To call the film meditative would be to undersell Kosakovskiy’s instinct for drama and tension.

Great turns don’t always amount to a great picture, and the unfortunate consequence of this no-frills directing approach is that the film-making can feel rather flat and functional – a display cabinet for the acting rather than a vital piece of storytelling.

For all its apparent structural complexities, The Father is not quite as mysterious as its creators would have us believe.

The theatrical origins of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom weigh heavy on this film, directed with a stagey air by Tony award winner George C Wolfe.

As is customary, absurdist humour, global history and abject horror sit side by side, all equally weighted and witnessed.

The film has a cold, abstract beauty.

May December also comes coloured by the lurid downlight of tabloid culture. It could be a pastiche of a psychological thriller, or a playfully misdirected daytime afternoon soap.

It’s silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.

Where Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s version comes into its own is in the moments where it dares to find its own distinct voice – nowhere more so than in placing Somewhere in the hands of Rita Moreno.

It’s a beguiling drama that contrasts the mirage-like quality of hopes against the more tangible solidity of regrets. But while there’s a melancholy magic to it all, the spell is stretched rather thinly over the long running time.

In Front of Your Face is a gentle pleasure and, as such, may not be a picture that will win new fans to the films of director Hong Sang-soo. But admirers of his distinctive style – long takes, zooms, social awkwardness, vast quantities of strong alcohol – will be beguiled by this bittersweet series of encounters.

If you’re looking for a film that explains where the Spielbergian tropes you know and love came from, then The Fabelmans is for you.

If it’s a love letter, it’s the kind tinged with the grasping anguish and stab of bitterness that comes from knowing that the object of affection is almost certainly eyeing up a new favourite.

The Gershwin songs are magnificent, and the climactic ballet a tour de force that won the great Hungarian-born cameraman John Alton an Oscar.

Frat boy humour is dressed up in an expensive, arthouse jacket.

There are many things to enjoy here, not least the force of Cage’s performance as incensed lumberjack Red (and, it must be said, his scream).

Much of it borders on the inept and the embarrassing, and that goes for the title song sung by Matt Monro, the "singing bus-driver".

One for the buffs. [17 Feb 2008, p.3]

The slow-motion breakdown of a family is tracked by a lens that initially sought out intimacy and celebration, but finds itself, as the years pass, increasingly distanced from figures caught in its time capsule of a frame.

Though the film is teed up as a kind of John Wick-style revenge bender, Cage’s star persona is soon smartly subverted.

Time and again, scenes of back-breaking struggle end with the screen fading to black, as if the film itself is simply too tired to go on or hanging its head in empathetic shame.

While the changing moods of BlacKkKlansman seemed bold and audacious, the warring elements of Da 5 Bloods appear bolted together rather than alchemically mixed.

While the Norns-of-fate narrative may contrive several reversals of fortune and sympathy, there’s little of the genuinely uncanny weirdness that made Eggers’s first two features such a treat. What madness lies herein is not of the north-northwest variety but more in keeping with the bonkers blockbuster spectacle of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

Trey Edward Shults’s bombastic third feature crashes and recedes, leaving few revelations in its wake.

The latest film from horror director Ti West (The House of the Devil), about a porn movie shoot gone wrong, is ripe with playful winks and nudges.

The result is an A-list B-movie that juggles moments of breath-taking visual splendour with much on-the-nose speechifying about sins of the fathers and eternal isolation, spiced up with some action-packed silliness that entirely undercuts its more po-faced pretensions.

Its writer-director, John Sayles, is one of my favourite American film-makers, when he is pursuing tough social and historical subjects as in Matewan, Eight Men Out and City of Hope. He's that rare being, a political director, but I don't care for Sayles's excursions into lyricism (Passion Fish, for example), and this present exercise in stage Irishry. [11 Aug 1996, p.8]

The teasing, tricky structure adds intrigue to a fairly rudimentary horror premise and the cinematography – actor Giovanni Ribisi steps behind the camera as the DOP – is suitably strident, with reds and yellows screaming from the screen.

Weighty themes are handled with a refreshing lightness of touch.

It’s a highly personal documentary: in addition to focusing on the mountains, Guzmán revisits his childhood home, now derelict, and explores his own archive footage of the 1973 coup d’état that prompted his relocation to France.

As an account of a notable moment in French legal history, it’s undeniably compelling stuff.

A crowd-pleasing, if slightly formulaic, documentary in the vein of Spellbound.

Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the film is all backdrop, a boomer nostalgia trip with little in the way of actual story.

It’s possibly the most Russian thing ever created, and it’s most certainly not a soothing viewing experience. But there’s something grimly fascinating about it nonetheless.

Ultimately, the question of what actually happened is just another red herring. The real point of the film is its heartfelt, if slightly trite, message: that it’s the wider world that needs to adapt and accept the differences of children like Minato and Yori, rather than the other way around.

While it leans a little heavily on baffling basketball strategy and court-based machinations, it’s a dynamic and unexpectedly affecting animation.

What we have instead is a succession of variously successful vignettes, only some of which hit that sweet spot between horror and humour, as we watch Arnaud’s life collapse around him.

Levine’s playful deconstruction of tortured genius is a witty and provocative send-up of tyrannical directors, diva-ish actors and over-invested voyeurs alike.

There are a lot of ideas churning around in this intriguing but scattershot picture, which veers into the surreal and macabre in its quest to explore themes of identity, authenticity and the nature of beauty. Not all of it lands successfully, particularly in the increasingly agitated and fragmented second half.

I’m not convinced that the picture carries quite the philosophical weight that it thinks it does. Still, it’s an undeniably gorgeous place to lose yourself for a while.

None of which is to say that Good Luck to You, Leo Grande isn’t admirably subversive and enjoyably whimsical fare.

The Humans struggles to escape its theatrical origins.

In Oscar Isaac’s enigmatic blackjack player “William Tell”, with his wary hooded eyes and closed book countenance, the film has a broodingly commanding central performance. It’s a pity, then, that much of its promise is squandered by sloppiness, both in the writing and elsewhere.

The film’s sometimes tiresome sense of humour is laddish in its embrace of viscera (blood, boils, vomit and live spiders all feature), but as the narrative trots (or, rather, plods) along, its men are revealed to be endearingly less so.

Gregory Peck's dignified Ahab is, like his leg, somewhat wooden, but the cast is splendid (not least Orson Welles's guest spot as Father Mapple), and Oswald Morris's experimental colour photography (based on old whaling prints) is commendable. [29 May 2005, p.79]

The film too often seems to be heading somewhere extraordinary, only to disappear into an ambitious conceptual hole that, while occasionally startling, is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

Film-maker Jamila Wignot pays particular attention to the specificity of Ailey’s black influences: the church, blues music and his southern upbringing, all of which informed his best-known work, Revelations (1960).

The element that makes this intriguing – the ghost POV shooting technique – is also a problem, undermining the suspense and distancing the audience from the vulnerable girl whose fate is in the balance.

Shinkai casts a spell in the moment, but the magic fades away.

This atmospheric debut from Costa Rican-Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén combines mud, moss and mysticism to arresting effect.

You won't easily forget Seul Contre Tous and you won't rush to see it for a second time. [21 Mar 1999, p.6]

By the Stream is a wry comedy of manners that muses, in its unassuming way, on the creative act.

As for Baker and regular co-writer Chris Bergoch, they refrain from judging their characters, observing the world from Mikey’s maniacally self-serving point of view even as comedy turns to queasiness and worse.

A long, marvellously vulgar tribute to the circus world, the penultimate movie by the septuagenarian veteran, that brought him a sentimental 'best picture' Oscar after 40 years in the business. [05 Feb 2006, p.2]

On screen, the man play-acted the qualities of courage and resilience. Off it, he came to embody them too.

The volcanically sweary dialogue doesn’t quite disguise the naivety of the feelgood trajectory, and the ending feels clunky, but this is a boisterous and disorderly charmer of a picture nonetheless.

Gibney struggles to psychologically penetrate his cold antihero.

The film runs out of momentum, finding itself ensnared in a needlessly complicated web of intrigue and administrative shenanigans.

It's performed by a non-professional cast, who all seem a little tense, and the rebellious Rita is an unsympathetic, inadequately characterised figure, though not unconvincing. [30 Dec 2001, p.12]

Feels closer in approach to his early gallery installation work than it does to his narrative film-making.

Half-witted British comedy about a dim-witted gang's attempt at a big kidnapping. But it's worth seeing for a gifted cast, headed by Terry- Thomas (the victim's rich, shifty husband), that includes George Cole, Sid James, Bernard Bresslaw and John Le Mesurier. [25 Aug 2002, p.8]

More than 70 civil and criminal charges have been lodged against the family. Marcos flaunted her wealth while her country’s living standards plummeted, and Greenfield’s portrait is damning.

Meandering but richly detailed drama.

But for all the feverish visual invention, there’s a sluggishness to the storytelling that seems at odds with the frenzied creativity of the film’s subject.

Fans will doubtless be dazzled by its meticulous imitation-of-life-in-miniature visual aesthetic, yet I swithered between whimsical amusement, mild curiosity and outright irritation.

That Ho Chi Minh City is as rotten as the old Saigon, only more cynical and decrepit, is no great revelation, and we learn little of how ordinary people live or how society is organised in Vietnam today. [24 Mar 1996, p.12]

The parallels drawn between Fabienne’s life and the stories she’s drawn to are a little on the nose. “What matters most is personality! Presence!” she declares, determined not to fade into obscurity. Deneuve’s luminous performance ensures she won’t.

This is a playfully sensuous affair that wonders what happens to slow-burn intimacy when mediated by the urgency of the online world.

The Fire Inside, which was scripted by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and directed by cinematographer turned first-time feature film-maker Rachel Morrison, understands that, with storytelling as with fighting, sometimes all you need to do is stand firm and land the punches.

As a tribute to the man and his legacy it’s fascinating stuff.

It doesn’t all work; the flashbacks are unwieldy and the pacing falters in the second half. It’s also rather coy in addressing some of the more damning elements in recent Catholic history. But there’s something disarming about a scene of papal bonding over beer and footy.

Anderson’s backdrop, a kind of steroidally enhanced Frenchness reminiscent of films such as Belleville Rendez-Vous and Amélie, is rather lovely, if ultimately as far removed from reality as is the film’s romanticised view of journalism.

The film’s actual pay off – the truth exhumed from this tainted earth – is ultimately not quite as satisfying as the picture’s elegantly constructed mood.

Kenneth Branagh’s unabashedly feelgood memoir of growing up in Belfast as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s suffers from a problem of perspective.

There’s an inherent irony in any drama that places her centre stage. Yet at a time when news itself is under fire, with journalists demeaned and attacked by despots bent on obliterating the very concept of truth, perhaps Colvin’s story is more relevant than ever.

There’s perhaps an over-reliance on voiceover by way of letters and emails, though the film’s unvarnished formal directness is a good thing, given the sensitive material.

Carmoon’s depiction of trauma, grief and mental health in crisis as a kind of putrid, repellent stench that clings to the skin, stings the eyeballs and turns the stomach makes for a queasily insalubrious viewing experience. Hoard is a film I admire, but struggle to like.

The compelling Ellis-Taylor goes some way towards tying together the disparate elements. She is a magnetic, dignified presence, persuasive in both the more melodramatic elements of the story and in the academic journey.

Even if the scattershot plotting doesn’t quite hold together, there’s a wayward energy to the picture and a barbed sense of mischief.

It’s a droll, perceptive and shamelessly sentimental look at generational tensions.

While The Duke is never quite as surprising as the case that inspired it, it nonetheless retains a much-needed astringent streak.

The cushioning effect of Ferrell’s celebrity and, judging by the closing credit list, an extensive and well-funded production team, mean that while this is a likable-enough film, it is an insulated and artificial construction.

Alexandra Shipp is a grounding presence as Larson’s girlfriend, Susan, while Garfield fizzes with energy and outsize emotion. He’s a fabulous crier and pitch-perfect as a shrill, preening narcissist who manages, against the odds, to remain resolutely likable.

The characters and plotting tend to be a little schematic, but just because the trajectories of the women’s narratives are predictable, it doesn’t follow that the story lacks power. On the contrary – this is fearless, potent storytelling.

It’s certainly informative and affecting, but the limited use of early archive footage and the emphasis on Williams’s decline and suffering make for bleak viewing.

It’s maliciously effective, up to a point: an enjoyably lurid piece of classy-trashy psychological warfare. Unfortunately, both the plot and the performances boil over in the third act, and the film loses much of its icily calculated cool.

Jordan is doing double duty here, directing as well as starring in this solidly by-numbers chapter in the ongoing Creed saga. He does a workmanlike job – the fight sequences are thrillingly visceral, but his weakness for cheesy montages and the film’s formulaic screenplay ensure that the picture was never going to take the franchise anywhere new.

For all its affable charm, there’s something slippery and disingenuous about this film.

The camerawork is unnecessarily showy, full of swirls and flourishes, which further distracts from the central story.

While the result may occasionally get bogged down by dramatic contrivance, it’s generally buoyed up by a pair of likably bickering performances from the two leads.

Poehler, herself a gifted comedian, doesn’t include her own voice in the film, though we still get a sense of her feminist perspective.

A terrific Penélope Cruz makes up for the lack of colour with her enjoyably strident turn as Ferrari’s permanently furious wife, Laura.

While the film may be flawed by some dramatic missteps, it remains buoyed by the surefootedness of Polster’s performance, which is engaging, believable, and wholly sympathetic.

It's flat, unrevealing, but powerfully sincere. [11 Apr 1999, p.6]

Denis’s usual panache with mood and imagery doesn’t mitigate that awkwardness, nor does it alter the feeling that, although both leads individually portray impassioned suffering brilliantly, there’s little chemistry between them.

What elevates this raucous romp by music video director Lawrence Lamont is the crackling energy between Palmer (Nope) and singer SZA, making her acting debut here.

The community support for the embattled shop surprises nobody, except, perhaps Tannenbaum, the ageing hippy whose love of literature is evident on every groaning shelf.

In a film defined by understatement, it’s the little details that matter.