Hoskins’ bullish, black-comic Napoleonism makes this movie: pugnacious, sentimental, a cockney Cagney.

I would have liked to hear more about Gena’s late mother and the family history generally, but this is an arresting portrait.

It is a really strange film, beginning in a kind of ethno-anthropology and documentary style, becoming a poisoned-herd parable or fever dream and then a Jacobean-style bloodbath. It is an utterly distinctive film-making, executed with ruthless clarity and force.

The power of this film creeps up on you by stealth; its dramatic idiom is admittedly mannered in the Leigh style but shy of caricature, and designed consistently to abrade the audience's consciousness without irritating – fingertips down the blackboard, not fingernails.

It’s a clever and expertly made movie; Oakley luxuriates in its winter chill.

Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic and romantic.

Ultimately, Experimenter finds a glimmer of hope by simply revealing itself. Maybe if more people are educated about the dangers of obedience, they’ll put up more resistance. It can’t hurt to hope.

Hansen-Løve has an acute eye for the details of Paul’s world. Glamour is twinned with mundanity, beauty with boorishness and friendship with selfishness, while artistic endeavour is undercut by self-indulgence.

Watching this film means recalibrating your expectations so you can gauge the subtleties and absorb the sotto voce implications about relationships and sexual politics. Pretty much all the way through, nothing very sensational seems to be happening. And yet the movie’s sensational meaning is hiding in plain sight: in the title.

It takes less than a minute of watching Duel, Steven Spielberg's feature-length debut, to realize you're in the hands of a master director.

Despite its somewhat diffuse centre, Collins’ film still has a straightforward poignancy, with subtle and dignified performances across the board.

Mass is performed with impeccable intelligence and sensitivity, although sometimes it feels like an exercise in award-winning acting. But I admit it: the final, unexpected dialogue scene, though arguably as stagey and showy as everything else, does deliver a punch.

Here is a visual portal to a hidden side of a controversial artist – one that is not for sale.

You'd need a heart of stone not to be won over by Wadjda, a rebel yell with a spoonful of sugar and a pungent sense of a Riyadh society split between the home, the madrasa and the shopping mall.

An intensely angry and persuasive piece of film-making, though maybe letting Bill and Hillary off the hook, a little bit.

An elegant midsummer, end-century night’s dream of a film, with an elusive, gossamer lightness.

Often music documentaries feel padded out with filler but honestly I could have spent another hour in Copeland’s company.

The film engages with Cave and Warren Ellis’ creative bond, one that’s produced some sublime work but also self-indulgent noodling (of which there’s a little too much here). Indeed, some might wish the spotlight was on Ellis more, a fascinating character who may be the more musically gifted of the pair, but not as capable of holding the spotlight like Cave – who has his suits, rumbly baritone and carefully coiffed too-black hair.

As a standalone film, The History of Concrete is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, compelling and surprising, if 20 minutes too long. And, of course, about much more than just concrete.

Arrival is a big, risky, showy movie which jumps up on its high-concept highwire and disdains a net. And yes, there are moments of silliness when it wobbles a little, but it provides you with spectacle and fervent romance.

Cregger might be expanding and improving his arsenal, using his skills more effectively than he did in Barbarian, but there’s still something crucial missing. Something sharper.

This mad succession of consequence-free events, trains of activity which get cancelled by a switch to another parallel world, means that nothing is actually at stake, and the film becomes a formless splurge of Nothing Nowhere Over a Long Period of Time.

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.

There’s no doubting the force of this drenchingly sad story.

The faces are the most intriguing thing. Loznitsa gives us a montage of inscrutability and repressed anxiety.

Camara and Darin contribute outstanding work here, a beautifully meshed pair of performances that reveals nearly everything you need to know about the characters and their inner lives through exchanged looks, shrugs and the odd arched eyebrow.

Bryan Fogel’s documentary about the Khashoggi murder may not reveal anything substantially new, but it’s a fierce, forceful and highly illuminating film, set out with clarity and verve.

This is not a cuddly version of Godzilla. He is rageful and entirely incomprehensible, seemingly not even motivated by hunger, desire or revenge. Like a god, he just is, an entity that has become death, the destroyer of worlds, as ineluctable as history itself.