It’s just a great story, you wonder why nobody thought to make a movie before.

For the most part, Hello, Bookstore potters along in anecdotal, amiably ramshackle fashion.

In delicate movements, the miserabilism of Small Things Like These coalesces into a wonderfully understated seasonal catharsis.

The tragic cycle is composed of the same beats that defined such superior films as The Godfather and Animal Kingdom. But the tight focus on Lesia, and her realisation that the men she loves are also capable of monstrous things, reinvigorates the familiar form.

What keeps it ticking is the fiery gut-clenched romance between the two leads.

This is a straight-edge, inspirational sporting film of the old school – closer to Rocky than Hoop Dreams. Taking all the inevitable compromises on board, it could hardly work better within its chosen parameters.

Bentley sometimes leans too heavily on lyricism and voiceover, but the film’s earnestness and restraint cast a strange spell. Train Dreams may mourn a disappearing US, but, more movingly, its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with.

The entire ensemble is remarkable. The drama is so engrossing, it knocks the jaunty Beatles song right out of the viewer’s head.

The most magical moments are the most ordinary, as Claire Mathon’s camera sneaks up on the two little girls in peals of laughter as they make a mess with pancakes or divvying up the parts in the script for (a fantastic-sounding) murder-mystery.

This is a Macbeth for the head rather than the heart, but no less beguiling for that.

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.

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.

Craig Zobel’s breathless film is stuffed with delicious jokes and eye-watering Tom-and-Jerry violence.

Hang in there and it’s rewardingly novel, touchingly human and agreeably nutty.

Chan-wook Park’s regular cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung trains his camera on dark, snaky corridors and Thatcher and East’s terrified faces as the Mormon girls realise the hopelessness of their predicament. It’s no fun for them, but it’s never dull for us.

Appealing documentary of the Nobel Prize-winning author has fascinating details.

Composed of small gestures and unspoken truths, it’s a bonsai miniature of the vastness of overwhelming grief.

A gorgeous, proudly unreliable glance over the shoulder. A tribute to an often maligned city.

An absolute treasure.

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.

The film does feel a little thin in its later stages, but the inventive performances – Rylance’s in particular – keep the film aloft throughout. No bogie. Comfortably a birdie. Not quite an eagle.

Hassan and Ingar deliver compelling, complementary performances: Hassan is as quiet and vulnerable as Ingar is fiery and charismatic. Clarissa Cappellani’s fluid cinematography and Fiona DeSouza’s stylish edits and inserts keep pace with the youthful exuberance. Judicious use of flashback sets up a gut-punch coda.

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

It is equally a solid genre effort, characterised by gory set-pieces, discombobulating scenarios, and welcome lashings of feminist revenge.

Basholli’s simple, elegantly structured script and Alex Bloom’s cinematography places Gashi’s carefully calibrated performance in almost every frame.

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

India Donaldson’s Good One is a sneaky revelation, a low-key coming-of-age drama that deftly sidesteps familiar tropes in favour of keen cringe comedy and emotional precision.

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

Jojo Rabbit works such tensions throughout: between laughter and groans, between emotion and sentimentality, between daring and bad taste. Such gambles are worth taking even if you believe the gambler is headed for the breadline.

Mad About the Boy may take place in the safest of all worlds, but it is more connected to the greater sadnesses of life than we had any right to expect. Oh, and it’s still properly funny. Which matters a bit.

With its lurid libidinous action and over-the-top murders, Pearl is a jokey spin-off of a jokey film. Imagine – and we mean this as a compliment – the slasher equivalent of The Naked Gun 2. Offsetting the self-indulgence, Goth sinks her teeth into the goose-killing heroine and spits out all the feathers.

One is tempted to demand a dramatic movie based on these yarns, but Castro’s Spies tells its story so compellingly that no such compromise is necessary.

Cheap gags aside, The Super 8 Years comes together as an effective gloss on a life that has already been carefully examined.

Djukic’s feature debut echoes the sensitivities of Céline Sciamma’s early coming-of-age stories but with a bold, cinematic bent.

Lisa Cortés’ fond, scholarly, starry documentary not only ensures that the innovator behind Tutti Frutti and Good Golly, Miss Molly gets his due but also provides a rip-roaring bow for the artist variously known as the Georgia Peach, the Living Flame and the Southern Child.

This is not horror gussied up as allegory or prestige: it is, pleasingly, a straight ghost story, executed with rigour, a swipe at misogyny and a sly sense of fun.

Effectively employing and expressive performances from his three actors, and subtle symbolism, Polanski fashions an engrossing drama in which the mounting sexual tension is palpable. He and his crew make remarkably resourceful use of the movie's severely confined locations, and the hand-held black-and-white camerawork is dextrous. [25 Jun 1993, p.11]

There is, as there was in the first film, a profound sadness at the heart of Inside Out 2.

C’mon C’mon is certainly heartfelt, but it lacks the lovely levity that defined Mills’s earlier films.

The risky focus that Leigh Whannell, the film’s director, puts on the psychological over the physical may alienate some gorehounds, but it makes for an original shocker with subtexts that linger.

A true original and deserving winner of the Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, El Conde’s heart-feasting, sexual subplots and accusatory banter coalesce into an extended and unmissable Grand Guignol finale.

Perry and his editor, Robert Greene (using split screens and collage techniques), build a dizzying kaleidoscope of timelines, earnestness and glee. What emerges is a film that’s as formally adventurous and oddly affecting as the soundtrack.

A deserving winner of the best screenplay at Cannes last year, this nail-biting drama is offset by Barhom’s terrific wide-eyed performance. The gorgon’s knot of political and religious machinations add distinctive hues to a genre piece with shades of All the President’s Men and The Name of the Rose.

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

Yves Cape’s unfussy, still camerawork never distracts. Chastain and Sarsgaard subtly work every acting muscle. (The latter deservedly took home the Volpi Cup from Venice last September.) Franco is kinder to these characters than he has been to many of his creations, leaving the viewer to parse the moral murk.

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

Forget the big brand space opera: here’s the season’s pre-eminent work of event cinema.

Dupieux is flogging no message. He’s inviting us to take risks on a ride that is as unpredictable as it is spooky. And it’s all done in under 80 minutes. There is nothing else like it out there.

Against the distress, Chukwu and Deadwyler find purpose in Mamie’s transformation into a hugely influential civil rights activist. This is a woman’s account of striving for racial justice in the era of Jim Crow laws.

Ignore the unassuming title: Ordinary Love is a love story that is extraordinary.

It’s a recipe for an emotional journey to match the trajectory of the title, but director Charlène Favier’s script, co-written with Antoine Lacomblez and Marie Talon, is as chilly as the permacold of its surroundings, and punctuated by DOP Yann Maritaud’s serene, snowy tableaux.

A terrifying reminder that those with absolute power don’t make good retirees.

More than a few critics have suggested the film ends up losing the run of itself, but few would deny that it remains indecently entertaining up to the last frame. Odd, special, important.

Gibney is equally fascinated by Putin’s journey from anonymous civil servant to strongman, and the broader political scene’s increasing resemblance to performance art. It makes for an arresting chronicle and many follow-up questions.

With its fast-paced walking, talking and shouting into telephones, A House of Dynamite is a nervy, timely thriller that goes down like Coca-Cola while another US brand – its military – takes centre stage.

Paolo Sorrentino’s soothing, funny, occasionally infuriating The Hand of God sits somewhere between the irresistible sentimentality of the Branagh drama and the more complex harmonies of Cuarón’s bildungsfilm.

Breakdown: 1975, like the best films of that period, never lets up on entertainment as it pursues a serious end. We don’t get just Network and Harlan County, USA; we also get The Towering Inferno and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All contribute to sharp analysis of a body politic apparently unaware of its own psychological instability.

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 visual gags are fresh, the jokes are funny, the world-building is disarmingly buoyant, and the musical cues, from Holiday in Cambodia to Carmina Burana, are playful.

In some ways it is Cartoon Saloon’s most “normal” film, but, stuffed with visual elan and powered by good nature, it confirms the studio’s desire to stretch in hitherto unexplored directions.

Linklater repays the debt in a beautiful film that eschews granular analysis of the art for a broad celebration of Frenchness at its most proudly awkward. It captures the point at which artists were just discovering energies that would turn culture on its head in the decade to come.

It’s Lee Chatametikool’s temporal-jumping edits that define this compelling drama.

DW Young’s film, a study of New York’s independent and antiquarian booksellers, looks to have modelled itself on that aimless pleasure. Never aspiring to anything like a structure, it meanders from shelf to shelf, sometimes picking up a volume and placing it straight down, sometimes leafing more carefully through the pages.

You will learn something of Agojie, the all-woman Dahomean army, from The Woman King, but this is largely popcorn-friendly fantasy pitched at maximum volume.

It would be nothing without a charismatic star at its heart. Sweeney is certainly that – and, as the final shot confirms, she is as game as they come. Nun more fun.

The script is as indulgent as it is compelling, which is fair considering its depiction of two riled people who know each other’s weaknesses. Marcell Rév’s crystalline high-contrast black and white cinematography is gorgeous enough to transform a domestic dispute into something wonderfullycinematic.

Sadly, Prince’s estate refused the rights to the audio of Nothing Compares 2 U. That could have been a big problem, but her famous version’s status as the ghost that didn’t come to the feast adds mystery to an already hugely engaging film. For fans and the uninitiated alike.

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.

This is a bold, brassy entertainment that breaks new ground as it hugs venerable genres to its chest.

The oppressively neon musical numbers and ominous pastoral pronouncements that “secular government was a mistake” are more convincing than the film’s late swerve into Giallo terrain. But the writer-director’s ideas about women as religious enforcers, complicit in their own subjugation, are fascinating.

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 film certainly invites fists to be pumped in celebration. It is less certain Air offers any meaningful critique of the society that gave us the sacred gutty.

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?

None of this would work if the lead actors were not so firmly connected to their complex roles.

That overqualified cast works hard with the mindless plot, but the stars of the piece remain the venerable beasts themselves.

Marc Evans’s film is a lovely thing.

An intriguing romance that plays pleasing games with the viewer until the final ambiguous scene.

The Kraffts, who first bonded over their love of Mount Etna, remain as committed to the cause of understanding volcanic hazards and triggers as they are to one another. Their story makes for this year’s best documentary to date, and a film that demands to be seen on the largest possible screen.

At its core, however, this is a big-hearted family drama about acceptance and a love story between an older married couple. It falls to the terrific Yeoh to hold all the subplots and occasional comic misfires together.

Playwright Florian Zeller’s third instalment – and second film – in a cycle that includes The Father is a muscular, devastating drama that ought to have featured more prominently in the protracted “awards conversation”.

There are obvious parallels between Rasmussen’s film and such similarly constructed animations as Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and Keith Maitland’s Tower, although Flee’s rugged lines are never as polished as anything found in either of those films. The sense of catharsis and the heartfelt voiceover, however, offset the roughhewn aesthetics.

In an ideal world, it’ll do Greatest Showman box office business. Mind you, in an ideal world, Dinklage’s forlorn turn would be nominated for an Oscar.

It adds up to a rare film about assimilation that can be equally cherished by both poles of the American political landscape. And everybody in between.

The film does occasionally struggle with getting England right. We are always aware that this is a French film-maker looking through the window at the crumpets on their doilies. But there is a mischievous intelligence at work that complements the embrace of sometimes broad misunderstandings.

Though certainly at home to overcast misery, the film incorporates spooky, stop-motion animation and musical interludes that might have amused Ken Russell. It works in surprising ways.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is not quite the equal of the same film-maker’s Oscar contender, Drive My Car. Both films, however, share a deceptively languid pacing and find an aching humanity in middle-class people in crisis.

This is one of those snappy, well-formed Brit-coms that one expects to see reworked as a Full Monty- or Kinky Boots-style Broadway show.

The Gold Rush is a typical Chaplin film; but it is better than any of those that have been produced before. From the very first moment of the picture Chaplin strikes that curious note of sublime aloofness that sets the key of all his best work. [19 Jan 1926, p.6]

It hardly needs to be said that the film will not be for everyone. But even those frustrated by the knotted plotting will admit that Hadžihalilović masters the crucial trick of presenting the narrative as if it makes sense to itself.

A lovely comedy of the most serious hue.

Sudan, Remember Us gives voice to the ordinary revolutionaries it portrays.

At its best, All My Friends shares DNA with both the social dread of Ruben Östlund’s get-togethers and the leylines of Ben Wheatley. Hints of English folk horror — a pitbull tied up near a car, accusing looks at the driven grouse shoot — add to the delicious disquiet. Imagine if Ben Wheatley rebooted Curb Your Enthusiasm.

God’s Creatures doesn’t quite manage its daring blend of maritime realism and Greek catastrophe. The huge final gesture feels just a little too heightened for this otherwise everyday world. The effort was, however, worth making. A bitter, unforgiving entertainment.

Mandabi’s playful grammar and arresting camerawork are as exciting and politically charged as anything that emerged from the contemporaneous Nouvelle Vague.

Celeste Cescutti leads a parochial cast that is largely unprofessional, with a fierce performance that bosses and grounds the film’s magic realist themes.

Just Mercy is commendably restrained in its courtroom scenes – there is none of the contempt-baiting wailing and gnashing of teeth that too often characterises legal procedurals.

Gleeson and Farrell play off one another in a perfect complement — sulky gorilla opposite enthusiastic puppy — that, as awards season kicks up a gear, has been entertaining premiere audiences on both red carpets and inside the auditorium.

Those who do stick with Killers of the Flower Moon – and you all should – when it opens later in the year will, however, be rewarded with the most ingenious of closing codas. There are issues here, but the great man has still got it.