Infinite Football is an austere 70-minute experience, but the eccentric idealism of Laurențiu Ginghină lingers in the mind.

Ultimately, it’s a sweet movie with some good laughs and a phenomenal rap soundtrack, but it fails to rise above the pack.

What DAU. Natasha shows is the bizarre way that, in totalitarian societies, the normal and the abnormal, the banal and the grotesque, and the human and the inhuman live together side by side.

There’s something refreshingly blunt about what Together is trying to say about the dangers of codependency, a film too busy having fun to waste time writing a self-satisfied dissertation.

Ozon has made a decent and valuable film, though it often seems like the drama part of a docudrama: some of the scenes feel like respectful re-enactments that could have gone into a documentary.

Martin Eden is a sad story of a sad man who lacks the capacity for happiness and who is astonished to find that artistic success is as compromised as any other kind. But there is a kind of thrill in tracing his progress from rags to riches to annihilation.

It’s a huge aspartame rush of a film: a giant irresistible snack, not nutritious, but very tasty.

It’s a lovely slice of life, a heartfelt New York story – and judging from the brief burst of writing that we are permitted to hear, the postman can rest easy whether he is on stage or at work.

In addition to its ability to take this odd premise and run with it, Nina Forever scores by being tremendously erotic. Granted, what’s sexy varies from taste to taste, but the exuberance in passion exhibited by young Abigail Hardingham is refreshing in a landscape of independent films that too frequently play nudity for a cheap laugh or just to tick a box off a potential distributor’s list of requirements.

Each new sentence adds more: more complexity, more woman.

Hepburn is in the boho-gamine mode, and this has a brittle charm, (arguably more than in Breakfast At Tiffany's four years later) but there is something unconvincing in the May-to-December pairing of 28-year-old Hepburn and 58-year-old Astaire and also something grumpy and not particularly classy about the way this film shrieks with laughter at silly modern women filling their empty heads with trendy Parisian intellectualism.

I would have loved to hear Kennedy on the tricky subjects of fusion cuisine or cultural appropriation. But there’s more than enough here to get your teeth into.

The film lets you appreciate Hadid’s delicate and complex situation.

The result is a rather stagey film whose back projections look quaint, with 3D apparently used to foreground items of furniture, such as table-lamps, giving rise to some eccentric camera-angles. But the set-up is ingenious and the "kill" scene genuinely thrilling. [2013 3D Release]

I was sometimes captivated but often frustrated by this epic essay-film, a meditation on Germany and his own family history that is stark, fierce, austerely cerebral and almost four hours long.

There are watchable moments, undoubtedly, and it is extraordinary to watch Houston’s sensational performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, singing The Star Spangled Banner with such passion: perhaps the greatest moment of her professional life. Her enigma remains unsolved.

Non-devotees might well give up, but director Bryan Singer always has a neat special effect, a well-timed gag or an action set piece around the corner, whipping up the action towards a symphonic climax.

The first half is so energetically surefooted as to establish trust in Manzoor’s instincts and hopes for a second feature. But like The Fury’s would-be signature kick that Ria struggles to nail, Polite Society banks on one big swing it just isn’t able to pull off.

It functions elegantly as both a victory lap for longtime fans and a belated introduction to the Belchers, a family of lovable misfits and cranks that’s as genuinely close as any on television.

The whole thing is underscored by barnstorming performances from Wong and Hawkins.

It doesn’t have the heart, the depth or the novelty of the first Lego movie, but it is relentlessly, consistently funny – which excuses everything.

Greene makes it clear early on that his interests lie less with a news report than with what Werner Herzog dubbed “ecstatic truth”. The dial swerves between “catching something” to “clearly rehearsed” and back again, and all to the betterment of the final project.

All good stuff from Depp, although by sending up Trump’s 1980s period, it feels a little off the money, and this is a figure who has already somehow absorbed derision into his skin and made himself immune to it.

This is a tremendously crafted, impeccably intelligent film.

If this film were a person, you’d want to give it a big hug, as you would a gawky teenager, and reassure it that it will be tough out there, that not everyone is going to get its idiosyncratic charms, but that’s OK because it’s awesome just the way it is.

While there are things to quibble with, there is also so much to like, and Trainwreck is still an important film. The romantic comedy, which it ultimately becomes, has been a dying genre of late, and Schumer’s effort, while flawed, is a reminder of what can make the genre so likable

It’s a great comic turn from Apte who deserves to be better known.

This is a sensually imaginative dive into the life of the Wuthering Heights author: it is a real passion project for O’Connor, with some wonderfully arresting insights.

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.

I’m not sure that I was completely on board with this film, which appears to have smoothly carpentered its narrative in the edit. Is it almost too good to be true?

The result is a film with urgency and heartfelt sympathy, but one which I couldn’t help thinking may have been better served as a documentary to focus more directly on the issues involved.

It is another highly sympathetic performance from O’Connor, who converts the British reticence of his earlier roles into Dusty’s strength and quiet vulnerability.

It’s a celebration of her musicality and extraterrestrial scariness, and a reminder that films about female singing stars need not be gallant tributes to tragically doomed fragility.

It's a fascinating story.

I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.

The pure energy and likability of this film make it such a pleasure.

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

This clever thriller teeters on the brink of abstraction, and walks a razor wire between horror and an incredulous absurdity meant to stand for how women must live in the modern world: the daily toll of living in fear of aggression, physical assault and withstanding the misogynistic structures that excuse them.

For its sheer silliness and towering pointlessness, Julia Ducournau’s gonzo body-horror shaggy-dog story deserves some points.

Billy Wilder's distinctive, irreverent slant on the world's greatest "consulting detective" holds up reasonably well 32 years on; you wouldn't expect anything directed by Wilder and scripted by his long-time associate IAL Diamond to be anything less than funny and watchable, and this is both.

One for the fans, perhaps, and a vivid Gradiva-esque glimpse of the past.

Leo Woodall’s breakout TV roles in The White Lotus and One Day offered a megawatt charisma, but for his biggest film role to date he dims it to a soft glow with gentle performance opposite Dustin Hoffman as one of a pair of New York piano tuners. And what a pair they are; they are a real pleasure to watch in an easy, unforced drama that mixes romcom moments with a relaxed crime thriller.

A sequel that is slick with silliness, but peppered with enough wit and peril to sustain the franchise’s momentum.

It’s a melancholy, interesting film, slightly opaque, a cine-journal about the way youth is clouded by experience.

Bellocchio shows us a brutal convulsion of tyranny, power and bigotry with echoes of the Dreyfus affair in France, and later, horrific events.

Frozen hews to real, recognisable plumb-lines and casts a lingering spell.

They Died With Their Boots On is a shameful whitewashing of history. Great battles, though.

I can't help thinking that the most interesting things happen in the precredit sequence - the fraught childhood, Blanche's sinister "accident" - but it's still vivid, barnstorming stuff.

An elegantly horrible coming-of-age.

The film is fun, but, for all its inventiveness, it’s a bit tame, with its nice-but-dim hero. But Diamantino is never dull.

It is a very grueling spectacle, often brilliant, sometimes slightly redundant and perhaps not able to maintain the storytelling rush of its first act. But it is always weirdly plausible in its pure strangeness and in the oddly poignant moments

It’s a beguiling mix of animated storytelling and narration that doesn’t flinch from exploring the emotional highs and lows that accompany a life with autism.

Mandibules is a rollicking, rambunctious tequila-dream of a movie.

It all bounces along amiably enough, due to the high-octane work of Boyega, Foxx and Parris. Perhaps they deserve to be in a more serious film or in a comedy that was skewed more to grownups. Well, it’s a film with its own peculiarly unexpected innocence and charm.

High-school students have plenty of growing pains to offload, and Gomez-Rejon clearly knows what makes them tick. His film is at once buzzy, fun and confronting.

A sombre, steadfast argument for art’s life-giving properties.

The issues involved here might have been discussed a little more extensively and the provenance and context of the TV interview archive material could have been labelled more clearly. But this is a decent film.

As with I Am Love, Guadagnino has put together something utterly distinctive here, a cocktail of intense emotions, transcendent surroundings and unexpected detours. A real pleasure.

In writer-director Evan Morgan’s unusual neo-noir The Kid Detective, it’s not just a suspect or a motive that’s a red herring, it’s an entire genre, a strange rug-pull of a movie that starts in the middle of the road before ending up off a cliff, in a way that both works and doesn’t, a fascinating gambit nonetheless.

It’s a minor work that knows its place in the margins, but is thought-provoking and surreptitiously insightful – and very funny.

Though effective in filling in the gaps of Chau’s story, the impressionistic animation dramatising his final moments commits a similar sin as the swashbuckling tales of yore, and makes a spectacle out of a tragedy that is ultimately not all that mysterious or abstract – but in fact grounded in material sociopolitical contexts.

The adults' behaviour is almost as confusing for us as it is for her. It's a neat trick that reminds us these weighty adult issues are both life-changing and, in the moment, somewhat insignificant to someone Maisie's age.

It's a likable film, though not a sensational development in Tim Burton's career.

Beneath the crazy candy-coloured palette, there is actually some real human warmth in the love story, and the acting ensemble features some great comic performers in supporting roles.

Southside With You uses our affection for the Obamas to add urgency in the otherwise simple script.

Bottoms is actually a bizarrely violent film, and its plot is always teetering on the brink of pure incoherence, but it’s always funny, thanks to the goofy and winning comic presences of Sennott and Edebiri.

Vallée, in collaboration with screenwriter Nick Hornby, gives the film its energy by pulling the narrative apart. They create a two-hour hallucinatory montage of the hike and Cheryl's back story that's wound together with the songs, phrases and poetry that she recited to herself as she walked.

This film is a time capsule of the 1980s: an era that was crass and excessive in so many ways, but now seems weirdly exotic.

While it’s ultimately a little too messy to work quite as well as it could have, given the interesting and ambitious ingredients, On the Count of Three is proof that Carmichael is a director to be excited about, hoping that perhaps he finds time to write his next script himself.

The Sea Beast gets the balance just right between rollicking action scenes, the inevitable didactic anti-hunting message about respecting other species’ right to exist and family-friendly humour.

While some of the beats might be a little too predictable and while the emotional wallop at the end might be more of a gentle tap, Raya and the Last Dragon works for the most part, a charming, sweet-natured YA-leaning adventure that acts as proof that Disney needs to focus on moving forward rather than continuing to look back.

Meadows is clearly not interested in lifting the biographical lid on anyone, just getting alongside the band, and picking up on their energy, vulnerability and excitement. He has no agenda; he just loves the Stone Roses, and it's a great, heartfelt tribute.

Salt of the Earth has humour, genuine feeling and great sincerity: it's a film about hope.

A very entertaining madeleine for movie-going of the analogue age.

Disclosure Day does give us once again a very Spielbergian primal scene of suburban childhood, though not with the devastating reality of his autobiographical The Fabelmans; rather, it is that aliens give Spielberg his way of defying the old maxim about not being able to go home.

Some of the set pieces are overdone but the final scenes take on an almost operatic quality.

The two women’s scenes together give the film its most interesting moments.

A drama with interesting moments, but also some false notes and a wildly bizarre ending.

It’s a powerful, immersively detailed film, with three outstanding performances.

The cumulative effect is very pleasurable. The film has got some Python, Douglas Adams, Charlie Kaufman and also John Waters and Ed Wood Jr in it; it’s also possible that Dupieux has seen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled.

In Dunham’s hands, the throughline of enduring and discovering one’s worth, however historically imagined, is at once a comfort and a lark.

The film has charm as well as a certain deja vu for audiences, although for me it didn’t quite have the distinction of Marnie.

The Measure of a Man’s decision to keep its conflicts so microscopic in the service of realism is a real problem. Put bluntly, Brize’s touch is so light that it’s immeasurable.

McCullin emerges as an unsentimental, plain-speaking, thoughtful man, disgusted at the inhumanity of war – and yet candid about how he is also personally and professionally drawn to its drama.

Poirier directs with a clear eye, an unsentimental mind and a fine ear for table talk. The humour, and there is plenty of it, comes from within, coloured by a view of the human race that combines realism with affection. [08 May 1998, p.7]

Plaza’s natural toughness gives this film some texture, but the truth is she isn’t in it much. You can spend very, very long stretches of the running time longing for her to re-emerge. So, when she doesn’t, it feels bland.

“This isn’t a Mensa convention!” says one player. Is that disingenuous? Isn’t there, in fact, some advanced showbiz intelligence and surrealist savvy in the way Jackass is set up and edited? Either way, it has a horror-comedy impact.

It’s still a tremendous spectacle: all four of the musketeers are very attractive characters, particularly the noble and agonised Civil as D’Artagnan.

Bujalski really has pulled off something extraordinary here.

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.

This isn’t really a film in search of a definitive truth – it’s a deliberate provocation to the conventional notion of truth in the age of media frenzies over salacious crime.

As if from nowhere, a first-time British film-maker has appeared with a tremendously accomplished, subtle and supremely confident feature, authorially distinctive and positively dripping with technique.

It's a superbly crafted film by a cult film-maker and features a virtuoso bank robbery sequence shot in a single take from a camera in the back seat of a car.

This is a dark reminder that even childbirth, that most universal human experience, can be clouded by sectarianism and suspicion.

Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism.

This film is terrifically acted by its central trio: three intensely and unselfconsciously physical performances in which their bodies are frequently on show, sensual but fragile.

Villeneuve is superb at juxtaposing the colossal spectacle with the intimate encroachment of danger and a mysterious dramatic language that exalts the alienness of every texture and surface.

While some viewers may complain that the action is too heavily weighted toward the ending, I’d argue that this is a strong example of destination-not-the-journey film-making.