The elements of silliness and deadly seriousness are nicely balanced and although I wasn’t absolutely sure about the ending, which has maybe too neat a bow tied on it, this is just very enjoyable and I was on the edge of my seat, not knowing whether to flinch or laugh, though I did both.

This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity.

The Northman is a horribly violent, nihilistic and chaotic story about the endless cycle of violence, the choice between loving your friends and hating your enemies – which turns out to be no choice at all, and the thread of fate down which masculinity’s delicious toxin drips. It’s entirely outrageous, with some epic visions of the flaring cosmos. I couldn’t look away.

The mystery of other people’s lives, the unbridgeable gulf between us all – even, or especially, between married couples – is the subject of this outstanding drama from first-time film-maker Aleem Khan.

The Power of the Dog is a made with artistry and command: it is one of Jane Campion’s best.

It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.

Perhaps the ultimate value of Nitram has nothing to do with its qualities as an intensely disquieting tone poem – though on that level the film is brilliant, marking another extraordinary achievement from Kurzel, who has a penchant for evoking gut-sinking emotional atmosphere.

Trier has taken on one of the most difficult genres imaginable, the romantic drama, and combined it with another very tricky style – the coming-of-ager – to craft something gloriously sweet and beguiling.

Where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur.

Vortex tells us something else about old age, something which a severe and high-minded movie like Michael Haneke’s Amour would not grasp: death is chaotic, like life. It ends with things undone and in messy disarray. This is a work of wintry maturity, and real compassion.

The film allows you to ponder not just the mother-child bond – strong enough to confront fascism – but the way everyone has to let their children be influenced by strangers; the unintended upbringing of being out in the world. What an emotional experience.

Kristen Stewart proves entirely compelling in the title role. She gives an awkward and mannered performance as Diana, and this is entirely as it should be when one considers that Diana gave an awkward and mannered performance herself, garnishing her inbred posh hauteur with studied coquettish asides.

Love letters to the past are always addressed to an illusion, yet this is such a seductive piece of myth-making from Branagh.

This family could be blown into pieces. And yet an irrepressible defiance and comic energy bubbles under every scene.

It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s The Outsider.

There’s something both reassuring and terrifying about it all, the family’s resilient warmth and togetherness providing comfort as the existential horror of what it all amounts to chills us simultaneously.

The movie hits its stride immediately with a taut, athletic urgency and it contains some superb images – particularly the eerie miracle of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, with Malcolm’s soldiers holding tree-branches over their heads in a restricted forest path and turning themselves into a spectacular river of boughs. This is a black-and-white world of violence and pain that scorches the retina.

This is a tremendously well-made film with a burning vitality: without question one of the most important Australian documentaries of the 21st century so far.

There’s a feminist undercurrent in You Won’t Be Alone, its observations of the patriarchy emerging in ways totally germane to the experience. An odd kind of eroticism also emerges: neither sensual nor entirely gross, and certainly not from the male gaze. Sometimes the film doesn’t even feel like it’s from a human gaze.

A gentle, exquisitely sad film.

This engrossing film is a time capsule of London itself – the faces not so very different from those you would see in the 40s or 50s.

The Innocents is a nightmare unfolding in cold, clear daylight.

Youth is a great theme of Linklater’s, but presented without any great directional moralising or emotional narrative. Being young just is. This is a film of enormous charm.

I enjoyed this more than either of the two earlier filmed versions, with Gene Wilder in 1971 and Johnny Depp in 2005. It supplies the chocolate-endorphins.

The Fabelmans left me with a floating feeling of happiness.

It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming.

With remarkable confidence, [Wells] just lets her movie unspool naturally, like a haunting and deceptively simple short story. The details accumulate; the images reverberate; the unshowy gentleness of the central relationship inexorably deepens in importance.

Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.