There are action thrills, to be sure, but they are folded into what becomes a sort of group therapy session on the psychology of grief, guilt, vengeance, chance and coincidence. Even more blessedly, it’s often hilarious.

Labyrinth of Cinema is indeed labyrinthine, a maze of jokes, film references, quirky back projections, bargain-basement effects and melodramatic confrontations. But at its centre is something deeply serious: a belief that, as the sole country to have experienced a nuclear strike, Japan has a terrifying exceptionalism. This awful truth is marked by a tonal cymbal-clash, both acidly comic and desperately sad.

With Hitch letting rip on the imagery - including a Dali-designed dream sequence - it's as colourful as black-and-white gets. [07 Aug 2010, p.43]

“This isn’t a Mensa convention!” says one player. Is that disingenuous? Isn’t there, in fact, some advanced showbiz intelligence and surrealist savvy in the way Jackass is set up and edited? Either way, it has a horror-comedy impact.

Of all the American independent movies this year, Ruby In Paradise is one of the strongest because, for all its meandering style, it seems to know exactly what such a life as Ruby's is about. [25 Nov 1993, p.4]

Egilsdóttir carries the drama, and her overwhelming feeling of relief makes sense of that gigantic landscape.

Above all, everyone in a Meyer film looks like they're having an absolutely great time.

A riptide of surrealism runs through Chino Moya’s ambitious debut feature, a fantasy suite of tales that don’t so much interlock as butt into one another and blurt out alarming, dreamlike correspondences.

Preposterous though it may be, this is a terrific family movie in a style audiences may not have seen since Mary Poppins.

Erotic languour turns gradually into fear and then horror in this gripping and superbly controlled psychological thriller from 1969.

That Sequin in a Blue Room was director Samuel van Grinsven’s graduate project is astonishing considering the film’s inspired visual panache, and the eroticism of the explicit depictions of casual sex. Leach’s performance in his first film acting credit is equally impressive; the way in which Sequin’s swagger gradually drains from his face to expose an inner vulnerability is incredibly moving.

A solid biopic, with fine performances – though in its sombre tone and attempt to cover too much of Wilde's life, it could be accused of overstating the vital importance of being earnest.

Netflix’s flashy RL Stine trilogy continues with a darker Friday the 13th-aping horror that brings more shocking gore and excellent performances.

Janiak has found a way to add new life to old material, gifting us with the rare horror franchise that makes us want more rather than less, the prospect of an expanded universe seeming less like a curse and more of a blessing.

The overstuffed, better-keep-up narrative suits the film’s purposes, occupying audience attentions to leave them unprepared for the nimble writing’s assorted baits and switches.

The movie has a streak of sentimentality amid its melancholy and a certain formal theatricality: director Emma Dante has adapted the movie from her own stage play, but has opened it out very plausibly and cinematically.

Both actors contribute knife-sharp timing and the kind of intensity needed to make this essentially two-man setup work.

As with all documentaries about art, we are left uneasily wondering if the galleries of the world are full of “wrong attributions” or straight-up fakes.

Pro-choice activists won with a campaign that declined to go negative, and, indeed, may have benefited from the attraction of its exuberant “Yes” motif. Now they face decades of vigilance to defend their gains.

With less gripping subject matter, this might have been a so-so bit of club memorabilia. As it is, it can’t help but be gripping.

By pairing real-life events with their animated interpretations, the film not only offers a fresh approach to documentary style but also draws out the tension between reality and artifice, private and public memory.

There are some pretty broad emotional strokes here and maybe a fair bit of grandstanding. But it’s made with some style.

With Red Rocket, Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine.

There is something very heartfelt and committed about Andrea Arnold’s film: a poignancy and intimacy.

This is a great documentary about people who are serious about music and serious also about art, and what it means to live as an artist.

I’m not sure that Les Olympiades says anything too profound about any of its cast of characters, but Audiard achieves something very watchable and entertaining in anthologising them. This is a connoisseur date movie.

It’s a brawny, brooding drama about the wreckage caused by men, beautifully framed in muted neutral tones as the camera circles the ranch-house with a deliberate, stealthy tread.

I am not entirely sure that Haroun entirely absorbs into the drama the shocking act of violence, with all its necessary consequences. But the sheer seriousness and urgency of the deceptively unhurried story give it power.