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.