Events are still unfolding, so this is a snapshot in time, but Gibney’s conscientious, revealing document proves a mine of valuable information and affecting emotional insights.

The road movie/buddy movie situations and emotions gain an intriguing perverse edge from the setting, with its genuine freaks and sideshow illusionism, as well as from Alex North's wonderfully unsettling score and Harry Stradling's dark cinematography. Better on electric, eccentric ambience than for its final rush of plotting, but such risk-taking movies are a welcome rarity.

For this slick, beautifully paced documentary, director Marc Singer was given unprecedented access to everything from police tapes to trial recordings to Dunn’s own private phone conversations, and the result is a uniquely compelling real-life legal thriller.

This is all fun all the time, a dizzying carnival of wisecracks, fisticuffs, explosions, chases and truly eye-popping effects.

The Program offers no obvious new revelations and Armstrong remains elusive – but it has an unsettling air that carries us through its more pedestrian patches.

Timoner refuses to run fully with Brand’s elevated idea of himself, preferring to offer glimpses of a vulnerability and ruthlessness behind the clownish bluster.

Nine years in the making, this impressive doc pieces together the story of the biggest global protest in history.

It’s a deeply humane film, as well as a quietly hilarious one.

You can see it coming, but it still has the delicious anticipation of the slow burn. And it all gets much worse. Director Richard Benjamin has the rare gift of knowing just where the funnybone lies, a certain taste for Keaton-esque slapstick, and a very fine comic performer in Hanks.

It’s not a happy watch – but it’s an essential one if you want better to understand the city and people around you.

This is a forceful, initially uplifting, ultimately sobering illustration of how much protest matters, how far those in power will go to stifle it, and how ugly and criminal those efforts look in hindsight.

It’s an emotionally involving rather than harrowing film, with scenes as beautiful as oil paintings.

It’s not all doom, gloom and personal disasters — the film also offers lucid insights on the links between the man and his movies.

It's a heady brew, awkwardly told, but smartly provocative.

All in all, ‘Madame Bovary’ is quite something, gradually building to a jawdropping final scene. Anyone with an interest in Chinese arthouse cinema really needs to see this.

Basically, it's the charming tale of a New Jersey shoe-salesman who fantasises about being a cowboy, and takes a group of assorted weirdos on the road with a travelling show. Not a lot to it in terms of plot, but Eastwood manages to both undermine and celebrate his character's fantasy life, while offering a few gentle swipes at contemporary America (the Stars and Stripes tent sewn together by mental hospital inmates). Fragile, fresh, and miles away from his hard-nosed cop thrillers, it's the sort of film only he would, and could, make.

Citizenfour is at its most eye-opening and essential simply as a portrait of the then 29-year-old Snowden at a point of absolute no-return in his life as he spends almost a week hiding out in Hong Kong before disappearing into an entirely new existence.

This woman has plenty of blunt wisdom to share.

This is a whale of a movie, grotesque and a little bloated but impossible to ignore. Its power and its horrors sneak up on you.

The virtue of Aquarius – the title, incidentally, alludes to the name of the block Clara lives in – is that it never feels the need to sermonise: its ethical, political and psychological insights are carefully contained within a consistently compelling narrative that feels fluid, relevant and true.

Seven sketches parodying a sex manual, in which Allen strung together "every funny idea I've ever had about sex, including several that led to my own divorce."

A Lynchian coda upends the entire film, raising several questions and resolving none. Fans of rigorous storytelling may find it to be one whimsical step too far, but others will marvel at this miraculous coup de théâtre. Jauja is a film to make you wonder.

As memorable as anything in the series (the arteries hadn't hardened yet) are modest highlights like Bond's encounter with a tarantula, Honeychile's first appearance as a nymph from the sea, the perils of Dr No's assault course of pain.

American Mary nods savvily to the ‘body horror’ of ‘Audition’ and ‘Dead Ringers’ but still possesses a truly original, deeply disturbing vision.

The action sequences are wild, the jokes relentlessly dumb-but-smart, and the sheer sense of anything-goes daftness...is glorious.

The Commune may veer towards sentimentality in the final act...but overall this is a warm, sharply characterised and absorbing melodrama.

Intelligent and screwball-funny with clever and complicated female characters.

We’re never far from Von Trier, and both Skarsgård and Gainsbourg appear to offer different versions of the author himself.

The Assassin is a beautiful, beguiling film; it's impossible not to get fully lost in its rarefied world.

The visuals are painstaking and horribly beautiful – shades of Hitchcock, Carpenter, even Spielberg – while the gore scenes are truly outrageous, knocking cheap imitators (hey, Nicolas Winding Refn, this is how it’s done) into a cocked hat.

Some people will hate Trash for being not grittily real enough, but Daldry’s point – a hope-against-hope optimistic one – is that the energy of young people can change Brazil.

Catch Me Daddy feels authentic and informed, but wears its research lightly and prefers to thrust us into the atmosphere of the moment rather than offer too much background or tie things up neatly.

Full of Anderson’s visual signatures – cameras that swerve, quick zooms, speedy montages – it’s familiar in style, refreshing in tone and one of Anderson’s very best films.

It might not be note perfect, jazz fans will probably hate it, and whole chunks might not be true. But ‘Born to Be Blue’ feels like it’s somehow getting inside Chet Baker.

Smartly cutting off before the long decline, this is an epic story, beautifully told.

The largely non-professional cast are as authentic as the craggy, unforgiving surroundings, and the way the film balances the simplicity of its central rite of passage with a broader outlook on a people caught in the shifting sands of time is a tribute to the filmmakers’ clarity of vision. A truly memorable first feature.

There’s horror here, but it never feels like a simple catalogue of degradation. This is down in large part to the performances, which are naturalistic without ever being amateurish, and the subtle, careful script, which refuses to slide either into pathos or tragedy.

The film isn’t perfect. It’s slightly too long and drifts a bit in the middle. But the final showdown left me in a cold sweat.

Though it lacks the awesome allegorical ambiguousness of the 1956 classic of sci-fi/political paranoia (here paid homage in cameo appearances by Kevin McCarthy and Don Siegel), Kaufman and screenwriter WD Richter's update and San Francisco transposition of Jack Finney's novel is a far from redundant remake.

The film’s meandering, surrealist-kissed, early scenes dance nicely in time with his urban protagonist’s disconnected, existential malaise.

There’s plenty of flesh (much of it belonging to porn doubles), although the film is rarely, if ever, what most people would call erotic or pornographic. It’s neither deeply serious nor totally insincere; hovering somewhere between the two, it creates its own mesmerising power.

The Invisible Woman is only partly a romance; it’s the tragedy of Nelly’s life that makes itself more powerfully heard.

It’s charmingly simple. But it also offers a sharp modern spin on Michael Bond’s London-set stories without being cynical.

This isn’t quite tense or funny enough to become the masterpiece some Hawks lovers claim. But it is smart, incisive and often very funny.

A languid celebration of the pleasures of the moment, which climaxes with an image of startling sexual candour.

It’s not a pretty story, but its warmth lies in its fondness – love, even – for the two boys at its heart.

Bowie’s performance is riveting, drawing on his history of mime to play a man who is almost, but not quite, one of us.

These dysfunctional, hypersensitive Japanese teens and their quest for erotic and spiritual enlightenment make for a swooning, often riotously funny melodrama charged with a refreshingly perverse undertow.

After a shaky start, Bad Neighbours blossoms, with inspired visual gags in excellent poor taste.

Its various riffs on codes, whether moral, sexual, societal or German, are plain to see rather than enigmatic or enlightening. Luckily it’s all anchored in a storming performance from Cumberbatch: you’ll be deciphering his work long after the credits roll.

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s slick and tense, and the camerawork has something of the in-the-moment, on-the-ground immediacy of the French New Wave films.

Director Jung Byung-gil (‘Confessions of Murder’) combines a familiar but fun story with slick combat action, whether it’s in dark streets, seedy clubs or underwater.

As arthouse coming-of-age films go, this is brilliant – smart and sensitive with a screw-you feminist streak. And it’s beautifully acted by two first-time actresses playing Eka and Natia, who have been friends forever.

An intimate, warm embrace of a film, it radiates joy and harmony despite playing out entirely in the shadow of a difficult father's death.

Despite the film's conspicuously minuscule budget and shaky narrative structure, it is funny. If you value enthusiasm and imagination more than glossy sophistication, you'll laugh.

This is Tavernier’s own film story so don’t expect a linear, full history of the cinema of the time. However, it’s anything but dry, as the film swoons with passion for Gallic films and filmmaking.

The absence of George and John is felt keenly, but Paul and Ringo are a pleasure to listen to as ageing raconteurs.

Shelton's film is about the nature of truth and popular myth, about the single-minded pursuit of glory, and the horrors within. It's also very funny. Jones gives a grandstand performance - this is his Patton, or even perhaps his Macbeth - as the pistol-packin', pill-poppin' Cobb, a monster who daren't look himself in the face, and refuses to apologise.

Overall this is a stupendously entertaining movie, crammed with delights.

Mostly, Zoolander 2 hits the mark with style. Just don’t expect anything too deep.

Scorsese never digs too deeply under the skin of these reprehensible playboy douchebags, and there are times where the swooping photography, smash-and-grab editing and toe-tapping soundtrack conspire to almost – almost – make us like them. But when the film’s cylinders are firing, it’s impossible not to be dragged along.

Seidelman brings a hip '80s SoHo sensibility to this emancipated screwball comedy, even if the plotting (a mistaken identity farce involving that old chestnut, amnesia brought on by a bump to the head) is square as a square peg. Madonna has never found a better fit than the role of Susan, a thrift-store free spirit - and even then Arquette gives as good as she gets with a deliciously kooky comic turn.

It's a road movie where the origin feels more interesting than the destination, but it's never less than warm and likeable.

The mixture of mutual need and mistrust in the relationship between Vince and Eddie is only one of the motors in a film that sees Scorsese's direction at its most downmarket and upbeat - never have pool tables, balls and cues looked so rich and strange - and has one of the most protean and compelling music soundtracks (Clapton, Charlie Parker, Warren Zevon, Bo Diddley) in ages.

Role Models isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, just polish it up a little. What emerges is a memorable slice of modern slapstick, with charm to spare and just a touch of soul.

As a memorable teen character, she’s almost up there with Cher from ‘Clueless’ or Ellen Page’s Juno. Watch and wince.

This painful, beautiful doc chronicles the fightback.

[A] wickedly funny black comedy, all fatalism and gallows humour, with both a beating heart and an inquiring mind lingering beneath its tough-guy bluster.

Baldwin and Toback make a snappy comic duo, and half of their talks with a line-up of luminaries focus on the art of filmmaking rather than the business.

Plenty of one-liners, and it has the best banana-skin joke in film history.

Occasionally baggy, always sincere, this is an essential document of a defining era when ‘soul’ really meant something.

What makes the film so effective is not so much the slightly sinister characterisation of the generally neurotic group, but the fact that Wise makes the house itself the central character, a beautifully designed and highly atmospheric entity which, despite the often annoyingly angled camerawork, becomes genuinely frightening.

Far from Men is a character study — a two-hander expertly acted by Mortensen and Kateb (best known for the terrific French cop show Spiral).

The fictional character Huppert creates is simply so lived-in and plausible that to insist Michele react differently to her own lived experience would be as obstinate as insisting that a person in real life cannot possibly feel the way that they say they feel. Whatever your take, it's a film that will inspire debate for decades to come.

When the film gets outdoors, it soars, and Ceylan continues to dig with acute intelligence into the dark corners of everyday human behaviour.

I’ve never liked Renée Zellweger more as a warmer and wiser Bridget Jones – but still capable of making a total prat of herself.

It’s a dour, at times glacial film that perhaps takes itself just a little too seriously, but it’s also grimly convincing and, in a remarkable final scene, shockingly effective.

This is a woman who has been through hell and come out kicking, and the result is as much a celebration of her life as it is a documentary.

Needless to say, the film’s big Brit hitters – Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier and especially Charles Laughton – all make exceptional work of Dalton Trumbo’s reflective screenplay, while Kubrick himself handles the film’s mechanics of corruption with skill.

A serious, intelligent and disturbing horror film.

Like the original, T2 Trainspotting is a winning mix of low living and high jinx, a stylized spin on real life.

As the actors move fluidly between various states, shedding one skin while assuming another, Polanski makes this subversive parlour game matter.

Politics and entertainment are never an easy mix, and Jimmy’s Hall is a familiar, slightly unsurprising coming together of the two from Loach and his writer Paul Laverty. Sometimes you can see the joins, but there’s also great warmth, charm and humour among the ideas, and the sense of time and place is especially strong.

Overall this is an absolute pleasure. There are times when Waititi’s script borders on genius.

In the end, the characters are more lasting than the story, which is a standard save-the-city-from-destruction yarn. But this crew is a riot, and their world is intriguing and even a little meaningful.

Director and co-writer Diego Quemada-Díez condenses many acute observations about life as an emigrant into a sure-footed, credible story.

The Clan shouldn’t be as enjoyable as it is. But it’s a delight to be in the hands of a storyteller who can impress you with his stylistic bravado (one sequence cuts together a nasty death with ecstatic sex) while never losing sight of the suffering at the story’s heart.

This is a provocative, intelligent movie for those with a strong emotional constitution.

The action's good, the photography excellent, the sets decent; but the real clincher is the fact that Bond is once more played by a man with the right stuff. Civilisation is safe in the hands of he who has never tasted quiche, and who, on the evidence here, at least, can perform a very passable tango.

Tale of Tales might lack magic in the immediate, flashy sense, but its strange spell is altogether seductive and special.

The use of education as a tool to enforce an ardent religious ideology upon children is what’s most distressing here (remember Malala Yousafzai?), and the filmmakers back up their investigations with testimony from key speakers in the Pakistani academic communities and a young girl who ran away from her local madrassa training programme.

Though the writer/director is working abroad and telling a linear story, it's immediately apparent - from the measured pacing, the immaculate compositions and elegant camera movements, the audacious ellipses and the inspired use of music - that this is a hallmarked Davies film. As such, it is extraordinarily moving, notably in a simple, underplayed death scene. Gena Rowlands' performance is a marvel of subtle nuances.

It might be familiar territory for Almodóvar, but only a master of his art could make it look so easy.

This is a portrait of cycles and change. But the mood of the film suggests that we should be impressed that this ever-growing, ever-changing city of ours is still chasing after new versions of the modern.

Over the course of three wild sequels, Coscarelli expanded his bizarre universe in a variety of imaginative and deliriously entertaining ways – but the original set the standard. [Remastered]

It works and then some, making for a noirish and complex emotional thriller. And Hoss is incredible, playing Nelly with the shuffling gait and haunted expression of a dead woman walking.

The movie manages to shift sensitively from laugh-out-loud moments to tear-jerking scenes, discussing euthanasia on the way. It’s not perfect, but the novel’s five million readers have nothing to worry about: it’s totally loyal to the book (unsurprisingly since Moyes wrote the script).

At once compassionate, engrossing from start to finish, and utterly relevant.