With a cast largely made up of the director’s relatives as well as villagers from the landlocked province, this deeply personal work on the plight of rural farmers has a striking feel of authenticity and poetry.

Broad-brush American Fiction might be, but its approach to race and racism is oblique and unexpected, and it’s very funny about publishing’s literary ghetto.

It’s a movie about masculinity that could have been solemn and prescriptive; instead it’s pulsing with humanity, thanks in great part to tremendous performances from its leads Natey Jones, Alexandra Burke and smart newcomer Temilola Olatunbosun.

Perhaps the most remarkable moment comes at the end when the elderly Aurora reflects that she doesn’t want revenge, she just wants those connected to the genocide to be made accountable for it: “sat in the chair” of justice.

In this film it perhaps isn’t clear what the sacrifices have been for, and Durkin is sufficiently loyal to wrestling and its fanbase not to question it; however there is a muscular force here and the sentimental postmortem scene is inspired.

What distinguishes North Circular is the overwhelming importance of music: there’s a musical tradition here that is not simply commemorative and static, but vital and evolving, and given a fresh burst of creativity by the emerging status of women in Ireland.

Stage Fright has serious fun with the business of acting, a trade that calls for both the cold, calculating Charlotte and the committed, caring Eve alike to transform into other people. And Hitchcock appreciates the charged atmosphere of an empty theatre, as well as the frisson when the doors are closed, the lights go down and audiences wait expectantly in silence, never knowing quite what will happen next.

Cagney builds a weird tragedy, and there is no more apocalyptic ending than when he and his world blow up to his triumphant cry, "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"

Xala means sexual impotence, and the film, culled from his own novel, is a brilliantly funny, ironic satire about post-colonial Senegal. [21 Dec 2000, p.13]

It’s a complex drama, a realist film teetering on the edge of the uncanny, whose very title points the way towards the idea that there are shades of grey in every judgment we make.

In the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices which art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners

The Imaginary may not be a standout in the rich and wide-ranging oeuvre of its makers, but it is a moving and charming testament to the delights of dreaming.

As always, I find myself considering that in a world where everyone’s a cynic and an ironist, Cousins’s unaffected rapture is unique and refreshing. And there is an odd-couple comedy here, with Cousins as the unstoppably garrulous super-fan and Thomas as the reticent English gentleman, almost like a charismatic Cambridge don on the long vacation, who has picked up a voluble hitchhiker.

This Korean war drama was as taut and gripping as one of [Malden's] performances, containing many of the pros and cons of his acting style, fervent but sometimes overemphatic. [02 Jul 2009]

The sleek, stark images of this film are hypnotic; the faces are compelling and the hallucinatory finale is rather inspired. An arresting piece of work.

It’s a work suffused with emotional tones and shades, surprisingly not all of them sad even though the subject knew at the time of filming he had mere weeks left before he’d die of cancer.

An entirely absorbing, coolly low-key movie.

Mercy Road is an original, darkly idiosyncratic thriller; I’ve never seen another quite like it.

Perhaps there is nothing very new in this film, but it’s a very civilised experience.

At its best, the Eras Tour film manages to capture the why of that bond, the shock of her vast stardom against the startling emotional clarity of her songwriting. The Eras tour, she says, has been the most special experience of her life; in this deft rendering, it’s easy to feel the intoxication of being in her temple.

Hit Man comes close to fantasy and approaches screwball but keeps the realism. A hit is what it deserves to be.

Violence and tragedy is where the story is naturally heading, and this trajectory is plain in every scene and every shot: a world where aggression must either be violently and dangerously resisted or accepted.

Roth thinks in hooks and punchlines, which keeps the copious slayings inventive and gratifying while also enlivening the connective tissue between them.

This is not a cuddly version of Godzilla. He is rageful and entirely incomprehensible, seemingly not even motivated by hunger, desire or revenge. Like a god, he just is, an entity that has become death, the destroyer of worlds, as ineluctable as history itself.

The folk singer and counterculture veteran Joan Baez is the subject of this intimate and painful documentary, which brings us to the brink of a terribly traumatic revelation that it can’t quite bear to spell out.

It was a goofy, almost silly caper which could have gone wrong or turned out to be misjudged; instead it was a moment of secular grace, like something from a late Shakespeare play. The film does justice to this overwhelmingly moving event in British public life in a quietly affecting drama.

Not a terribly profound film, but delivered with real brio.

The script, by Roderick Warich and Kröger, isn’t quite as nifty as its famous models, but it has its own grim integrity, especially with the jarring last frames.

Green Border is a tough watch: a punch to the solar plexus. But a vital bearing of cinematic witness to what is happening in Europe right now.

This is an absorbing story, acted with superlative delicacy and maturity by Chastain and Sarsgaard.

Seydou and the others are not exactly masters of their fate, or captains of their souls, to quote WE Henley’s Invictus. They are swept along by power and inequality, but Garrone shows that their humanity and compassion are still buoyant.

Comer’s vulnerability and idealism are authentic as are her determination and a dash of real ruthlessness . . . She carries everything with unselfconscious strength and style.

It’s a fascinating and frightening stranger-than-fiction tale and is an unusual choice for Kendrick’s directorial debut. She makes a convincing first-time film-maker, capturing the feel of a time and a number of places with ease.

Dream Scenario is a cousin to Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and very enjoyable; it is at once strangely light-hearted and heavy with menace.

With Russia trying to further circumvent the OPCW, this coolly outraged film shows how Washington’s unilateralism has been a gift to even more belligerent parties.

It is only with the explicit possibility of a supernatural explanation, combined with full-on psychiatric breakdown, that the movie loses its light touch and its plausible detail. Yet there’s always a hyper-vigilant twinge of fear.

This is a fervent film, heartfelt and shot with passion and sweep.

Building in power and finesse, Danner oversees a very satisfying dialectical dustup.

Sing Sing isn’t just telling an uplifting story. The story of its own making is uplifting.

This is a powerful and important documentary, though I have one tiny qualification.

The film’s particular innovation is to privilege Black women’s perspectives on the history of American racism, and with the exception of Kendi himself, every expert commentator here is a Black woman.

Stolevski’s film-making is deft. He weaves a social consciousness into his narrative without retreating to mawkish parables of resistance and redemption.

Admittedly some of these moments get a little gushy. Beyoncé has much to be thankful for and she spends a little too long doing the thanking, from her parents to her dancers to guests like Diana Ross. But there’s always another slab of concert action round the corner to jolt the whole show back to life.

It’s in uncompromising bad taste but made with lethal precision and discipline.

Night of the Hunted may fall a bit short of moral substance, but it certainly holds us in its grip.

If George Orwell had had a career stint as a Korean estate agent, this is the kind of story he might have turned out.

With natural sympathy and warmth, film-maker Carol Morley has created this likable, generous, imaginative response to the work of the neglected English artist Audrey Amiss.

Calling a film-maker a “dreamer” sounds hackneyed, but it does justice to his idealism. Perhaps no other description will do.

It is a record of the past, but an almost unbearable warning of agony yet to come.

The question of who gets to tell stories is discussed (spoiler: mostly white men, until recently), and for a 97-minute film, Subject squeezes in a lot of ethical biggies.

It’s all a fizzy, funny, convincingly romantic delight, a tribute to the craft of making big movies with big stunts that is heartfelt in its appreciation without taking itself too seriously.

What would Pretty Woman look like if it bore the smallest resemblance to the reality of sex work? Maybe something like this, Sean Baker’s amazing, full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal.

It’s not for everyone, but for gorehounds this film delivers and then some.

There’s nothing sentimental about this documentary, which looks at people with the clear, unflinching gaze of a portraitist.

Berger orchestrates marvellously tense, explosively dramatic scenes and with cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine and production designer Suzie Davies contrives some spectacularly strange and dream-like tableaux.

Directed with verve and enthusiasm by 37-year-old former bank employee Lokesh Kanagaraj, who moved into directing after winning a short film competition, the influence of the likes of Quentin Tarantino on all of this is very much evident.

This documentary includes witty and insightful interviews with MI stalwarts like Thompson and Hugh Grant; it is a great pleasure to watch and will send people back to Merchant Ivory films themselves, particularly perhaps their Quartet (1981) and The Golden Bowl (2000).

Well, Caine and Jackson and their ineffable class give this film some real grit: it’s a wonderful last hurrah for Jackson and there is something moving and even awe-inspiring in seeing these two British icons together.

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

The effect of it all is elegant and overwhelmingly stylish, yet maybe there’s not a superabundance of substance to go with the style. Kinds of Kindness feels heavier and longer than I expected, as if reaching for a meaningful resolution that might not be there. Yet absence and loss is perhaps the whole point.

I Saw the TV Glow marks a remarkable progression for Schoenbrun as both writer and director, a more substantive, if still challenging, narrative married with an incredible, expanded ability to fully immerse us in the visuals they have created. It’s made with such transportive precision that I can still feel it as I write.

C’est Pas Moi amuses – and discomfits.

Her story is obviously astounding in itself, but what makes The Fire Inside, once called Flint Strong, such an upper-tier sports movie is that Morrison and the Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Jenkins don’t rely solely on the facts of her life to compel.

It’s an exhilarating, alarming look at that much discussed subject: the Russian soul.

Maria is the most persuasive and seductive of Larraín’s trilogy of great women at bay, after Jackie about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer about Princess Diana.

West mulches up a thick impasto of pulp, gore, filth and fear and gets away with some colossally self-aware scenes.

In every shot and every scene, mostly in closeup, Ronan carries the film with her unselfconsciously fierce and focused presence.

Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent.

There’s such electricity to Rebel Ridge – I just hope enough people get the chance to feel it.

In its trashiness – and, yes, its refusal of serious substance – The Substance should really be put out on VHS cassettes and watched at home in homage to the great era of home entertainment pulp and video-store masterpieces of weirdness and crassness.

Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story give a shrewd, fly-on-the-wall picture of the divisions within the union itself, with the working-class members and people of colour uneasy with the white college-grad contingent who are very gung-ho about protesting and getting arrested, not quite realising that for black people this is to risk death.

It is entirely gripping and a witty and unnerving way of representing the mysterious silence of animals and a future world in which human beings can no longer exist.

Kill’s objectives are achieved with an energy and enthusiasm that make it a tasty piece of action cinema which doesn’t pull its punches; it’s finger-cracking good.

For all the characters’ misery and misfires, Between the Temples is a winsome journey. It’s a little weird, a little sweet and a lot of awkward – a testament not just to the Jewish tradition but the faith we can learn to have in each other.

It’s a tender, painful, intimate film, made over several years as we watch four girls in the months before the dance.

Working through one’s own strife as a form of autofiction can often lead to self-indulgence but Kaphar has crafted something that deserves to exist outside of his inner circle, an emotionally wrenching drama set to resonate with those who have also had to confront the complicated equation of radical forgiveness.

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

The film’s chief enjoyment is seeing how motivations transform, and character is forged, through the sliding doors of new people, victories and losses, and the sharpening of the young women’s disparate judgments on the genuinely disappointing differences between boys and girls state.

Vandross’s specific power isn’t always fully articulated here – but his musical brilliance certainly is.

There’s a surprisingly grand emotional punch, arriving suddenly and landing with force.

It is very intelligent and humane, and what a great performance from Collias.

By the end it’s nearly impossible not to shed a tear after the touching finesse and shape of this story.

From a horror fan’s point of view, this is an absolutely fascinating experiment with form.

I last encountered the work of the Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez in the documentary-reverie Double Take from 2009, which imagined an encounter between two Alfred Hitchcocks. Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961.

Izaac Wang’s reserved, undemonstrative performance is what sets the film’s non-sucrose tone: he only really smiles in a goofy video of his much younger self. It’s a cool, downbeat and satisfying piece of work.

Squibb is as understatedly funny and commanding as you’d expect. Both actor and character remain, despite all societal and personal forces to the contrary, absolutely vital even as the circumstances and potential of life shrink. What a joy to witness it.

Itō is an amazing personality: an intelligent, courageous journalist who may have changed the course of Japanese history.

As fun as the boys are, this is Barrera’s show. She is tremendous, and seemingly having a tremendous amount of fun.

This documentary about [Moth's] life, directed by the actor Lucy Lawless, is a fascinating portrait of a woman who had two mottoes: “no regrets” and “don’t be boring”.

The Kupferer-Mallens are Chicago theater stalwarts, having founded their own company, and the affection everyone involved with this project feels for the stage – as an art, therapy and practice – is so evident as to be contagious, even in the film’s most theater-y meta moments.

Sweeney’s fight for bodily autonomy, against religious fanatics in Immaculate, transcends the screen in a way most B-movies like it could only pray for.

It’s a quiet film, and Panigrahi plays Mira with such poise and intelligence, conveying her innermost thoughts with a slight lift of the chin here or lingering look there.

[A] deeply disquieting and indeed enraging documentary.

Patel turns it into a very exciting and stylish movie. His previous acting work didn’t obviously point to a kickass action career, although his performance in The Green Knight might have given us a hint. He’s evolved.

Matt Vesely’s impressive debut ably stakes out its own territory, not least in the vast distances covered by a single on-screen actor and a handful of vocal performances.

I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers.

The sheer sustained silliness of this spoof silent comedy is what finally compels admiration. It’s like chancing across a bunch of eerily gifted kids by the roadside putting on a bizarrely accomplished, very extended series of magic tricks and circus acrobatic stunts.

It is an absorbing, committed drama.