I would have loved to hear a discussion on a wider range of issues, particularly #TimesUp, but with a film this much fun, it seems churlish to ask for anything else.

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.

It is a beguiling and unique piece of work.

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.

It is reasonably inoffensive, a bit like the recent Goosebumps, in which Black played a comparably defanged role, but it looks as if it was produced by some computer programme, devised by accountants and market researchers.

It’s another of Wahlberg’s collaborations with director Peter Berg, but without the style of their other films.

It is a horrifying parable, with chilling moments, although the story is structurally uneven.

Escobar is not without interest, sweep or colour, but bears signs of high-level, edit-suite indecision over what sort of movie it wants to be. It’s an alluring product, inexactly cut.

The movie is full of wackiness but contains only traces of comedy.

A sad, sweet movie.

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.

It’s a curiously underwhelming, muted, often plodding two hours that fails to reach the emotional highs and devastating lows one would expect from the material.

While the shifts in genre, plot and location do prove intriguing for much of the film, they ultimately result in a feeling of mild dissatisfaction, the whole never quite the sum of its parts.

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.

With a premise straight from classic literature and fairytales, Crazy Rich Asians is a transportive romcom about a poor girl who finds her Prince Charming – and is then thrown into the extravagant, glitzy, catty world of the Singapore elite.

It’s a victory lap, which will probably be enough for fans content to share Q’s presence and nothing more. But this movie isa cataloguing of a man who lives in three dimensions. In sticking to recitation of well-known historical fact and flattery it has taken the easy way out.

It’s a lugubrious quasi-noir mystery set in modern-day New Orleans, starring a charismatic Patricia Clarkson as Detective Mike Hoolihan; a movie that sometimes seems papier-mâchéd together with layers of mannerism and pastiche, floating along like a two-hour dream sequence.

Weaving themes of colonialism and class into the broad strokes of a won’t-stop-can’t-stop revenge potboiler, the film marks a step forward for the Australian director in terms of ambition and scope. In execution, however, the songbird hits a few false notes.

This is a film with an impressive, sometimes oppressive craft and technique – but it also feels unfinished. A sustained and rather brilliant conjuring of atmosphere, with some superb ambient music, finally succumbs to a rather banal inability to decide where to take the story and exactly how important the story has been.

JT LeRoy may have been an elaborate fib, but Kelly finds a genuine pearl of wisdom in the web of deception.

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

Her Smell is built around a performance of near-unwatchable toxicity by Elisabeth Moss, who channels a combination of Courtney Love and Heath Ledger’s Joker with her spiteful, slowly imploding rock star.

There’s clearly a more nuanced drama to be made from this story but given the scale, there’s still a lot here to praise.

It’s a pulpy slab of exploitation masquerading as an important treatise on the struggles faced by the working class in rural America, thumping us in the face with its shallow viewpoint until we beg for mercy. Or at least the credits.

None of it rings remotely true and his insistence on playing out so many scenes at such a high level can make it an excruciating watch.

There are good intentions and good performances here, but they’re squandered in a movie that isn’t quite sure what it should be and how far it should go.

Kidman fearlessly commits to the filth of it all, whether it’s drunkenly fighting off her daughter’s sleazy boyfriend or jerking off a bed-ridden informant, but her radical transformation and some timeframe trickery can’t mask a plot that feels rather empty.

You rarely get the sense of Fogelman’s characters being complex figures with internal lives – instead they’re merely there to smile weakly through whatever trauma their sadistic creator puts them through.

It’s a film entirely devoid of subtlety yet one that also fails to provide the grand emotion it yearns to deliver, despite the use of a sledgehammer.

It’s a heartbreaking, troubling film about men whose lives were cruelly deprioritised and whose families remain ever altered as a result. It ends on a note of melancholy but the burning anger also remains, the final scenes tinged with a painful awareness of wounds that may never heal.

This is mass-market entertainment with a radical bent, a loudspeaker blast of a teen movie.

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.

It’s everything and nothing, a familiar regurgitation of a formula with precious little to add.

With an achievement of this calibre it’s hard to resist hyperbole: High Life contains the single greatest one-person sex scene in the history of cinema.

It’s an engaging, inventive cover version.

It’s a film with love at its root, both familial and romantic, and Jenkins fills so much of it with a radiating warmth.

There are so many characters at play here and McQueen and Flynn’s script manages to let them all breathe, giving each actor small defining moments and given the exceptional cast involved, it makes for a richly rewarding experience.

There are some effectively nasty kills (this is no PG-13 reboot) and Green’s visual eye often results in some impressive imagery but both the look of the film and the script feel confused. Green can’t seem to decide whether he wants it to be gritty and lo-fi or slick and cinematic and so ends up awkwardly between the two, anything resembling an atmosphere sorely missing.

The danger of the whole thing collapsing under the weight of its own convolutedness is ever present. That it doesn’t is due to the power of Moore’s closing argument.

It has none of the brilliance and insight of Emma Cline’s 2016 novel The Girls, on roughly the same subject.

There are moments of crushing emotional weight but as the film progresses, they start to carry less power.

Final Score puts a cheeky British spin on the set-up.

There’s an authenticity underpinning the portrayal of events in The Front Runner that lifts it above the less-than-groundbreaking set-up.

There’s definite fun to be had here and franchise fans will surely appreciate both Black’s nods to the past and his plan for the future but there’s something forgettable about its freneticism, and I struggle to imagine in 31 years if it will be thought of at all.

If the historical epic exists as a delivery system for swords-and-shields clashes, panoramas of rolling natural vistas and gruff inspirational speeches to those about to die, then Mackenzie has done his job and then some. But his prior films have set the bar a bit higher than that, and this straightforward, unchallenged take on macho valour doesn’t quite reach it.

Refusing to make Breivik spectacular, the film pays tribute to process, how Norway gave him precisely what he was entitled to so as not to give him what he wanted – scale, martyrdom, glamour.

It’s part satire, part social comment, all fragmented and downright inconclusive.

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

I was utterly absorbed in this teeth-clenchingly exciting story and the “heist” sequence itself stands up really well – as well as anything I’ve seen.

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.

Zahler has a way with action, and the set pieces are inventive and nasty, with an unflinching eye for violence. Such style and confidence is impressive. But after three movies, his increasingly morose characters’ world-weariness is becoming wearying in itself; a little more light and shade here and there would easily take this cult director to the next level. That is, if he wants to go.

Julian Schnabel has made a heartfelt if straightforwardly reverent film about the last years in the life of Vincent van Gogh – acted by with all the integrity and unselfconscious ease that you would expect from this great actor.

A debut of unarguable promise, though – plenty to build on if Elba can resist the adolescent lure of running round with 007’s PPK.

Audiard’s storytelling has an easy swing to it, his dialogue is garrulous and unsentimental, and the narrative is exotically offbeat.

There are smart moments of fear and subliminal shivers of disquiet, the dance sequences are good and of course Guadagnino could never be anything other than an intelligent film-maker. But this is a weirdly passionless film.

Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now.

The Coens have given us a hilarious, beautifully made, very enjoyable and rather disturbing anthology of stories from the old west, once planned for television but satisfyingly repurposed for the cinema: vignettes that switch with stunning force from picturesque sentimentality to grisly violence.

For one star to get an award, a handful of defeated nominees have to swallow their pain, as the spotlight moves away from them. For one star to deliver the shock of the new, another one has to receive the shock of the old. A Star Is Born turns that transaction into a love story.

This is a crazy, dishevelled, often hilarious film, in which lightning flashes of wit and insight crackle periodically across a plane of tedium.

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.

At times it feels novelistic, a densely realised, intimate drama giving us access to domestic lives developing in what feels like real time. In its engagingly episodic way, it is also at times like a soap opera or telenovela. And at other times it feels resoundingly like an epic.

The pair share an easy, spiky chemistry and Reeves in particular shows himself to be surprisingly skilled at delivering such bile-filled dialogue.

This delightfully entertaining and idiosyncratic music documentary ought to banish the stereotype of drummers as talentless thickos. It’s also one of those films you can happily watch without having a jot of prior interest in its subject.

Ego, money, drugs: Lavelle’s story has the makings of an entertaining account of the music business. But this film feels too much like a promo for a comeback attempt.

If you thought the bogeyman was slender, wait till you see the film.

Whannell’s finite reserves of creativity have been meted out in an imbalance, going all in on world-building while giving the fight choreography and the cinematography listlessly documenting it the short shrift.

Watching it is like travelling through a wormhole to a slightly crummier version of 2004.

Chaganty’s tab-toggling is pacy enough, but he gets pedantic about tying up unfinished digital business, and Unfriended’s pulse-raising wildness is beyond him.

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 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.

It’s a strange witches brew of deadpan farce and arthouse stillness that some will find exasperating, and it’s not without its missteps; but there’s a confidence and clarity of vision that’s hard not to admire, especially for a first feature.

Bryan’s done his homework, mapping out an elaborate network of past wrongdoings with news clippings and TV footage. If the just deserts that this film demands ever come to pass, it will almost certainly be the most copiously photographed treason in a long and illustrious American tradition.

Given the nasty taste in the mouth that the film leaves, it seems almost besides the point to worry about plot holes.

This bland and predictable animation about an outsider kid who makes friends with aliens pinches an awful lot of its ideas from superior family films, without reviving any of their wonder or fun.

Mandico has made a wildly strange debut, striking enough to make you sit up and pay attention.

It is a sad and lonely world, sympathetically captured, beautifully photographed.

It is a bit silly, but is likable hokum.

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

It’s pretty much impossible for Kate McKinnon to dip below a basic level of funny, and her presence keeps the fizz in this spy spoof action-comedy from director and co-writer Susanna Fogel.

As with all overwhelmingly poor movies, it’s the delicate confluence of many varied factors that creates the critic’s familiar feeling of despairing hopelessness in the cinema.

The debate over the utility of violence and the dignity owed prisoners of war has raged since time immemorial, and recent developments have only amplified the decibel level. Operation Finale zeroes in on these complex dynamics, only to erase their nuance.

It is a strange, subdued, rather miserable film, interestingly perceptive on conformism and philistinism as a way of life, and on the disconcerting wiles the inhabitants use in order to thwart Florence’s entirely reasonable plans.

It is romantic and hallucinogenic, with an edge of softcore erotic sleaze.

It’s spry, stirring entertainment foremost – arguably indulging its star with one drunk number too many – but also evidence of a country beginning to tell its own stories with confidence and justifiable pride.

For all the expensive honey drizzled over this script, Forster’s film is just unpersuasively weird for an hour, before it tails off in the softest of focuses.

It’s a thoughtful, dream-like film, but, in the end, I’m not sure what Distant Constellation is saying about age or memory.

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

There is no romantic tragedy, nor even a visible grit in the oyster: just a dogged, talented, unassuming professional showing us that it’s about the perspiration, not just the inspiration.

A superlative performance from Gemma Arterton is at the centre of this almost unbearably painful and sad film from writer-director Dominic Savage.

It buzzes with uncomplicated enjoyment.

Their film pushes the limits of documentary filmmaking and will likely push the tolerance of viewers. This is a demanding watch, the arthouse cinema equivalent of the marshmallow experiment, testing the attention span of audiences.

It’s a film whose initial charge of mystery and intensity dissipates over its running time, the narrative impetus slows, and there is that question of tone that is very much not solved by the revelation at the end. These drawbacks are offset by the directors’ terrific confidence and visual style.

The look is cute, deceptively simple and suggestive of the illustrations in children’s books, however, the 2D minimalism is executed with a high degree of craft. It is hard to make something like this look so easy and effortless.

The twist ending is muddled, and has a rather bland and emollient equivalence between intelligence agencies.

You might need a sweet tooth for this gentle, Hornbyesque drama from writer-director Brett Haley. But it’s a likable heartwarmer and very decently acted.

Xavier Giannoli’s The Apparition is a flawed but heartfelt film about the mysterious workings of divine grace, and things that can’t entirely be explained away.

A handful of jokes in this minipop Ragnarok, like the crack at Gene Hackman’s role in the 1978 Superman, land at the exact sweet spot where fond fanboy scholarship meets sublime goofiness.

This is an enthralling drama: the best and most interesting Australian biopic since Chopper in 2000.