This crystalline tale of memory, love and brain surgery from writer-director Lili Horvát (who made 2015’s The Wednesday Child) is a treat – sinewy, seductive and beautifully strange.

What the film-maker has built for us here is the cinematic equivalent of an Anderson shelter: basic, sturdy and unfussy. It’s there if we need it and have nowhere else to go.

It’s a collection of grimly satirical snapshots, fitting together like the misshapen pieces of a Chinese puzzle ball to create a dyspeptic, dystopian portrait of our past, present and future.

It’s unsavoury viewing – flies on the wall are rarely attracted by the sweet smell of roses after all – but it’s queasily fascinating nonetheless.

There’s a sense of Stranger Things camaraderie among Billy and his foster siblings, who are actually fun to spend time with, and the film’s message of found family is a sweet one. Still, its overblown finale overstays its welcome, teeing up the team as mainstays in the inevitable sequel.

See The Room Next Door for its stunning mid-century architecture, chic interior design, and for Swinton’s enviable euthanasia wardrobe. But don’t expect to feel much of anything, unless you have an unhealthy passion for colour-blocked chunky knitwear.

Of the two main characters, Clara provides the tonal touchstone for the film. Like her, the picture spins off into moments of unpredictable fantasy – musical numbers inspired by television variety shows. Music – peppy Italian pop, schmaltzy ballads – is inventively employed throughout, but the use of colour and costume is particularly evocative.

This gripping thriller, an early film noir in colour, features the Niagara Falls thundering grandly in the background and Marilyn Monroe wiggling sexily in the foreground as a treacherous wife whose scheme to murder her middle-aged husband (Joseph Cotten) goes fatally wrong. [27 Sep 2009, p.29]

Interviewees tie themselves in knots of gushing superlatives, but the real insights come from the man himself.

This is subdued storytelling that, while it drags a little in its pacing, asks tough questions about society’s relationship with elderly people.

It isn’t breaking new ground, but the feature debut from TV director Drew Hancock is pulpy, bloody fun.

Chalamet’s Dylan sucks so fervently on his cigarettes it’s as though he’s breathing in the genius of the musical heroes who came before him. But while he radiates insouciant charisma and channels the once-in-a-lifetime talent, he reveals next to nothing about Dylan as a person. This is not necessarily a failure in Chalamet’s acting. It’s a deliberate choice – the film is called A Complete Unknown, after all, and it’s a manifesto as much as a title.

Directed with wit, subtlety and great emotional honesty by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (the co-directors of 2012’s brilliantly life-affirming Good Vibrations), it’s a singular story with universal appeal – striking a very personal chord with some viewers while finding common ground with the widest possible audience.

While the actual plot is a little thin, this is a thrillingly evocative piece of film-making: it’s shot in colour rather than the black and white of Lyon’s photographs but there’s a weary, beer-stained grit to it all, like leathers that have wiped out across asphalt a few too many times.

Good in parts, mainly due to the excellence of Vivien Merchant, Jane Asher, Julia Foster, Shirley Anne Field and Shelley Winters as his various conquests and, in a brief but memorable role, Denholm Elliott as a sad abortionist. [28 Mar 2010, p.57]

Long, well-mounted early Christian epic based on the novel by 1905 Nobel prize-winning Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz about eager Christian martyrs and hungry lions in ancient Rome. [03 Aug 2014, p.45]

Mini-chapters focus on characters in turn, each offering a new perspective on the unfolding drama; choral and chamber music is an unexpected but effective punctuation in the storytelling, but most powerful is sound design that understands the gravity of moments of weighted silence.

The film’s messaging on female empowerment and living authentically might border on the trite. The means of delivering that message, however, does at least feel genuinely fresh and new.

It’s a visceral, breathless rampage, and while it’s a little rough around the edges at times, the picture’s brawling energy makes it an exhilarating ride.

Documentaries should be more than a vehicle for information. Here, the message is hard to argue with, but the medium – an excess of music video-style cutting, contemporary pop culture montages and literal music cues – does the material no favours.

The film’s abrupt tonal shifts are jarring.

It may not be as significant to the Marvel canon as, say, Black Panther but the skittish wit and playfulness wins us over.

As the enigmatic, tarot-inspired title suggests, questions remain, but Lentzou leaves us with the sense that this long-stalled relationship can finally move forward.

What we get is closer to early Vegas Elvis – a little bloated and befuddled, and not as light on his feet as he needs to be.

It all adds up to a very modern drama about age-old anxieties: the fear of ageing and death; the desire for intimacy and reassurance; the allure of artifice and deceit.

Pretentious, highly entertaining melodrama about the international movie business, giving Ava Gardner an iconic role as a wayward actress who takes a dangerous step too far when she marries an impotent Italian aristocrat (Rossano Brazzi). [01 Oct 2006, p.14]

It’s unabashed froth, as substantial as a tulle skirt. And perhaps that’s exactly what we need right now.

Despite the background noise of police brutality, gang violence and financial peril, it is the altogether more intimate elements of Brother that drive the drama.