One for the fans, perhaps, and a vivid Gradiva-esque glimpse of the past.

Fun, fiery and totally frivolous, Heads of State is a perfect summer movie with great potential for future sequels.

More than any comedy or even film I’ve seen recently, this is movie driven by the line-by-line need for fierce, nasty, funny punched-up stuff in the dialogue, and narrative arcs and character development aren’t the point. But as with Succession, this does a really good job of persuading you that, yes, this is what our overlords are really like.

Buxton gains confidence as the film heads into the murky final stretch, neatly gliding around the, ahem, sharp corners that would have seen others crashing into the darkness. He leads his story to a knockout ending that’s both hauntingly downbeat yet crushingly inevitable without going to new, unnecessary extremes.

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.

It hardly needs to be said that subtlety is not really among this film’s attributes - but it is fierce, angry, engaged, and intensely, sensually alert to every detail of its own pleasure and pain.

It is another powerful, absorbing picture from Campillo and a fitting swan song for Laurent Cantet.

It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.

This is a big, muscular picture which aspires to the crowd-pleasing athleticism of Spike Lee’s sports icons; it’s very enjoyable and there’s a great turn from Washington.

Without Buckley, this would have been lacking; with her, it’s a very bizarre and enjoyable spectacle of married bliss.

The Ring is a showcase for the young Hitchcock's editing panache: the experimental, Soviet-influenced montage that would surface so violently in Psycho. [04 Jul 2012]

This is a family film with an IQ higher than the average – though before you book your half-term tickets, ask yourself if your little one is ready to watch a kid take a DIY flamethrower to the face of a scary monster.

It always feels as if the people making this movie are having fun, and while that’s never a guarantee that the audience will too, it’s certainly the case here.

With a blend of archive footage and re-enactments the film-makers skilfully recreate the urgency, passion and energy of their protest.

I still can’t be convinced that Megalopolis is anything other than an (honourable) failure. But Figgis’s documentary is an absorbing success.

Its riddling quality, combined with its spectacular visual effects, may leave some audiences agnostic – and I myself wasn’t sure about the silent-movie type effects. Yet it’s a work of real artistry.

It is dense with fear and sadness.

It is engaging and sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory setpiece sequences, and is challengingly incorrect thoughts about the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.

It is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side.

It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema.

Fares’s gaunt, handsome face so eloquently conveys vanity, but also a poignant emotional woundedness, anxiety and self-pity.

Simón has an instinctive and almost miraculous way of just immersing herself within extended freewheeling family scenes – her camera moving unobtrusively in the group, like another teenager at the party, quietly noticing everything.

With icy provocation, Israel’s ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of 7 October.

It’s a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives – and how they come to love and understand him just at the moment when they come to see his flaws and his weaknesses.

What gives the film its distinct flavour is a slightly feverish tone and dream-like logic. In places, it’s hard to see what the magic realism adds, and the script’s ideas about gender and gaze feel underexplored. Perhaps in the end, this sense of unreality opens the door to its characters finding love in this harsh and hopeless place. A touching and moving film.

There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi.

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.

It’s impossible not to be carried along by the delirious rush of silliness in this knockabout screwball comedy.