat, particularly from an editing perspective, there’s also something laboratory-like about raiding the archive from a distance and imposing such an articficial structure on it.

The Painter and the Thief suggests, human relationships are complex and multidimensional things. And whenever you foolishly start to try to contain them in a simple frame, they stubbornly burst out.

Some may be frustrated that Kaufman leaves viewers to figure out his ultimately puzzling narrative, but this film’s entrancing strangeness begins to assert a hallucinogenic hold. Even if the roads are sometimes treacherous, they’re well worth exploring.

It’s an excoriating story told with gentle sympathy; a lashing tale about the abuse and marginalisation of women at the hands of a dark establishment in a sun-filled resort.

Lurker is sometimes a little too on the mark.

The directorial debut of long-time screenwriter and producer James Schamus exudes a tasteful reserve, but actor Logan Lerman cuts through the seeming gentility in a performance that seethes with his character’s burgeoning arrogance and cynicism.

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.

This story of a guilt-ridden bailiff ostensibly resembles conventional social realism but then broadens its scope fascinatingly, foregrounding satirical intent and a mischievous degree of verbal overload.

These troubled, lovable, prickly, obsessive entertainers, supported by brother-son Todd, invite the viewer into their rackety lives – bright, lived fully in the spotlight, chin-up and completely unsinkable.

Far from presenting Michael J. Fox as a tragic case, Still is uplifting but also clear-eyed — as piercing as the look Fox gives the camera as he stares straight into the lens.

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.

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

Limber and thought-provoking, An Unfinished Film is an absorbing portrait of an unfinished era.

The first half of Age of Shadows feels muddy as momentum builds; the latter stages boast a cinetic energy - cutting a violent melee to classical music (in this case Ravel’s Bolero), may be a tribute to John Woo, but it’s stunning nonetheless.

The blend of character study, Hitchcockian intrigue and an excellent central performance from Aline Kuppenheim makes for a tensely involving tale.

For all its familiarity, Ly’s film is executed with enormous confidence and energy, building up to an apocalyptic ending that delivers on a gradual build-up of nervous tension.

A beautifully bizarre film whose considerable strangeness allows for sharp observations about family, loneliness and the terror of emotional intimacy, Kajillionaire is further proof of writer-director Miranda July’s ability to bend reality to her will.

Offering little in terms of exposition and even less when it comes to dialogue, Fischer’s sophomore effort develops character and, eventually, unsettling moral questions entirely through action, playing as a more consciously political companion piece to J.C. Chandor’s similarly taciturn All is Lost.

The human testimony is undoubtedly the most engaging aspect of Another Day Of Life, but the animated sequences earn their place when they provide a sense of the emotional turmoil that Kapuscinski experienced as he faced the chaos and horrors of a war that would continue until 2002.

This is a satisfying and impressively acted drama.

Featuring a rousing finale — two of them, actually — and substantial nostalgic pleasures, the new film can’t quite balance its desire to be both wistful and escapist, knowingly cheesy and surprisingly touching.

Johnson and co-writer Matthew Miller turn the story of RIM’s brisk rise and meteoric fall into a kind of breathless tech fever dream, a relentless but addictive downbeat human comedy about the struggle to stay on top in a fast-moving industry.

Moving, politically committed and with an absolute ring of hard-researched reality, this is at the very least their finest since 2011’s The Kid With The Bike, and arguably one of their very best.

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.

The impressive feature debut from Maltese-American writer and director Alex Camilleri manages to be both self-contained, in its depiction of an embattled community, but also unexpectedly far-reaching in its themes. The film is an exploration of masculinity in crisis, of the attrition of traditions by the forces of progress and of the agonies and uncertainties of new parenthood.

Plotwise, the film is a little ragged, particularly in the third act, but star Eddie Peng is impressive.

Lacking nuance in its early stages, it matures into a more considered, moving tale that effectively blends the personal and the political.

Warfare certainly isn’t the first combat movie to take such an immersive approach to the subject, but what’s striking about this film is its overriding commitment to the truth as perceived by its real-life characters.

It is to Jacobsen’s credit that she highlights how apparently minor decisions can suddenly feel weighty.