It’s extremely moving in the gentlest, most linear way, and the other performances are sterling, too.

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.

It all makes for soaringly satisfying viewing, yet the satisfaction comes from blistering performances and virtuosic screenwriting, and absolutely nothing else.

A raucous and blood-splattered social satire.

Everything about The Lighthouse lands with a crash. It’s cinema to make your head and soul ring.

What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration.

Wheatley and his collaborators have produced something that some of us thought would be impossible: an outrageously entertaining film that feels utterly rooted in the bleak era in which it was made. Lockdown project or not, it’s a milestone.

Love Lies Bleeding’s total lack of filter is its greatest strength. It’s the sort of film you instinctively want to tuck under a mattress: hot, nasty and mouth-wateringly disreputable, this is cinema with nothing to lose.

This is a masterpiece of serious cinema; long, slow and grave as the grave.

As a writer, Kaurismäki has a precious knack for jokes that work beautifully in any language.

Half-fish, half-fowl and altogether inspired, it is a dazzling mosey through the creeks and canyons of the Coenesque, whose scattershot format and by turns bizarre and macabre sense of humour belies a formal ingenuity and surgical control of tone that keeps the viewer perpetually off-guard.

Fraser’s casting is so moving in part because we can still recognise this beloved figure under the blubber, but it’s also because Fraser’s own performance doesn’t court pity. His Charlie is complex, flawed, funny and otherwise fully and radiantly human: a rounded character in more ways than one.

In its own ingenious way, One Cut of the Dead cleaves true to the most important zombie rule of all: survival has always been a team effort.

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.

The acting quartet of Jones, LaPaglia and double Davis is just immense.

If films were gestures, this one would be a perfectly timed shrug, with the smile to match.

Why are they are so relentlessly endearing and funny? Comic timing is a big part of it: every skit and pratfall is staged to split-second perfection.

Jerome Robbins’s legendary choreography needs the biggest screen it can get; when the movie’s firing on all cylinders of music, lyrics and motion (twice: “America” and “Gee, Officer Krupke”) there’s little to touch it.

[Kaufman's] film leaves your head spinning.

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.

The film thrives on unsettling images of overgrowth and rot, such as the dead flower that drops at Kerr’s touch, and the beetle that crawls obscenely out of the mouth of a cherub statue.

It is unquestionably Nyong’o’s film, and the 12 Years a Slave actress gives a nerve-flaying double performance. As Adelaide, every facial expression seems to embody an emotion in its purest, uncut form, while her evil double has a twisting, buckling physicality that comes close to avant-garde butoh dance.

This foursome’s lives intersect in consistently thrilling and surprising ways, thanks in no small part to the fundamental volatility of contemporary young urban lives.

Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far.

If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.

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.

Nothing about the sound in Sound of Metal is ordinary.

This is an often shoulder-shudderingly funny film, whose comic dialogue is dazzlingly designed and performed. But McDonagh leaves fate itself with the last, black, bone-rattling laugh.