The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.

Columbus is an engrossing and unexpectedly passionate film, although much of the passion is displaced outwards into a feeling for space, for mass, for building materials. It is a static passion, but not inert.

Miss Kiet’s Children is a lovely film.

It does serve as a handy summary for those who want a cinematic introduction to Bell’s sprawling, singular story.

It’s all very silly, though it’s impossible not to feel some affection for this film: Cruise’s pure, strenuous earnestness, the disconcerting laser focus of his stare, and the video-game combat sequences with the MiGs – the words “Soviet” or “Russian” aren’t mentioned.

The elegance of Power’s approach belies the extremities of his blood-splotched, hard-nosed story. Which, as the film escalates conflicts and scampers towards closure, is more than grim – borderline misanthropic, perhaps.

Surprisingly, there’s emotional resonance in this slapstick flick about friends who are terrified to hug. Add that to the solid chemistry between the leads, and Tag is a fine callback to the sprawling ensemble comedies of the 1980s, back when the real-life tag team graduated high school. It’s a solid summer film that will melt away from memory by fall.

Although the story unfolds at a steady pace over two hours, the filmmaking is sufficiently elegant and metronomically efficient as to make every minute gripping, especially after the tragic twist halfway through the story.

It's a smart, cynical look at space travel, treating it as a blue-collar job and not a divine calling as Kubrick and others would have you believe.

This documentary is an invigorating, disturbing portrait of the arrogance and sinister self-importance of rich people, bullying politicians and their battalions of lawyers.

Reiner’s film, the perfect 90-minuter, is sometimes a little stretched at 107 minutes. Nevertheless it maintains its tension well, plays enough tricks on us so that we don’t ever treat anything quite seriously and Goldman’s script has enough good lines and situations to keep one interested in exactly what is coming next.

It’s Nicole Kidman who steals the show. Forced to endure the brunt of Hughie’s attacks, Rae is both cool and desperate, calculating and vulnerable, with a strange energy that feels young and tender but wise beyond her years.

Even in the film’s less successful moments, I admired the loose shagginess of it all.

Timothy Dalton's monogamous, deadpan 007 brings a more nuanced interpretation to the central character, whose relationships evolve in ways rarely seen in the earlier films.

Our ­Beloved Month Of August is a real one-off: ­eccentric and singular and ­cerebral: an arthouse event, yes, but also witty and emotionally engaged. I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards – and smiling a very great deal. Try it.

A poignant, funny male-bonding tale, adapted by Robert Towne from Darryl Ponicsan's novel. [21 Dec 2013, p.54]

All The Money In The World is not perfect; there is a touch of naïveté and stereotyping in its depiction of the malign Italians with their one, redemptive nice-guy gangster. But with the help of Plummer’s tremendous villain-autocrat performance, Ridley Scott gives us a very entertaining parable about money and what it can’t buy.

It is an introspective and downbeat film, but forceful and personal, with excruciating and all-too-real moments of mortification. And it can be weirdly moving, almost out of nowhere.

It’s a film to remind you of the almost miraculously collaborative nature of cinema, but also the radiant personalities of individuals.

Annihilation is more than mere visuals and it will shock, fascinate and haunt whatever screen it’s watched on.

A sombre, relevant piece of work.

It’s a beguiling story and Bell and Bening are tremendous as the star-crossed lovers.

This is an urgent, deep soak in the current refugee crisis.

After Love is intelligent, compassionate, challenging film-making.

This exquisite, exemplary science documentary, directed by Irish editor turned helmer Emer Reynolds, recounts the rich and fascinating story of the Voyager mission, arguably Nasa’s finest, noblest contribution to scientific understanding.

Our Souls at Night is your classic Hollywood weepie, so immaculately played that it confounds crass preconceptions.

Lady Bird doesn’t exist as a twee indie movie construct, it feels thrillingly real and deeply personal, every single beat ringing true.

Farhadi’s storytelling has overpowering force.

[Pearce] gives us a carefully crafted dramatic setup, an intriguingly curated selection of suspects for the crime and all of it building to a fascinating, finely balanced ambiguity in the movie’s climactic stages.

This is richly satisfying and powerfully acted work.

A nightmarish triptych of loss, waste and grief that is nonetheless arranged with such visionary boldness that it dares us to look away.

It contrives to be a very funny and recklessly provocative homage to Woody Allen, channelling his masterpiece Manhattan and brilliantly finding a fictional way to tackle his personal reputation head-on.

Lean on Pete is at its potent, stirring best during the opening furlough, when it focuses on this makeshift hobo family as it criss-crosses the Pacific Northwest from one racetrack to the next.

This film offers something that is never in sufficiently plentiful supply: fun.

It spends its time among unfeasibly beautiful young people in microscopically tiny swimming costumes, and moves with them in a trance of heightened physicality, drifting across beaches, bars and dancefloors. The mood is dreamy unseriousness qualified occasionally by temporary stabs of jealousy or misery. The sexiness isn’t promiscuous exactly; more directionless.

The Third Murder is a captivating puzzle.

It is, perhaps, a little derivative and maybe finally fudges the dark mystery of the quest’s end point. But this is a film with thrilling ambition and reach.

Paul Newman is at his charismatic best as convict Luke Jackson, fighting to maintain inner freedom despite the brutalities of a deep south chain gang. Much in the style of the old Warner Bros melodramas, the hardnut action here is lightened by a funny streak, as in the celebrated hard-boiled egg-eating contest. [31 Aug 2013, p.46]

Thoman coolly creates an oppressive atmospheric charge, as well as a deadpan satiric view of a certain kind of chillingly affectless conceptual art. A disquieting and mysterious mirage of a film.

The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.

It is a finely constructed drama, avoiding stuffiness without slipping into camp territory and while diehard historians might disapprove, everyone else will be supremely entertained.

With a giddy irreverence and a cavalcade of stupendous comedic performers, Long Shot is outrageously funny.

It’s a hugely charming crowd pleaser, an infectiously entertaining coming of age film that feels primed to attract and retain a loyal eager-to-rewatch audience. There’s a wealth of snappy dialogue and what feels like an attentive grasp of teenage life.

Joseph L Mankiewicz's four-hour Cleopatra is a stately but sometimes mindboggling spectacle. The central moment is the queen's jawdropping entry into Rome, for which Mankiewicz creates a sensational Busby Berkeley fantasy, like the world's biggest Olympic opening ceremony.

The mystery remains: did the North Koreans get it? Did they not get it? Or did they choose a foggy condition of semi-incomprehension as the only state in which they could reconcile ideological piety with reaching out the hated west?

Ghost Stories is a barnstormer of an entertainment, a fairground ride with dodgy brakes.

It isn’t nearly as deep as it thinks it is, but it is marvellously entertaining.

Jason Clarke is strong as the weak senator, and he wisely goes easy on replicating the unmistakable Massachusetts accent.

The script’s nuanced treatment of the complex relationships and a feel for the many-faceted, multicultural city in which it’s set – a unique urban blend of hedonism and tradition, bound together by hummus and history – redeem any shortcomings.

This isn’t a particularly chancy film, unless the decision to go old school is considered such. It is still, however, quite good.

Utterly bizarre and entirely ridiculous – and yet effective, an imaginative Guignol festival, like the goriest of soap operas, in which one wrong move opens a portal to hell.

With Three Men and a Baby, Nimoy proved himself to be an adept handler of mainstream 80s comedy, updating the far more farcical (and chauvinist) French original Trois Hommes et un Couffin into something more Hollywoodised and slick. But within the slickness, he let his three leads, Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson shine through with their own individual charm.

Dodgy history and dodgier accents, but Kevin Costner's medieval romp still has some magic – and shouldn't be judged on the weakness of its imitators.

Sometimes the shagginess of the film can make it feel a bit slight and at times it does work better as a concentrated character study, but it’s such a joy to spend this time with McCarthy, drunkenly scheming and grumbling, that it’s hard to complain.

Hotel Mumbai is an excellent, white-knuckle thriller – and an unlikely crowd-pleaser.

The film’s insidious crawl away from comedy into sweaty waking nightmare is arresting indeed. As is, finally, its insistence that some elements of American life remain too serious to joke about.

Watching Never Goin’ Back, it’s easy to see the frames of reference Frizzell pulled from, besides her own teenage escapades. But the film also defies easy categorization; it’s not consistently funny enough to be a comedy, nor lively enough to be a drama.

[A] highly entertaining and outrageously over-the-top Cinderella soap opera.

There’s a delicate intimacy between the characters that feels raw and authentic and like Coogler, Caple Jr’s indie beginnings seem to steer him toward filling a big film with small moments.

There is some stuffy, faintly reactionary stuff in this famed 1955 teen drama, but James Dean is truly extraordinary, and it has some brilliant scenes

This documentary by Morgan Neville reveals that he really was just what he seemed to be at first innocent sight: a kind-hearted, square but saintly man who genuinely loved and understood children.

The Favourite may have corrected Lanthimos’s tendency towards arthouse torpor. It is a scabrous and often hilarious film, made loopier by the nightmarish visions and wide-angle distortions contrived by the cinematographer Robbie Ryan.

In some ways, If Beale Street Could Talk is a portmanteau movie with great performances from KiKi Layne, Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry, a succession of scenes from interrelated lives, constellated around the main narrative arc and supercharged with an ecstasy of sadness and knowledge.

It’s a very mysterious and even bizarre film in many ways, shot in what is becoming Nemes’ signature style: long takes, a persistent closeup on the lead character’s face, and a shallow focus that allows the surrounding reality to intrude only intermittently.

The strangeness of this story will live in your bloodstream like a virus.

Just as in Stacy Peralta’s classic 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, this gives its audience a sense of the almost pastoral innocence of skateboarding, its devotion to nothing more or less than having fun: a subversive urban vocation that is dedicated to the art of pleasure.

It’s an immersive and exotic experience. Howard is a revelation.

This film is a deeply felt, tremendously acted tribute to courage.

The film comes from a place of deep admiration for MIA, but unlike more fawning biographies, it makes a convincing case that this admiration is well earned.

Elsie Fisher is magnificent as a vulnerable teenager facing trouble at school and at home in Bo Burnham’s gripping drama.

Gyllenhaal is terrific as a teacher and wannabe poet who exploits a child prodigy in this gripping psychological drama.

There’s an almost meta-maturity, as if Scorsese is also looking back on his own career, the film leaving us with a haunting reminder not to glamorise violent men and the wreckage they leave behind.

This is a highly enjoyable and bracing piece of work from Wash Westmoreland.

[A] gripping, well-acted and sharply-written low-budget drama.

There is humanity and complexity in this welcome movie, as well as muscular power and unreconciled anger.

It’ll annoy many with its refusal to take a stance beyond the absurdity of it all, but that lack of easy outrage makes it a true original. An important documentary for our times too, taking us deep into the heart of a bubble far from our own.

Wardle tells a compelling story of the three happy boys who became three unhappy men, their faces shining with a kind of ecstasy in their youth, then muted with sadness and bewilderment in middle age.

It’s an extremely watchable movie, beautifully and even luxuriously appointed in its austere evocation of smalltown America – though maybe a little self-conscious in its emotional woundedness.

Adrift doesn’t have quite the existential gut-punch of JC Chandor’s similar All Is Lost or the recent Cannes debut , but what it lacks in the department of pure howling cinema, it makes up for with the emotion of its central relationship.

This is an entirely ridiculous shaggy-dog story, a comedy salted with strangeness and seasoned with surreality.

Thanks to inventive camerawork, mesmeric performances and incisive yet elliptical editing and storytelling, the claustrophobia becomes a feature instead of a liability.

While it’s unfolding before us, it provides – whatever else the courts insist we call it – stirring, seductive spectacle.

The man himself would have tried to hoodwink you into thinking he was a decent guy. Bugsy the movie follows suit.

The first world war is one of the 20th century’s oldest, grimmest tales of futility and slaughter. Dibb and his excellent cast put new passion into it.

It’s a wonderfully spritzy dialogue-driven work, full of oomph and chutzpah.

Miraculously, Möller turns a handful of phone conversations into a nerve shredder.

It’s an uncompromising midnight movie.

The film concludes in a minor key, and unresolved: always smart, amusing and engaging.

There is one especially lovely moment. At their first meeting, lovestruck Tony asks Maria if her kindness to him is just a joke. She replies: "I have not yet learned to joke that way. Now I never will." This is a real big-screen event.

It is a haunting portrait of emotional undeadness.

Martinessi shrewdly combines subtlety, melancholy, satirical observation and candour about sex.

It is an absorbing and moving tribute to the courage of the young victims of Utøya.

Mug is a strange, engaging film – well and potently acted and directed, a drama that puts you inside its extended community with a mix of robust realism and a streak of fantasy comedy.

Museum is an oddly genial, garrulous film in many ways – rather like Güeros – and it doesn’t behave quite like a heist thriller, nor exactly like a coming-of-age comedy.

The whole thing might have been improved by slightly nippier pacing, but the slow-burn action pays off with a spectacular climactic gun-fight, where the distances are so vast it takes half a second for bullets to find their marks.

It’s a film which demonstrates that debate, the exchange of ideas, can be as thrilling as any ramped up action flick.

The beauty and the pathos of the film are vivid in every frame.

It’s a quietly devastating film.