The effect of it all is elegant and overwhelmingly stylish, yet maybe there’s not a superabundance of substance to go with the style. Kinds of Kindness feels heavier and longer than I expected, as if reaching for a meaningful resolution that might not be there. Yet absence and loss is perhaps the whole point.

I Saw the TV Glow marks a remarkable progression for Schoenbrun as both writer and director, a more substantive, if still challenging, narrative married with an incredible, expanded ability to fully immerse us in the visuals they have created. It’s made with such transportive precision that I can still feel it as I write.

C’est Pas Moi amuses – and discomfits.

Her story is obviously astounding in itself, but what makes The Fire Inside, once called Flint Strong, such an upper-tier sports movie is that Morrison and the Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Jenkins don’t rely solely on the facts of her life to compel.

It’s an exhilarating, alarming look at that much discussed subject: the Russian soul.

Maria is the most persuasive and seductive of Larraín’s trilogy of great women at bay, after Jackie about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer about Princess Diana.

West mulches up a thick impasto of pulp, gore, filth and fear and gets away with some colossally self-aware scenes.

In every shot and every scene, mostly in closeup, Ronan carries the film with her unselfconsciously fierce and focused presence.

Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent.

There’s such electricity to Rebel Ridge – I just hope enough people get the chance to feel it.

In its trashiness – and, yes, its refusal of serious substance – The Substance should really be put out on VHS cassettes and watched at home in homage to the great era of home entertainment pulp and video-store masterpieces of weirdness and crassness.

Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story give a shrewd, fly-on-the-wall picture of the divisions within the union itself, with the working-class members and people of colour uneasy with the white college-grad contingent who are very gung-ho about protesting and getting arrested, not quite realising that for black people this is to risk death.

It is entirely gripping and a witty and unnerving way of representing the mysterious silence of animals and a future world in which human beings can no longer exist.

Kill’s objectives are achieved with an energy and enthusiasm that make it a tasty piece of action cinema which doesn’t pull its punches; it’s finger-cracking good.

For all the characters’ misery and misfires, Between the Temples is a winsome journey. It’s a little weird, a little sweet and a lot of awkward – a testament not just to the Jewish tradition but the faith we can learn to have in each other.

It’s a tender, painful, intimate film, made over several years as we watch four girls in the months before the dance.

Working through one’s own strife as a form of autofiction can often lead to self-indulgence but Kaphar has crafted something that deserves to exist outside of his inner circle, an emotionally wrenching drama set to resonate with those who have also had to confront the complicated equation of radical forgiveness.

Each new sentence adds more: more complexity, more woman.

The film’s chief enjoyment is seeing how motivations transform, and character is forged, through the sliding doors of new people, victories and losses, and the sharpening of the young women’s disparate judgments on the genuinely disappointing differences between boys and girls state.

Vandross’s specific power isn’t always fully articulated here – but his musical brilliance certainly is.

There’s a surprisingly grand emotional punch, arriving suddenly and landing with force.

It is very intelligent and humane, and what a great performance from Collias.

By the end it’s nearly impossible not to shed a tear after the touching finesse and shape of this story.

From a horror fan’s point of view, this is an absolutely fascinating experiment with form.

I last encountered the work of the Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez in the documentary-reverie Double Take from 2009, which imagined an encounter between two Alfred Hitchcocks. Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961.

Izaac Wang’s reserved, undemonstrative performance is what sets the film’s non-sucrose tone: he only really smiles in a goofy video of his much younger self. It’s a cool, downbeat and satisfying piece of work.

Squibb is as understatedly funny and commanding as you’d expect. Both actor and character remain, despite all societal and personal forces to the contrary, absolutely vital even as the circumstances and potential of life shrink. What a joy to witness it.

Itō is an amazing personality: an intelligent, courageous journalist who may have changed the course of Japanese history.