The 31-year-old Stewart – who will be instantly and justifiably awards-tipped for this – navigates this perilous terrain with total mastery, getting the voice and mannerisms just right but vamping everything up just a notch, in order to better lean into the film’s melodramatic, paranoiac and absurdist swerves.

Ozu may have made subtler films, but the clarity of his social critique here is wrenching and unassailable.

It is an extraordinary, prolonged popping-candy explosion of pleasure, sadness, anger, lust and hope.

The film is thrillingly reckless enough to make you genuinely dread what’s coming next.

Marriage Story may often resemble a tug of war between its stars, but it’s on both of their sides.

Mercifully, The Philadelphia Story then transmogrifies into one of the smartest, sassiest - and sexiest - movies ever.

A late narrative gambit made me worry that Hansen-Løve was pushing her conceit a little too far into the realm of the meta, but it pays off with thrilling clarity and elegance.

It’s perhaps Wright’s first feature to feel, in a positive way, like the work of a director for hire: every flourish and trick here isn’t in service of a singular creative vision so much as a great, rumbling excitement machine.

A romance that stays memorable precisely because it couldn't go anywhere. Celia Johnson plays the married woman who meets Trevor Howard in a train station and falls in love; David Lean directs with forceful restraint. [24 Jun 2013]

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.

The film is crammed with so much transporting spectacle and visual invention, it feels epic even at living-room size.

It’s really a radical experiment in non-fiction cinema – not seeking to enlighten or inform, but to disorientate us, practically to drown us, in a nightmare vision of the ocean’s power.

There’s a gleeful toxicity here that will launch a thousand think-pieces – Pitt’s character is capital-P problematic, absolutely by design – but the transgressive thrill is undeniable, and the artistry mesmerisingly assured.

A masterly reconstruction of a Brooklyn bank siege on August 22, 1972, built around arguably Al Pacino's finest screen performance.

This tale of a Welsh dairy farm that became an unlikely haven for rock stars was an absolute joy from start to finish.

Like any good chocolatier, King has obsessively focused on texture and flavour. And it’s those qualities – tuned to mass-market tastes, yet held in connoisseurish balance – that give his film its irresistible velvety sweetness.

All Quiet on the Western Front remains an essential piece of social history and a heart-wrenching film.

One of the finest films of the year: a shiveringly passionate period piece.

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.

A film as transporting, profound and staggering in its emotional power as anything I’ve seen in the cinema in years.

This follow-up doesn’t re-take the temperature of British society one generation on so much as vivisect its twitching remains.

Glorious.

A Different Man mulls how cinema – and art more broadly – deals with disfigurement, but has even more fun holding its audience’s toes to the coals.

Starting her film with an aphorism of William Blake’s – “The bird, a nest; the spider, a web; man, friendship” – she not only does justice to the human end of this equation, but looks out for a rare spectrum of the animal kingdom into the bargain.

This is a humane and heart-wrenchingly beautiful film from Docter; even measured alongside Pixar’s numerous great pictures, it stands out as one of the studio’s very best.

It’s the casting of Moore, though, and her willingness to denude herself at 61 – emotionally, as well as physically – that gives The Substance a startling connection with its themes. Not for 30 years has she owned a film with anything like this certitude. Watching her confront the Demi Moore in the mirror, and do it so mercilessly, is extraordinary.

It feels like summer on film – the thing radiates Factor 50 good vibes, and boasts a cast so preposterously attractive, and with such sweltering chemistry, that a couple of hours in their company may make you feel as if you’ve had a holiday fling by osmosis.

Pugh is mesmerising.