We’re All Going to the World’s Fair doesn’t quite go where it’s expected, or hit the most obvious talking points. It offers something all the more intriguing – a last-minute twist that forces us to reexamine what we’d already accepted as either truth or fiction.

What keeps the film’s heart tender is the fact that, even if Linda’s been reduced to a husk, she’s still a mother who loves her daughter; who knows she’s in pain and can’t help her outbursts. She still sits at her daughter’s bedside and sings, gently, like a bird. She still wants to try, even when she fails. And that’s something to count on.

For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.

The Substance doesn’t quite gel as it should, but it’s potent.

Depp does magnificent work in embodying the sense of existing out of place, not only in the violent contortions and grimaces of supernatural possession, but in the way Ellen’s gaze seems to look out beyond her conversation partner and into some undefinable abyss.

Obsession is delicately handled work, unafraid to find pockets of humour. Customer service is hilariously inept, even when it’s a matter of life or death. But Barker, both as its writer and its director, is also interested in how the dynamic between Bear and Nikki starts to reflect real-life toxicity, and never plays too recklessly where it really matters.

Peele, really, is the magician disguised as a filmmaker. Nope is the sleight of hand so slick you’ll never question how the trick was pulled off.

Nicolas Cage stars as a Satanic serial killer in a movie that is nasty, precise and as subtle as a magic trick.

Even if Sarah Polley’s superlative work doesn’t get the plaudits or the audience it deserves, it should stand to have a far greater legacy. This is the kind of cinema that endures – not just as a great work of art (although it is that), but as something that moves us all forward.

Dickinson doesn’t end Urchin on a note of sentiment or tragedy, but somewhere in the very human middle of it all – and in doing so announces himself as a director with real guts.

The unexpected advantage here is that, when Williams wants to be truly upfront about his struggles, that veneer of fantasy shields us from the more harrowing details of his life, so that we can confront them yet still enjoy that “right f***ing entertaining”.

Presence’s greatest feat, and presumably Soderbergh’s main interest in the project, is in how alive and defined a character our ghost is.

Cooper shows us his subject’s mix of magnetism, volatility and childlike egotism but he remains a strangely elusive figure. It’s left to Mulligan’s Felicia to crack the film’s sometimes too-shiny facade and to give its story some bruising emotional depth.

Cinema is in a precarious position right now. And, just maybe, Project Hail Mary will remind people why they ever fell in love with it in the first place. Sometimes, to move forward, it helps to look back.

Love Lies Bleeding bottles that hot, feverish, salvatory desire, only to shake it like soda pop and then ping off the cap.

Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle’s still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.

It’s a film that not only signals a major musical arrival, but ends up feeling a lot bigger than the conventional (and often confining) boundaries of the “music biopic”.

History might not have allowed Elisabeth the kind of power she wanted, her death in 1898 also bringing her life to a violent close. But Corsage reimagines it all, granting her unexpected agency and, in eventual death, one moment of pure, well-earned freedom. There’s something magnificently empowering about that.

Rex actively underplays Mikey’s self-interest and cruelty, so that – in a way – the audience becomes an equal target of his manipulation.

This black comedy about the travails of the teenage Rita (a marvellously taciturn Barbara Osika) captures beautifully the awkward ugliness of adolescence before a brutal final punch. [11 Aug 2001, p.8]

This is a low-budget horror helmed by a young pair of mavericks. It’s anchored around a phenomenal central turn by Wilde, who’s all twitchy eyelids and haunted relatability. Its practical effects are effective, rendering it dead in bloated, blotchy, dripping flesh. And when the spirits reveal more demonic, subversive desires, the tricks they play on the living are delivered with a taunt and a giggle.

The film is bawdy and wistful, with a rich vein of melancholy running through it.

Cal McMau’s debut takes the well-worn path of prison dramas, focusing on a violent feud waged between cell block bunkbeds. But there’s enough of a noxious stink in the air – the sense that all the system does is create a microcosm of the state, with even less power to scrap over – that Jonsson has the material he needs to fully mesmerise.

The combination of Christie and Wilder ensures the story is impeccably told and the dialogue is unsurpassable from start to finish.

Stewart’s febrile, sensitive performance and Larraín’s trademark lyricism give it an emotional kick that such predecessors lacked.

No Sudden Move may be a fairly minor entry in his filmography, but it’s well-crafted and thrilling in a way that feels oddly reassuring.

The idea that it serves a film like September 5 to tell its story through an apolitical lens isn’t just wrong: it’s laughable.

Who’s really at the wheel of Richard’s ambition? His love for his children or his own ego? It’s a testament to both Green and Smith that the question is allowed to linger so potently.