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

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

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

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

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.

The beats ought to form a more compelling narrative than they do.

Bombshell is entertaining throughout, but it offers little more nuance than a morning spent with Fox & Friends.

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.

It is impossible to watch the picture without meditating on the way video games have changed action cinema. Similar thoughts kicked up during the very different 1917, but the loop is more dizzying here.

Against the odds, Iannucci has delivered a minor miracle. Somehow or other, he has managed to touch all familiar elements over 119 consistently delicious minutes without allowing the slightest whiff of compromise.

Harrison Jr is frazzled and electric; Russell is wounded and circumspect. The audacious drama is matched by musical cues from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score and a wildly impressive collection of tunes, running from A$AP to SZA.

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.

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 film is a genre entertainment and, like all such beasts, it honours certain conventions and allows certain compromises.

For all that emotional content, Amanda is a pleasingly unsentimental film, never more so than in its understanding of children.

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 real issue is the distracting and disturbing “digital fur technology”. Every time Cats settles into an admittedly avant-garde shape, an ear twitches or a tail flicks and you’re back thinking about how ghastly the actual cats look.

The film is merely a component part of a larger machine (the trilogy) that plugs into an even larger mechanism (the Star Wars universe). It has no more use or appeal when examined in isolation than would a sparkplug or a distributor cap.

At the heart of Pillion, a very English class of reasonableness brushes against an equally English interest in hierarchical kink. Nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but doesn’t it play terrible havoc with the knees.

The story’s underlying message has ended up more relevant than the film-makers can ever have anticipated.

This compelling, acutely observed and deeply affecting film is imbued with tenderness and humanity. [11 Mar 2000, p.77]

This is softer, more emotional and in some ways, more obvious, than Angelopoulos's other work, yet it has a memorable, moving grandeur. [11 Jun 1999, p.13]

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

To emphasise the absurdity of war, Kusturica shapes Underground as a wild, intense tragic comedy that is as black humoured as it is upsetting. [25 Oct 1996, p.13]

While The Brave mostly holds the attention and is accompanied by a stirring Iggy Pop score, it squanders its strong dramatic premise in a naive and disjointed screenplay. [14 May 1997, p.12]

Brash, noisy and colourful, Space Jam should appeal to young basketball and cartoon fans alike.

The movie loses its way, piling on pointless narrative twists and relying more and more on very contrived coincidence. [07 Apr 1995, p.13]

Bruce Beresford's film of William Boyd's first novel, A Good Man In Africa, intermittently hints at the comic absurdity with which the book reputedly abounds. However, even though Boyd himself adapted his novel for the screen, only those hints survive in this heavy handed, shapeless movie.