Despite featuring big-name actors – Miller, Paul and Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks as Debra’s sister – American Woman is a film with a lived-in authentic feel. And Miller plays it beautifully with psychological depth and not a jot of actorly condescension.

The ending is unforgivably mawkish, though, and the running time of two-and-a-quarter hours is simply too long.

A movie with flair and force.

While some of the nastier lurches in the third act will appease genre fans, the guff that surrounds them will probably confuse and ultimately alienate them, the film’s moving parts never really moving in unison.

The gusto and pace put many of 2019’s American blockbusters to shame, and – right through to a wildly overcranked final act that throws up surprises like spindrift – Lee balances vertiginous, windswept set-pieces with satisfying character beats.

The digital novelty is striking for the first 10 minutes, silly for the next 10 minutes, and by the end of the movie you’re pining for the analogue values of script and direction.

There are some neat, borderline gory animations to illustrate how concussions work, which for this viewer were a lot more interesting than the endless stretches of racing footage. The anonymous, off-the-peg score of backing music and flat editing, however, still make this a bit of a slog.

This film is a distinct, articulate pleasure.

Jamie Bell’s tough performance carries this forthright, earnest, if limited drama.

Art born of outrage has to be more rigorous – and we might also contemplate what merit there is in guaranteeing prospective terrorists a filmed account of their misdeeds.

Throughout the film, the cast engage in so many wonderfully measured scenes of mayhem that the fun they’re clearly having radiates from the screen.

What a gloriously daring and explosive film Joker is. It’s a tale that’s almost as twisted as the man at its centre, bulging with ideas and pitching towards anarchy.

With Aniara, the Swedish writing-directing team Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja deliver a cold, cruel, piercingly humane sci-fi parable that’s both bang on the zeitgeist and yet also unnervingly original.

What this solemn and enlivening documentary plunge into the history of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic reiterates is the idea of film as a collective art form – not just the wider circle of writers, performers and technicians beyond the director, but in the case of the truly great films, serendipitous access to a deeper collective unconscious to which we all have the keys – even if few know how to use them.

I’m not convinced it amounts to any more than the sum of its parts, but the parts are intriguing – and some are possessed of real power.

It’s a disquieting parable of iniquity.

You will no doubt bail out at some point – but that’s part of the deal. Llinás has done enough to make sure we come back.

There’s little room to breathe in writer-director Chinonye Chukwu’s constricting, devastating drama Clemency, an intentionally airless film processing a tough subject through an unusual viewpoint.

I would have liked (in a spirit of devil’s advocacy) to hear from an economist about the measurable benefits or otherwise of this brutal approach, and perhaps to ponder the climbing global population. These reservations hardly diminish the film’s force.

Even with an intelligent, credible performance by David Oyelowo, the daftness and utter implausibility of a smartphone so smart it can make calls to the future is overwhelming.

There’s a slicker, more coherent and ultimately more thematically audacious film to be made from the disparate elements that make up In the Shadow of the Moon but what we have is a lovable mess nonetheless. Its ambitions are easy to criticise but hard not to admire, a mad little movie with big ideas on its mind.

It’s neither a rousing success nor an embarrassing failure, falling somewhere in between, closer to admirable attempt.

It is heartfelt, but its periodic attempts at thriller-style bouts of excitement are redundant, and I wondered sometimes if the film-makers were sure what exactly their story was.

There is such tenderness to this film. I was overwhelmed by it.

Perhaps the film’s overwhelming ace is an overarching awareness of just how pointless it really is, made with the same disposability with which it should be consumed.

Cringemakingly written and clunkily directed, and even the final action sequence runs out of steam after a minute or so.

It’s an extraordinary picture, steely and unbending and assembled with an unmistakable air of wild-eyed zealotry. Ad Astra, be warned, is going all the way - and it double-dares us to buckle up for the trip.

What a thoroughly likeable and funny film.