At a tight 72 minutes, the film is a quick and dazzling burst of pleasure, pulling together so many opposing visuals, ideas and genres and coming up with something dazzling as a result.

It is a well made, well controlled film, and its sullenly monomaniac quality – perhaps partly a function of the star doing the writing and directing – is entirely appropriate for the subject matter.

This film is a very sly, subversive and disturbing black tragicomedy about a universal secret addiction.

It’s a film you have to feel your way into, like a ruined church or a haunted house.

Tanna has a warm, shimmering vitality. Like the trees and the birds, the frame feels alive.

Some critics have expressed reservations about melodrama and overworked symbolism, but I found it gripping, with an edge of delirium.

It is such a beguiling performance from Richard, natural, unaffected, unselfconscious, you find herself rooting for Ana, although what form success might take for her is a mystery. Very impressive work from Lang.

Macdonald grants us insight into the process and, as expected, it’s hardly as haphazard as sceptics might think.

The film is immaculately cast...The principal figures in its ideological debate – the chilly, number-crunching executive Robert Duvall, godlike network supremo Ned Beatty and the ambitious, exploitative programmer Faye Dunaway – are vivid caricatures. But the movie runs out of steam as satiric invention turns into fervent, deeply sincere statement, and solid William Holden’s middle-aged producer becomes the representative of old-fashioned integrity.

The Portuguese Nun (2009) was a gem of gentle comedy, and his new drama, The Son of Joseph, has the same droll innocence and lovability. With its carefully controlled, decelerated dialogue, it is weirdly moving in just the same way.

The film occasionally hits a rather loud note of passive-aggressive piety, but it is very persuasive.

The film is pitched with insouciant ease and a lightness of touch at both children and adults without any self-conscious shifts in irony or tone: it’s humour with the citrus tang of top-quality thick-cut marmalade.

With stealth and elegance, Kennebeck brings these alarming truths into the light.

The film is a bit stagey sometimes, but ambitious and insightful. Tovey is excellent as he shows someone progressing from innocence to fear and then to loneliness.

What this exceptionally lucid film-survey reveals is what has to go on at ground level, and beneath the surface, in order to power a powerhouse.

We can debate if Burn Your Maps merely fetishises a different culture or holds it in true reverence, but I’d like to give it the benefit of the doubt. If nothing else, the performances are terrific all around.

Railing against rising tides, Gore emerges as a cannier performer and a more compelling subject than he was in 2006; a message that sounded critical then has become no less urgent with time.

Unassuming and old-fashioned funny entertainment isn’t exactly what we associate with this film-maker, but that’s what she has very satisfyingly served up here. It’s not especially resonant or profound but it is observant and smart, with some big laughs in the dialogue. The whole thing is enjoyably absurd though not precisely absurdist.

There is so much detail in the breakneck race from image to image that Isle of Dogs will reward multiple viewings as much as any Anderson film, visually if not narratively.

It is superbly directed and shot with great scenes.

Rather like its central relationship, the film is messy and flawed yet painfully familiar.

These were two women who reached a state of balance thanks to an almost aggressive honesty.

Coppola tells the story with terrific gusto and insouciant wit, tying together images from the first scene and the last, so that the narrative satisfyingly snaps shut.

Coco is a rousing, affecting, fun and much-needed return to form after underwhelming Finding Nemo and Cars sequels and will help to ensure that Pixar’s legacy remains intact.

Not all is explained in A Ghost Story, but enough is there for vibrant discussion to break out the minute the credits rolled.

The film has its own specific vibe, thanks in part to the writer-directors’ unique, immersive sense of the milieu and the leads’ tender chemistry.

It’d be easy to dismiss as jaded hipsterism but the film isn’t scared to laugh at itself and the unsustainable lifestyle its protagonists are clinging to.

There’s no clumsy exposition here to explain motivations but delicately scattered crumbs involving status, family and the crippling strain of competitive masculinity.

This is a sombre, grieving movie which appears to gesture to the ghost-town ruin that is still in Detroit’s future.

Harrelson is an affectionate director, finding memorable bits for performers all across the cast list, and his writing is peppered with arresting phrases.

Mudbound is absorbing: the language, performance and direction all have real sinew.

Sheridan is emerging as a master of the Mexican standoff, the shootout, the stomach-turning crime scene, the procedural office politics, but he’s also adept at tuning into the vulnerability and strength of the women and men called in to uphold the law. Wind River is a smart and very satisfying movie.

Beach Rats is a captivating character study and one that feels vital.

This isn’t the film we need right now, that’s a meaningless statement, but it’s a film that we deserve to watch, discuss and be grateful for.

This debut feature from Yorkshire-born actor and first-time director Francis Lee is tough, sensual, unsentimental, with excellent lead performances from Josh O’Connor and Alec Secareanu.

It’s a haunting little film that ends with a somewhat overwhelming poignancy.

It’s a highly entertaining portrait of the two men, and Tucci’s own directorial brush strokes are bold and invigorating.]

There aren’t really any surprises in The Other Side of Hope; it’s more like witnessing the ongoing cultivation of a humane philosophy. But the film is devilishly funny, economically constructed (the demise of Wikström’s marriage is shown in wordless images) and decked out in the director’s dismal palette of cobalt blue, moss green and burnt-marmalade orange.

It shouldn’t work, but it does, due to the intelligence of the acting and the stamina and concentration of the writing and directing.

It’s the deeply felt affection for metal that really makes The Devil’s Candy sing.

It’s always supremely watchable, but rarely, if ever, commits itself to genuine jeopardy or suspense. Instead of edge-of-the-seat moments, there are gags and clever touches and excellent performances.

I’ve never been sure exactly how profound this movie is, and it sometimes teeters on the edge of complacency, but it has a trance-inducing strangeness and Swinton is insouciantly magnetic at all times.

The film’s real ferocity is saved for the ideologues of terror.

It’s an endlessly charming film focused on a woman whose view of life is one to be envied.

The Land of Steady Habits, though not as funny and breezy as Enough Said or Friends With Money or Please Give, is a natural extension of Holofcener’s work, the totality of which is, in part, a rebuke of the idea that likability is necessary or even desirable in film characters.

It is a movie packed with wonderful vehemence and rapture: it has a yearning to do justice to this existential adventure and to the head-spinning experience of looking back on Earth from another planet.

Uncertain is a vivid, pungent ode into a world that is fast disappearing.

Post-Slumdog, Hollywood and Bollywood have repeatedly attempted to collaborate, with mixed results: here, they’ve produced a properly expansive and enthralling afternoon matinee.

For horror aficionados it is unmissable. For others, so intense it might be unwatchable.

The dazzle of the cast and the targeted in-jokes never take away from the film’s core messaging about the importance of believing in one’s own ability as an artist.

What an intelligent, emotionally grown-up film. More of this please.

Annette is a forthright and declamatory and crazy spectacle, teetering over the cliff edge of its own nervous breakdown, demanding that we feel its pain, feel its pleasure and take it seriously.

If Burden has any fault, it’s that it is overly straight, but perhaps for a subject with which it is so difficult to relate, that is necessary.

The intelligence of Kent’s direction and the humanity she reveals in both Clare and Billy give the film its arrowhead of power.

It would require a true curmudgeon to not derive pleasure from that twinkling performance from Redford, radiating smoothness, wisdom and charm to the very end.

The physical suspense is all but unbearable: a sexualised hunger, fear and need. Fingleton writes and directs with gusto and flair.

Gage’s remarkably intimate portrait of female youth on the verge leaves you with a largely hopeful feeling that this particular group of women will make good on that advice.

Stronger is a film filled with warmth and humanity, but one that doesn’t sugarcoat the reality that comes with it.

It’s a beguiling film: subtle, sensuous and delicate.

Camara and Darin contribute outstanding work here, a beautifully meshed pair of performances that reveals nearly everything you need to know about the characters and their inner lives through exchanged looks, shrugs and the odd arched eyebrow.

The performance is austere and challenging, it takes us through the grim events, their aftermath and the long endgame of King’s life, but without the emollient or lenient notes that a Hollywood treatment might attempt. It is a requiem of a sort, and a sombre indication of all that has not yet healed, or been fixed.

Last Men in Aleppo is one of the most difficult documentaries you’ll see this year.

It’s a comedy that doesn’t really have, or aspire to, any very tragic dimension, but it’s touching. The quirks are underpinned by a heartfelt solidity.

It’s an intriguing, disturbing, amusing twist on something which in many ways could be a conventional horror-thriller from the 1970s or 1980s, or even a bunny-boiler nightmare from the 90s.

A sad, sweet movie.

Yes, Del Toro’s latest flight of fancy sets out to liberally pastiche the postwar monster movie, doffing its cap to the incident at Roswell and all manner of related cold war paranoia. But it’s warmer and richer than the films that came before. Beneath that glossy, scaly surface is a beating heart.

Like Solaris, his earlier meditation on the future, Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker is mysterious and compelling though in my view not, like Andrei Rublev, in the realms of greatness: a vast prose-poem on celluloid whose forms and ideas were to be borrowed by moviemakers like Lynch and Spielberg.

This knotty psychological study is an impressive debut from Poland-based Swedish director Von Horn.

Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep give excellent performances, though not exactly a stretch in either case, and both with a tiny, tasty touch of cheese. Their characterisations are luxuriously upholstered, effortlessly fluent, busting with relatability.

It is a film with a sledgehammer punch.

A friend who watched this with me said that it’s the kind of film she’d like to see again when she’s dying. That pretty much nails its meditative, melancholy tone and suits the kind of work Goldsworthy does, which is all about the ephemeral and the enduring; time and the tactile qualities of the instant.

It is gripping and absorbing in its way, although perhaps too conscious of its own metaphorical properties and opinion may divide as to whether its expressionist element works. Yet there is no doubt as to its power, and its severity.

This production’s triumph is the room it’s granted Rajamouli to head into the fields and dream up endlessly expressive ways to frame bodies in motion.

Baahubali demonstrates the pleasing, straight-ahead simplicity of certain videogames: whenever our hero accomplishes a task, some new challenge presents itself.

The stunts are still awe-inspiring, and there's plenty of laughs. They really were thinking big.

Teenager vs Superpower does a solid job of contextualising this larger ideological battle, with talking heads and archive footage, but it’s always clear that the focus here is Wong.

It’s a marvellous movie about the lies we tell ourselves to stay sane—and the reasons why we might need to tell the truth.

There are a lot of twists and turns in the plot, but not all of them are satisfying. What does work are the performances, specifically Cooke and the richly sympathetic character she creates.

Support the Girls is a shrewdly observed, day-in-the-life-style portrait of a woman under pressure. It’s way too early to be thinking about awards season, but Regina Hall could be in line for some silverware.

There are such great gags, and it is acted with such fanatical gusto by Barratt that it’s impossible not to root for this unlikeliest of heroes.

It is a movie which teeters perpetually on the verge of hallucination, with hideous images and horrible moments looming suddenly through the fog; its movement is largely inward and downward, into a swamp of suppressed abuse memories which are never entirely pieced together or understood – even as the sickeningly violent action continues.

This movie really brings some gobsmackingly weird and outrageous spectacle, with moments of pure showstopping freakiness. Eventually it loses a bit of focus and misses some narrative targets which have been sacrificed to those admittedly extraordinary set pieces.

Yes, 24 Frames is rigorously experimental; it demands patience and engagement. But this haunted ghost-film had me completely entranced.

Just when we thought it was impossible to say something new about , documentary film-maker Eugene Jarecki pulls it off.

The script crackles with such bleak little jokes like this, relieving the tension in a work that could otherwise prove overwhelmingly depressing and borderline melodramatic.

If you are going to see one outlandish and occasionally nauseating bloodbath samurai pic this year, this is the one.

This is grownup film-making, more savoury than sweet, seductive, oblique and carried by a wonderfully smart and emotionally generous performance from Juliette Binoche – who delivers the material superbly, material which from almost anyone else would sound dyspeptic or absurd.

Polarizing yet undeniably fascinating, the bait-and-switch horror film lures its viewer into a false sense of terrified security before pouncing in an anything-goes frenzy, and Evans’s latest is a prime specimen.

What shines through most here is the pure sense of pride felt by Vitali, in the trust Kubrick placed in him, and in his part in creating some of the last century’s most monumental pieces of cinema.

Joyous, outrageous and slyly mournful.

This is a movie using non-professionals playing versions of themselves, and under Zhao’s patient, unintrusive directorial eye they appear to be inhabiting a kind of heightened documentary.