It manages a light, improvisatory mastery, an immaculate hold on tone, and a grave yet sunlit tableau of an ending, with each one of these faces turned in collective mourning, that I’ll never forget.

Where Fassbinder crafted extraordinary tableaux of self-parodic misery, such as the drunken, prostrate Petra diving for the phone on her white shag carpet, Ozon breezes through this exercise instead with his usual snappy relish. He has plenty to say about the original’s magnificence, but perhaps not an awful lot to add.

It’s testament to the artfulness of Moore and Johnathan McClain’s screenplay that your suspicions flit constantly between all four parties, and the denouement – which takes a surprising yet just about merited turn for the macabre – still manages to surprise.

Dark Glasses is mainly just flat, but it could definitely have done without this all-round disgrace of a dog performance – quite enough to have Uggy from The Artist shielding his peepers with a front paw.

The film has an impetuous, let’s-try-it-on quality that makes it a modest pleasure.

The new film Dog is essentially an hour and three quarters of Channing Tatum rolling around with a dog – and quite frankly, for many of us, that’s enough.

Flux Gourmet plays like a gonzo skit, and is hilariously unabashed on that level, but there’s clearly a level of commentary here regarding the crazy whims of artistry, the trouble with getting funded by people whose opinions you despise, and the shrivelled incompetence of anyone paid to write about your work and consume it when it’s served.

This is a film which simply wouldn’t have worked in any medium but animation: in an hour and a half we come to know Amin intimately without actually setting eyes on him at all. It’s an ingenious way to tell a story that’s both extraordinary and commonplace: only with the teller’s anonymity tactfully preserved can the tale itself be hauled fully into the light.

Every frame is so obviously green-screened, airbrushed and otherwise climate-controlled that it unfolds without a squeak of peril – the stakes couldn’t have felt lower if an extra-life counter were sitting in the corner of the screen. As for the script, you can almost hear the words NEEDS TO BE FUNNIER written in capital letters in the margins at least once per scene.

Take one high-concept format, two big stars and lots of songs... this romcom isn’t perfect, but you can’t help rooting for the main couple.

Branagh exploits a star-packed cast to distract us in all directions. The trouble is, it sometimes feels like a dozen actors signed on, then drew lots to see who was playing whom.

A Wolf of Wall Street-like treatment of this story could have been a scream – and the details are more than bizarre, crass and damning enough to have supported it. But cheeks aside, this is flat, colourless stuff.

The film sounds actively embarrassed by what it’s trying to pitch, and reverse-engineers its sci-fi elements to fit the default disaster template Emmerich could apply in his sleep. We’re promised the Moon, but sold a lemon.

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.

The Princess tells us nothing we don’t already know, but there’s bracing value in seeing it crisply spelled out.

Some might criticise its narrow focus, but on its own terms Nothing Compares is the most potent and hard-hitting film about the travails of a woman in the pop industry since Asif Kapadia’s 2016 Oscar-winning Amy. And what makes it ultimately more heartening than that anguished documentary about Amy Winehouse, is that O’Connor offers a story of survival.

It can’t be denied that as a piece of cover-all-bases, hi-sheen, lo-thought, built-to-order corporate product, the film runs with a steady and satisfying whirr.

This chamber-horror oddity from the English actress-turned-auteur is too weird, too wonky; intermittently gross, and often gruelling.

Breaking down taboos around our attitudes to sex on screen is a laudable project, and one that the British two-hander Good Luck to You, Leo Grande gets at least half right.

Without giving in to bromides, the cha-cha, surprisingly feel-good rhythms of Nagy’s direction make this heroine's sudden sense of purpose rather exhilarating.

It’s a film that could have so easily smacked of an exercise, but its beauty feels thrillingly natural, and its considerable emotional power is honestly earned.

The film fares best when the chief negotiator, a fellow Marine vet played by the late, great Michael Kenneth Williams, steps into the fray. It’s one of his final performances, and a wary, angry one that elevates the material.

The film gets too caught up in its svelte, talky stylings to stay properly watertight as a suspense piece, and when it goes for broke in the last reel, it has too many characters – major and minor – behaving like buffoons. It definitely could have ended better.

The anger of the protesters that day was clear but in this documentary they were a variety of calm, smug and deluded. It was the police and politicians who were the angry ones.

A terrific, despair-drenched final scene is the viewer’s reward for staying the course: pitilessly cruel, spare and shivery, it’s got everything the rest of this strangely stiff and synthetic film lacks.

Not one of the quartet misses the opportunity to do some of their very best work here.

Long Promised Road doesn’t really bring us any closer to comprehending the inner workings of Brian Wilson’s extraordinary mind, but it might just remind us that there is a real suffering human being behind the musical magic.

As a giant window on all this toil, the film is full of news, insights and revelations without pushing a dogmatic thesis: it’s as open-ended and humanly interested as documentaries get.

For all the placidity of its cud-chewing subject, Cow has a thrillingly alien charge.

The killings themselves are run-of-the-mill, jump-scare assaults staged with minimal invention or flair, which only makes the film’s box of tricks look emptier: there are even quips about how we’ve seen it all before, at which I found myself duly nodding. It gets almost too meta to function.

The film has the heft of Shakespearean tragedy, but a more generous cosmic outlook. Maternal love goes a long way. [14 Mar 2015, p.10]

While it’s fully grounded as a family portrait, overlaid on it still is that type of cosmic optimism which makes Mills’s work so lovely. I’m not even sure we fully deserve it, but it would be sheer masochism to turn it down.

In place of depth, MacKay and Niewöhner invest Legat and Hartmann’s relationship with a watchable if uncomplicated friction, but it’s when the Führer himself first appears, more than half an hour into the film, that things really start to cook.

Boiling Point grips remorselessly while it’s spinning all these plates, and somehow ladles onto them a smorgasbord of great, frazzled acting from all concerned.

Rather than doing anything novel or surprising with the basic spies-gone-rogue template, The 355 just repackages it in girl-power wrapping: it’s the film equivalent of a high-fructose, corn-syrup-based fizzy drink being passed off as chic in taller, slimmer cans.

It gives you a family hanging on by a thread, and makes the careful tending of that thread feel so desperate it’s more than a little terrifying.

The distinctive charms of Wain’s aesthetic certainly come over, especially daubed across the lovely end credits, by which time this jumpy curio, with almost palpable relief, has laid itself to rest.

It shows so much blood being spilled in the name of democracy, and so many tears shed, that it’s next-to-impossible not to be fired up.

There are snatches of fun to be had early on, before the teasing gimmickry about reality and fakery expires. But the second half is just a slavish rehash of all the series’ best-known tropes. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, crossing through this looking glass, we may simply wind up less and less curious.

The film frustrates because it’s frictionless, almost completely devoid of credible conflict, and generally keen to sail through as a testament to everlasting love at its most altruistic.

It is what these films always are – source material for its own advertising campaign – but in this instance, it’s little more, which might have been a problem if said campaign hadn’t already proven such a roaring success.

So no, The King’s Man doesn’t take itself especially seriously – until it suddenly, jarringly does.

We’d give the lazy set-up a pass if sufficiently fun things started happening off the back of it.

As a debut, it’s grungy, overscaled and rarely far from cliché. But it also has guts, and there’s a vigour to the acting that pulls it through.

The effects have a pleasingly retro patina, but the action itself is drab, the jokes scarce, while the town itself is both entirely characterless and oddly deserted, giving the impression that nothing’s really at stake. It’s just what we were warned about all those years ago: something weird that don’t look good.

At a time when the corporation’s live-action output keeps doubling down on the franchise grind, here from just over the garden fence is a lesson in storytelling that feels at once elegantly classical and zingily fresh.

At a glance, A Boy Called Christmas looks delightful enough, with its snowy landscapes, cosy knitwear, and scenes of Jim Broadbent larking around in a periwig and frock coat. But beneath its Paddington-meets-Potter storybook exterior, its bloodstream runs with purest gloop.

It’s never outright bad – not unforgivably so – but comes off muted, diffuse and generally half-baked.

Stone packs a ton of information in, then lurches to a halt; while he milks Kennedy’s mistrust of the three-letter agencies, his grasp of “what really happened” is still fundamentally guesswork. Still, he does persuade us of smoking guns out there that weren’t Oswald’s, or anywhere near the book depository.

It’s a hard film to recommend, but it works on its own gutsily perturbing terms.

Encounter is bugged-out science fiction paranoia, stylish and sinewy, with an opening sequence that may have you bolting for the door, or at least the remote control.

You suspect Sorkin relishes the clash between Ball’s fundamentally fatuous show and the razor-smartness of his take on it. And it is smart. It just isn’t much else.

Don’t Look Up’s driving thesis – roughly, “look at all these morons!” – is so basic it’s only really possible to respond to it as a hit-and-miss actors’ showcase.

With Statham literally riding shotgun, Ritchie has binned any pretence at subtlety and goes back to basics with an bullet-strewn romp that kicks down the door first and asks questions later. And which is, in the end, nothing more than an excuse for its star to punch as many villains as possible.

A nicely maintained amiable tone takes the edge off the inevitable lavatorial humour, while the 14-year-old Camp, of Big Little Lies and The Christmas Chronicles, strikes up an impressively plausible emotional connection with her goofy, lolloping co-star (not Whitehall, the dog).

There’s no need for Spielberg and Kushner to tease out topicality here. Aspects of West Side Story feel as pertinent today as they must have done on its 1957 Broadway debut. But relevance is easy: timelessness is the real artistic feat. And Spielberg has magnificently pulled it off.

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.

Ridley Scott's crime drama feels like a soap opera with airs, but its star's sheer chutzpah ensures it's never less than watchably raucous.

In a world of algorithmically sorted content, Anderson’s ninth film, and his first since 2017’s Phantom Thread, is irresistibly hard to pin down: you’d have to go back around 50 years, to the likes of Hal Ashby’s Shampoo or Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, to find another that runs on a similar kind of woozy clockwork.

For all the contrivances, it’s hard to deny the Colour Room’s charms. Ceramics are cold to the touch and shatter easily – but this film is gooey and generous and sure to impart a warm glow.

This Tex-Mex drama about a retired rodeo star on a mercy mission has an intermittent dawdling charm. It’s also slack and featherbrained – and set in the late 1970s, but you can barely tell.

If Miranda’s tendency towards showmanship can leave Tick, Tick…Boom! feeling a little insistent in places, it also means the film shares its hero’s jet-propelled determination to do his own thing – whether the world happens to be braced for it or not.

Despite its ambitious goal of transposing a dystopian classic to the modern “Young Adult” genre, Voyagers is ultimately about as effective as a leaky space-suit.

It’s a pity this one isn’t a little more distinctive and sharply honed.

The film satisfies all the same, because they’ve figured out what a great stand-up routine Venom can do this time, and Hardy has settled well into being straight man to his own not-at-all-straight alien weirdo.

The sheer depth of Sassoon's personal misery feels like a brutally unfashionable thing for a contemporary film to confront, but Davies, who’s never given a fig about fashion, confronts it head on.

It’s lots of fun until you notice it doesn’t quite add up.

On all fronts, you wish that Dear Evan Hansen had nothing to do with Evan Hansen.

As an undemanding pas de deux, it’s sweet enough.

If you thought that a film about Mary Quant would be for fashion geeks only, then cast aside those preconceptions. For all the talk of mini skirts and Swinging Sixties glamour, this is the sparky tale of a woman who, from the mid 50s, led the charge of a youthquake which changed the way a whole generation behaved.

It has a certain clomping, smart-alecky entertainment value, wedded to the meta appeal of watching three A-listers juggle all the twists with ease, before walking off into the sunset with silly money. Did Netflix never twig that the real heist was on them?

The last thing you want to feel about the end of the world is that you’ve seen it all before.

This superb debut feature from Andreas Fontana puts an ingenious spin on the paranoid thriller: its main character is determined to behave as if he isn’t in one.

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.

Perhaps the hope was that Marvel’s 26th film might rattle the franchise out of its comfort zone. But the franchise is nothing but comfort zone, which renders its latest entry an instant white elephant.

The Phantom of the Open is a rousing salute to a very English strain of nincompoopery – and a wise and witty reminder that that the pleasure of doing something spectacularly badly can outstrip the satisfaction of a job well done.

When Clooney gets this cast riffing off each other in boozy hangout mode, the movie skips along surprisingly well for all its so-what-ishness.

The Last Duel, which was adapted from a non-fiction book by Eric Jager, is a knotty, stimulating drama with a piquant #MeToo edge and the heft and splendour of an old-school historical epic.

Peter Baynham, best-known for Borat and Alan Partridge, co-wrote this script, which offers just the right of blend of madcap farce and piercingly precise gags about social media.

It feels like a Blazing Saddles gag writ large – no bad thing – and the jab of Mel Brooks humour it provides feels considerably more inspired than the hackneyed split screens, freeze frames and wobbly zooms which are regularly deployed in the rest of the film for winking grindhouse cred.

The talking heads offer little but platitudes and clichés, while the endless racing footage is dry in the extreme. Here is a life not sugar-coated by cinema so much as rolled in powdered alum.

Shallowness permeates all the characterisations, giving it a bland, marshmallowy centre.

Each vignette has the subcutaneous prickle of folklore – unapologetically weird as they are, you can feel their hooks snagging on your psyche’s most deeply buried regions.

Oasis Knebworth 1996 is a film to restore your faith in the unifying power of rock and roll.

While Gyllenhaal thrusts himself into the role with energy, you can sense his awareness that his acting has to carry the whole shebang, like a chef in the kitchen doing every last job. He’s entertaining, but guilty, like The Guilty, of throwing nuance in the bin.

Sacks, humble and charming to the end, makes for such agreeable company that it’s hard to object to the hyperbole.

There’s zero latitude in the spare, naturalistic script for actorly showboating – but the performances, as captured by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s searching, empathic camera, are quietly tremendous.

The conclusion the directors reach could have come from any of the other Spears films

it’s often very funny indeed. The mood is often closer to the perkier passages of the Connery films, and the humour feels contemporary and British: the Phoebe Waller-Bridge script polish evidently yielded the desired result.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth may be the best-served by cinema, with terrific, distinctive adaptations over the years from Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, and most recently Justin Kurzel, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Coen’s is something different again – though new would be entirely the wrong word. It resonates with the ancient power of a ritual.

Time and again, the film corrals their characters into situations it lacks the emotional delicacy to get them through unscathed – not least a weirdly frenzied sex scene which begins with so much off-screen grunting and puffing I assumed it must be the set-up to a joke, and the camera was about to pan across to the pair shifting furniture.

Anyone who’s ever wondered who and what made Tony the way he was will be richly rewarded by Alan Taylor’s trip back in time.

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.

The film is ultimately little more than a trifle, but Hudson is the cherry topping: as this messy, crafty, grasping nightmare, the actress is more fun than she’s been in years.

It’s a film that creaks as reassuringly as leather.

Drag is what it is, and drag is what it does.

Any film that hands Sofia Boutella a katana can’t be dismissed as an entirely fruitless exercise. It’s the Algerian actress and dancer, rather than Cage, who proves to be Ghostland’s greatest asset. And when your damsel is evidently capable of dealing with her own distress, thank you very much, the rescue mission can’t help but feel a touch redundant.

There’s nothing at all wrong with Respect, which is colourful and pretty well played, other than an overall air of caution – and the thing about Aretha Franklin’s voice is that it really swung for the rafters.