Just as Ripley is the female action hero against whom all others are judged, so the alien itself, brilliantly conceived by HR Giger and, equally brilliantly, concealed by Scott and kept in shadow for much of the film, is one of the most terrifying monsters in cinema history.

Precision-tooled, ambitious in scale yet bracingly concise, this is Bigelow’s boldest and most assured film yet.

If Beale Street isn’t quite as seamless as the Oscar-winning Moonlight, this adaptation of the James Baldwin novel still proves to be a stirring, absorbing experience that articulates something ineffable about everyday life.

This extraordinary documentary weighs the bleak details – and they are, at times, almost unbearably grim – against moments of lyrical beauty and even humour. It’s a remarkable achievement.

What you get in these performances is intelligence, emotion and physicality, and when they come together as combustively as they do here, what you get is something extremely rare - a film that catches the messy, hot complexity of life and love.

With shades of Robert Altman’s freewheeling spirit embedded in this tale of politicians, Hollywood producers and waterbeds, Licorice Pizza gains momentum as its ambles along, resulting in Anderson’s gentlest, most endearing picture to date.

It’s a remarkable film – exhaustive, informative and rigorously researched, but also crackling with energy , ideas and formal daring.

Golden Exits is an idiosyncratic film about little moments of human pain and loneliness. There’s jealousy, sadness, unfulfilled loves and lives, all of it relayed in quiet conversations and glances, rather than big dramatic scenes.

Graced by Tilda Swinton’s emptied-out performance as a woman haunted by a strange sound whose origins she is obsessed with uncovering, Memoria eludes easy categorisation while becoming a powerful meditation on connection, spiritual isolation and renewal.

Invested with a real sense of joy, Faces Places is also something of a lament for a fast disappearing France.

This is a delightful surprise, and though it is even more minimalistic than his last two illegal exports, This Is Not A film and Closed Curtains, it is also more mature, and better calibrated and - at the risk of annoying art house patrons who often hate this term - more entertaining than the other two.

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.

Once again, Lee has crafted a film of wondrous complexity and inscrutability. The more we see in Burning, the less sure we are of what we are watching.

Maintaining his fondness for long, contemplative shots, Weerasethakul creates a deceptively serene sense of storytelling, with gentle grace notes of wry humour.

Retro horror and racial tension mix to surprisingly entertaining effect in Get Out.

Lady Bird is often screamingly funny but it also has a generous spirit, embracing characters with all their flaws and foibles, virtues and defects.

Bolstered by a series of fragile, lived-in performances, led by Zac Efron’s astonishing turn as the soulful eldest brother in this seemingly doomed clan, the picture asks troubling questions about fate, fathers and ambition, eventually arriving at some hard-earned answers.

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

TÁR’s engrossing spell starts to dissipate over its final third, and yet this is that rare film about a creative person that feels neither self-pitying nor self-aggrandising. Indeed, one of the picture’s great strengths is that it’s never entirely clear what Field thinks of his complicated heroine.

The exceptional level of craftsmanship — which includes some seamless, low-key special effects — wouldn’t be nearly as affecting without the comparable care Lowery brings to this story.

Cold War is glorious, sophisticated film-making, shadowed by the spirit of Pawilowski’s Oscar-winning Ida. Lead actress Joanna Kulig is arresting.

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.

There may be money on the screen, but cash alone can’t guarantee this kind of pulsating, cinematic magic, delivered by a director at the height of his powers, mustering the very best at their craft.

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.

As with his United 93 and Captain Phillips, filmmaker Paul Greengrass has taken a horrifying true story and brought sober perspective to it — in the case of 22 July, suggesting that a community’s response to terror can be as critical to a democracy as the attacks themselves.

Nickel Boys is about societal evil, certainly, and carries a score which almost bites the skin of the audience as a reminder of that pain, but it is the tenderness at its core that deals the emotional blow.

A magnificent and enthralling film that fits into no easy genre bracket, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) – to give it its full title – is a technical tour de force, a beautifully performed and smartly scripted black comedy that will leave its audience keen to head back for more.

Following his hugely ambitious period productions Mr Turner and Peterloo, the director returns to what might be considered the quintessential Leigh mode of tightly-framed domestic drama, and does so with exceptional bite.

Nolan demonstrates his usual prowess for impeccable visuals and stunning craftsmanship within a deeply despairing portrait of an arrogant genius who, too late, realised the impact of his monstrous creation.

A complex work of novelistic density, this is among the boldest and most accomplished statements from one of the world’s exemplary filmmakers.

There has been no shortage of films that deal with Europe’s current refugee crisis over the last decade or so. Still, this picture, with its supremely confident handling of a fractured, fragmented structure and its twin driving forces of compassion and fury, is undoubtedly one of the best.

Hardly a conventional love story, but achingly tender nonetheless, Here is fully present and dazzlingly alive.

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

Ambitious in scope but precise in its execution, this deceptively small-scale character piece reverberates with compassion and insight.

Using techniques of distanciation that sometimes make it an alienating, even confusing experience, László Nemes’s cogent, strikingly confident debut is harrowing, but cinematically rewarding.

Reichardt has crafted another deeply felt and beautifully ambiguous meditation on contemporary life in the far corners of the American heartland.

Gut-punchingly authentic with radiant moments of tenderness where least expected, intimate yet not voyeuristic, this first feature by writer-director Camille Vidal-Naquet gets the balance between looking-for-love and settling-for-sensation exactly right.

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.

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.

This is not a venture into wire-work and acrobatics but a contemplative, often ravishing-looking, immersion in the complex politics, power struggles and personalities of the Tang Dynasty as seen through the moral dilemmas facing an enigmatic trained assassin.

Tangerine paints a portrait of transgender sex workers and their clients that pulses with raunchy energy and compassionate humour. It’s a bracing slice of American indie film-making.

A significant, ambitious and entirely impressive film by a dazzling young French director in full command of her ship.

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.

Beautifully crafted and perfectly cast, the film touches on everything from keeping up appearances and family dynamics between parents and adult children to a critique of retirement homes that over-medicate residents. Nina and Mado’s loving intimacy is exquisite as is the care with which the proceedings are lit. The answer to Nina’s question, who cares about two old dykes, is that we do.

Sunday’s Illness doesn’t put a foot wrong.

Care and respect is evident. Camerawork is beautiful, but in the service of the piece, not beauty itself. Sound design is enveloping, and together they convey worlds of light and water, of the humming from electricity that can travel for miles and of a range of emotions from anxiety to shame that run deeper and more vividly than it seems we can possibly understand.

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.

High Life offers an uncompromising mind-bender of a deep space journey through destructive desire, faith, trust and the instincts for good and bad that make us merely human.

It is a film in which, over two hours, the maverick Argentinian virtuoso quietly blows up and rebuilds the established language of cinema in challenging but ultimately exhilarating ways.

A vital cinematic document. ... The conversations could not be more stimulating, offering a glimpse of Black America past and present that is joyous, defiant and sobering.

The Zone of Interest is a challenging rather than conventionally provocative film but, by any measure, essential viewing and a work that will be a vital focus of discussion both in the cinephile world and beyond.

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.

A magnificent performance from Rebecca Hall is Christine’s clear highlight, but the entire ensemble shines in this stripped-down but deeply sympathetic drama.

Lifting his camera to survey the wide open plains of the past, Scorsese extracts an epic Western from horrible real-life crimes committed against the Native American Osage tribe of, latterly, Oklahoma, delivering something biblical, human, yet deeply inhumane.

The lynchpin of the whole enterprise is a terrific star turn from Dev Patel, who has never been better. The energy and physicality of his performance is a constant delight; a tangle of arms and legs, he plays the knockabout farce with the timing and agility of a Chaplin.

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 film becomes convoluted in its final stretches, losing the effortless sweep which that preceded, but even then Rex’s masterful turn keeps us glued to the screen

Perhaps the most impressive thing about a hugely impressive exercise in directorial control is the fact that we come away from an intensely violent film, a film where bones crunch and blood smells, touched by pathos and a strange sense of hope.

Some of the credit must go to the stellar casting and performances. It’s difficult to single out one of the six actors in this alternative family unit as it’s a true ensemble display. But Kore-eda’s deft command of tone is a key factor too.

There are three superb performances at the picture’s centre, but none is more radiant than that of Greta Lee, gracefully capturing the spirit of a searching soul who seems to understand things about the nuances of love that are beyond the grasp of the rest of us.

Like the distinctive artwork made by Showing Up’s sculptor protagonist, Kelly Reichardt’s eighth feature is beautifully crafted, a modest gem that grows in impact the more one examines it.

A meditation on memory, identity, grief and loss, with the narrative device of a global pandemic thrown in for good measure: Apples might initially sound like a tough sell. But this hugely accomplished, satisfyingly textured first feature is really something special.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a period drama of startling tonal fluidity, and Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps deliver reserved performances that slowly reveal significant depth, transcending the material’s potential plight-of-the-artist clichés to hit at something far richer and more mysterious about desire, ambition and control.

Thrillingly inventive, satisfyingly textured and infused with warmth and humanity, this is a triumph.

She Dies Tomorrow is both cheeky and disconcerting — and unlike life, it ends right when it should.

This is a remarkable debut feature; provocative, absorbing and mysterious. There are no easy answers to the big existential questions, just a desire to seek them out with a kind heart and good intentions. In the end you just have to have faith.

Filled with both spectacle and strikingly intimate moments, The Eras Tour is almost too much of a good thing — so many hits, so many memorable set pieces, so many peaks.

Into what might have been an alienating, hard-edged setting, human warmth comes from some relishably muted performances.

A stirring follow-up that tops the formidable original, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse draws us deeper into Miles Morales’ saga while offering the same stunning animation, dazzling set pieces and irreverent humour.

What’s certain is that Sound Of Falling, the striking second feature from German director Mascha Schilinski, is a work of thrilling ambition realised by an assured directorial vision.

Surprising, awkward, refreshing and, at times, downright hilarious, German director Maren Ade’s dazzlingly original follow-up to her 2009 Berlinale Silver Bear winner Everyone Else is that rarest of things: a nearly three-hour-long German-Austrian arthouse comedy-drama that (almost) never drags.

It’s a distinctive world that Decker and her team have created. Among this year’s coming-of-age films, it’s got to be one of the most original. But it’s also one of the more perplexing.

This portrait of the artist as a young film-maker will certainly stand the test of time.

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.

Darren Aronofsky’s churning fever dream mother! is a devouring and restless experience: a creative surge that’s like the lancing of a boil, releasing a torrent of despair and disgust for the greedy chaos of society today as well as a self-loathing portrait of the artist as an emotional succubus.

Guillermo del Toro channels all the streams that make him unique into The Shape Of Water, pouring his heart, soul and considerable craft into an exquisite creature fable.

Thanks to a sterling lead performance from Oscar Isaac, the Coen brothers have once again delivered an impressively nuanced character study — one that has much to say about art, compromise and all the aspiring hopefuls who never got their moment in the sun.

It is an absorbing film of quiet power.

Cameraperson is about process and aesthetics, images and rules but it is also about empathy and ethical dilemmas.

A sympathetic but clear-eyed character study transforms into something more insidious, sobering and infuriating in (T)error, a superb documentary that personalises the US War on Terror in ways that make the human toll intimate and unmistakable.

Writer-director Jim Jarmusch often explores existential themes, but they’ve perhaps never been so beautifully unadorned as they are in Paterson, a deceptively modest character piece that’s profound and moving while remaining grounded in the everyday.

The sixth film in the series is among the most outstanding, delivering a near-exhausting amount of stupendous action sequences paired with deft character drama and the requisite life-or-death stakes. Fallout is a testament to writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, who gives the proceedings a witty, sophisticated grandeur, and yet the film belongs to Cruise and his seemingly limitless passion for putting himself and his audience through the wringer.

A challenging narrative structure - withholding key information and skipping between several time frames - makes this film a daunting watch overall. But Wang’s ambition and seriousness, aided by strong ensemble performances, ensure it is a formidable and, for the most part, involving work of novelistic scope.

It’s this adoption not only of Minnie’s point of view but the voice and narrative style of her half girlish, half womanly outlook on life that makes The Diary of a Teenage Girl such a vibrant, hopeful film.

This is, quite simply, thoughtful and ultimately moving animation at its best.

The latest from the Safdie brothers is a cracking follow up to Good Time: a jangling panic attack of a movie and a timely reminder that, when he puts his mind to it, Adam Sandler can be one of the finest actors currently working.

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

An exemplary sequel, the film retains the innocence and beguiling lack of cynicism of the first film, but moves on to explore other motifs

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.

There’s a lot of love in ROMA, and, as is the way with love, it doesn’t always arrive in ways that are equal, or reciprocated, or even endure. His first film to be set in his homeland since Y Tu Mama Tambien in 2001 is Alfonso Cuarón’s most personal film, and his most honest. It may even be his best.

Semi-autobiographical and dedicated to his late mom and dad, the film is a potent memory piece guided by remarkable performances from Michelle Williams and Paul Dano, who are asked to walk a delicate tonal tightrope, delivering a portrait of an imperfect marriage that’s heartbreaking in its tenderness.

A mixture of domestic drama, apocalyptic fable and old-fashioned (and unironic) Hollywood musical, The End is an audacious and frequently enrapturing experience, with superb performances at its emotional heart.

At heart Dreamcatcher is a simple film, but it is also a rigorous and compassionate one.

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

It’s a musical and a piece of time and a feeling that’s a privilege to share.

The latest from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen is a terrific psychological thriller and a brooding, muscular piece of filmmaking which makes the most of both the Galician backdrop and the imposing physicality of Menochet and, as his nemesis Xan, the remarkable Luis Zahera.