This is the same wondrous journey on which Apichatpong sends his audience: inwards and downwards, to a place where the simplest rhythms of everyday life become hallowed and mythic.

Tale of Tales dances on a razor’s edge between funny and unnerving, with sequences of shadow-spun horror rubbing up against moments of searing baroque beauty. The result is a fabulously sexy, defiantly unfashionable readymade cult item.

Girlhood carries you along with its characters, neither lionising nor demonising them, but allowing you to watch them live their lives and make their own decisions, be they rash or inspired or a terrifying mixture of the two.

Carol is gorgeous, gently groundbreaking, and might be the saddest thing you’ll ever see. More than hugely accomplished cinema, it’s an exquisite work of American art, rippling with a very specific mid-century melancholy, understanding love as the riskiest but most necessary gamble in anyone’s experience.

Allen has worked wonders in the past with superficially similar moral tales, but this one’s a sketchy rehash.

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.

Kapadia’s film is many things: a Sherlockian reconstruction of Winehouse’s arcing path across the skies of superstardom, a commemoration of her colossal talent, and a moving tribute to a brilliant, witty, vivacious young woman gone far too soon. But above all, it’s a perceptive examination of the singer’s need for love – from her friends, family, colleagues, husband and public – and the ways in which that need went unmet, or was exploited, at the times it ached in her the most.

Every frame has been composed with cerebral coolness, and the hotel and its surrounding forests are shot with a dream-like lucidity. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before, and I’m still not sure that I have even now. This is the kind of film you have to go back to and check it really happened.

Pitch Perfect 2 is a joyous harmony of bawdy humour, campus high jinks and crisp musical performances.

You emerge from this brutally unsentimental education with your chest pounding and your ears ringing – its radical empathy extends to putting us in not just the same room as its subjects, but the same helpless, despairing position. Some films are made to leave you speechless; for some experiences, there can be no words.

The world of Mad Max has always been welded together from bits of whatever was lying around, and the films’ brilliance has always been in their welding – the ingenious ways in which their scrap-metal parts were combined to create something unthinkable, hilarious or obscene, and often all three.

Yes, the film's clunky. Yes, it's dumb. But it's fashioned with such charm that it's also lovable, poignant and funny.

This story is about whether secrets can be survived, whether the knowing or not knowing is more injurious. Haigh’s very fine, classically modulated film keeps these questions alive until literally its last shot, and lets them jangle their way through you for days afterwards.

It’s a wholly respectable adaptation, though perhaps a flash or two more of wildness wouldn’t have gone amiss.

It’s the interplay between the film’s many different characters, rather than the blow-up-the-world crisis they’re trying to defuse, that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

When it finally gets going, it becomes gloweringly compelling, shored up by its strong supporting players (Paddy Considine, Vincent Cassel and Charles Dance also pop up), handsome photography and sheer, clanking momentum.

It’s not that the film is particularly loathsome, or that Blart is an overweeningly horrible character. What rankles is that he’s barely anything at all; a stereotype of a stereotype; a half-remembered punchline; a stomach with a moustache and wheels. As you watch the film, it’s already forgotten.

A flabby, directionless disappointment, which only occasionally raises the heart-rate.

The film doesn’t look like the future, or the past’s idea of the future, or anything other than a venal cash grab.

Morgen manages to stay clear of hagiography, instead compiling an exhilarating piece of film-making – one that’s fully in keeping with Cobain’s virtuosity.

John Wick has such stylistic assurance that even when it falters – the music’s a bit moronic, and the subtitles for Russian dialogue get a naff, pseudo-pulpy typeface – it mainly tends to remind you how much you’re enjoying everything else.

That strange, conflicted tone of "operatic realism" that the critic and essayist Phillip Lopate found in the films of Luchino Visconti also runs through the core of Munzi’s film: there’s an almost theatrical grandeur to the plot, which was adapted from a novel by Gioacchino Criaco, but moment-to-moment it zings with realism.

The more calculated Vaughn’s films are to appeal to his surprisingly rabid fan-base, the more they seem custom-built to repel everyone else.

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of its cast, the film just isn’t that good.

Vengeance has powered countless movies over the years, but rarely can it have been given such a thorough – and thoroughly entertaining – showcase as it gets in Wild Tales.

Winterbottom’s shapeshifting spontaneity has long seemed as much limitation as virtue, characteristic of a filmmaker unable or unwilling to commit to his own better ideas. Here, you feel him hedging around his subject, less out of sensitivity than a constitutional evasiveness, an inability to formulate a clear line of argument.

Vogt gives us a brilliantly slippery handle on the rules of this rather twisted game, but also makes it real, in that it’s coming from a place of authentic terror, anxiety and loneliness in Ingrid’s head. Intellectually exciting though his film’s gambits are, they feel like acts of tremendous imaginative empathy – lightbulbs in the dark.

Seventh Son would hardly be the first film to use "strong female characters" as a means of waving its misogyny under the radar, but it’s seldom carried off as depressingly as this.