[Lhakpa's] resilience and sunny disposition light the film up, but it certainly shows a tough life, riven by conflicts, taking its toll.

Even those familiar with King’s 2013 follow-up of the same name, more of an absorbing dark fantasy than a horror novel, won’t be prepared for the alchemy of elements cooked up here.

Samuel Peckinpah drank four bottles of whisky a day while filming his only war movie, but clearly it did nothing to diminish the power of his last masterpiece, related from the viewpoint of a German platoon retreating from the Russian front in 1943. [05 Apr 2014, p.33]

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is both a courtroom drama for the ages and an urgent shot across the bows.

Fans of the genre will enjoy the scene in which Robinson's moll sings Moanin' Low, about a woman trapped in a relationship with a cruel man. [06 Aug 2011, p.30]

Russell, a revelation in Trey Edward Shults’s under-seen Gen-Z melodrama Waves, is career-makingly good here, while Chalamet’s tender, tousled allure and razor-edge of raw danger powerfully recall the late River Phoenix: his Lee is a hustler to the core, always calculating where his next meal is coming from, and who he’ll have to sink his teeth into in order to get it.

Carruth creates a wholly compelling world. And despite my irritation with his deliberate obscurity, my immediate desire when it ended was to stay in my seat and watch it all the way through again.

This is an energised romantic drama overflowing with humour and passion.

The film has scads of charm and only token gestures at redeeming moral value. That’s why – kind of in the Beano spirit – it’s such a delight.

Night Will Fall isn’t simply a film about the war, it documents the power of emerging technologies to reveal and publicise war crimes - something that also feels acutely relevant today.

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.

For the usually irrepressible Miike, it’s remarkably controlled, even restrained. And yet it involves 200 bodyguards being annihilated every which way, in a sustained frenzy of blistering choreographic skill that Hollywood won’t top all year.

Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed) doesn’t make images pop like the Coens, but he knows how to get a plot simmering, and he can milk a sit-down to perfection.

Subtle but assured to the end, Granik’s film is all undertow, but it irresistibly grabs you.

It’s very much the point of Athale’s screenplay that life was too short for such a grudge after the epic association these men had. By saying so, Giant hoists itself out of sports-biopic ordinariness and becomes really quite moving.

Directed with what you might call resounding competence by Theodore Melfi, Hidden Figures isn’t pushing the cinematic boat out in any new directions, but it steers its prescribed course nimbly and nicely.

For all its feints and innovations, Frozen II knows its audience inside out, and wants to ensure every last subdivision leaves feeling both seen and satisfied. That’s obviously good business. But it’s also generous, deeply charming filmmaking.

An assortment of myths are exploded in Zappa, the baggily engaging docu-portrait directed by Bill & Ted star Alex Winter.

This illustrious courtroom drama, adapted from an Agatha Christie play, is directed by Billy Wilder, who wisely stands back and allows Charles Laughton to give one of his gloriously hammy performances as a barrister hired to defend Tyrone Power on a murder charge. Marlene Dietrich is also excellent as the accused's wife.

Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its time jumps and nomadic shifts in location, its very destiny.

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.

Law is horribly good.

The film’s stark realism and bruising impact are enough in themselves, but the risk, and the real artistic payoff, is its bold sensory plunge into this Hadean inferno.

Luckily, Wilde has brought together a pair of stars whose joy in each other’s company is impossible not to relish, and their chemistry just goofing around reaches Tina-Fey-and-Amy-Poehler levels of inspired fizz.

Director Jim Sheridan’s documentary painted a fond but nuanced portrait of a flawed genius. It meandered towards the end but so did O’Toole’s mercurial career.

It’s almost certain to be the most existentially probing talking animal cartoon of the year.

No film has made me ache more for the reopening of cinemas in May than this trashily sublime, visual-effects-driven blare-a-thon, in which a king-sized gorilla and a radioactive lizard settle their differences over the smoking remains of a city or two.

It is less a true-life thriller than a kind of justice procedural – and a sharp, scouring work of moral seriousness from Greengrass.