The film can be difficult to get a handle on, but eventually encourages you to surrender to its poetic moods and distinctive rhythms.

In Tran Anh Hung’s seventh feature, a passion for food becomes a conduit to exploring an appreciation for the beauty and mystery of existence — as well as telling a delicate, complicated love story.

It’s a quietly profound film, one that encourages appreciation of the world through exultant widescreen landscape shots, macro close-ups and textured field recordings of skittering bugs and crunching ice. It also preaches acceptance of the inevitable cycles of nature – cycles that we, as humans, should learn to embrace rather than fight against.

The nothing much that unfurls over the following eighty or so minutes feels like everything.

Mudbound is full of strong performances, singular moments, and a heavy heart, but it’s an over-ambitious affair that struggles to find the right balance between its many characters.

The muted elegance of Passing’s design proves to be a deft feint for a film full of passion and profound longing, highlighted by two controlled but devastating performances.

A compact triumph of stop-motion animation in the service of a bittersweet tale, My Life As A Courgette (My Vie de Courgette) is as delightful as it is affecting.

The picture draws parallels between China and the US when it comes to botched and skewed deployment of information.

With an ambition that far exceeds its relatively small on-screen scale, Atlantis is a remarkable piece of filmmaking from an exciting emerging Eastern European voice.

The result is a careful chronicle that, while staying true to its observational ethos, nonetheless, leaves plenty of questions – and, occasionally, its audience – behind.

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.

Lee’s love for this hard land and the boy trapped in it – so fully embodied by young British actor Josh O’Connor – is unexpectedly moving and rich.

Linklater does connect you with the fun that he must have had in those days. If you can take the testosterone, you’ll have a good time.

Two Prosecutors is crisply fable-like in construction.

Open-minded audiences will soon realise that Pillion is not out to provocate, but to authentically and sensitively explore a side of gay culture little seen in mainstream film.

Highly entertaining from start to finish, the film benefits from David Koepp’s inventive screenplay and Soderbergh’s storytelling swagger.

One Child Nation is an utterly compelling documentary that examines the consequences of this staunchly enforced ‘social experiment’. If it stops short of making an explicit political statement, a series of powerful testimonies leaves a harrowing micro-level impression.

Subdued in tone and stoic in its approach to the dangers that can decimate an entire community, Identifying Features is admirable in its restraint, and all the more powerful because of it.

Its layered story, about a rich man and the extraordinary book that changes his life, is particularly well-suited to Anderson, who revels in such Russian Doll narratives and delivers the story as a dramatic reading, narrated by its characters.

A cinematic symphony more than a classic narrative film, Terrence Malick’s long-awaited The Tree Of Life has moments of breathtaking visual and aural beauty, but in the end it has us longing for the days of Badlands, Days Of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, when the Texan auteur also knew how to spin a good yarn.

With this seductive, serpentine neo-noir, Park Chan-wook raises the bar on the 2022 Cannes competition programme and reasserts his position as a peerless visual stylist. But there’s nothing superficial or superfluous about his style here: it’s all in the service of the film’s mercurial and at times disorientating blend of crime and passion.

Despite the sentimental score, which unnecessarily ramps up the emotion, Daughters is honest about the fact that this programme is not a magic bullet, just one important step on the road to change.

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.

The bittersweet realities of being a stranger in a strange land create a complex, thought-provoking human interest film.

Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of this hopeful parable of failure is the way casting, acting, script, and camerawork conspire to usher us into an immediately believable world which is observed with a painterly eye yet never seems staged.

An intimate, deeply felt engagement with profound matters of life and death.

It’s a picture of love that has led first to desperation and incarceration, and now to a sort of suspended grief, as the girls and mothers face an uncertain future, unsure whether they will ever be reunited, hope mixing with fear to the last.

This is a film you haven’t seen before from a place you’ll never visit, a first-class example of bravery and reportage melding into an filmed testament. It’s not just that it’s nailbiting. The unease lingers long after viewing, though, for every person associated with it.