[A] terrific debut feature.

It is a tough story, told with conviction.

This documentary does something very few films can: it makes you grin with pleasure.

This is a genuinely bizarre, startling, freewheelingly lo-fi and funny indie picture with the refreshing bad-taste impact of Todd Solondz or Robert Crumb.

Everything in Showing Up is certainly valid, but I confess I thought it lacked some perspective on Lizzie’s life, and it is sometimes a bit studied and passionless, especially compared with Reichardt’s previous film, First Cow. But there is sympathy and charm and food for thought.

Albert Serra’s bizarre epic is a cheese-dream of French imperial tristesse, political paranoia and an apocalyptic despair. It is a nightmare that moves as slowly and confidently as a somnambulist, and its pace, length, and Serra’s beautiful widescreen panoramic framings – in which conventional drama is almost camouflaged or lost – may divide opinion. I can only say I was captivated by the film and its stealthy evocation of pure evil.

Here is a film about a very complicated and painful kind of coming of age, or maybe a meditation on “coming of age” as something that never actually happens; it also examines the illusory dividing line between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, present and past.

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

The movie is fundamentally silly, with tiringly shallow characterisation and broad streaks of crime-drama intrigue, which only underline the fact that not a single word of it is really believable.

Sad to say, it goes down like a cup of tepid, milky and over-sugared tea.

The recurring dependence on sexual violence as a shock tactic is, however, a desensitising misstep. Nevertheless the assured command of style situates Jabbaz as an impressive new voice in horror cinema.

The film might be didactic in tone, but it is the kind of didacticism that injects political integrity into a cinematic landscape sorely lacking a backbone.

Epically tiresome. ... What is exasperating about the film is its reluctance to dramatise the teaching: to show the young people themselves simply getting better at acting.

Mario Martone’s beautifully shot and superbly composed film teeters on the edge of something special. And if it doesn’t quite achieve that, settling in the end for something more generically crime-oriented, it’s still very good.

Leila’s simmering rage at the contemptible mediocrity of her father and brothers, and the exhaustion of trying to save them from themselves, is the emotional energy that powers the movie, building to that climactic wedding scene. It is a great performance from Alidoosti, first among equals in a great ensemble cast.

There is a simplicity and clarity of purpose here that I responded to and the Dardennes have got excellent performances from their young leads.

Abbasi undoubtedly conveys the brutal attitudes which create victimhood.

This film touches on her keynote themes of sexuality and colonialism, in its 21st-century manifestation, though maybe the romantic passion and duplicity don’t come across as strongly as they might have done with leads who had a stronger chemistry.

I’m not sure this is my favourite Skolimowski film, but it is engaging in many ways: beautifully photographed, sentimental and surreal in equal measure; and also stubborn – as stubborn as its hero – in its symbolism and stark pessimism.

It’s not a movie so much as 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same time, with no variation of pace.

It is not exactly a horror film, despite some spasms of disquiet, but an uncanny evocation of how, when left utterly on our own, we spiral inwards into our memories, dreams and fears.

It’s a movie that is boldly anti-clerical, juxtaposing the spectacle of faith with a hidden reality of corruption and hypocrisy – although in the final act I sensed that it perhaps did not quite have the courage of its satirical convictions.

It functions elegantly as both a victory lap for longtime fans and a belated introduction to the Belchers, a family of lovable misfits and cranks that’s as genuinely close as any on television.

This film has mystery and passion, it climbs mountainous heights and rewards you with the opposite of vertigo: a sort of exaltation.

It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.

A regular beat of tension and release plays out as people get saved only to face new dangers, following the template of disaster films since the beginning of cinema, but it’s done well here. The visual effects are impressive, especially the water, which is so notoriously hard to animate.

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 extraordinary planet that Cronenberg lands us down on, and insists we remove our helmets before we’re quite sure we can breathe the air.