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.

Nothing is safe and nothing is sacred in Julia Ducournau’s delirious new world. Rev up and get ready to run over everything the hotrods in Fast & Furious hold dear.

Featuring terrific female characters, endlessly funny sidekicks and a genuinely jaw-dropping score, this loose adaptation of The Snow Queen is the best film from Walt Disney Animation in close to a generation.

Beneath the zany antics and pastiche aesthetics – Ken Seng’s cinematography knows all the fly moves – the satire has plenty of bite.

Think Mean Girls mashed into Lindsay Anderson’s If ... But with more sublimated high-feminist discourse. Just perfect.

Good news for both lubbers and sea dogs. The recent cutbacks in Netflix’s animation department came too late to condemn this lavish, funny, playful adventure to the briny depths.

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

It’s good fun. The critters are cute. The landscapes are burnt orange dystopian or pretty and pink. The action sequences – some utilising the Philippines’ national martial art, arnis – are staged with aplomb. The central conceit, however, feels unwieldy.

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.

The grander schemes of those who seek to monopolise elder care add weight. Mostly though, this is just tremendous fun.

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

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.

An engagingly offbeat meditation on the human need for affection and companionship. [08 May 1998, p.13]

My Old Ass sensitively and sweetly negotiates coming-of-age themes, first love, wistful summer recollections and wise-cracking dialogue.

A compelling and hopeful insight into the turbulence leading up to the 2021 coup.

Bones and All deftly segues between teenage romance, hinterland tableaux and genuinely unsettling encounters.

Has Denis Villeneuve succeeded where others – most notably Alejandro Jodorowsky – have floundered? Given the extensive runtime, it’s impossible not to think of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s alleged assessment of the French revolution: “Too early to say.”

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, the debut feature from the writer and director Pat Boonnitipat, is a warm, witty tear-jerker improbably rooted in elder exploitation.

Perhaps Gray’s best film so far.

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

Kendrick proves herself a formidable talent on both sides of the camera. The timeline can be choppy, but this is as considered as it is chilling.

It’s a fascinating news story, but the film’s additional, if entertaining speculations remain just that.

“If you had the chance to talk to someone that died, that you love, would you take it?” asks Christi Angel in this apprehensive documentary portrait of dead-raising digital capitalism.

The tricky father-daughter pairing at the centre of Charlotte Regan’s surefooted debut feature marks Scrapper as the poppier, knockabout cousin of last year’s Aftersun. In common with Charlotte Wells’s award-winning film, this drama pitches a knowing pre-adolescent against an uncertain parent. But the tone, colours and flights of fancy make Scrapper lighter and sparkier viewing.

For all the interesting biographical details unpacked here, Harris remains a strangely elusive presence, as if he’s refusing to co-operate from beyond the grave.

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.

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.

For much of its impressive duration, Dolan’s film blurs the line between family friction, bipolar disorder and the supernatural.

A bracingly original, notably creepy film that leaves you brooding on its knotty messages.

Will & Harper, a natural Netflix entertainment, oscillates between sincere openness and painful artifice.

The film is never boring, but, once that delightful opening winds down, the action clunks where it should purr.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s translation of the late Jonathan Larson’s semi-autobiographical musical, a cult hit off-Broadway in the early 1990s, asks a lot of even the most indulgent audience.

An exciting and often powerful piece of mainstream film-making that allows its heroes to emerge as normal people who make everyday mistakes. Highly recommended.

Older than Ireland is at its most moving when addressing the universal experiences that shape all lives.

Not everyone will approve of the big swing here. But few will resist the richness and fullness of [Arnold's] characterisation.

Some of the stylistic flourishes are delightful. Others work too hard for their own good.

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.

Bloodlines, after that first-class opening section, isn’t quite so clever in its constructions as were the earlier episodes. There is more reliance on out-of-nowhere splatter than on amusingly inevitable disaster.

With its 1980s neon fonts, strangely sanitised storytelling, expositionary dialogue, wrongly aged cast and terrible wigs, The Iron Claw looks and feels like a prestreaming TV movie – and not just any old TV movie but a strangely entertaining, darkly tragic, completely gripping TV movie.

Fair Play was acquired by Netflix following a bidding war at Sundance. It’s a fitting home for Chloe Domont’s debut feature, which pivots around a star-making turn from Bridgerton’s Dynevor, with a keen line in eroticised gaslighting that will sit nicely beside three seasons of stalker soap, You. Brian McOmber’s angular score adds to the anxiety.

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

Nobody (surely) was expecting The Godfather from the director of Atomic Blonde and the writer of Hotel Artemis. Nobody (equally) could have anticipated such a dreary mess.

Michael B Jordan, who bossed the previous two rounds as Adonis Creed, shuffles behind the camera for a film that intersperses soapy sentiment with first-class acting duels.

It is hard to gripe at a movie that sends one out in such buoyant mood. Job just about achieved.

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.

Arriving as part of the recent vogue for historical lesbian romances, The World to Come is better than Ammonite and rather more carnal than the chilly Carol, if not nearly as swooning as Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, nor as fascinating as Fastvold’s own writing.

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.

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.

The set list could use a few more upbeat numbers, but the project finds a heartfelt focus in the fans, who sob, snivel and bawl their way through loud, dramatic singalongs. Trembling manicured hands hold thousands of iPhones aloft.

The directors do good work in conjuring up a remote era and teasing out still extant racial tensions. One does, however, end up yearning to hear a little more about how the legal team went about their work. A good complaint to have.

The two flawless performances, presented in the polite shades of prestige British cinema, make a winning case for the virtues of seasoned affection. An irresistible treat.

What an auspicious debut for Kline and what a fine showcase for all other parties.

A perfect late-summer diversion.

There is a lot to like here, not least Ray Winstone’s Papa Bear. The forests are Skittle-coloured. The set pieces are wild and kinetic. But it is Banderas’s star power that saves the day.

A swaggering, unapologetic appearance by Yair Netanyahu, the premier’s son and presumed successor, signals a continuation of the family’s legacy.

It works as therapy. It works as an acting showcase. But the dips and flips we demand from narrative art are missing throughout.

A subplot or twist might have elevated Andrew Kevin Walker’s script above speech bubbles, but a shadowy fight set-piece, Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score make for sleek entertainment.

Taking place in an upmarket east London restaurant on a busy night during the Christmas season, the film gives a real sense of the frantic stress that underlies such operations. The lack of cuts presses home the real-time scenario and allows no escape from the hurtling momentum.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady cemented their reputation for tender portraits of young people blossoming away from home with their earlier films The Boys of Baraka, Detropia and the Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp. With Folktales, the veteran documentary duo return to familiar thematic terrain with renewed compassion.

Among the undercooked female parts, Cruz converts a nothing wife role into fabulous distress. Even she can’t save Ferrari. Who knew a film about fast cars could be such a slog?

This is an awfully clean version of borderline anarchy. But the relationships are teased out so delightfully that few will feel it worth complaining. Even the sentimental denouement is forgivable.

This excellent debut feature from Ben Leonberg may be unique among horror films in fairly attracting the compound adjectives “deeply unsettling” and “utterly adorable”.

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

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

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.

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

This charming, beautifully made drama gets about halfway (maybe a little more, maybe 60 or 70 per cent) towards confirmation as a classic of English reserve before a stunningly uninteresting subplot concerning less charismatic characters arrives to deaden the closing scenes.

This electrifying new film from director Romain Gavras starts as it means to go on: with a riot and fireworks.

Coda is an unqualified success in its relaxed, almost matter-of-fact treatment of how deaf families move through a largely uncomprehending society.

The two lead actors are strong. The conversations around the museum amusingly tease out tensions between factions in the LGBT community. But Bros fails to satisfactorily map out its own space. Passes the time well enough. Doesn’t quite pull down the barriers.

Save for some Skittle-coloured CG and cartoon violence, the original West End director Matthew Warchus puts a filmed version of the stage show onscreen. Theatre fans will be delighted; movie fans will wonder where the wide-angle chorus lines went to.

In short, the third best Christmas film ever.

Unrequited love is seldom so much fun.

We are left with a perfectly respectable, eminently professional slice of prestige arthouse. Nobody with even modestly open-minded sensibilities will walk away in a blind fury. Few will leave in an ecstasy of transcendence.

Appearing opposite Nora-Jane Noone in a film that twists the actors round each other like competing bindweed, McGuigan could hardly have delivered a more bracing final performance. So savage is her turn that you expect water drops to hiss off her broiling skin.

Revelling in bright fabrics and seductive horizons, the director, despite all the conflicts, is here to argue for both the warmth of traditional families and the excitement of contemporary youth culture. No film other than Sirat has, this year, made such compelling use of music.

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

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

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.

Mickey 17, adapted from a novel by Edward Ashton, feels like a rickety compromise bolted together from incompatible parts.

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.

The wacky mythology is offset with gorgeous hyperreal visuals, as raindrops bounce off umbrellas and puddles. With more than a nod to real world climate change, Weathering With You clings to love in the face of rising oceans and environmental catastrophe.

Extravagant horrors and psychological torments ensue. James Vandewater’s edits and Karim Hussain’s phantasmagoric visuals add to the anxiety and chaos.

You couldn’t sincerely argue that The Outrun brims over with plot, but its rough, maritime texture is never less than diverting. It needles. It provokes.

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.

Extra Ordinary is not always subtle, but most viewers will yield to its mystic charms.

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

The Spielberg film casts a long shadow over the stage musical, which too often feels like a retread of that film interrupted by songs. The musical number as narrative speed bump is a flaw that carries over to the big screen.

The misused music and hollow visuals set the tone for a vacuous film that frequently feels like an overstyled catalogue shoot.

This remains a careering exercise in mid-ranking Yorgosia that just about justifies its many indulgences. We should remain grateful that a talent so odd remains somewhere adjacent to the mainstream.

A lively, coming-of-age fable featuring Rockwell’s family – including wife and former Fresh Prince star Karyn Parsons, daughter Lana and son Nico – Sweet Thing has been described by Tarantino as one of the most powerful new films to emerge in years. It’s certainly memorable.

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.

Nia DaCosta, young director of the fine Little Woods, is behind the camera and she shows a real gift for gruesome showboating.

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.

Honour Among Thieves could have tidied away its plot more economically, but the leisurely pacing does allow us to connect with the surprisingly fleshy characters. It is no mean feat to make something so funny from such unpromising material. It is more impressive still to end on a genuinely moving note. A welcome surprise.

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.

A welcome innovation is the foregrounding of the dead; previous iterations have focused only on the survivors. The casting of mostly unknown Argentine and Uruaguarn actors adds to the novelty, as does the film’s compelling depiction of survivors’ guilt after the “Heroes of the Andes” return to their home country.

Die My Love is uncompromising, hypnotic, brave and often indelible looking, even when the theatricality and fractured structure erode any emotional weight. The result is an impressively punishing, intermittently brilliant bad trip that may be the worst date movie ever made.