Seligman’s command of the flow and swell of comic tension is thrillingly intuitive – she knows exactly when to let it well up, and when to pop it for maximum effect.

Smart comedy is already a rarity; smart comedy that looks this good is a once-in-a-blue-moon event.

There is also a wonderful range of archive materials apparently dug out from Sievey’s cellar, including footage of Frank’s transfixingly odd appearances on Saturday morning children’s television, skulking around behind Andy Crane on Motormouth and riffing with Andrea Arnold on No. 73.

The film’s signature move is poking around the strange psychological grey space between being kept and being caught.

The result is in every sense a partial portrait, but doesn’t remotely suffer from being so – in fact, its exhortation to viewers to fill in the gaps where possible is one of its central pleasures.

[Kaufman's] film leaves your head spinning.

To borrow the words of the award-winning man of the moment Jean DuJardin (star of The Artist): "It's a simple story – a love story. It's universal. And everyone loves a cute dog."

It’s considerably too polite to do Philip Roth justice. Only in that single tête-à-tête does it truly crackle with the cold, white heat required.

Where the film moves from compelling to revelatory is in its use of archive footage of Fox – from his films and shows, but also televised personal appearances – to reveal a join-the-dots picture of what was actually going on behind the hot-young-star facade.

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.

Man on the Run offers an intimate, funny and sometimes emotional charge through the 1970s as McCartney tried to escape the aftermath of being in the biggest band in the world by forming Wings – who would go on to become one of the biggest bands of the decade.

Thanks to one of the most indestructible poster campaigns ever designed, the words Les Misérables can’t help but call a child’s face to mind.

Hepburn's sensitive and eloquent performance makes it one of her finest films. [03 Dec 2016]

Thrilling, moving and gloriously Cruisey, Joseph Kosinski's sequel to the 1986 hit is unquestionably the best studio action film in years.

Camping out at the film’s doleful core is a very skilled Baruchel, so crestfallen and cowed as Lazaridis that to watch him is to feel the years ebbing away in virtual real time. Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

The really great thing about Airplane! is that the jokes undercut your expectations so deftly, right down to the sour air traffic controller called Stack. When it's suggested that he turns on the landing lights on the runway, he snaps back: "That's just what they're expecting us to do."

Part of the genius of Warfare’s ending is that it admits that war rarely – if ever – contains endings at all.

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

It’s a real tea-drinker’s piece, wanting you to sit down and let its hushed insights, like some earthy infusion, linger on the palate. The incentive is strong to see it again – not immediately, perhaps, but just when it’s just starting to fade on you. The second time, the flavours here can only deepen and unfurl.

There’s a bicep-flexing quality to Landes’s direction, with its bursts of colour and chaos, its conjuration of a surreal experience out of tactile reality. You tumble out of it bruised, bewildered, mesmerised.

This is a film as delicate as dripping water, with depths that are quietly waiting to be plumbed.

Allen’s ambitions with this taut, tart character study might not be stratospheric, but they’re at least moderate-to-high, and his degree of success is exciting.

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.

Hurt is brilliant as Merrick, projecting in his anguished eyes and mournful body language a humanity past the makeup that embodies so convincingly the pain of Merrick, the original elephant man, whose rare disease was exploited by the people running a Victorian freak show.

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

It wouldn’t be quite right to describe Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men as a horror film. Rather, it’s the kind of thing the victims in a horror film might watch, just after pulling it from the cellar of a derelict harbour cottage, and shortly before succumbing to some blood-curdling maritime curse.

Though the movie offers no new bombshells the filmmakers have nonetheless wrought a spare and unflinching feature that offers a fresh perspective on Knox without descending into the sensationalism that attended original coverage of the trial.

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.