It has a seriousness, an unsentimental readiness to look reality in the face.

As with the previous Knives Out films, the characters are not, in fact, equally important and equally capable of murder. An inner core of suspects emerges and their guilt discloses itself incrementally at the end, as opposed to being withheld for a final reveal. What a treat though, with cracking turns from one and all and O’Connor the first among equals.

There is such simplicity and clarity here, an honest apportioning of dignity and intelligence to everyone on screen: every scene and every character portrait is unforced and unembellished. The straightforward assertion of hope through giving help and asking for help is very powerful.

This is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain.

If you want a genuinely Millerian cinematic experience, the best way to go is to get hold of Salesman, a 1968 documentary made by Albert and David Maysles, along with Charlotte Zwerin. 

With its unabashed focus on bodies, luring us in with their nudity before hacking them into tiny pieces, the back-to-basics slasher X arrives as a bold rebuke to all things staid and dignified.

It is simultaneously exasperating and magnificent that he shows no interest whatever in asking the Mael brothers anything about their personal, emotional or romantic lives.

It is a fierce and impassioned denunciation of evil.

This extraordinary documentary by director Sebastien Lifshitz, who has made many films about the LGBTQ+ experience (Wild Side, Bambi, Open Bodies), achieves a remarkable degree of intimacy with its young subject and her family.

Knock Down The House is far more effective when it is about the people and the process, not landing quips.

This long, exciting second world war thriller (based on a true-life incident involving art conservationist Rose Valland, who appears briefly in its opening sequence) has particular present-day relevance in view of the mindless destruction of art works and ancient ruins by Islamic State and our responses to these iconoclastic barbarities.

If I had a criticism of this film, it is that – like so many historians of spies and spying – the director gets a little overexcited about the archive details. Still, what a riveting story: a grim curtain-raiser to today’s tragedies.

From behind the camera, Ha Le Diem attempts to protect Di by reasoning with kidnappers, but is pushed away; she admits to the young girl later that she did not anticipate the tradition could be so brutal. The decision to leave in such details is particularly thought-provoking, fracturing the supposed neutrality of documentary film-makers.

The film appears to exist in the Venn diagram-overlap between twee and hipster, which isn’t for everyone – but let it grow on you, and there is a real sweetness and gentleness in its absurdity, a savant innocence and charm.

The film has its own kind of mad, migrainey energy and individuality, and Robert Pattinson gives a strong, charismatic performance.

Impressively made though some of the acting lets it down: Robbie's a real scene-stealer. [04 Mar 2006, p.53]

The dreary details of post-heist calamity are as pertinent as the main event. It is this that attracts Reichardt’s observing eye and makes The Mastermind so quietly gripping.

This is a bleak, bold, extravagantly crazy story which is emotionally incorrect at all times.

I found something a little too subdued in this film, though the evocation of Tokyo itself is very uncliched, despite the emphasis on something that is the subject of so many touristy jokes: the loos. Not perfect, but engaging enough.

There is real emotional warmth and human sympathy in this otherwise somewhat flawed film, a docudrama experiment in getting actors to play some of the real people in a tragic news story from Tunisia.

The film’s final twist makes the story close with a satisfying click, though there is something a little smooth about it; for me it works against the story’s social-realist credentials and its evident ambitions for something more mysterious and spiritually resonant. Yet there is great pleasure to be had in those fervent, crowd-pleasing lead performances from Montenegro and de Oliveira.

In Passages the sex is the plot: the plot of all our lives.

Never has grotesque wealth looked so unenviable, or its removal been so entertaining, as in this garishly watchable riches-to-rags documentary.

Eid proves a dolefully expressive lead, and Wolfgang Thaler’s ever eloquent camerawork is as fascinated by the discovery of bullet shells in the sand – a clue, and a warning – as it is by the punishingly craggy landscape.

It's an intriguing movie, in some ways, but its contrived and even bizarre final revelation depends on coincidences of almost Hardyesque proportions. It is not really believable, and yet if it is not taken literally, but as a cinematic prose-poem, it has undoubted force.

Compared to the CGI chaos that tends to engulf DCEU and MCU movies, especially in crossover teamups, the clean zip of Pixar animation feels exhilaratingly rare, like a lost language rediscovered.

All said, there are less educational ways to raise your blood pressure for two hours, and the masochistic Twitter-refreshers nourishing themselves with a steady drip of maddening headlines will have plenty to fume over. Starting with the sniggering title, this torturous rehashing of yesterday’s history all seems to be for them.

Despite the desultory nature of the film, it is sure to hammer home some key points.