A sombre, sobering work.

Hong makes all of this look as easy and fluent as breathing.

The hippo, as a German tour guide tells us at the very beginning, may look fat and placid and rather cute, but it’s fast-moving, aggressive and dangerous to humans; perhaps the film itself, so mysteriously distended with huge digressions and non-narrative scenes, is as exotically fleshy and strange as a hippo. Yet it has bite. And the hippos themselves are entrancing.

Film-makers Adéla Komrzý and Tomáš Bojar are interested not only in the individual subjects, but also the hidden machinations of cultural institutions.

Clever, heartfelt and frequently stunning, The Wild Robot offers the type of all-ages-welcome animated entertainment that will delight kids and leave a lump in one’s throat.

This is a bleak, bold, extravagantly crazy story which is emotionally incorrect at all times.

I can think of few documentaries that are more honest, self-scrutinising and revelatory about ageing, familial love and its limits, and the whole tragicomic process of dying.

The film is to its credit much more interested in psychology rather than tech, and the fine lines between avarice, rage and impotence that make the capitalist world go round.

There are a couple of not-quite holes exactly, but slightly threadbare patches. More importantly, the narrative isn’t really the point; this is first and foremost a tense portrait of a toxic relationship, and a brutally compelling one at that.

The point is not motive, it isn't the elucidation of the human mind; it is more the simple juxtaposition of horror and bourgeois normality as a kind of Neurotic Realist motif: sinister, enigmatic, disquieting.

Don’t Tell Mom is a justifiably sweet feat that makes latchkey kids across the generations feel seen. Refreshingly, it represents real growth for an industry that would much rather be left to its own devices.

In this film, nothing about mega-celebrity looks fun.

McAvoy is the most compelling reason to see this one. The original may be darker, but it didn’t have McAvoy.

It’s an absorbing drama given sympathy and life by two very high-calibre performers.

If we’re nitpicking it’s fair to say that neither of the couple’s interior lives are as fully fleshed out as would be permitted in a novel, but maybe they don’t have to be: they function as avatars for romantic hopes and dreams as much as anything, delivering all the vicarious pleasure and pain that we’re looking for when we tuck into a good romance

It’s warm, it’s breezy – it’s a burst of summery family fun that is sure to inspire long looks back at the old movies and Cobra Kai episodes while sparking renewed interest in martial arts apprenticeship. Anyone would get a kick out of it.

Audiences hoping for lashings of graphic violence may be disappointed that not all of these problems involve gallons of blood – this is a relatively gore-free thriller – instead, it’s all aboard and anchors aweigh for some larky tension between likable characters who find themselves plunged into a nightmare scenario.

[A] richly enjoyable documentary.

There’s no doubting the shiver of pure fear that runs through this movie from beginning to end.

A tough, sinewy drama about a whole community that wants to look away from others’ differences and its own culpability.

This is another deeply felt film from Jia Zhangke, with a very contemporary artistry.

[Fahy's] dialed-in performance is thankfully matched by an overarching crispness to the proceedings – just enough flourishes, an enjoyable but not unbearable amount of stress, no wasted time, a perfect match of star, script and style.

The technical diligence and conceptual novelty on display during the boost uphold a high standard of excellence, its most inspired sequence played like a nerve-shredding game of red-light-green-light. Believably portraying expertise requires some measure of the same behind the camera, and the attentive, inventive Gudegast can keep pace with his subjects.

It is elegant, eccentric and needs some time to be indulged. ... And yes, it is six parts beguiling to one part exasperating. But ... it leaves you with a gentle, bemused smile on your face.

The film may not be perfect, but its courage – and relevance – are beyond doubt.

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.

Writer-director Sandhya Suri has made a tense, violent and politically savvy crime procedural set in India: a film about sexism, caste bigotry and Islamophobia that doubles as a study in the complex relationship between two female cops, a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie.

Its heartwarming aspect comes framed with real grandeur, and a stark absurdism and tightly wound sentimentality reminiscent at times of Takeshi Kitano.

It might resemble other family dramas, but there’s a hum of something strange underneath, a sense that life is about surrendering to the infinite flow of events.

[A] remarkably unguarded documentary.

The issues are fundamentally the same: the enforced invisibility of a class of economic migrants who are now so numerous that many game the system, doubling their exploitation. Sangaré’s exemplary, unfeigned performance helps them speak.

The film ends with a terrifying question about the fate of one of the women. It spreads an existential chill.

Gazer’s atmosphere of looming disaster and dreamlike oppression crowds in on you as the movie progresses; an intriguing, genuinely scary picture.

It’s a sombre, sober movie but made with impressive artistry.

There are fierce and overwhelmingly authentic performances here from first-timers in Julien Colonna’s terrific mob drama.

Viet and Nam is a film that first feels opaque and elusive, and yet it becomes drenched with emotion.

Pharrell’s rags-to-riches story is a familiar tale re-energised not just with his unique sound but the basic decision to animate his life so that it can thrive with his imagination and hit so many visual grace notes.

It’s an amusing, affectionate tribute.

The forthright, punchy screenplay shows Kinoy’s TV background, but there is a galloping energy to the whole drama.

I would have liked to hear more about Gena’s late mother and the family history generally, but this is an arresting portrait.

A delirious and oddly agreeable stopover.

Àma Gloria is a small-scale film, barely over 80 minutes, but it leaves an almighty impression.

Heretic is gruesome and bizarre and preposterous, the third aspect made palatable by Grant’s dapper performance of evil.

Films about film-making are usually deeply self-conscious, and sometimes deceiving. But there is one at least that succeeds in surpassing the movie whose making it describes.

It’s all a lot, as they say, but those with a taste for maximalism will swoon over the goods on offer here.

Riveting, seamless, at points genuinely shocking, Last Breath exemplifies the possibilities of human collaboration – a feat that has stuck with me and, yes, took my breath away.

While it would have been good to have Nash’at properly cross-examine these men, his film’s careful approach pays handsome dividends. Hollywoodate teases back a corner of the curtain to reveal a Taliban regime stitched awkwardly over the bones of US occupation. It shows us the soldiers pining for the caves where they once hid, and mourning the glorious death that has somehow been snatched from their grasp.

There’s a fair bit of macho silliness here, but the panache with which director Joseph Kosinski puts it together is very entertaining.

It’s such a joy to watch two such assured and natural performers allowed the room to exercise both movie star and actor muscles as well as showcase their ease with both comedy and drama.

It uses its supernatural premise to explore some very human behaviour.

There’s an ingenuousness and innocence to Memoir of a Snail, a family-entertainment approachability that belies a strange intensity.

It labours for an hour to find its own thematic core, but as the psychological pieces accumulate, the film starts to exert an inexorable pull in its exploration of cognitive dissonance and mental illness.

Holy Cow is sentimental in the best of ways, with its warmth and hope in human nature.

Peck’s film, in which LaKeith Stanfield narrates a kind of heightened, fictionalised first-person account from Cole’s own writings and diaries, is devastatingly sad. It is the sadness of an artist who becomes estranged, not merely from his homeland, but from his art and his livelihood.

Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this.

As the synopsis suggests, plot is nothing more than an excuse to create a string of humorous set pieces featuring visual gags, snappy one-liners and lively song-and-dance numbers.

Like an unusually designed coat featuring quirky details and an interesting fabric choice from a young designer’s first collection, Swedish writer-director Mika Gustafson’s feature debut has raw edges and some sloppy stitching in places, but the whole is fresh, directional and beautifully cut.

Middleton’s film makes the case for remembering the Apollo 13 mission in all its mundane, dated, precise details – a real, rare and breathtaking tale of survival and ingenuity, clearly and painstakingly told.

Haugerud has something of Eric Rohmer, and perhaps a little more of Hong Sang-soo; a readiness to simply talk, and talk and talk some more. It’s surprisingly cinematic.

It is a deeply unsettling meditation on sexuality and transgression.

Hard Truths is a deeply sober, sombre, compassionate drama about a black British family, with flashes of fun and happiness that are emollient if not exactly redemptive.

It’s exciting, ingenious, funny and an unmissable Christmas treat.

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

It’s possible to read Friendship as a plausible, if far-detached character study, a cringe-comedy Single White Male heading for disaster. Then it swerves away, following its nose towards something weirder.

The film moves more freely because of its willed unconcern with the historical implications of the Munich hostage massacre; modern audiences may feel the contemporary context makes it naive or obtuse. But it’s a muscular, well-made picture with the tang of cold sweat.

It feels relaxed and sure-footed in its Spielberg pastiche, its big dino-jeopardy moments and its deployment of thrills and laughs. Maybe the series can’t and shouldn’t go on for ever: we need new and original ideas. This one would be great to go out on.

It’s a film that mixes small screen zeitgeist fragments and madeleine moments, a memory quilt of a certain time and place, juxtaposing Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg with Richard Nixon and George Wallace, John and Yoko in concert with ads for Tupperware – all inspired by the fact that John and Yoko did an awful lot of TV watching in their small New York apartment of that time, with John in particular thrilled by the American novelty of 24/7 television.

There are some very coolly orchestrated scenes in the big city and Mackenzie ratchets up the tension in style.

Interestingly, it has the crowd-pleasing energy of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator films. There is real sinew here.

Opinions may divide about the extended coda that Fortuné gives her story but it is evidence that she is ambitious for something that eludes so many film-makers: an ending. It’s a stylish debut.

A heartbreaking collection.

Class and racial tensions come to the boil in this potent tale of disaffected youth in smalltown France.

Democracy has never looked so vulnerable.

It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.

Gracey’s involving and immersive direction sweeps us up and out of our seats, refreshing beats that have grown musty in this territory (does every musician have a bad dad and a drug problem?) with endlessly inventive transitions and montages that find ways to offer something unexpected.

What a performance from Erivo; it is genuinely moving when the Prince has to convince Elphaba what we, the audience, have always known: that she is beautiful.

There is terrific fun, charm and storytelling energy in Superboys of Malegaon, and it settles on an interesting theme: very rarely indeed does a new film-maker find success with a completely original work.

The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.

This is a fascinating and neatly realised horror riff on the 2020s’ most popular genre.

The film has so much energy that its overall tone is fundamentally invigorating; this is the cinema of euphoric nihilism, and it’s a welcome return to form for Moreau.

This is a very impressive debut.

The film’s real power is in the accumulated testimony from others about the Netanyahus’ entitlement and paranoia.

Deeply caught up in decoding this tradition, perhaps Serra is too beholden to it. If only this admittedly riveting examination of dark human compulsions had found a way to also articulate the perspectives of the animals for whom the arena is a lethal experience.

As visions of apocalypse go, it’s rather lovely: a world lush with nature, animals learning to get by together.

Perhaps there can be nothing totally new to say on film about Hitler and nazism, but Lang is interesting on the hidden disbelief and fear that existed among the leaders.

Terence Fisher conjures up his customary dark fairytale atmosphere in one of Hammer’s best Frankenstein sequels. 

This is a never-say-die story and its cheerful optimism makes it a calorific Christmas treat.

Sweethearts thankfully avoids full predictability – a welcome relief, particularly in a film that embraces the rampant horniness of 18-year-olds. Even if you’ve suffered through the turkey dump, this one is a treat.

While showing Totsuko’s religious beliefs respectfully, The Colors Within takes care to highlight how community can be meaningfully formed outside religion, in the embrace of creative arts.

This is a very entertaining account of an actor who appeared to ascend, singly, to a higher plane than all others of the Hollywood golden age.

All in all, this is a powerful example of a bricolage-like editing technique that relies heavily on exploiting the copyright laws around fair use to create a prismatic, provocative style of cinema that’s very 21st century.

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

A lucid, emotionally honest account of trauma that lies beneath the smiles of family photos and wedding videos.

This is an exciting, forthright, energised – though very gruesome – film in which there is real human jeopardy and conflict. Non-zombies are more cinematic.

We get some tastily over-the-top acting and some huge rewind POV shifts to explain what has really been going on – and, of course, the heady whiff of gaslight as Millie can’t quite be sure she really understands anything that’s happening. Silly it may be, but Feig and his cast deliver it with terrific gusto; this is an innocent holiday treat.

It feels confident, inventive and as grippy as duct tape throughout.

Andres Veiel’s sombre documentary tells the gripping, incrementally nauseating story of Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl, the brilliant and pioneering German film-maker of the 20th century who isn’t getting her name on a Girls on Tops T-shirt any time soon.

A funny but also melancholy piece of work. It’s more interested in maintaining a consistent and sincere emotional connection than in wild virtuoso showboating.