This lean Danish drama is not wholly original – David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom is an obvious comparison – but it’s a tense, suspenseful piece of storytelling and a showcase for a treacherously mercurial performance from Knudsen as the fearsome matriarch.

It’s about overcoming trauma; it confronts and interrogates the role of some African peoples – the Dahomey included – in the enslavement of others. It’s also a thunderously cinematic good time: see it on the biggest screen you can find.

Lunana’s appeal is hard to miss: though rather naive in its messaging and unashamedly sentimental, the film is so pure of spirit and so open-hearted, you want to breathe it in, to fill your lungs with it.

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]

This sublimely orchestrated marvel takes fantasy film-making to a new level, looking back to the dramatic choreography of silent cinema and forward to the colourful ecstasies of Ken Russell.

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.

Goth is riotously entertaining throughout, but two specific scenes, in both of which the camera rests solely on her face for an extended shot, capture the full force of her unnerving talent.

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

This first film version, a milestone work in every sense, helped, through its fast, wise-cracking dialogue and rapid editing, to change the sight and sound of the new talkies. Adolph Menjou as the suave, double-crossing editor Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien as his star reporter head a great cast. [17 Dec 2006, p.8]

It’s small wonder that she effectively torpedoed the stardom she never much wanted anyway.

The Tarnished Angels is a polished psychological melodrama, meticulous in its subtle observation, but only the planes involved in the dangerous flying scenes are strictly of the 1930s.

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.

What’s interesting and unexpected is the film’s subtle acknowledgement of culturally specific generational trauma and displacement.

There are three sides to every story in Ekwa Msangi’s vivid and carefully observed feature debut, and so she cleverly splits the film into thirds, replaying the action but changing the vantage point with each chapter.

While the film defies neat genre classification, it has elements of physical horror – like a mating between the mind of David Cronenberg and something that crawled out of a compost heap.

Ali & Ava is a vibrant work that uses the transcendent power of song to turn a streetwise tale into a diegetic musical, with genuinely surprising results.

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

Tyrone Power is outstanding in the most demanding role of his career as a con man who emerges from the fairground world to exploit the credulous rich as a mind-reader and descends to depths he's never dreamed of as a pre-avian flu carnival 'geek', biting off the heads of live chickens in exchange for alcohol. [04 Dec 2005, p.14]

A collision is inevitable, but even so, the film’s climax is unexpectedly devastating.

There are episodes of muscular, tautly directed action but the overall tone is brooding melancholy, all of it accompanied by a fretful, moaning wind and an eerie score.

Rafeea, a non-professional actor and Syrian refugee, is the film’s secret weapon. At times, the tragedy unfolding on screen feels borderline unwatchable, but his strange, fascinating, eerily adult face offers a litany of minute expressions. There is a wisdom, a soulfulness, and an icy, angry candour that feels lived rather than performed.

Conventional, highly efficient patriotic war drama, made during the Korean War but set in the Pacific during the Second World War. John Wayne as a martinet US Marine Crops squadron leader is confronted by Robert Ryan as a compassionate second-in-command, and the flying sequences are as outstanding as one might expect from a movie produced by ace aviator Howard Hughes. [08 Dec 2002, p.8]

Stokes is a fascinating, elusive protagonist – she was a recluse who enjoyed daily martinis and felt a kinship with Steve Jobs. Yet Wolf treats her archive with reverence, rather than writing her off as an eccentric.

Throughout, there’s an intriguing interplay between the performers’ real and fictional personae that lends emotional weight to the “stuff and nonsense” of their act.

There’s just enough magic and mystery to tease out a supernatural reading of the film, though Petzold encourages viewers to find pleasure in puzzling out his femme fatale for themselves.

It’s directed with verve and acted with gusto.

The interview subjects are fascinating throughout, but jewellery designer and author Aja Raden is a particular gift: funny, insightful, dripping with sarcasm and oversized earrings.