Asteroid City proves, once again, that there is so much more to the filmmaker than casual detractors assume.

As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick, is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you.

Weaving in footage from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On (a melodrama following a female taxi driver and set during the heart of Nicolae Ceausescu’s crushing reign in Romania), and capped off by an extended movie-within-a-movie contained in one static shot, Jude’s film is an ambitious experiment of the mad-science variety.

Ambulance is here to remind you of the head-spinning delights of watching a genuine cinematic madman at work. This is eye-popping, ear-splitting, guffaw-inducing stuff that makes Red Notice look like the dumpster juice it truly is.

There is a sincerity here that sticks.

Farhadi wrings two magnificently raw performances from both actors, providing A Hero with its one and only honest truth.

Structured like a quietly grand novel, subtle and elliptical, Ceylan’s film unfolds with Chekhovian grace and a cutting understanding of character.

Parallel Mothers’ twin purposes merge into something just shy of profound. It is a moment, and movie, that just might save your soul, too.

This is action cinema filtered through the thousand pile-on details of a serialized Dickens novel, grand and seismic. And when the action sequences do arrive, they are glorious.

Classical and ultramodern – Bonello closes things off with a QR code, of all things – The Beast is an experience both bold and rich.

If watching a Jafar Panahi film is something of a political act, then it is also a soul-nourishing one.

The power of Lowery’s work here is to filter his many influences into a singular vision that feels entirely in his sole possession.

Saulnier has returned with a tremendous, high-impact blast of a movie, making any delayed gratification all the more satisfying.

The new Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers movie is a delightful, zippy and genuinely fun thing

In terms of pure spectacle and shock-and-awe achievement, Villeneuve has produced an adaptation of mad glory and power.

The kind of full-throated, barrel-chested, more-more-more exercise in gusto and ambition that comes around once a decade, Babylon might either take Chazelle’s impressive career to new heights, or sink it to the bottom of the La Brea Tar Pits. Either way, the filmmaker deserves attention for throwing his entire self into making a delirious, lurid and sprawling concoction whose magnificent reach just about meets its grasp.

This is a startlingly entertaining, erotically charged movie that hits its many targets with a kind of ferocious and crazed accuracy that’ll knock the wind, among other things, right out of you.

While Benedetta the woman may have been touched by Heaven or cursed from Hell or neither, Benedetta the film is undoubtedly a miracle.

Happening is set in the sixties, but Diwan’s stark, unwavering direction, coupled with sparing costumes and cinematographer Laurent Tangy’s intimate lens, lend the film a sense of timelessness. The power of Happening is in the terrifying knowledge that Anne’s struggles could be happening to anyone, at any time.

Nothing is exactly new in F1, yet at the same time it is all immensely, rewardingly renewable – a true blue box of recycled cinematic trash, compacted into something irresistibly bright and shiny.

As is the case with much of Reichardt’s work, The Mastermind is a genre movie that zeroes in on a formula only to meticulously scrawl over it in jet-black ink.

This is an ambitious, methodical, immersive, and admirably devious experiment in conjuring atmosphere and testing gag reflexes. It will quicken your pulse, tighten your throat and – for those on its extremely particular wavelength – bust your gut.

The entire spectacle is so unabashedly outrageous that you cannot help but side with its many excesses.

A weird, hilarious, romantic, messy, violent and upsetting manic spectacle, Lana Wachowski’s sequel-reboot-remake encapsulates every emotion of this supremely messed up year.

Some moviegoers will be repelled – there was only a smattering of light applause during the film’s Toronto premiere, which was filled with audiences who likely leapt to their feet at the end of The Shape of Water – but it is as effective a nightmare as Del Toro has ever conjured.

There is almost zero chance that this film escapes the festival or art-house circuit to become a mainstream cultural artifact – its sexually explicit material all but guarantees it – but Jude’s work is an almost profound act of high-wire lampoonery that deserves to be seen and debated far and wide.

By the film’s haunting finale – a gut-punch moment of reckoning that follows nearly half an hour of entertainingly amateurish gunplay – Kurosawa’s sentiments on the current state of e-commerce are clear. Whether emptor or venditor, capitalism is full of caveats.

After Yang is a tightly controlled yet tremendously alive film, powered by the beating heart that is Farrell’s performance.