Ciro Guerra’s gorgeous picture just has that ripped-from-your-dreams sensibility, where surprising turns float alongside a story you feel like you’ve known your whole life. Embrace of the Serpent is the type of film we’re always searching for, yet seems so obvious once we’ve found it.

Mixing droll animation, stock footage and a restrained number of talking head interviews, the director Penny Lane’s biography has all the whimsy of a tall tale, until a late change in tone surprises with genuine emotion. Nuts! is really a kick.

Buttons will definitely be pushed by White Girl, but after the moral panic hopefully people will still be talking about the film itself.

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.

Things to Come is a smart, earnest undertaking: an exploration of the insecurity that can hit any of us, at any age, when we start to question the life we’ve built.

There’s an absence of fun here, and for what is ultimately a chase movie, a severe lack of pace. Nichols doesn’t feel like a strong match for the genre or for the very specific type of fantasy movie he wants to make.

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.

There are always some laughs to be had here, and Ben Stiller’s couture legend now has an endearingly muppety look.

Like the emotional equivalent of a massage with a sandpaper loofah, the film leaves you feeling raw and tender, thanks particularly to the knockout performances from the small cast, especially Collette.

Deadpool is neurotic and needy – and very entertaining. An innocent pleasure.

Perhaps no film can entirely compete with the simple fact of this novel/museum’s existence, but the movie circles around the dual conceptual artefact beguilingly.

Hail, Caesar! is a lot of fun, and beautifully crafted, too. One to savour.

It’s coarse and it’s stupid, but it is, thanks mostly the two good performances and some stylish use of music and editing, a little bit moving.

[A] lazy affair that aims for inspired lunacy but misses the mark by a mile.

Wiener-Dog doesn’t find Solondz going light to deliver an inspirational medley. Instead, he’s created arguably his most caustic film since Happiness.

A riveting excursion into fear and loathing on the campaign trail.

Yes, the story has the makings of a Lifetime movie; what grounds it are the terrific performances and Heder’s rich direction and screenplay.

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

Did you like The Commitments? Did you like We Are the Best!!? Well, Sing Street isn’t as good as either of those two, but it’s still pretty terrific.

It’s Shannon who leaves the most lasting impression.... She effortlessly mines the material for all its uncomfortable laughs.

It may wind up as the year's most significant horror film; it's certainly among the most original.

The ending doesn’t quite land the gut punch it’s hoping for, but this is more about fun than about exposing deep, nefarious truths. At least, I think it is.

It’s a shocking and compelling piece of work.

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

The Lure’s premise alone will turn heads but once the novelty wears off the question will remain: where’s the story?

It’s one hell of a yarn, which makes The Lovers and the Despot’s strangely soporific style something of a disappointment.

Beckinsale is a hoot to watch as a character with no redeemable qualities, except for her cunning ability to get what she wants. You can’t help but love Lady Susan because of the evident joy she takes in being so duplicitous. Her energy is infectious.

For those looking for a ride through our modern technological world, or indeed a preview of what is to come, this is it.

Sachs’ approach is so humane, and his characters so fully rendered, that an agenda never announces itself; instead, Sachs’ worldview seeps into you. He’s that skilled a film-maker.

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.

Unfortunately a slack screenplay and lack of focus holds the project back from being anything more than an actors’ showcase.

For a directorial debut, Ross’s film is admirably odd and hard to pin down.

Equity takes us inside modern Wall Street in a unique and gripping manner.

The world needs people like Foley, and this film argues that cameras are every bit as important as firearms in the current struggle. This movie, despite its somewhat simplistic form, acts as a fine tribute to the man, his work and the bravery of others who are called to his field.

The ideas here were far more interestingly rehearsed in movies like Tropical Malady and his Palme-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. A diverting footnote to the main body of work, no more than that.

Unfortunately, on the whole, Schamus’ debut feels too self-serious to fully engage.

As the proceedings grow increasingly more far-fetched, the story starts to feel thinner, any semblance of reality increasingly abandoned. What keeps Hunt for the Wilderpeople afloat are the full-blooded characters that populate it.

The film is a pointed, astute and unflinching look at unbridled machismo and its consequences.

It’s hard to escape the sinking feeling that this is a waste of talent – and that this is a good-natured, well-meaning but pointless kind of Brit-comedy ancestor worship, paying elaborate homage to a TV show that got it right the first time.

The noble intention to make us dwell on our culture, and perhaps shame its more voyeuristic members, quickly devolves into a cavalcade of tedium.

Unfortunately, with the big reveal having arrived in the first act, the film isn’t much more than an elongated debate that leaves you thinking: so what?

In Hall, [Campos] has the perfect actor to convey Chubbuck’s internal struggle in a manner that’s devastating.

Like Reichardt’s directorial hand, the performances are understated across the board, but deeply felt.

Mostly, the film is heavy-handed, with subtlety nowhere to be found.

Manchester-by-the-Sea is a study of family dysfunction and the worse loss imaginable, but one held back by the fact it’s all filtered through Affleck’s withdrawn lead.

Anyone who has pushed things a bit too far, and woken up with one too many “wtf” mornings, will appreciate how close Belgica has got to replicating hedonism going off the rails.

It’s written to a machine-tooled formula, with two more episodes naturally planned to gouge cash out of the fanbase, and whatever interest this film has dies about five minutes before the closing credits.

Jon Cassar’s film rejects the recent revisionism that’s flooded the genre. His take – a straight rip-off of the classics – is weirdly refreshing as a result.

It’s worth mentioning again that, somehow, this movie, with all its full-frontal historical horror, is still loaded with laughs.

There is something interestingly non-argumentative and personal about this documentary. It is gentle and reflective, a paean to his own youth and idealism that have been preserved in the ice.

Unassuming, likable entertainment.

Abhorrent politics aside, it’s also a terrible movie. The dialogue is atrocious, the performances rote. One could make the case that its incoherence is a grand meta-narrative statement about the fluidity of combat, but I don’t think that’s the case.

This laid-back amusement should not be misinterpreted as competent storytelling. Though some of the jokes land, that’s entirely due to the performances; there’s not one example of clever writing in the entire picture.

This could be one of those rare and terrifying serial killer cases where the psychotic culprit apparently intends to bore and embarrass everyone to death with bad acting.

The movie gets completely lost, unsure if it wants to be a serious exploration of repressed memories or a work of giddy, spooky trash.

A Simple Life is a tear-jerker, but thoughtful and intelligent, with an anti-sentimental dimension.

It’s by-numbers filmmaking that rarely adds up to anything worth the price of admission.

The Road Chip isn't exactly what I'd call a good film and has almost nothing going on in the visual department, but for those saddled with kids for an afternoon, you could do a lot worse.

First with the telephone, then early cinema, the magic of wireless radio and, finally, television, Dreams Rewired bombards the senses with a thorough and clever montage of found footage from the 1890s to the pre-war era.

The Force Awakens is ridiculous and melodramatic and sentimental of course, but exciting and brimming with energy and its own kind of generosity. What a Christmas present.

Tarantino has created another breathtakingly stylish and clever film, a Jacobean western, intimate yet somehow weirdly colossal, once again releasing his own kind of unwholesome crazy-funny-violent nitrous oxide into the cinema auditorium for us all to inhale.

Hard to Be a God creates its own uncanny world: it is beautiful, brilliant and bizarre.

It’s silly and poignant and funny.

A very valuable film.

The Club sees the film-maker at his most masterful, steering the picture through complex tonal shifts without letting it capsize into hysteria, even when the characters do.

The Brand New Testament is a peppy, original and (importantly) very sweet story.

What I like about Among the Believers, a portrait of radical Islam in Pakistan, is how the first two-thirds of the movie strives to remain as balanced as possible.

David O Russell’s Joy is an intriguing but weirdly subdued and stylised film.

What is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control and he unspools great meandering, bravura travelling shots to tell it: not dissimilar, in some ways, to his previous picture, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin.

With its sheer warmth and likability, this good-natured documentary won my heart.

Jimmy Ellis’s story really is stranger than fiction.

The tone is gently mischievous rather than exhaustingly wacky.

It's nowhere near as good as many of the films it so wants to be positioned next to, but it's nasty enough to leave an impression.

Director Ron Howard does a solid job of getting the smell of salt off the page and into the picture. The first half works quite well simply as a procedural, but when the action comes we run into trouble. The well-earned seriousness is washed away as we’re broadsided by B-movie tropes.

The Good Dinosaur looks great, of course, but it’s not in the league we’ve come to expect.

Too often it’s just silly.

Tamasha keeps shapeshifting, in ways both intriguing and self-defeating.

While we open with dazed individuals in a crashed limousine as it begins to take on water, Submerged’s frequent flashbacks eventually reveal a tiresome crime plot rife with soporific acting and unremarkable dialogue.

While formally quite different from his more universally-respected early work, Chi-Raq has the exuberance and wit you’ll find in Do The Right Thing and Crooklyn. It’s the best film he’s made in a very long time.

It’s a thin, trickledown sort of fun.

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

Chiwetel Ejiofor, one of our top-tier film actors right now, is on good form throughout, and the others act their hearts out, too. But they are somewhat left out to dry in a production that feels more like syndicated television than a feature film.

The script may feature numerous wobbly passages in which everyone eerily states precisely what they are thinking (an unfortunate tradition that runs throughout the series) but if anyone can sell it, it’s Stallone and Jordan.

Surprisingly, for a movie this ephemeral, the closing sequences, which consist of flashbacks and confrontations, are actually quite touching.

Without stridency but with a clear sense of purpose, director Tonje Hessen Schei compiles a mix of original interviews and footage and archive material and simulations to explore the history of drones.

If the plot’s familiar, no imagination or expense has been spared in mapping the kingdom it winds through.

There’s real energy.

Amid all this holiday melancholia, Wilde bursts into the film with an intensity that feels held over from another, better movie.

My All American is awful; but it gets points, I suppose, for at least looking professional.

McKay’s attempt to cover so much ground is admirable; and the outrage that courses throughout is deeply felt. But his busy execution...feels labored.

The script could have done without the odd bout of heavy-handed chess symbolism (“a king for a king”) but it’s a solidly entertaining drama with an intriguingly unconventional lead.

A harrowing subject for a film, then, but somehow Landesman – who also wrote the screenplay – never manages to turn it into a gripping movie.

By the Sea’s uncompromising nature is its most admirable asset. It’s a vanity project that’s difficult to love, but alluring to unpack.

Eid proves a dolefully expressive lead, and Wolfgang Thaler’s ever eloquent camerawork is as fascinated by the discovery of bullet shells in the sand – a clue, and a warning – as it is by the punishingly craggy landscape.

With In The Basement, [Seidl] seems to falling back on the same old shocks. The freakiness is losing its capacity to disturb.

The pace, which had been so tightly controlled in the first two films, is a curious mess, starting off painfully slowly, then rushing when it really matters.

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere is confounding at every level.

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.