This is a vital companion piece to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and it ends with a chilling coda.

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.

Each sequence of the film springs a fresh horror and a new intrigue.

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.

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

It’s a cracking, effective thriller, powered by uneasiness, and made all the more potent by the recent death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old killed in police custody after being detained for violating the Islamic Republic’s dress code for women.

A highly original, singularly beautiful film.

Inspired by a real-life Sandusky, Ohio legend, writer-director Todd Stephens crafts an impeccable odyssey that ponders love, loss, and attitudinal changes.

Elliott Crosset Hove and Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson make for compelling adversaries in a wonderful terrible contest.

As ever, Zhao Tao puts in the best performance you’ll see this year.

A bruising character study that challenges the audience to sift genuine catastrophe from psychic projection.

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.

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.

This riveting film is a sad coda to one of cinema's most fruitful partnerships. [30 Oct 1992, p.12]

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.

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

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

Simultaneously folkish and earthy, Delpero’s follow-up to the much-admired convent drama Maternal shares DNA with Small Body, Laura Samani’s equally remarkable tale of spiritual redemption.

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?

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.

A superb family entertainment. Maybe even a future classic.

The ever-reliable Dyrholm is both charismatic and curdling as the grubby matriarch. But most of the film is writ large and affectingly in Sonne’s agonised face.

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]

Working from a libretto by the cult band Sparks, cult director Leos Carax’s English-language debut is unlikely to please mayonnaise mainstream tastes. But for those seeking surprises, spectacle, and shadows, Annette is a marvel like no other.

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.

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

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

The second feature by Hungarian writer-director Horvat plays in the thin space between love, madness and consciousness. There are pleasing overlaps with Alain Resnais’s Je T’aime Je T’aime and An Affair to Remember, but Preparations is unique.