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.

Anderson and his fine cast layer all these pyrotechnics with a palpable sadness for their characters and for the country. There are few explicit arguments here about the state of the US, but one can imagine endless such arguments being projected upon it.

For a film with a challenging runtime, scratchy aesthetic and confrontational swagger, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World finds a pleasing rhythm and mines much absurd comedy. Welcome to the sixth stage of despair: hilarity.

Aftersun’s greatest achievement is to gradually reveal the imminence of a tragedy that, though never explicitly confirmed, feels inescapable by the already celebrated final shot. It is hard to think of another film that has pulled off this trick so effectively.

A film that feels as authentic as it is boisterous.

If we were previously in any doubt, Haneke is confirmed as the premiere European director of his generation.

It is a film of high emotions and quiet conversations. It is a film that embraces blended nationalities while acknowledging the pull of one’s earliest home. One leaves aware of unavoidable open-endedness but sated by a work that has achieved all its lofty ambitions.

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.

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.

Beautifully shot by Ranabir Das, a cinematographer who apparently revels in the variety of artificial light sources, those scenes welcome us into the last act with a warm, satisfying hug. It is, however, Kapadia’s generous polyphonic engagement with Mumbai that sits most memorably in the brain.

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.

The middle body of the picture, shot impeccably by Florian Hoffmeister, takes on the quality of an oblique ghost story as, struggling to prepare a performance of Mahler’s Fifth, she finds her fragile carapace creaking and cracking.

Ardent lovers may well wish for someone to look at them the way Attenborough looks at giant kelp; at another moment, he excitedly recalls forgetting to breathe during his first snorkel.

Defiant, endlessly resourceful and gripping cinema.

Sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr’s compositions are as dramatically impactful as Tilda Swinton’s performance is delicately minimalist. Her carefully calibrated movements sit beautifully within the director’s enigmatic images and hypnotic pacing.

The epic results simultaneously function as endoscopic body horror, as a portrait of overworked and underfunded medical staff and as a business study of death.

So hard and chillingly perfect is the aesthetic – Friedel and Hüller adding another carapace with their unflinching performances – that one bristles a little when it is occasionally broken.

In Mendonça Filho’s slippery moral universe, revelation offers neither catharsis nor closure, only the squeamish knowledge that some nightmares end, and others are obscured by history.

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

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.

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

It’s not the banality of evil that chills so much here as its matter-of-factness. This is really something.

All the best science fiction on artificial intelligence is really about the challenges of being human. Her is full of strong, sly jokes and intriguing speculation on future technologies. But, ultimately, it is a sad story about the difficulty of making meaningful connection with any psyche, whether organically evolved or digitally tailored to the user's needs.

It’s a ravishing spectacle. The trouble is that the unremitting gorgeousness robs the material of all its grit, of its satire, of the sense of precariousness that one experiences on the characters’ behalf, of the fear of hunger, and of the dread that any chill or fever might be a death sentence.

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.

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.

A series of indelible images coalesce into a powerful chronicle of institutional abuse and racial inequality.

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.

Poitras’s biopic of Goldin is powered along by righteous fury: an engaging portrait of both the artist and her activism.

A lovely comedy of the most serious hue.

Revisiting many of the master’s favourite themes – familial obligations, intergenerational frictions – Ozu’s 54th film delicately maintains its post-war critique.

No purer entertainment has come our way this year.

Wiseman has made films about bureaucracies, city halls and cabarets, but here the institution is pleasure itself. It’s a feast that will leave many viewers ravenous.

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

Shot in chiselled light by Lukasz Zal, who was behind the camera for the first two films in the trilogy, Fatherland also becomes, as the car moves eastwards, increasingly taken up with the ravages of grief and the responsibility of the artist. Those themes come together in a beautiful, sad epiphany that closes out a terse film with divine economy.

Bounce along as Julie might and it’s a lively, sexy, eventful two-hour adventure.

One can scarcely imagine a more enjoyably chaotic way of welcoming in the new year. What a blast.

As ever, Reichardt works in delicate movements as a storyteller. Magaro and Lee’s wonderful chemistry keeps perfectly in step with the filmmaker.

It has the precision of retooled memory. It speaks to experienced time and place.

Once you’ve hacked your way through the jungle of controversy, you will, in Abdellatif Kechiche’s already-notorious, rough-edged romance, encounter a small (though far from short) masterpiece.

Hogg has created her own universe and explored it with relentless vigour. Few final shots have so satisfactorily summed up such a magnum opus. Sod the detractors.

Sound of Falling asks a fair bit of audiences. It provides great rewards for those who oblige.

The damaged, rising community depicted in Sugarland are in no mood for apologies. They want accountability.

The cross-cutting between activism, brutish military figures and merciless degradation doesn’t always work. But the haunted faces of actors such as Jalal Altawil are hard to forget.

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.

One good reason we all have to remain upright is this clever, original, warm cinematic balm.

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]

This picture is, in part, an attempt to assuage guilt at enjoying the teen-camp slasher at its most misogynistic and transphobic. It is also, as the director would admit, an amusing send-up of where they now find themselves.

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.

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.

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

This is a wildly impressive first narrative feature, powered along by a strong cast, great chemistry, virtuoso flourishes, and fierce energy.

A highly original, singularly beautiful film.

Working halfway round the world, Campion has fashioned a startling translation of later chapters in the American creation myth.

The action is unsettling throughout. There is a pervasive sense of unspoken menace lurking just outside the frame (or somewhere in the near past or future). But it is also a celebration of uncomplicated human kindness.

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

Between Kurtz and Stigter – a Dutch journalist who authored Atlas Of An Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 – no stone is left unturned.

Watching Andreas Fontana’s wildly impressive first feature, co-written by the director and writer Mariano Llinás, is a little like being Warren Beatty in The Parallax View.

The vigorous, masterful script, written by the director his wife and frequent collaborator Ebru Ceylan, counterpoints the extended runtime. The director says he could have made the film longer; remarkably, most viewers will agree.

A knotty, rough-hewn marvel.

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.

It’s impossible to recreate the electricity of a live performance but with a musical as beloved as Hamilton, one can hear the audience swoon as Christopher Jackson’s George Washington appears, or when Daveed Diggs’s Thomas Jefferson struts onto the stage.

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

Parallel Mothers wears its heart on its beautifully styled sleeve. Even the dark excavation at the heart of the enterprise is delivered with wit, warmth and eye-popping colours. It is difficult to think of another filmmaker who could so effortlessly juggle tones and seemingly disparate elements.

It amounts to a dizzying feast of cinematic excess. But there is intellectual traction and psychological grit to the project.

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

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

An ambivalent, accusatory depiction of intercountry adoption, Return to Seoul mines South Korea’s controversial adoption history to craft a smart if maddening character study.

It’s life, both not as we know it, and yet precisely as we experience it.

Taking its cues from those ancient remains, Rosi’s deserving Special Prize winner at Venice gifts us a pristine, durable snapshot of Naples.

Joshua James Richards’s poetic cinematography – allowing in sunsets that drag us back to the America of John Ford – contributes to the queasy sense that redemption can come from landscape. Those sorts of conflicts are everywhere in a film that is quietly at war with itself throughout.

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.

With the cinematographer David Gallego, the sound designer Olivier Dandré and a superb ensemble cast, Nyoni has crafted indelible tableaux, powered by dark survivors’ humour, blistering originality and retaliatory fury.

An elegantly structured film composed of clever, delicate movements, every aspect of Georgia Oakley’s debut feature – from Izabella Curry’s editing to Kirsty Halliday’s period costuming – is as restrained as Rosy McEwen’s excellent performance.

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

Flow needs to make no specific points about human misuse of the planet. Its generalised sense of environmental dread reminds of something we all know and constantly pretend to forget.

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.

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.

At 72 minutes, Playground falls shy of feature length, yet it atones with a sickening sense of dread and pinpoint emotional accuracy. The performances that Wandel coaxes out of her young cast are remarkable and often painful to behold.

It’s a knotty, fascinating delve into the French legal system, the nature of truth and the institution of marriage.

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 main body of Across the Spider-Verse is, however, so endlessly, dizzyingly imaginative that few will lose hope at the mildly disappointing denouement. There is surely more to come, and the potential is there for endless variation. Excelsior!

It’s a haunting spectacle that will leave you reeling, even before a heartbreaking aftermath.

The hilarious histrionics similarly mask the paedophilia, gaslighting and self-justifications. Haynes cleverly stages a soap opera only to ask: you are enjoying this, but should you be?

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.

We have a new cinematic poet in Kulumbegashvili, and she doesn’t care if the stanzas rhyme. Difficult. Abrasive. Worth persevering with.

Maybe, Morgan’s Creek does not have the ironic grit of Sullivan’s Travels or the suave perfection of The Lady Eve, but, as a showcase for Sturges the comic impresario, it can hardly be bettered.

Detailing the cold shoulders offered to a young woman after she becomes pregnant in 1960s France, the film works evocative period detail in with implicit warnings against contemporary backsliding on reproductive rights. The relentless clockwork of human biology lends it an awful tension. The actors give in to no cheap options.

Based on the novel by Elena Ferrante, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s opening gambit as a writer-director is a brave charge at source material defined by flashbacks and far too many subplots.

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.

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.

There is a point to all this. As well as offering a delicious audio-visual feast, the film firmly makes the case that those who have least to blame for global warming — those living close to nature — will be the ones who ultimately suffer the most. If we have to be taught such a grim lesson then this is the way to do it.

Seydoux and Poupand bring plenty of emotional clout to their roles, even if the script straddles uncomfortably between verité and melodrama.

The film never attains the Shakespearean-sized tragedy of the Korean director’s Decision to Leave or the bludgeoning impact of OldBoy.

My Father’s Shadow, which was coproduced by Element Pictures, is not a conventional political drama. Instead it quietly marries personal and national histories, offering a deceptively sprawling portrait of Lagos, a family and the fragile, frantic ways people try to hold on against tyranny.

A small film about great matters.

It’s certainly something to see – especially Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes and Jade Healy’s production design – and plenty to mull over but both the viewer and the film-maker should have guessed from the offset that there can only be one Barry Lyndon.