Garrone knows exactly where he’s leaving both his heroes and his audience: on the agonising cusp of a happily-ever-after his film makes you want to will into existence.

For all its simmering malice and buried secrets, it’s worth remembering that this is David Fincher in fun mode: unnerving, shocking and provoking for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, but mostly sickness.

Its generation-spanning story has serious power, and, in its masterful opening chapter and final sequence, brushes against greatness.

Kahn never allows his filmmaking to pull focus: at times, the camerawork could almost be documentary footage. But his craft is crisp, and the supporting cast so well picked that the arrival of each witness on screen comes with the satisfying thunk-y feel of an arrow hitting its target.

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.

Werner Herzog's classic vampire movie Nosferatu will scare the living daylights out of you.

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.

There’s enjoyment to be had watching McKellen, 86, gamely pecking away at the role, snacking on morsels in every scene. If only he’d been given a fuller feast.

It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.

The script, co-written by Del Toro and Patrick McHale, is perhaps a little slick when it comes to hustling the plot towards the next moral lesson. But the storytelling itself is unashamedly old-fashioned, and forays into the political and the macabre are all carefully tailored to younger viewers.

Le Carré’s relationship with his father is the focus of the film. This is well-worn territory, and yet it proves impossible to tire of le Carré talking about the old devil.

Denis Villeneuve's sequel to his 2021 sci-fi epic is a bold and visually astonishing piece of filmmaking.

The film can get so emotionally and spiritually punishing that it needs Elba’s industrial magnetism to keep you on side. And vile as the Commandant may be, he’s a strong showcase for the actor’s talents.

It’s warm, cosy and very Linklater: it definitely exudes more chill than urgency.

Attenborough's stately film is in every sense of the word an epic and Ben Kingsley is superb as Mahatma Ghandi, aging as he does 50 years during the three-hour film, and transforming from dapper young lawyer to loin-cloth wearing ascetic.

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.

Manning Walker’s wily command of tone and glistening sweat and DayGlo visuals do make you pine to be young again for the first half hour or so of this.

The real reason to see this is Swinton and Hiddleston’s sexy, pallid double act: two old souls in hot bodies who have long tired of this Earth, but have nowhere else to make their home.

The staging and tone are determinedly old-fashioned, and the atmosphere of romance and danger only amplified by the glorious French settings: lots of muddy byways, echoing courtyards and fine, candlelit interiors, and not a green screen in sight.

David Oyelowo has never given a better performance. He seems to penetrate into King’s soul and camps out there for two hours. He’s tremendous, of course, when electrifying his congregation at the podium, but a sense of fatigue is even more paramount.

The film may handle differently to its predecessor, but it’s clearly been tuned by the same engineers. After the pared-down drag racer, here comes the juggernaut.

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.

There's evident patience and intelligence to the filmmaking all over, as well as an engagement with genuine ideas about diplomacy, deterrence, law and leadership. However often it risks monkey-mad silliness, it's impressively un-stupid.

It relies on Binoche’s radiance, but also her immense control, to keep any kind of shape, demanding a portrait in shards which she pieces together, like an affecting mosaic.

Wright’s inkily beautiful, imaginatively structured picture - drama bleeds into newsreel and archive footage - is another excellent new film about the strange ways British landscapes (and here, seascapes) work on British minds.

The great coup Washington delivers, beyond framing his co-star’s virtuous anguish so well, is the risky, brilliant, and frequently alienating performance he gives as Troy.

With Kimi, director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp have dazzlingly updated Rear Window for the work-from-home age: their film puts a thrillingly contemporary spin on a vintage paranoia-drenched premise.

Conclave is briskly enjoyable, but once you’ve wafted the white smoke away, it leaves you with frustratingly little to chew on.