The film’s vision of the Twenties may be propelled to the very border of believability, but it’s rarely inauthentic. This is a work of studious imagination.

It’s a film of overwhelmingly visceral emotion; impossible, then, to separate from what we imagine Panahi must feel himself. And yet, so often, we’ll see characters clamber over each other and wheel around their limbs like they’re in a Buster Keaton comedy.

What Lighton has achieved here is incredibly delicate, intuitive work, which never compromises on the story’s explicit nature or in the specificities of its subculture.

Amazingly, Welles gets away with it. Citizen Kane may be the more weighty, rounded work, but Touch of Evil is a heap more fun.

I Saw the TV Glow speaks so powerfully to the curse of denial that the words “there is still time”, scrubbed in chalk on a suburban street, can have an almost magical effect on the viewer.

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.

It’s the most gripping sports movie in years.

The film magnificently frames modern life as a world of illusions, where a busy life equates to a successful one and the gamble always pays off. It’s an almost punishingly chaotic film, though each line of overlapping dialogue and jittery camera move is carefully orchestrated.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is also disarmingly tender, blessed with a deep affectation for its subject that feels fuller and more romantic in its nature than straightforward respect.

Stanley Donen's 1957 musical represents a triumph of form over content.

Go back to your roots, we’re always told, and you’ll find your heart’s true home. But in Davy Chou’s daring and mesmeric Return to Seoul, an adoptee’s search for her birth parents tears open wounds and unearths neither meaning nor resolution.

The animation is not overcooked. It manages to swerve clichés, despite being full of heartwarming messages that, in the wrong hands, could meander into mawkishness.

Paul Thomas Anderson has directed a swaggering, funny and timely action epic, where momentum never lets up and supporting actors Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor steal the show.

The Banshees of the Inisherin is really a beautiful work to behold.

Recruited by RKO to knock out some cheapo horrors and recoup the losses the studio had incurred on Citizen Kane, the producer Val Newton instead made a cycle of indefinably creepy and mysteriously poetic films, of which Cat People was the most successful. [24 Dec 2011, p.26]

While it’s been argued that Lanthimos harbours active disdain for other people, Don reminds us that there’s a poignant streak of empathy to be found in even the most nihilistic of his stories. Hope, in Bugonia, is mostly lost. But not entirely.

Die My Love captures most meaningfully the feeling of spiralling mental distress as like a dam that’s about to burst with no river to carry its water.

It’s not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There’s such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity.

While the supporting cast are impeccable across the board, it’s really Blanchett and Fassbender’s film to command, with performances that drip with old-school star power.

It’s a war picture, in the more conventional mould, that feels new and revelatory purely because it’s being viewed through the eyes of its singular director – expressionist yet rarely sentimental, disquieting in its terrors yet tender in its hope, and profoundly interested in the ordinary lives of others.

Part Two is as grand as it is intimate, and while Hans Zimmer’s score once again blasts your eardrums into submission, and the theatre seats rumble with every cresting sand worm, it’s the choice moments of silence that really leave their mark.

Del Toro can do worldbuilding in his sleep, but you might also find Cooper’s brittle performance, filled with such elemental sadness, hard to shake off. Nightmare Alley is the shadow that lingers.

In its own offbeat way, Asteroid City is an Anderson patchwork of Cold War paranoia and American family values in all their often hypocritical glory. It is every bit as arch as his best work, while still managing to tug hard on the heartstrings.

A feat of full-bodied immersion, using a point-of-view camera, finely tuned sound design, and cinematic illusion to create a reality that takes hold of and then never quite leaves its audience’s souls.

The mind, too often, moulds memories into prophecies. Colours get dialled up. Emotions solidify. It’s a hard thing to talk about, let alone visualise. That’s why Aftersun, the debut of Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, is so astounding. She’s captured the uncapturable, finding the words and images to describe a feeling that always seems to sit just beyond our comprehension.

DiCaprio and De Niro are brilliant, but it is relative unknown Lily Gladstone who is truly extraordinary.

For all the cruelty and buffoonery that might surround his hero, Bong lets us in on a revelation: what we’re really watching is a man learning that it’s OK for him to be happy.

It is a tender, sprawling drama that feels less inert than its predecessor and far more compelling.