It’s a complex drama, a realist film teetering on the edge of the uncanny, whose very title points the way towards the idea that there are shades of grey in every judgment we make.

There is a trio of excellent performances from Arabuli, Kankava and Dumanli: very good actors, very well directed, defining three personalities very different from each other in terms of age and attitude but bringing them together in a way that doesn’t feel forced.

This is, against great odds and surely some western expectations, a beguiling hangout film – an invitation to the dinner party, a fascinating window into a group of underground artists who carry on despite the risks, a representation of creativity under surveillance. A snapshot of everyday resistance, the fight for a freedom from the bottom up. And most effectively, a moving portrait of one nutritive, symbiotic friendship in transition.

One of the grittiest, least romantic movies ever shot in New York, it's incisively edited by Dede Allen, whose work ranges from The Hustler to Reds.

What makes the film so compelling is the ferocious ingenuity with which Moodysson ratchets up the fear and astonishment that accompany Lilya's all too believable descent.

It may seem grainy and fusty compared to the all-action tongue-in-cheek spectaculars that came later, but it's the Bond closest to my heart.

Alternately rueful and whimsical documentary.

It’s an engaging and spirited piece of work.

It is an intriguing and empathic study, which could help all of us to understand.

It is an intriguing story, although I have to admit to feeling a bit bemused at the arbitrary way the Beast story is inserted into the already tense and interesting situation of Suzu/Belle and her relationships with people at home and school.

What an intelligent, emotionally grown-up film. More of this please.

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.

It’s an entertaining spectacle but the brilliant tonal balance in something like Jordan Peele’s satire Get Out leaves this looking a little exposed. Yet it responds fiercely, contemptuously to the crassness at the heart of the Trump regime and gleefully pays it back in its own coin.

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

The film has sympathy and charm, although I can’t exactly share all the praise that’s been lavished on it. It unfolds in an indulgent, dreamy summer haze, halfway between rapture and torpor; a murmuring indie-stonewash of good taste.

The cumulative effect is like strolling through a Reykjavik gallery where each painting moves within its well-chosen frame.

It sure as hell got under mine. Jonathan Glazer's sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary, and very erotic. It also comes with a dog whistle of absurdist humour that I suspect has been inaudible for some American reviewers on the international festival circuit so far.

Red Army is executive produced by Werner Herzog and Polsky borrows some his impishness. He makes sport of the old guard's rebuffs, glories in the occasion when Fetisov gives him the finger. This, he seems to say, is the attitude that made these guys.

The plot is hardly the point here - the animation is delightful, colourful and detailed and the flying sequences in seaplanes as old-fashioned as this style of animation are exhilarating.

Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep give excellent performances, though not exactly a stretch in either case, and both with a tiny, tasty touch of cheese. Their characterisations are luxuriously upholstered, effortlessly fluent, busting with relatability.

The film is, I think, just as Cunningham would have wanted it: cerebral, highbrow and mildly frustrating, with nothing so conventional as talking heads or context.

It's another extraordinary film with a quality of stillness about it, but combined, as usual, with brief bursts of explosive violence and Kitano's lovely deadpan humour.

The Sting is the most purely enjoyable film in Oscar history – and that, I think, puts it in the most valuable American film-making tradition of all.

This melodrama the director weakens by mistaking postponement of event for suspense. But the film has compensating strength in the star, who photographs more beautifully than before and, though she is acted off the screen by Anna May Wong, shows herself unique in Hollywood by being majestically beautiful.

Pennebaker's film, running just under an hour, is revelatory in getting under the skin of the main players. And the director's opening revelation will exasperate musical-theatre nerds as we hear that this was the pilot for a whole series on original cast recordings that never got made. [15 Sep 2021]

Vandross’s specific power isn’t always fully articulated here – but his musical brilliance certainly is.

The film punches out its warped drama with amazing gusto and Clark is lethally assured: not Saint Maud really, but Saint Joan, a spectacular horror heroine.

[A] richly enjoyable documentary.