The intergenerational debate underlying Graduation does throw novel wrinkles into the mix.

On this present occasion, Farhadi may hardly be reinventing himself, but his old tools serve him just fine.

The Ones Below is a creepy genre exercise by a craftsman finding his groove.

Gibney’s problem here, in a way, is his main point: the very lack of transparency about these missions, which operate in ill-defined spheres of international law, obstructs informed public discussion.

Elle forces you to critically confront every myth it indulges, every cliché it embraces and subverts.

No director working today observes family life with such delicacy and care, or is so unstintingly generous with what they find.

Staying Vertical is a script by a hot talent never quite getting round to being fully written, and instead disappearing down a series of suggestive dead ends.

Slack Bay is half as long as Quinquin, but still feels too long. Major ensemble scenes (a family banquet, a service on the beach) dawdle indulgently, as if waiting for the joke to start.

It earns respect and a cumulative awe in its intently amused vision of reality: it’s a commanding and intellectually gratifying piece of work.

Risk doesn’t burnish the Assange myth – it injects you into the bloodstream of the Assange story.

Though there isn’t a single word of dialogue in the film’s 80-minute running time, the big questions it asks, about ambition, acceptance and the beauty of companionship, ring loud in every heart-melting frame.

How Jarmusch takes this match-stick house of nothings and fills it with such calm and wisdom is a mystery with only one real answer: he’s an artist.

Both the festival and filmmakers might have been better off waiting another week, until the screens were empty and delegates had all gone home, before unveiling this thing, perhaps to a slightly less derisory audience of seagulls.

While it too often sands the complications off what you sense should feel like an uncomfortably splintery issue, in its best moments, it’s a quietly fearsome piece of drama.

It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment at which The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s deviously kinky period thriller, shifts from being a lascivious slice of art-house delirium to a gruelling, dislikable contraption which meretriciously sells out its source material. But that’s what happens.

Braga has been presented with an uncommonly dense and multi-faceted role here, and she plunges into it with a kind of glossy-maned, leonine majesty, investing the character with a hard-won dignity that often has you stifling a cheer, but also exploring her flaws in gripping fashion.

The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family.

It has a straight-down-the-highway momentum, interesting stakes, and more textured character work than you can shake a stick at.

The film depends on a performance from Stewart in which she’s virtually never off-screen or less than riveting.

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.

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.

When the film reaches its logical end point, Refn just keeps pushing, and eventually lands on a sequence so jaw-dropping...that all you can do is howl or cheer.

It’s only in the final stages of assembly that you start to realise some bits are missing.

The film’s sweetness and bitterness are held so perfectly in balance, and realised with such sinew-stiffening intensity, that watching it feels like a three-hour sports massage for your heart and soul.

It’s one of his least crazy films in narrative terms, but you couldn’t call it subdued, because the colours and textures he’s coaxed from a new director of photography, Jean-Claude Larrieu, are even more intoxicating than ever – it’s like an unexpectedly dry martini in a dazzling Z-stem glass.

Think of The Nice Guys as candy noir: all the key ingredients from mysteries such as Chinatown and The Long Goodbye poured into a tall glass, then topped up with sugar syrup, a spritz of club soda, a sprig of mint and an ironic paper parasol.

It’s a weighty technical accomplishment – the extraordinary detailed motion-capture technology alone, which stretches Rylance’s human performance to giant-sized proportions, is river-straddling bounds beyond anything you’ve seen before.

The characters often come across as immature dolts, but the film’s humane enough to recognise that’s all part of being 18.