The jokes are funny and weird. At its heart, there is a story worth caring about.

[Hania] carefully sidesteps ethical questions about the use of performance alongside archival evidence with a clear-headed chronicle of a tragedy and of wider Palestinian suffering.

Late Wenders sits at an odd angle to the young man obsessed with wandering and with the United States. There is a sense of a busy mind eager to share enthusiasms. Its generousness is part of the appeal.

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, for all its razzle-dazzle, never loses sight of its northern working-class roots.

Moratto and Thanyá Montesso’s script is precise and minimal. Christian Malheiros and Tales Ordakji make for a wildly charismatic screen coupling.

Brian and Charles themselves, meanwhile, make for an irresistible two-step in a delightful tale of friendship and loneliness, dramatised and written in beats that make one think of Wallace & Gromit without the clay.

The inclusion of older footage from the Armando Diaz school, where Genoa police kettled protests during the 2001 G8 summit, reminds us that previous generations have equally hoped for change.

In short, the third best Christmas film ever.

Jessie Buckley’s determination to stop her slippery part from wriggling out of her clutch is positively heroic. The Kerry actor becomes Everywoman and Nobody. Her sorrow is bottomless. Her uncertainty is painful. One can imagine no better guide through these mysterious swamps.

Masculinity has seldom been more cartoonishly toxic than in Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s compelling hair-trigger drama.

The strain of absent fathers, generational addiction and the cycle of poverty are carefully countered by resilience, love and the flicker of youthful possibility.

Hardwicke and O’Hara make for forbidding facades with unexpected depths, but impressive newcomer Ollie West, who appears in every scene, shoulders most of the emotional heft.

Working with Gammell, Keough, a granddaughter of Elvis Presley and the compelling star of The House that Jack Built and Daisy Jones & the Six, successfully transitions to the other side of the camera with this respectful take on a community under pressure.

The wild conceit is, against all odds, through smart writing and clever use of CGI and puppets, made palatable. The denouement is pleasingly shocking.

The final scenes, even for those familiar with the real-world outcome, are haunting.

The director and star deftly juggles social commentary, genre tension, spookiness and some fabulous period costumes (courtesy of designer Maïra Ramedhan Levi).

Marder, who co-wrote the script with his brother Abraham, sets out quite a stall with a drama that’s as visceral and hard-hitting as its protagonist’s drum solos.

Just as Youri fashions outsider art – or survivalist dreams – from his doomed banlieue, Liatard and Trouilh craft an imaginative debut feature from the rubble.

Völker’s sensitive film brings together these two wounded families to sit down for tea. It’s a fascinating encounter defined by guilt and unspeakable hurt. There is no sense of absolution or cathartic breakthrough. There is only imperfect reckoning.

Promising Young Woman nonetheless remains an entertaining, imaginative exercise in creative score-settling.

Late Night with the Devil is at its best when it colours within the lines of the found-footage genre.

The most anxious Jewish comedy since the Coen brothers visited Jobian trauma on Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man stars Carol Kane as an adult bat-mitzvah student. This alone would justify the admission price, but there’s more.

Working from a blackly comic script by Austin Kolodney, Van Sant fashions a shouty standoff in the tradition of Network and Dog Day Afternoon.

If nothing else, this fine debut feature from Korean director Jason Yu – hitherto assistant director to Bong Joon-ho – counts as a small masterpiece of tone.

Camus’s prose is heard as we sink into intellectual concerns that obsessed French intellectuals through the 1950s. But it remains a gripping piece that treats its source with great respect.

O’Connor, who caused a stir with his breakthrough turn in God’s Own Country, and Catalan actor Costa, share an easy and natural chemistry. They don’t blaze up the screen: they simmer and charm.

Many will have issues with the depiction of a largely benevolent military and political hierarchy. Some will worry about the necessarily terse summaries of North Korean and Russian polities. Almost everybody will shiver at the realisation that when a response to nuclear attack is required it is too late for any to be effective.

Whishaw’s performance is a theatrical masterclass in controlled ramble; Hall’s is the art of listening, with responses that range from concern to a slightly cocked head. Their chemistry enlivens the most throwaway anecdote.

Evil Dead Rises is not quite so unambiguously comic as that early work, but Cronin never forgets we are here to have a bloody good time.

For all its undeniable pleasures, Dumb Money, derived from Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network, feels just a little shallow.

No doubt the unrelenting archness will annoy many. But, honed to an economic 93 minutes, Black Bag beats all the current worthless streaming thrillers for wit, pace, style and commitment to the bit.

Cultural crises are seldom so entertaining.

Dave Davis’s petrified protagonist is nothing short of star-making.

Dickinson plays a small role as Mike’s antagonistic friend, but everything rests on Dillane’s powerhouse turn and the writer-director’s compassionate, daring script.

An absorbing peek behind the pop-star curtain from the veteran documentarian RJ Cutler, maker of The War Room and The September Issue.

Hewson confirms her capacity to fill every square inch of a screen. Kinlan deftly hints at the vulnerability behind performative aggression. Helped out by fine support from Carney stock company members such as Jack Reynor, Marcella Plunkett, Don Wycherley and Keith McErlean, the leads confidently bring home a smallish film with a sizeable heart.

If you have ever experienced acute anxiety, panic attacks or any other nervous disorder, then watching Anne at 13,000 Ft – presumably through your fingers – will bring a sense of representation and horror in equal measure.

Every scene, every ride and every development feels dangerous and combustible.

The Card Counter – executive produced by Martin Scorsese – revisits Schrader’s twin preoccupations with despair and salvation, powered along by tart political urgency, a magnetic central performance from Isaac, and no little style.

Writer-director Josh Margolin, making his feature debut, based the eponymous character on his grandmother. The script, accordingly, is never patronising.

A hugely entertaining record of a person no novelist could have invented.

Lilleaas and Reinsve go up against each other with nuanced vigour. Fanning, though not suggesting any real film star I can think of, has fun spreading trivial glamour about the place. Skarsgard deserves the Oscar he may well receive.

This remains a top-notch effort that implicitly pleads for invention and sincerity in family entertainment.

The unlikely friendship between Michael and Kensuke is the heart of a film that touches lightly on environmental themes, loss and history.

Pray for Our Sinners (clever title, incidentally) is not a shocker on the scale of clerical-abuse documentaries such as Mea Maxima Culpa or Deliver Us from Evil. It is a smaller story that connects directly with a tight community. Its power lies in its intimacy and, ultimately, in its cautious hopefulness.

Jalmari Helander, who previously scored an international hit with his Santa-themed horror, Rare Exports, mines every gory set piece for squeals of delight and revulsion. Styled as a midnight movie, Sisu makes terrific use of limited military hardware and a forbidding Lapland landscape.

Niasari, who writes and produces as well as directing, racks up the tension to match his psychopathy in this sure-footed debut feature.

Forming a Greek chorus, the films are only as disjointed as their context: the obliteration of normal life and the stubborn, miraculous act of carrying on.

Janet Planet plays a little like a memory piece from an unknown future – the assembled past life of an adult who, as a child, grasped only a bare majority of the tensions unfolding about her. A lovely, flawed idyll.

Sing Sing itself does us all good while delivering a compendium of engaging personal dramas. Domingo rules over all like the most benign of creative deities.

Like the fanciest of scams, Barbie is carried off with a conviction that deserves sustained applause and occasional loud hoots.

This compelling, acutely observed and deeply affecting film is imbued with tenderness and humanity. [11 Mar 2000, p.77]

The film does not quite pull off its enigmatic ending, but this remains a startlingly eerie debut that finds new angles to a familiar genre.

McCarthy’s directorial precision is complemented by wit and an imaginative backstory that deserves an expanded universe.

Apples works both as an unintended record of the times and as a wry comment on the ancient human condition. Dare we call it “memorable”?

Life in The Villages intersects with the suburbia of Blue Velvet and, in common with that dark dramatic underbelly, there’s a compelling soap opera bubbling under the sterile surface.

Still, this is an intriguing psychological thriller and a carefully calibrated study of maternal mourning, powered by perceived class differences and harsh maternal judgment.

The filmmaker’s technique generally counterpoints any caveats and script imperfections. The ensemble cast is starry and strong. The segue from the end of the second World War into the cold war is marked by a spectacular explosion sequence. “Brilliance makes up for a lot,” Murphy’s Oppenheimer tells us. It sure does.

Working from his own tight script, Whannell demonstrates an admirable ability to place the wet-yourself shocks where you least expect them. Benjamin Wallfisch’s insidious score complements later action, but the director is prepared to play out the opening conflicts with no music whatsoever. Great thought has gone into the architecture of this ingenious structure

In his impressive feature-length debut, the Irish documentarian Gar O’Rourke offers an immersive and mesmerising portrait of life in a still recognisably Soviet institution.

Dupieux, as ever, writes, directs, shoots, and orchestrates the madness. This isn’t as conceptually neat as Deerskin nor as playfully intertextual as Rubber, but it’s consistently fun.

At any rate, though loose in structure, Friendship offers a few minor masterpieces in the art of cringe.

The third part in a loose, geographically defined trilogy, as sensitively penned by Loach collaborator Paul Laverty, The Old Oak is a gentler film than the stark austerity painted by I, Daniel Blake or the chilling dissection of the gig economy in Sorry We Missed You. The film is, however, astute in its depiction of a disenfranchised community, ravaged by vulture property speculators and post-industrialisation.

It shouldn’t work, but it’s infectious fun for all of its not inconsiderable run time. The eccentric format double-jobs as a Sparks primer for the novice, and as a greatest hits package for the hardcore fan.

A rare historical epic that is connected to contemporary crises.

The copious talking heads fail to open up the intellectual wiring required to derive pleasure from an activity that invites submarine asphyxiation. What we do get is lucid explanation of the sport’s mechanics and satisfactory celebration of two impressively unstoppable personalities. A smart buy for the streamer.

By way of contrast, Imitation of Life and its predecessors really poked their noses into the ratty, fetid spaces behind the plush curtains.

Arriving somewhat under the radar, Marley Morrison’s enchanting comedy makes something convincingly British of a form that the American indie cadre has exploited to near exhaustion.

As in the best of Anderson’s work, there is a lesson in here about the addictive balm of storytelling.

When the macabre does fully show itself, no concessions are made to taste or restraint. Though Weapons is lavishly shot and expensively acted – Amy Madigan is deliciously gamey in a role we won’t spoil – it ultimately settles into the rhythms of premium-brand pulp.

Alas, the film does slip towards industry-standard punch-ups in the last 15 minutes. But there is enough promise in this cheeky, witty, incisive shocker to let us look forward to inevitable sequels with something like enthusiasm.

Few will complain about the delicious perplexities of the opening hour. The film’s focus on the sadness of remote lives – everyone here seems alone – adds satisfactory emotional ballast.

Along the way, Scala!!! (the number of exclamation points varies) takes in the history of a wider culture. You could see the community under discussion as that swimming in the long wake of punk.

This fine documentary on the Palestine solidarity encampments at Columbia University, in Manhattan, makes much of comparisons with student protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

It mostly succeeds on old-fashioned smack-’em-up and sure personal chemistry.

It would be a mistake to seek too many lessons from the film. Its great achievement is in the creation of a timeless nowhere that is both drawn from history and independent of it. That is the absurdist ideal.

Much of the project’s power is derived from Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning central performance.

The script, by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, tarries for singsongs, dinners and poignant conversations about cinema and the self.

There are no big dramas, save for a call up to the office for skipping a school trip. Reiko Yoshida’s script instead foregrounds sincere friendship and the joyful mechanics of songwriting.

Servants confirms the director as a major talent.

The director of Stranger by the Lake returns to the deadpan, sexually unstable working-class environs that have shaped many of his previous films with this pleasingly confounding tale of displaced characters and desires.

Adam Arkapaw’s dynamic cinematography, the pulsing electronica of the director’s regular composer (and brother) Jed Kurzel, and a snarling script make for a taut and gritty thriller that could pass for a moody, rediscovered early-1970s classic originally shot sometime between The French Connection and Death Wish.

At 118 minutes, Tina – an old-fashioned marriage of talking heads and footage– is long for a music documentary. But there’s plenty to mull over, a fine array of contributors and wonderful archive material.

If any recent release has the potential to become a cult classic it is this melodic warning from beneath the earth.

Civil War is wan as satire. But it’s an action stormer for the ages.

There is a sense here not just of Vietnam-era experimental cinema but of contemporaneous postmodern novels by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and the recently late John Barth. Smart and dumb. Fascinating and frustrating. An absolute blast.

There are cruising parallels with American contemporaries the Ross Brothers and Halina Reijn, but this daisy chain has an earnest, festive charm unlike any other. It’s a vibe.

The film never lets up. Pieced together from carefully colour-graded archive footage and the contemporaneous testimonies of Khrushchev, Andrée Blouin, In Koli Jean Bofane and Conor Cruise O’Brien (narrated by Patrick Cruise O’Brien), Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat finds an unlikely villain in its propulsive score: jazz.

This is the kind of issue-driven cinema that used to win Oscars. That Dark Waters and Just Mercy weren’t mentioned during awards season is as troubling as it is perplexing.

Moving from his standard New York neurotic, Eisenberg does a convincing job of moving from frustration to a violent, active mania. Poots is better still as someone who can’t find the words to communicate her growing despair.

Morris plays along, but his visuals – shadowy rooms, obfuscated photographs, carefully filleted scenes from adaptations of the novelist’s work – hint that this isn’t the whole story.

None of which is to suggest the film backs away from great gags that, as it was in 1984, continue deep into hilarious improvisation over the end credits.

Passing is, in some ways, a slender story. But Hall’s feel for the period and her gift for folding potent discourse into the attractive visuals kicks it up to the level of high art.

At its best, Dreams is intimate and contemplative, anchored by Overbye’s dreamy voiceover and performance. The second half loses some of that purpose.