Here is an intelligent entertainment as generously stuffed as the greatest 19th-century novel. They rarely make them like this any more.

It’s a thrilling journey for both young viewers and those with more cause to ponder the afterlife. A fine bow from one of the great directors.

Working from a novel by the Georgian author Tamta Melashvili, Naveriani and her writer, Nikoloz Mdivani, have crafted a warm, witty and wise film.

No other film – not even by Georges Méliès at his most fantastic – trumpets early cinema's status as a magical science and scientific magic, quite so loudly or melodically.

Resurrection, shot with extravagant beauty by Dong Jingsong, makes more sense on first viewing than the director perhaps allows. Each story is whole in itself. But it has the quality of a gorgeous knot that will never fully be untied.

The audience, eager to give such characters their due, has to crane its collective neck as the momentum drags it to a relentless conclusion. But it’s worth the muscular strain. There’s more to Uncut Gems than dizzying momentum.

If The Brutalist were not so wedded to audiovisual effect, it might play like a lost Great American Novel.

The Lighthouse stands as a monument to two titanic performances. Pattinson’s easy naturalism curdles into something unnerving and evil here, while Dafoe goes full German Expressionist villain with the biggest screen performance since Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

Director Coralie Fargeat follows up her gory 2017 rape-reprisal thriller, Revenge, with this outrageous comic body-horror, pitched somewhere between Sunset Boulevard and Brian Yuzna’s cult classic, Society.

It is a film of many enchantments.

Jude Law channels swaggering disquiet, resembling both the tormentor and tormented of a Harold Pinter play.

Despite the claustrophobic setting, Diop crafts an evocative modern retelling of Medea, with detailed notes on femininity, immigration and race.

The same droll humour and keen social awareness that have defined [Kaurismaki's] work since Leningrad Cowboys Go America, in 1989, are now put in service of a lovely, star-crossed romance.

The powerful current Palme d’Or favourite features terrific performances from youthful leads Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele, claustrophobic cinematography from Frank van den Eeden, weepie-worthy orchestrations from Valentin Hadjadj, and meaningful musings on how we hide behind small-talk, and internalise pain and gender norms.

There are similarities with the mumblecore science fiction of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Colour and The Endless, but Trenque Lauquen daringly stakes out its own spooky terrain.

There are similarities with the mumblecore science fiction of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Colour and The Endless, but Trenque Lauquen daringly stakes out its own spooky terrain.

What really hooks you, however, is the gorgeous smoothness of the narrative machinery. We get jolts. We are not short of shocks. But, as in all the best farce, the surprises ultimately seem preordained.

Everyone on screen is having a ball — albeit behind the straightest of faces — in this uproarious gallimaufry of movie-related pretentiousness.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movie has a strange, magical aura for cineastes.

Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s pitch-black comedy makes merry with malignant narcissism and the worried well.

Perhaps Eggers has lost some of the horrible intimacy we savoured in his earlier work. But he offers us compensation in scope, intensity and pure bloody ferocity.

There are no easy answers here, only people and centuries of redrawn borders.

Kristen Stewart is inspired casting as a woman on the brink of escape from a superficially comfortable prison. Who better to play a person remembered for her perceived shyness than the current maestro of hooded introspection?

The closing sequence, sure to endure future homage from impressed film-makers, has already become famous for its chilling ambiguity. One of the year’s very best films.

At a moment when truth is increasingly relative, Cover-Up acknowledges the grim continuation of the state apparatus that Hersh first exposed in the aftermath of My Lai. Without journalists of his calibre, we’d be none the wiser.

This is, for good or ill, the sort of enterprise both fans and detractors will be talking about for years to come.

Absolutely essential.

At 76, more than 20 films into his storied career, Paul Schrader can still deliver a sucker punch.