Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams is a furiously visceral force behind the camera. His knuckleduster direction goes beyond mere muscularity and takes on the daunting persuasive power of a mob enforcer; his storytelling is both thrilling and utterly terrifying.

The slow creep of the camera mirrors the incremental build in pressure; this is the kind of tension that feels like a tightening chokehold on the audience.

Both the film and its cast of charismatic, dreadlocked old-timers are loaded with an easy charm that is as heady as anything that gets smoked during the course of the recording sessions.

It’s a credit to Feldstein that the wobbliness of her Wolverhampton accent never comes between us and her character. Instead, we simply get on board with her adventures, accepting her for what she is – however odd that may sometimes sound.

[A] tender observational documentary.

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.

Set pieces . . . are thrilling and judiciously spaced. The performances Clooney draws out are even better.

This is a triumph-of-the-human-spirit story as dramatic as the most finely wrought melodrama, with flashes of vintage newsreels reminding us that it is all “real”.

Blending melancholy wistfulness with unruly energy and piercing humour, it’s a down-to-earth tale of love and death, boosted by a brilliantly believable central performance and elevated by fantastical moments of hallucinogenic horror and ecstatic joy.

The result is a technically astonishing mixture of optimistic Stalinist kitsch, agitprop and the epic Soviet style of the Twenties.

What becomes clear from the film, which vividly details the cultural backdrop as well as Goldin’s work, is that fear has never been part of Goldin’s vocabulary, either creatively or personally.

At the centre of it all is Kidman, bringing an impressive physicality to her performance that says more about Erin than words ever could. We learn so much from simply watching her walk, her gait combining an air of stroppiness with an overriding sense of being weighed down or crushed, like a packhorse hobbled by years of abuse. It’s a terrific turn that (like the rest of the movie) reminds us that awards often offer little indication of what’s really worth watching in cinemas.

The latest film from the acclaimed writer-director Pema Tseden casts a typically wry eye over the collision between modernity and tradition in 1980s Tibet.

This film understands that, irrespective of where your parents were born, or what part of the world they raised you in, if you grew up in the late 00s, you grew up primarily online.

For me, the moment where it all came together was during Blunt’s haunting rendition of The Place Where Lost Things Go, a heartbreaking lullaby that has something of the spine-tingling melancholy charm of Feed the Birds. Watching this sequence, I noticed I had started crying, and realised that I was safe – the movie’s spell was working and the magic was still here.

Like a big old glass of pub wine, it might not be particularly complex or sophisticated but, my goodness, it hits the spot.

Indecision and miscommunication, it turns out, are timeless. Sexiness less so, with Jones and Rizwan not quite able to summon the smouldering chemistry of Woodley and Turner.

What makes this particular adaptation, co-written by Bravo and Jeremy O Harris, sing is the fact that, while it winks at Twitter with a smattering of emojis, it’s the legitimacy of Zola’s voice, rather than the means of its dissemination, which is prioritised.

It’s bleak, certainly. But what makes this a distinctively Elliot film is not the relentless misfortune but the flashes of mordant humour to be found alongside Grace’s hoarded knick-knacks, and the care with which the director handles his damaged, cherished social outcasts.

Handsome, ponderous, politically toned-down treatment of Hemingway's passionately committed novel about an idealistic American (Gary Cooper) fighting with the anti-Franco loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. The casting of Cooper, Ingrid Bergman (his peasant lover) and Oscar-winning Katina Paxinou (gypsy guerrilla leader) couldn't be bettered. [25 May 2003, p.8]

There are thematic parallels with everything from The Lego Movie to The Matrix, but key to its appeal is an unabashed sweetness and goofy enthusiasm that proves irresistible.

Right now, Villeneuve is riding the sinewy worm of Herbert’s sacred text with aplomb.

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.

There’s something about the macabre sensuality and mossy, crepuscular gloom of this retelling of the vampire legend that leaves a mark on the audience. It’s not so much a viewing experience as a kind of haunting.

Superior mythic adventure yarn about the search for the Golden Fleece, nicely scripted by the late Beverly Cross (playwright and second husband of Maggie Smith), with pleasantly frightening monsters by the Hollywood-trained, London-based Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013). [13 Apr 2014, p.45]

It asks pertinent questions about loneliness and a world in which algorithms can know us better than our human partners ever will.

It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject. Audiences will be delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.

Eye-popping is one way to describe the prolific Japanese director’s 103rd film, a cheerfully pulpy Tokyo-set noir.