Though there isn’t a single word of dialogue in the film’s 80-minute running time, the big questions it asks, about ambition, acceptance and the beauty of companionship, ring loud in every heart-melting frame.

How Jarmusch takes this match-stick house of nothings and fills it with such calm and wisdom is a mystery with only one real answer: he’s an artist.

Both the festival and filmmakers might have been better off waiting another week, until the screens were empty and delegates had all gone home, before unveiling this thing, perhaps to a slightly less derisory audience of seagulls.

While it too often sands the complications off what you sense should feel like an uncomfortably splintery issue, in its best moments, it’s a quietly fearsome piece of drama.

It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment at which The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s deviously kinky period thriller, shifts from being a lascivious slice of art-house delirium to a gruelling, dislikable contraption which meretriciously sells out its source material. But that’s what happens.

Braga has been presented with an uncommonly dense and multi-faceted role here, and she plunges into it with a kind of glossy-maned, leonine majesty, investing the character with a hard-won dignity that often has you stifling a cheer, but also exploring her flaws in gripping fashion.

The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family.

It has a straight-down-the-highway momentum, interesting stakes, and more textured character work than you can shake a stick at.

The film depends on a performance from Stewart in which she’s virtually never off-screen or less than riveting.

You could also argue that this almost intentionally exhausting film is too much of a good thing. But there’s amazingly little of it you'd want to live without.

Loving is short on grandstanding and hindsight, long on tenderness and honour, and sticks carefully to the historical record. It also features two central performances of serious delicacy and depth.

When the film reaches its logical end point, Refn just keeps pushing, and eventually lands on a sequence so jaw-dropping...that all you can do is howl or cheer.

It’s only in the final stages of assembly that you start to realise some bits are missing.

The film’s sweetness and bitterness are held so perfectly in balance, and realised with such sinew-stiffening intensity, that watching it feels like a three-hour sports massage for your heart and soul.

It’s one of his least crazy films in narrative terms, but you couldn’t call it subdued, because the colours and textures he’s coaxed from a new director of photography, Jean-Claude Larrieu, are even more intoxicating than ever – it’s like an unexpectedly dry martini in a dazzling Z-stem glass.

Think of The Nice Guys as candy noir: all the key ingredients from mysteries such as Chinatown and The Long Goodbye poured into a tall glass, then topped up with sugar syrup, a spritz of club soda, a sprig of mint and an ironic paper parasol.

It’s a weighty technical accomplishment – the extraordinary detailed motion-capture technology alone, which stretches Rylance’s human performance to giant-sized proportions, is river-straddling bounds beyond anything you’ve seen before.

The characters often come across as immature dolts, but the film’s humane enough to recognise that’s all part of being 18.

You miss the lingering after-sting of catharsis that was a regular signature of Lumet’s work, but in the heat of the moment, Money Monster’s bluster and nerve keeps you hooked.

Café Society isn’t Vonnie’s story, but it’s Stewart’s film.

Better than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but not by an awful lot, and vastly less entertaining than Marvel’s current Captain America smash, it’s also curiously more sadistic, and seemingly less bothered about large-scale human fallout, than this once-spirited series used to be. Apocalypse isn’t quite the end of the world for X-Men fans, but it might be the end of the line.

Captain America: The First Avenger is all utility. It has everything you might want from a movie of this kind — bangs, baddies, nonsensical backstories — except for the most important element of all: surprise.

As an empathetic snapshot of the current immigrant experience in France, the film is compelling right through, but it’s the central relationship that really digs its way into your soul.

Like most comedy sequels, it’s also content to dig out the same old punchbowl and dilute the dregs.

The thing actually docking this unpretentious ride is a nagging shortage of charm, because all the script’s efforts can’t drum up a buddy dynamic between Elba and Madden (both playing Yanks) that’s anything more than strictly contractual.

In a golden period for both animation and children’s filmmaking, here is a head-splitting reminder of just how bad those two things can get.

At the root of that is Civil War’s greatest strength – and the reason it makes all thought of the recent Batman v Superman debacle evaporate on contact. The Russos’ film has an unshakeable faith in these decades-old characters: they’re not wrangled into standing for anything other than who they are, with no gloss or reinterpretation or reach for epic significance required. This is the cinematic superhero showdown you’ve dreamt of since childhood, precisely because that’s everything – and all – it wants to be.

It’s a welcome surprise: sharper and funnier than its doom-laden predecessor, with a fantasy setting immersive enough to distract from the narrative’s various chips and cracks.

“Everyone is looking all the time; you just have to train yourself to look harder,” Hockney explains. This warm, affectionate, perceptive film makes looking harder look easy.

The tone is almost identical to the Horrible Histories television series, albeit very slightly fruitier, with jokes that should play just as well to intelligent children and immature adults.

Favreau’s film is a sincere and full-hearted adaptation that returns to Kipling for fresh inspiration, but also knows which elements of the animation are basically now gospel, and comes up with a respectful reconciliation of the two.

Irons’s Hardy steals this film away from its ostensible hero, in part because pulling the shutters down makes him that much harder to know.

The film’s slightly feeble and teenage ideas about what counts as transgressive quickly drain these outpourings of their capacity to shock.

All the best parts of the movie are transitions and montages, jazzing up the video-game-ish plot with mock-heroic exuberance. The summer ahead is looking madly stuffed with talking animals, but Po has jammed his bulging frame through first, and done it with style.

The film has a scrappy optimism about it that’s often very winning, but it never draws itself up to its full height.

Hawke expertly captures Baker’s angular fragility, both in his languidly crumpled face and his voice.

No major blockbuster in years has been this incoherently structured, this seemingly uninterested in telling a story with clarity and purpose.

Most of the film takes place in this vacuum-packed, Sartrean hell of other people, which Trachtenberg, his cast, writers and crew evoke with chest-tightening efficiency. Every sound and line rings with a tight, tinny echo; every room is felt out to its corners; every knick-knack drily noted.

Like the earlier Divergent films, Allegiant is studded with enticing science-fiction ideas, but it keeps such a poker-straight face while presenting them, you often can’t help but crack up.

No director working today can carry out this kind of heavyweight emotional excavation with such feather-light flicks of his trowel. That’s Hong’s gift, as counterintuitive as it is unique: he makes molehills out of mountains.

Carlyle shoots the story with a propulsive, page-turning energy that’s enjoyably at odds with the Glasgow backdrop, which is dilapidated to the point of timelessness.

Grimsby doesn’t ever wound quite as devastatingly as Borat or Brüno, but it’s a vital, lavish, venomously profane two fingers up at Benefits Street pity porn and the social division it fosters. I laughed, winced, gagged, then laughed even more.

It's an accomplished disappointment: the zealous cast, surplus of attitude and sinewy set pieces never quite compensate for the thinly sketched characters, unfocused plot and general gnawing sense of potential not being met.

The most haunting part of this riskily earnest film isn’t the unmentionable effects coup of its grand finale, but the quieter beats, all in close-up, that comprise its coda: atomised, spent, and sad.

A War does something brave and challenging in making its most sympathetic character responsible for the worst thing that happens in it.

It’s fun to see Zoolander once more. It seems unlikely that the premise could ever sustain a third film, but if this is Derek’s swan song then he leaves amid a flurry of feathers and bustle – surely all a male model could wish for.

It’s a film of few frills or flourishes, which never tries to dress up its subject or soften its blows. Yet in its rage and its pain, in the wire-brush scrub it gives to the movies’ woozily romantic notions of alcoholism, Glassland feels wholly honest and true.

The fourth-wall-smashing is fun in a Ferris Bueller kind of way, but it’s never pulled off with the devious panache of Blazing Saddles, let alone Funny Games or Hellzapoppin’. Since it's this stuff, rather than the ongoing thud-thud-thud of bad language and gore, that feels mould-breaking, it’s a pity Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s screenplay doesn’t have the courage to experiment a little more.

It’s flat-out hilarious – find me a funnier screen stab at Austen, and I’m tempted to offer your money back personally. Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it’s also Stillman on the form of his life.

Dad’s Army bleakly suggests that even the best source material in the world can only take you so far.

Hail, Caesar! keeps stumbling over its own best ideas as we stop to appreciate them – ditching momentum, preferring gaps for applause.

The apocalypse, in its effect on Cassie, mainly takes the form of a been-there, done-that checklist of Young Adult story tropes, and none of these are very scary or original, or bode very well.

A lot of the blame for this misfire must fall on novice Brazilian director Afonso Poyart, whose crackpot editing and fondness for irrelevant zooming don’t so much turn this film’s screws as loosen them unrecoverably.

Perturbing truths about old age nestle inside an outwardly sentimental shell — it’s a less cosy or placid prospect than it seems.

Lame Ferrell, through some weird freak of his talent, tends to be the best Ferrell, and despite the film’s general mediocrity in most departments – let us swish briskly over everything about the way it looks – his floundering star turn delivers the goods.

Sincerity isn’t the film’s problem; it’s more a question of mileage.

The film unquestionably dices with slightness. But you don’t leave the cinema feeling that something was missing, and Tomlin, who appears in every scene, constructs a persuasive and highly watchable character.

In emulating the two-strip Technicolor process, it creates a look that’s scratchy and primitive, but also, through the peculiar alchemy of Maddin’s craft, eerily rich and dreamlike, with the depth of an oceanic abyss.

Sisters is entertaining as far as it goes, but it only occasionally feels like it’s going far enough.

While there’s nothing here to remotely trouble young minds, there’s nothing much to stick in them either. For the most part, the film just seems to waft along, and though Charlie Brown's life is low-key by nature, the stories are mostly flimsily low-impact.

The Hateful Eight is a parlour-room epic, an entire nation in a single room, a film steeped in its own filminess but at the same time vital, riveting and real.

From the off, JJ Abrams’s film sets out to shake Star Wars from its slumber, and reconnect the series with its much-pined-for past. That it achieves this both immediately and joyously is perhaps the single greatest relief of the movie-going year.

Though it delves into the worst extremes of human ugliness, German’s film is exhilarating, moving, funny, beautiful and unshakeable – a danse macabre that whirls you round and round until the bitter end.

Since Joy is a David O. Russell film, the presence of a) Lawrence and b) bizarre, fizz-popping explosions of catharsis are to be expected. But the ringmaster of The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle seems to have mellowed a little, which means fewer outright belly laughs, but a more layered and involving emotional landscape.

I’m not sure The Revenant is quite as tough and uncompromising as it thinks it is: it's coffee-table existentialism, with psychological brush-strokes so thick they might as well have been put on with a mop. But there’s no question it’s an extraordinary, blood-summoning, sinew-stiffening ride.

Dark Horse is a shuddering, but delicately handled, exploration of that most basic human desire: to leave a mark and to forge a legacy.

Gradually, the simplicity yields an idiosyncratic charm.

There’s so much incident crammed into this tale of misfortune that there’s never quite enough time to truly tangle with the sheets and sails of its meaning.

As a film, it feels like a bunch of people pretending to be in a film. As a continuation of the show’s faintly ridiculous appeal, it has enjoyable moments.

Of course it’s lightweight, bordering on disposable.... But it’s also genuinely warm-spirited, with three lovable central performances from Gadon, Powley and Reynor

It makes you wince at the fragility of life while simultaneously welling up at the wonder of it – and that unexpected mixing of the sentimental and the existential left me feeling what can only be described as aww-struck.

Despite its well-worn ideas and themes, Gary Ross’s provocative, pulse-surgingly tense adaptation couldn’t feel fresher, or timelier.

Like the 69-year-old Stallone hoisting his frame gingerly into play, Creed takes a while to move. But by the end, it’s genuinely moving.

After the subterranean sluggishness of the last film, too thinly spun out from the first third of Suzanne Collins’s final book, Mockingjay – Part 2 returns the series to its characteristic high gear.

It radiates a candour, immediacy and tongue-scalding sex appeal that a bigger budget would have only smothered.

Robertson gives himself and his actors time to ponder the board and build convincing relationships and tensions: he’s especially deft around his younger performers, allowing them to register as distinct, often defiant personalities.

Mendes...lets the quieter moments breathe.... But Mendes is rather good at being loud, too, and his nine times Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins makes the wildly ambitious action sequences the most beautiful in Bond’s 50-year career.

His recollections are as sobering as his images, and a great many of both will embed themselves in your head.

Unusually for any film top-billed by Adam Sandler these days, there are jokes to please young and old.

From its unshowy script on down, Mississippi Grind is content to rumble along as a character piece, keeping its storytelling loose and unpredictable, like a repeat flick of the dice.

Amenábar is no stranger to psychologically vivid thrillers with ghostly overtones, but Regression feels depressingly like journeyman work.

This is a film about human flaws. It should not be missed – whatever your views on Greenpeace.

Faulkner’s book, an oblique and complex tale of the American South’s festering decline, hasn’t so much been reworked for cinema as simply dumped on the screen in handfuls, and the result is a swirling mess.

It’s a feat of pure cinematic necromancy.

Its sombre sincerity and hypnotic, treasure-box beauty make Crimson Peak feel like a film out of time – but Del Toro, his cast and his crew carry it off without a single postmodern prod or smirk. The film wears its heart on its sleeve, along with its soul and most of its intestines.

This is a handsome and mature entertainment, rich with novelistic intrigue, that asks for very little in exchange for its rewards.

It’s written, shot and acted with a hot-blooded urgency that reminds you the struggle it depicts is an ongoing one – and which shakes up this most well-behaved of genres with a surge of civil disobedience.

For all Neville's undoubted slickness and poise as a filmmaker, Under The Influence displays a fundamental lack of curiosity about the cackling enigma at its heart.

The network of links he builds, and the film’s ever-deepening empathy for those whose search can’t be satisfied, are persuasive enough to banish doubt, leaving you humbled, shocked and moved.

Zemeckis turns the event into a kind of blockbuster Cinéma Pur – an almost avant-garde game of composition, movement and perspective, exhilaratingly attuned to form and space. ("Mad Max": Fury Road did the same.) The camerawork is subtle and meticulous, the 3D head-spinningly well-applied.

Admirable cause, amateurish film.

A timely, terrifically acted moral nail-biter.

Occasionally things get a little overcrowded, particularly during a sticky final act, but Pan has a certain timeless buoyancy that keeps it bouncing back.

Egoyan, working from a script by first-time screenwriter Benjamin August, works hard to steer the premise away from crassness – and in Plummer, he’s blessed with a lead actor who can express Zev’s interior struggle with delicacy and dignified understatement.

It’s a chewy watch, heavy on the socio-political carbs, and its method can be a little exhausting. But its determination to do right by its subject – and Gitai’s own country too – is soberly compelling.

Heard, who certainly has the requisite physical allure for the part, puts in a decent enough turn as the enigmatic Six but, like her on-screen character, can seemingly do the nothing to prevent the brutal murder, either of herself, or of Amis’s bestseller.

There are gorgeous things about it, there’s one really good performance, and reminders of Davies’ transcendent style ripple through the film. But it also feels broken and cumbersome, weighed down by a number of decisions that simply don’t work.

The mood’s often as fun as it is funereal, and though the film occasionally feels clever in a way that isn’t necessarily a compliment, Sokurov’s ideas have a philosophical depth and richness that are found almost nowhere else in cinema.