In Fabric is indulgent, certainly, and I regretted the fact that the excellent Jean-Baptiste is not as centrally important to the film as I had assumed she would be. When she is gone, the voltage drops a bit. But it is just so singular, utterly unlike anything else around.

Django Unchained also has the pure, almost meaningless excitement which I found sorely lacking in Tarantino's previous film, Inglourious Basterds, with its misfiring spaghetti-Nazi trope and boring plot. I can only say Django delivers, wholesale, that particular narcotic and delirious pleasure that Tarantino still knows how to confect in the cinema, something to do with the manipulation of surfaces. It's as unwholesome, deplorable and delicious as a forbidden cigarette.

The message is laid on slow and thick, but it's no less powerful for it.

The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.

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.

Its cultural setting is fresh; its storytelling, less so. It navigates the reefs but it doesn’t discover a whole new world.

It’s an absorbing drama given sympathy and life by two very high-calibre performers.

Throughout, Costa’s voiceover adds shape but doesn’t intrude excessively and lets the powerful compilation of original and archive footage, material shot on the ground in the middle of riots and by drones soaring hundreds of feet above Brasilia, tell the story.

Some of the movie doesn't exactly convince, and some of the scenes have an actors-improv feel to them, but there's always plenty of humour and energy.

Imamura tells his tale, taken from a short story by Akira Yoshimura called Glistening In The Dark, in a bold mixture of styles encompassing horror (the murder) and passages near to farce, while at other times this seems the creation of a classically trained film-maker working out for himself a quiet psychological drama. [11 Nov 1997, p.9]

All of which works terrifically well up to a point.

It is a film of style and surface, and these are cleverly created and maintained.

There’s an ingenuousness and innocence to Memoir of a Snail, a family-entertainment approachability that belies a strange intensity.

A Fantastic Woman is a brilliant film: a richly humane, moving study of someone keeping alive the memory and the fact of love.

This thoroughly emo body-swap fantasia, a sizable hit on home turf, demonstrates that [Makoto Shinkai] inherited much of his [Hayao Miyazaki's] artistry and charm, but not yet his narrative mastery – nor, crucially, that magic that distinguishes lasting artworks from well-drawn ’toons for teens.

The film is entirely ridiculous, often quite boring, with a script showing worrying signs of being cobbled together. But even as a longtime Von Trier doubter, I now have to admit it grows on you; there's a mawkish fascination and some flashes of real visual brilliance.

You, the Living is a very funny film - though in the darkest possible way. It is a silent comedy, but with words.

It is invigoratingly freaky and strange, with a Death-Valley-dry sense of humour somewhere underneath — though a little derivative sometimes. More than once, Carruth gives us a close-up on a hand ruminatively stroking a surface: very Malick. And the shots of creepy creatures swarming under the skin are very Cronenberg.

This is an amiably talky film, and yet I never for a moment considered that the central relationship was being presented with anything less than seriousness, and there is much dry comedy to be enjoyed.

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 Grand Bizarre is a film that will alienate many with its video-artiness but the focus here on looking and looking again with wonder at the everyday stuff around us may strike a chord at the moment.

A neglected 1976 gem from a neglected Hollywood genius. May was known for her comedy but here proves absolutely fluent in the language of mobster lowlife, with an edge of caustic, disillusioned humour, and strange yet shockingly real outbursts of violence in which cafe owners and bus drivers are suddenly roughed up.

The Hate U Give is a fierce, dynamic movie with a terrific performance from Amandla Stenberg as Starr.

White smartly weaves Gibson’s evolution as a poet and performer, commanding stages like a rockstar –“we called them the gay James Dean,” Falley jokes – with their hopes to stage one final show, a celebration of life before their death.

When the wisps of khat smoke clear away, it is perhaps not easy to decide exactly what is left behind, or to decide if khat is a cultural practice to be celebrated or rejected: but there are some marvellous images and moods in this misty, impressionistic study.

You can’t help but admire Anger’s audacity, sly humour and film-making chops.

Perhaps a more unassuming genre director would have tightened this movie’s cables a little, so that it had more tension and less revulsion. At all events, it delivers some nasty shocks.

Johnson’s more extravagant and often indulgent sequel will likely find those who prefer it to the original, it’s so stuffed with so much that it’ll surely prove more fun to those who appreciate getting more bang for their buck. It’s hard not to have fun when Johnson pulls the strings, I just wish he’d not pulled quite so many and quite so hard.