While the urgency of the message emerges powerfully, the details are often hard to absorb, as Gibney skips from political information to technical specs.

The young cast, from the newbie leads to an army of go-for-it extras, are terrific, and Marillier is something else – ferociously expressive in a performance that’s no-holds-barred on every front.

This is partly a consummate figures-in-a-landscape study, with characters – and their accompanying mules - often merging into the vastness of a varied, but usually profoundly, inhospitable landscape. But the cast makes striking use of non-professionals, and Laxe has an unerring eye for faces that tell a story.

Low-key performances by the conflicted Lahti and the radiant Airola prove the final knockout hit, with The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki at its best when it’s lingering upon the nuanced expressions on their faces, or highlighting the way their portrayals so convincingly convey their characters’ affections.

Hands Of Stone tests how far a film can go solely on heart, and in this case, it turns out to be just enough to overcome biopic conventionality.

If the film exasperates and exhausts, which it does, there is also the knowledge that before too long there will also be moments of surreal comedy, freewheeling invention and genuine tenderness.

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

One thing that can be said about brazen crime comedy Dog Eat Dog is that it’s a full-blooded venture in every respect, with Schrader and his leads Cage and Willem Dafoe clearly enjoying the gore-soaked frenzy. But the film also feels like a too- familiar reheating of in-your-face Tarantino-style crime tropes.

While the stand-off does have its scripted moments, Clash rises above this for two reasons. Firstly, it’s intensely cinematic.... Secondly, underlying the drama is a rather poignant lament for the unity and energy of Egyptian culture, something which comes through in a wealth of small details.

The fading, erstwhile disgraced star’s grizzled, weary urgency gives this story some gusto and resonance, but otherwise, Mesrine director Jean-François Richet delivers adequate B-movie excitement only in spurts.

Like Kore-eda’s 2008 family drama Still Walking, this is a film which is interested in the architecture, both emotional and physical, of the family home.

he film’s unexpected narrative elements — including a few shots you’ve never seen no matter how often you go to the movies — make this a rewarding take on coupledom told with satisfying visual flair.

The end result proves commanding and fascinating, even if it’s not wholly satisfying from start to finish.

Exploring a bewildering range of issues from ideas of masculinity to assisted suicide and the fraying of societal ties, Staying Vertical is wildly eccentric, darkly comic and filled with you-don’t-see-that-often moments which are liable to render it an acquired taste.

This knowingly excessive brew of cartoonish knockabout and macabre comedy horror just isn’t that funny.

those who aren’t put off by the extensive subtitling will find themselves swept away by this family reunion which offers not only a masterful portrait of the contemporary Romanian middle-class but also a whole set of smart, perceptive reflections on the relativity of truth, on the failings of memory, the interpretation of history, the significance of religion and much more.

Farhadi remains a master of pace and tension, slowly upping the stakes in an unsettling narrative fuelled by a lingering sense of powerlessness, paranoia and the possibility that you never entirely know the person you love.

Sometimes all a documentary needs to do is to get us in the room with somebody we’re curious about. Laura Poitras did this, and a lot more, in Citizenfour, by taking us to meet US whistleblower Edward Snowden; she pulls off the same trick in Risk.

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

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.

It is often very funny, unsettling and yet still proves illuminating on the character of Neruda and the battle for Chile in the 1940s.

The film is mostly unmoving, neither the romance nor the social consciousness succeeding in stirring our emotions. Even worse, Penn lets the plight of displaced Africans slip into the background, resulting in yet another well-meaning film that wants to address planetary ills by concentrating our attention on the good-looking outsiders who come in to save the day.

Ma’ Rosa is atmospheric and involving to a degree but also feels as if we are in familiar territory.

While it might not break new ground, there is no denying the potency of the film’s empathetic anguish and fury.

The film manages the tricky feat of both staying true to Waters breathless, page-turning prose, and creating a wholly persuasive new milieu for the story.

Jarmusch fans won’t find much of the director’s signature touch here, as he self-effacingly pays homage to a beloved act – Stooges fans will find plenty to enthuse about in the film’s ample coverage of a little-documented career.

The ingredients of an old-fashioned romantic weepie are given class and conviction by director Nicole Garcia whose elegant restraint helps to ground the more fanciful elements in some sense of reality. Her approach also makes the eleventh hour revelations easier to swallow.

Favouring an unhurried pace, Filho takes the time to let us get to know Clara. And while the moments of drama are small and intimate, the effect is engrossing.