Cultural crises are seldom so entertaining.

The Caméra d’Or-winner Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq’s affecting quasi-autobiographical drama is sweetly reminiscent of Céline Sciamma’s childcentric will-o’-the-wisps Petite Maman and My Life as a Courgette.

Aisha is a portrait of unassailable dignity in the face of cruel happenstance.

There’s something of the Greek weird wave or Wes Anderson in Cavalli’s deadpan humour, which is offset by Porcaroli’s wildly energetic central turn.

For all the gloom, this is a lovely, heartfelt creation from the Oscar-winning animator.

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

For all that self-aware fuss, Glass Onion works darn well as a mystery romp. It is a little smooth to the touch, but there are beautiful chicanes along the route to a satisfactorily clamorous conclusion.

It is not unreasonable to wonder if Mission: Impossible is moving into its Spy Who Loved Me phase. After all, Tom Cruise and the series itself are more than a decade older than, respectively, Roger Moore and the Bond Cinematic Universe at the time of that film. Have we reached cosy pastiche? Is it now all just one big guffaw? On balance, no. The exhaustingly titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is certainly aware of its own occasional ridiculousness.

The two performances, rather than playing in a continuum, work as contrasting sides of a fractured psyche.

Living, which is composed entirely of delicate movements and earnest pleasantries, maintains a quietude and stiff upper lip in the face of tragedy.

A remarkable piece of work.

By relocating a Parisian crime to the French Alps, Moll and his cinematographer Patrick Ghiringhelli visibly stifle Yohan’s frustrated inquiries. The comings and goings among the gruff, macho unit are not particularly interesting. But The Night of the 12th, which was nominated for 10 César Awards, winning in six categories, including best picture, is otherwise absorbing.

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

[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.

The Mitchells vs the Machines feels, even without the benefits of a theatrical run, just like summer.

The new film, evocatively shot by Sean Bobbitt, feels like a trivial, if entertaining, diversion on the way to a more substantial closing fall.

Harrison Jr is frazzled and electric; Russell is wounded and circumspect. The audacious drama is matched by musical cues from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score and a wildly impressive collection of tunes, running from A$AP to SZA.

It is 15 minutes too long and, with all the emotional and literal clamour, loses some of the intimacy you desire for a rural golden-age-of-crime lampoon.

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

The extravagance of Fastvold’s techniques can sometimes get in the way of the characters. Strong supporting actors such as Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie and Christopher Abbott don’t quite succeed in making personalities heard over Blumberg’s bewitching arrangements. But, as cinema of melodic effect, The Testament of Ann Lee could hardly be bettered.

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.

Caustic exchanges and lopsided family dynamics make for entertaining verbal donnybrooks.

If you scrunch up your eyes and tilt your head you could imagine yourself watching an avant-garde animation at a Brooklyn art house. But there is also, about it, something of the charming work that Oliver Postgate did for British children’s television in the 1970s.

This is a cinema of introversion, concealment and evasion. Nothing is given up easily.

The script’s wandering and overlapping arcs can feel uneven and tricksy, yet there’s something utterly compelling in how Glasner stages decay not just as a biological inevitability, but a doomy familial legacy.

By the close, the picture risks taking on the quality of those allegorical novels that provided solace in the post-hippie era. Jonathan Livingstone Lavatory Cleaner. Zen and the Art of Lavatory Maintenance. But better than that. Sharper, less sentimental, less aphoristic. A film to live your life by.

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

What emerges is a torrid, gripping drama that acknowledges not just what damage the careless can wreak but also to what extent the responsible often conspire in their own annihilation.

Exhaustingly beautiful, serious of purpose, the film knows where it’s going and, when it gets there, it stays for a very, very long time. A Hidden Life risks inducing Stendhal syndrome with its early overload of beauty. It risks something closer to narcolepsy in its repetitive final act. But even then, the singularity of Malick’s approach repels irritation.

A late narrative development swerves the meet-cute into less sure-footed terrain. But this remains an encounter to treasure, jollied along by quiet political protest and poignant notes on widowhood.

White Riot is here both to educate and to serve the nostalgists.

A quiet character study pivoting around mum sex and elder care, it’s not the director’s best work but it’s streets ahead of this recent misfire.

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

Horror aficionados will find much to admire, but everything about this wild project defies generic expectations. It’s a thriller; it’s a cat-and-mouse game; it’s a truly messed-up love story.

The Eternal Daughter remains a dazzling double-header for Swinton, who, against all odds, disappears into both roles.

The writer-director and his cinematographer, Simone D’Arcangelo, evoke spaghetti westerns with wide-angle vistas of forbidding horizons. Odd moments of Quentin Tarantino-style playfulness add to the unease. The perverse, atonal effect is as discombobulating as Harry Allouche’s plucked, appositely bleak score.

The film has its flaws, but worriers will find much with which to identify.

This tribute feels plausible. It feels touching. But it also feels a bit otherworldly. All those adjectives are appropriate for another tremendous film from one of our era’s great young directors.

Haarla and Borisov demonstrate impeccable timing and expertly tiny movements as they warm up to one another. It’s something like love but without either sex or romance. And it’s a joy to behold.

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.

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.

Shot in 96-frames-per-second, this is a stunning, thrilling chronicle of nature at its angriest.

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.

George Lechaptois’s sunny cinematography and ROB’s lively score add bright notes to a film that is consistently light on its feet, despite its potentially weighty subject matter.

Straddling the current revival of the picaresque in US indie cinema (The Sweet East, Riddle of Fire) and cinéma vérité, this is a pleasing meander, skilfully directed, shot, and edited by the upcoming auteur siblings.

This is softer, more emotional and in some ways, more obvious, than Angelopoulos's other work, yet it has a memorable, moving grandeur. [11 Jun 1999, p.13]

The director’s formal control, from the eerie electronic sounds of an ondes Martenot to the startling image of blood flowering across ice, collides the cinematic and the liminal.

There are implicit arguments here about the monetisation of motherhood and about the human capacity to shut out unattractive truths.

There are endless nuances and ironies throughout. Though stories are told, In the Shadow of Beirut is more a mosaic than a narrative tapestry.

Risk and bondage are seldom as playful as they are in Babygirl.

Working from a script composed of real-life testimonies and dramatised with youthful verve and extravagant flights of fancy, the director’s follow-up to the exquisite Pinocchio is a true adventure.

A film that is no less thrilling for its sober rigour.

Strickland has expressed a passion for This is Spinal Tap and Flux Gourmet has much to do with how close confinement causes creative types to claw out one another’s eyes. The characters here are every bit as cleanly drawn as the members of that fictional rock group and, even if they generate less open affection, they also encourage one to take sides.

Peter Bebjak’s disciplined film is forever reminding us of arbitrary cruelties and absurd outrages.

Copa 71 is conventionally told: talking heads interspersed with footage of the era’s pop music. But the rhythms are captivating and the story is irresistible. Highly recommended.

The camera dutifully records esteemed actors – including one Corrie veteran, as it happens – talking in beautifully appointed rooms, but it seldom finds the cinematic spark that might elevate the drama beyond a polished theatrical exercise.

It’s a lovely thing to behold, but who exactly is this for? Unlike Matteo Garrone’s sublime 2019 fantasy, a version that managed to be faithful, wildly imaginative and all-ages in appeal, this brooding musical veers wildly between primary school scatology, repeated journeys to the underworld and darkest history.

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.

Ultimately, we end up with an abundance of craft and a forest of lore wrapped around personal narratives too flimsy to sustain marching feet.

The film has bad news for us about humanity, but it also exudes a joy in the art of creative storytelling. All of which is a way of saying: pay attention throughout.

Youthful exuberance has seldom been so painful or compelling to watch.

The seat-of-the-pants grit of the first film seems as distant as kitchen-sink verite.

To emphasise the absurdity of war, Kusturica shapes Underground as a wild, intense tragic comedy that is as black humoured as it is upsetting. [25 Oct 1996, p.13]

One can offer no greater compliment to D Smith’s examination of the black transgender experience than that it makes the viewer, however they identify, feel a welcomed part of the busy conversation.

The stoical, quiet, affecting beast of burden in Li Ruijun’s much-admired drama is emblematic of the film’s larger appeal.

Grief is seldom this entertaining.

Does it all add up? The cleaved-brow Fiennes, who does inner torture better than anyone, makes something believable of Lawrence’s battle for truth and integrity. Isabella Rossellini works magic with a minute supporting role. But few will survive the final scenes without pondering the Italian for “magnificent hokum”.

Shot in chocolatey browns amid the more comfortable suburbs of Copenhagen, Another Round underlines its later, more cautious warnings by reminding us how inexhaustibly tedious the drunk seem to the sober.

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

It is Coppola’s best film in 20 years.

Vogt coaxes impressive, carefully calibrated performances from his creepy young ensemble.

There is always room for a post-Beatles doc if it’s this good and this original.

Lawrence Michael Levine’s blisteringly original, provocative, often hilarious screenplay lurches between familiar tropes – “I saw the way you were looking at her!” – and jagged edges. It’ll keep you guessing long after the credits roll.

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.

In common with Jude’s scathing attack on the gig economy and toxic online culture in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 takes a scattershot approach to various targets: anti-Semitism, capitalism, nationalism and religious hypocrisy. The incomparable writer-director’s dark comedy doesn’t care to resolve its heroine’s quandary; it’s out to poke with ethical heft and barbed wit.

A welcome oddity.

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.

In short, Kosinski and his team have accomplished their odd, hybrid mission more impressively than should have been possible. Most importantly, they have, in an age of cartoon computer graphics, delivered action sequences that appear to be taking place in the real world.

Pitched somewhere between The Social Network and The Thick of It, BlackBerry brings a welcome touch of anarchy to the corporate drama.

The latest film from the Dardenne brothers, a heart-rending tale of misused immigrants in contemporary Belgium, arrives just two weeks after Frank Berry’s Aisha pondered similar misfortunes in Ireland. Both are roughly in the social-realist mode, but the tone and the perspectives are quite different.

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

Many will retain understandable uneasiness about the project, but few could deny the technical brilliance and dedication to an austere brief. An essential watch. Though maybe just the once.

It was riveting, not for any great insider insight, but because Carville turned out to be a much more interesting, more complex and more "authentic" character than Clinton himself. The cliches real, messy candidate and ersatz, cold-eyed handler - were reversed. Clinton made brief, bland appearances on the sidelines. Carville was the - heart of the drama: intense, passionate, emotional, funny. Carville laughed, cried, shouted. Clinton just smiled and waved. [10 Nov 1993, p.12]

Colin Farrell’s central turn, a lovely, soulful study of melancholy, is one of his best performances to date.

Servants confirms the director as a major talent.

As directed by Sophie Hyde, who made the recent Irish film Animals, the picture never fully collapses beneath its own compromises. Credit for that must go to Thompson and McCormack. You get a sense of actors from different generations relishing the opportunity to tug at the ragged screenplay like handsome dogs squabbling over an old blanket.

It’s not world-building; it’s world-sprawling. Imagine Harry Potter. But with head-stomping.

The film arguably shares DNA with the psycho-geographical works of Pat Collins and Alan Gilsenan.

A lovely, pastoral pleasure that admits its share of blood-drawing barbs.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond cares not a jot for the confines of conventional narrative and identification. This is cinema as bombardment, as fetish, as swooning fan collage. Who needs a new Bond film?

The ensemble remains electrifying against the damp.

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.

This is an exciting, surprising treatment of a story many of us have heard only in half-understood whispers. Well worth settling in for.

Mulligan brings heart to Basden’s wistful folk compositions, and Key babbles amiably, as this crowd-pleaser salutes the redemptive power of a singsong.

More than 100 artists contributed to the homeschool green screen and rough-hewn post-Minecraft animation. The anarchic and imaginative world-building around Batman’s hood is impressive.