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

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.

Byrne pops around the stage like a man rejuvenated, or perhaps one who has never aged, without as much as breaking a sweat. How wonderful for it all to be the same as it ever was.

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.

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.

A documentary that is particularly urgent and eye-opening in the context of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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.

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.

Taking on one of cinema’s foremost obsessions with a compassionate and ethical approach, Our Body tells the hidden, forgotten and ignored stories of female bodies through their unhurried encounters with the extensive, often invasive, and wonderfully life-saving medical interventions at a Parisian public hospital.

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.

Sherpa swiftly proves as grippingly human and political as it does visually spectacular.

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

A polished, engrossing procedural, Spotlight offers plenty of old-fashioned pleasures — chiefly, the sight of smart, scrappy muckraking journalists stopping at nothing to uncover systematic corruption.

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

To say that Dominik’s film touches on a raw nerve is an understatement, but the film, dedicated to the memory of Arthur, is revealing both about these musicians’ creative processes, and about questions of mourning, trauma and emotional survival

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.

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

Sometimes overwhelming but always penetrating, the film practically demands multiple viewings to absorb its rich collection of ideas, images and music.

A remarkable study of poverty, family and personal responsibility, The Florida Project meticulously illustrates how life on the margins affects one impressionable six-year-old.

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.

Some cinema hits you in the gut – this film places you right inside the gut, and while it’s not always a pleasant place to be, it’s a visit you’re not likely to forget.

While this simple story may not seem inherently momentous, it speaks volumes about the ways in which women are marginalised — especially when it comes to making decisions about their own bodies.

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.

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

The fourth fiction feature from Kleber Mendonça Filho is a sweat-saturated riot of a movie: a dual-timeline thriller powered by the kind of anarchic, erratic energy that you would expect to find at the end of a two day bender.

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.

Hamaguchi has taken Murakami’s original story as a springboard rather than a strict template, changing and adding locations, inventing additional characters and boosting the importance of others.

There’s a seam of pitch black gallows humour running through the picture, and moments of absurdist hilarity. But mostly, it’s an impassioned and forthright condemnation of the regime and of the men who do its bidding.