As an indictment of the industry, this is strong stuff.

The film has a cumulative power that sneaks up on you even as you think you’re keeping track of it, and a twilit afterglow that hasn’t faded yet.

Dora and the Lost City of Gold has contraptions to spare – falling platforms, lava pits, a water slide that pays homage to The Goonies – but its storytelling is commendably lean and faff-free. In the depths of summer break boredom, it’s a treasure horde of fun.

This is the same wondrous journey on which Apichatpong sends his audience: inwards and downwards, to a place where the simplest rhythms of everyday life become hallowed and mythic.

The believability of this fractured family is clinched by Machoian’s casting.

Precisely because it’s less emotionally coercive than Kore-eda’s last couple of pictures, it’s even more moving: rather than lunging full-bore for the solar plexus, the truths it’s telling creep up on you.

It’s tense, absurd, desperate and daft, all at once: seldom have so many contradictory tones been so gainfully employed.

Christine, which asks a top-notch Rebecca Hall to play out the last days of Chubbuck’s life, dares us to hope that it’s somehow about a different Christine Chubbuck – one who made it out the other side of her own tragedy.

The premise sounds morbid but the execution couldn’t be sunnier: think Snoopy does RoboCop.

Its loopy verve is reassuringly human.

It’s all thumpingly corny, but in the way good family films often are.

Could this be the late-emerging hit movie of summer 2013? No chance, although if this was August 1987, a time when we allowed action films to be smart on their own dumb terms, it might have cleaned up.

With the magnificent Elba to anchor it, the film gradually achieves a sort of grandeur, in the manner of the hero it depicts.

Cinematogapher Dean Semler gets amazing colours as the sun sets, and there’s a bravely avant-garde debut score from Kiwi composer Graeme Revell, pumping up the pulse with sinister breathing sounds. The plot even thrives on a tacit cultural tension between the Australian stars and the arrogant interloper.

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

Needless to say, Armstrong’s script is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the zingers, and you could spend an enjoyable evening in the pub debating your favourite gags, but it would all amount to nothing without Mountainhead’s unsparing psychological insight.

It’s a hysterical screwball fantasia that openly steals from Lubitsch, Hawks, Capra and Sturges and wants to be caught with its fingers in the till. The result is a highly-sexed Jenga-pile of silliness, to which Bogdanovich can’t resist adding block after teetering block.

As a statement, Benedetta won’t win any awards for coherence, but there’s just Too Much Verhoeven going on here for sensation hunters ever to feel short-changed.

Vogt gives us a brilliantly slippery handle on the rules of this rather twisted game, but also makes it real, in that it’s coming from a place of authentic terror, anxiety and loneliness in Ingrid’s head. Intellectually exciting though his film’s gambits are, they feel like acts of tremendous imaginative empathy – lightbulbs in the dark.

We’re stuck with Key, a stand-up virtuoso who is thankfully amazing playing a windbag who can’t read the room – a ludicrous ruiner of sunsets, or any other vaguely peaceful moment.

Via breezy metaphysical farce, Palm Springs identifies this very recognisable strain of millennial malaise, before skewering it with merciless accuracy.

Time has been kind to Lindsay-Hogg’s film. I felt like I was viewing the period through a fresh perspective, perhaps simply because his editing style and choices (made contemporaneously, without benefit of hindsight or a deeply nostalgic agenda) felt quite radically different to Jackson’s. [2024 Restored Version]

Even at practically Kubrickian length, though, the lockstep slaughter barely gives you pause for breath. It’s a barrage, and a blast.

Nodding in that direction without going for broke, the film becomes an open-ended saga about rejecting family to pursue your own independent path, and keeps us wondering just how much scorched earth – or flesh, for that matter – Thelma intends to leave behind.

This is a heartbreaking story – how could it not be? But Frears’ film breaks your heart and then repairs it.

In a classic Brit-com flanking manoeuvre, the film tries to simultaneously reduce the viewer to tears while inviting us to bask in the fuzzy glow of our friends and neighbours’s innate decency. Luckily it succeeds, thanks in no small part to the commitment shown by Horgan and Scott Thomas.

This agreeable film pushes past the stereotype of Blunt as the second coming of Chris de Burgh and delivers an affecting portrait of a posh pop star who has endured a lifetime of vitriol.

Everything’s told in shards, and Amalric does very well to create a sense of emotional continuum amid all the procedural detail. His own performance is fantastic, jittery and dishevelled.

Poitras sets the saga on a low simmer, while the Social Network-like score throbs away.

Grand, propulsive.

It’s a film which understands the pleasure of seeing familiar roads driven with consummate expertise. The F does stand for formula, after all.

Booth is simply outstanding, weighing up with deep shading the oppressive circumstances that have made Evelyn both torturer and captive, nemesis and potential lifeline.

Heidi Thomas’s screenplay, cannily expanding a little on Bennett’s glisteningly witty original script, shows its hand with tactical finesse.

It’s a wholly respectable adaptation, though perhaps a flash or two more of wildness wouldn’t have gone amiss.

A summer blockbuster that’s not just thrilling, but that orchestrates its thrills with such rare diligence, you want to yelp with glee.

Baumbach packs his film with the wit and vigour of a polished one-act play, right down to a climax which wants us to notice how much juggling he’s doing with his ideas.

As a psychothriller, it gives itself one simple assignment – to set your heart rate pounding through the roof. And on this level, with a lurid voltage that might require health warnings, it nastily delivers.

Laugh for laugh, it may well be a series peak. I bow down to the perfection of one immaculately organised prank in a furniture shop, especially when innocent bystanders weigh in with their “He went all up in the ceiling!” comments.

I was surprised to find how emptying out a man in this fashion triggered genuine emotion by the end.

Very dark and very British, with strong performances all round. [28 Aug 2010, p.30]

[Lhakpa's] resilience and sunny disposition light the film up, but it certainly shows a tough life, riven by conflicts, taking its toll.

Even those familiar with King’s 2013 follow-up of the same name, more of an absorbing dark fantasy than a horror novel, won’t be prepared for the alchemy of elements cooked up here.

Samuel Peckinpah drank four bottles of whisky a day while filming his only war movie, but clearly it did nothing to diminish the power of his last masterpiece, related from the viewpoint of a German platoon retreating from the Russian front in 1943. [05 Apr 2014, p.33]

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is both a courtroom drama for the ages and an urgent shot across the bows.

Fans of the genre will enjoy the scene in which Robinson's moll sings Moanin' Low, about a woman trapped in a relationship with a cruel man. [06 Aug 2011, p.30]

Russell, a revelation in Trey Edward Shults’s under-seen Gen-Z melodrama Waves, is career-makingly good here, while Chalamet’s tender, tousled allure and razor-edge of raw danger powerfully recall the late River Phoenix: his Lee is a hustler to the core, always calculating where his next meal is coming from, and who he’ll have to sink his teeth into in order to get it.

Carruth creates a wholly compelling world. And despite my irritation with his deliberate obscurity, my immediate desire when it ended was to stay in my seat and watch it all the way through again.

This is an energised romantic drama overflowing with humour and passion.

The film has scads of charm and only token gestures at redeeming moral value. That’s why – kind of in the Beano spirit – it’s such a delight.

Night Will Fall isn’t simply a film about the war, it documents the power of emerging technologies to reveal and publicise war crimes - something that also feels acutely relevant today.

Dupieux is clearly aware there’s no real dramatic mileage in Mandibles’ absurd premise, but it’s the opposite of a problem: Mandibles becomes funnier the longer it wanders around aimlessly, kicking at rocks.

For the usually irrepressible Miike, it’s remarkably controlled, even restrained. And yet it involves 200 bodyguards being annihilated every which way, in a sustained frenzy of blistering choreographic skill that Hollywood won’t top all year.

Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed) doesn’t make images pop like the Coens, but he knows how to get a plot simmering, and he can milk a sit-down to perfection.

Subtle but assured to the end, Granik’s film is all undertow, but it irresistibly grabs you.

It’s very much the point of Athale’s screenplay that life was too short for such a grudge after the epic association these men had. By saying so, Giant hoists itself out of sports-biopic ordinariness and becomes really quite moving.

Directed with what you might call resounding competence by Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures isn’t pushing the cinematic boat out in any new directions, but it steers its prescribed course nimbly and nicely.

For all its feints and innovations, Frozen II knows its audience inside out, and wants to ensure every last subdivision leaves feeling both seen and satisfied. That’s obviously good business. But it’s also generous, deeply charming filmmaking.

An assortment of myths are exploded in Zappa, the baggily engaging docu-portrait directed by Bill & Ted star Alex Winter.

This illustrious courtroom drama, adapted from an Agatha Christie play, is directed by Billy Wilder, who wisely stands back and allows Charles Laughton to give one of his gloriously hammy performances as a barrister hired to defend Tyrone Power on a murder charge. Marlene Dietrich is also excellent as the accused's wife.

Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its time jumps and nomadic shifts in location, its very destiny.

True to its title, this film is about a nest, every twig that was used to build it, and what flying out of it might mean and cost, to parents and child alike. The detail is in those twigs, and if Gerwig is capable of all this in her first solo feature, who knows what feats of woodwork she'll craft for us next.

Law is horribly good.

The film’s stark realism and bruising impact are enough in themselves, but the risk, and the real artistic payoff, is its bold sensory plunge into this Hadean inferno.

Luckily, Wilde has brought together a pair of stars whose joy in each other’s company is impossible not to relish, and their chemistry just goofing around reaches Tina-Fey-and-Amy-Poehler levels of inspired fizz.

Director Jim Sheridan’s documentary painted a fond but nuanced portrait of a flawed genius. It meandered towards the end but so did O’Toole’s mercurial career.

It’s almost certain to be the most existentially probing talking animal cartoon of the year.

No film has made me ache more for the reopening of cinemas in May than this trashily sublime, visual-effects-driven blare-a-thon, in which a king-sized gorilla and a radioactive lizard settle their differences over the smoking remains of a city or two.

It is less a true-life thriller than a kind of justice procedural – and a sharp, scouring work of moral seriousness from Greengrass.

Its control of tone can be a little uncertain, particularly during the ambitious epilogue – and I wish it had allowed itself a little more freakiness in its most savage moments. But at its best, it could be Bergerac reimagined by Nicolas Roeg, with its tangled character psychologies and great shudders of dread that seem to ring through the soil underfoot.

Through all of it, Vega – a singer and performance artist whose advice Lelio initially sought in devising his story – makes an indelible impression, absorbing each sling and arrow with a fatigued air of having suffered worse, and hoping for better. She and her film make a powerful case for deserving it.

It is a confection in every sense, but plump with natural sweetness.

This isn’t just good writing, it’s humane and honourable.

Its icy conviction and unblinking Bressonian rigour generate their own particular, intoxicating strain of doom-laced excitement.

A gothic horror story and revenge thriller, it’s one of the darkest Westerns going. As much a ghost story as anything else, it stars Eastwood as a gunslinging cowboy paid handsomely to protect an idyllic Californian mining town from bandits.

The film tells the story as it is, without unnecessary frills or padding. It's the essence of the TT.

Inglesby wittily repurposes such modern plot-wreckers as mobile phone tracking and instant messaging into real dramatic assets, while as a director, Pearce is a savvy stylist who knows exactly when to rein things in: imagine Jacques Audiard with a cricket conscience perched on his shoulder whose only job is to say “steady on”.

The intergenerational debate underlying Graduation does throw novel wrinkles into the mix.

This excellent film is a sequel and knows it, and wants us to know that it knows it.

Scrambling to keep up is part of the fun, but nowhere near as much fun as the parts where the film settles on a good idea for a set-piece and just gallops with it.

The canon of Alzheimer’s films doesn’t lack for performances piled up with compassion and fine-grained observation, from Iris all the way to Still Alice. But as their faded Winnebago wends its way to the coast, Ella and John show there’s room for two more.

In short, the film actually looks funny. Remember when animations always did.

Abbott, almost invariably good (we’ll forgive Kraven the Hunter), is perfect here: he gives us a guy striving too hard to be a great dad, unlike Blake’s own father, and neglecting the husband side of the equation.

Things keep barrelling along thanks to both Pugh and the plot’s punchy critique of certain recent trends in the internet’s more testosterone-raddled dark corners. With a smudgy red-lipsticked grin, Don’t Worry Darling drags them out into the blazing desert light.

The free-range majesty and fine-grained, muddy-fingernailed detail of Fastvold’s film, though, is entirely its own thing: like Ann, I was left wobbly and breathless by its grandeur and nerve.

While admitting the man’s flaws, Coogler chooses to give Oscar the benefit of the doubt, which is precisely what he didn’t get on that platform just after midnight struck.

Howard’s film is a paean to the courage and canniness of the seasoned non-professional: subterranean heroism has never looked so down-to-earth.

Levy ultimately wants to yank the heart-strings more than poke the grey matter. And as Free Guy breaks free from his programming and explores the world on its own terms, the film has lots to say about loyalty, friendship and love.

The film’s addictive patterning draws us into its cycles of obsession as hungry observers: each part dispenses only as much new information as Moll wants to give away.

Leigh Whannell’s film – one of the smartest and scariest yet to roll off the production line at horror specialists Blumhouse.

Serving as an allegory on post- and antenatal depression, Prevenge is a kaleidoscope of violence and humour, a tense tale that wickedly extracts laughs through the banality of its suburban setting.

If there’s a chink in your emotional armour, there’s simply no resisting what this film has to offer.

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

In a breezy chat, the quartet are mostly unwilling to dwell on unpleasant subjects, so Michell uses archive footage to spell out the subtext.

It looks amazing, and the complex treatment of the issues marks it out from the shoot-'em-up standards of the time. [29 Jun 2013, p.32]

Laid-back caper movie, adapted by William Goldman from a Donald Westlake novel and directed with the lightest of touches by the perennially underrated Peter Yates. There's lovely footage of early 1970s New York and Quincy Jones provides the ultra-cool soundtrack. [09 Jul 2011, p.30]

After its slight 85 minutes had passed, I wasn’t immediately sure how much of it had mattered. It was a lovely, strangely reassuring feeling.

Everything builds with implacable skill up to, but not quite including, the finale, which is played for a table-turning punchline that feels more crowd-pleasing than strictly satisfying.

Chazelle has always specialised in virtuoso endings, and his sure hand and sharp eye brings this ambitious character study smoothly into land.