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.

The film develops into a stirring salute to their deep-rooted spiritual devotion and quiet determination.

The Souvenir: Part II is a film to savour, visually and sensorily.

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.

This is no superficial recounting of yet another injustice against native people.

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

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.

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.

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

Delicately segueing from deadpan humour to delicate poignancy, Sorry, Baby is guided by the filmmaker’s graceful lead performance, which captures the guilt, anger and sadness of a woman who once seemingly had a bright future — until, suddenly, everything changed.

While the three sections don’t tie up narratively, nor strictly conclude as such, they leave plenty of ideas in their wake – and a multitude of entrancing images.

Brilliantly constructed and heartrendingly performed, The Tale feels as cathartic and cleansing as a primal scream.

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.

In a scant 72 minutes and in a few locations, Holmer has found a dignity in her appealing subjects, and a mystery.

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.

Herrero Garvin has evidently built a strong level of trust with all involved.

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.

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.

Following the siege month by month through 2016, the film has a gripping narrative drive, with many sequences that work to variously harrowing and cathartic effect.

This audacious, irony-laced, convention-jumbling tale is just plain fun to watch.

Minari is never downbeat, despite the challenges the characters face. Chung’s love for his characters—and the Arkansas farmland where he grew up—always shines through.

The Farewell is so fixated on its principle problem that it doesn’t allow its story or its characters to veer from it, or find further complexities in it. There’s only so many scenes a story can take of family members trying to keep the truth from grandma before it become less compelling.

This propulsively entertaining, bracingly amoral character study is powered by Timothee Chalamet’s performance as a despicable egoist who happily manipulates those around him.

While it smoulders with indignation for the injustice that was perpetrated for so many years, Great Freedom is also a love story, a remarkable character study, and an absorbing meditation on what long-term imprisonment for a crime that is not a crime does to the soul.

You don’t have to be an animal lover to appreciate the craft and the genuine poetic vision of a film which, though strictly unsentimental, is intensely moving, transfixing and quite genuinely unique.

As a dreamy yet concrete evocation of lives beset by unseen anxieties and dwindling resources, Western has a mythic quality in keeping with its totemic title.

If The Power Of The Dog isn’t the absolute killer coup that Campionites might have hoped, this is her most thoroughly conceived, consistently involving drama for years: taken all in all, pretty much the full visual, dramatic and, indeed sonic package.

Maria Speth’s study of a veteran teacher and his early teens students lasts three and a half hours, but not a moment is wasted. Anyone who teaches, or has ever been taught, will find something to relish in this serious-minded but quietly celebratory film. just as Bachmann puts the students at ease, the film-makers have managed to do the same – unintrusively catching the pupils’ episodes of vulnerability, or certain telling moments, as when two of them exchange flirtatious taunts.