Here’s heavyweight French auteur Bruno Dumont demonstrating his gift for deadpan comedy.

Nicole Holofcener has a reputation for making Woody Allen-ish chick-flicks. Which sounds like a snidey compliment. Enough Said is her best yet.

Eastwood's first film as director, and first exploratory probe for the flaws in his macho image as outlined in Siegel's The Beguiled. A highly enjoyable thriller made under the influence of Siegel (who contributes a memorable cameo as a bartender).

It should be disastrous. But psycho ground controllers (Stack and Bridges), laff-a-second pace, and bludgeoning innuendo make this the acceptable face of the locker-room satire.

This philosophical war film is impressive and thought provoking but it’s also too restrained and pensive to ever completely connect.

What Welcome to Leith does very well is dig deep and expose Cobb – and by extension the entire American neo-Nazi movement – as weak, confused and desperate, using a dying ideology as a way to feel less alone in the world.

One of the most pleasing things about Blue Jasmine is that it feels truly knotty and never obvious in how it unfolds.

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

The story is fictional, yet it builds up a chastening picture of divisive separate political and religious agendas holding sway over common humanity, and leading the country deeper into chaos. A striking, tough-minded achievement.

In Between is a great film. The performances are fantastic – as the gorgeous, headstrong Laila, Mouna Hawa is mesmerising. It’s not always uplifting but it is compassionate and intelligent.

Yamada’s creative direction shows a filmmaker with a distinctive way of looking at the world, following in the footsteps of other maverick Japanese talents like Ozu, Kitano and Miyazaki. Yep, she’s that good.

It's a spare film, muted in colour and unflashy – and it's all the more powerful and urgent for it.

Vikander’s spellbinding, not-quite-human presence (her synthetic skin is silky yet creepy) keeps us watching. But an only-too-obvious ‘twist’ and some clunky plotting...drain much of the credibility from a story which promised so much.

The world that Zootropolis creates is intelligent and fascinatingly detailed – it feels more like a movie by Disney-owned Pixar than a straight Disney film.

There are scenes that grab – Abrahams’s dash round Trinity quad; the chats between Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson as dons who dress up prejudice in fine words. But the parallel stories tend to cancel out, rather than complement, each other. Oddly, for a film about triumph over adversity, there’s nothing as uplifting as the opening and closing jogs along a windswept beach.

Mamet's glee in tracking the rackets and his ear for the great American aphasia - 'I'm from the United States of Kiss My Ass' - more than compensate for the sometimes flat direction, and the performances are splendid.

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.

A pity that the directors prove less ruthless than their own creations, but there is more than enough here for people who enjoy murder attempts on cute pet poodles.

Tracks might be a bit slow for some, but it’s one of those films that quietly creeps up on you.

Lau’s astute performance is rather like the film as a whole – at first you think it’s underdone, but it’s actually cannily judged to favour genuine feeling over pushy sentimentality.

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.

Seidl gestures towards understanding rather than confrontation – turning in a slighter, softer-grained film than its predecessors, but no worse for it.

The talk is pointed and careful in a household that savours the power and meaning of words, but it’s as much the imagery that makes this film such a painterly joy.

Gripping...A very convincing nightmare, and if Hackman gives too rounded a performance to approach the omniscient evil of Laughton's original, Patton assumes the mantle as Brice's henchman, while Costner confirms his arrival as a star. Clearly, they can remake 'em like that any more.

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

It’s a film with the texture and truth of life, and at its heart is a beautiful performance by Cliff Curtis, who never in a million years will be nominated for an Oscar, but deserves one.

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.

The Gift will have you triple-locking the doors and rushing to pull the curtains.

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

The first half has a sardonic edge to it, but the more seriously the movie takes itself the sillier it gets.

Amid all the shifting mirrored surfaces and hazy ambiguities of Olivier Assayas's bewitching, brazenly unconventional ghost story, this much can be said with certainty: Kristen Stewart has become one hell of an actress.

This Jungle Book has the bare necessities, and then some.

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.

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.

Child’s Pose plays its thematic cards far too early, but it’s sustained by Gheorghiu’s compelling central turn as the endlessly self-deluding grande dame.

It will drive some viewers up the wall, but fans will feel the rush of discovering a unique new director and, in Richard,a gawky yet captivating screen presence.

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.

[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.

What a knotty, frighteningly real drama The Hunt is.

If the final effect is somewhat less nuanced than his previous work, it's a good deal more vigorous.

It's a terrifically moving film that has a fitting earthbound feel to it.

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.

The Immigrant promises rich territory to explore, but in the execution it’s overly stately, dreary and unconvincing.

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

Overall, Logan is something rather special: a moving and mournful story of life at the end of the line, and the perfect blockbuster for these embittered times.

Hats off to Dreamworks for offering some bold surprises in a respectable sequel filled with moments of humour and emotion among its ample noise and movement.

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

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

Reiner's splendidly confident, witty teenage variation on It Happened One Night.

A beautifully acted but disappointingly stiff period drama.

A film that never feels remotely real, content to wallow in dead-rock-star mythology and tedious druggie indulgences.

Newcomer Florence Pugh is like a lightning bolt, totally electric as Katherine, who’s up there with Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina in the literary heroine stakes.

Overall this is giddy, ridiculous fun, a witty, wacky and wonderfully generous sugary gift of a film.

It's not an action film: there's little in the way of exciting set pieces, and Eastwood's restrained performance is low-key almost to the point of minimalism. Rather, as he slowly tries to tunnel out with a pair of nail-clippers, it's an austere depiction of the tedious routines of prison life, and of the courage and strength of spirit needed in coping with unpleasant warders, tough fellow-inmates, and a life sentence.

Even after The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, this brings us chillingly closer to the real story of the post-Iraq shitstorm.

This anime feature takes an intriguing premise and does little with it. The detailed Ghibli-esque visuals are decent enough, but this is disappointingly bland.

There's a gripping, dark, truly monstrous film lurking in here somewhere, but Bayona seems hell-bent on keeping it at bay.

Some accuse the filmmaker of being just like the politicians who turn up, look around and do nothing. It adds a confrontational edge to the film’s already startling combination of immersive aesthetics and humane empathy.

But while she's thoroughly committed to serving both the rom and the com (the film is genuinely sweet, and at times very funny) Scherfig somehow never falls into any of the obvious traps.

There are few surprises in Creepy. With the exception of a bleak, pointed ending, it all plays out as you’d expect. That’s not necessarily a criticism – it’s fun to watch the pieces click into place, and the film is never less than slick, well-acted and nice looking.

The Ben E King theme song and all the imagery of tousled adolescents preening themselves like miniature James Deans rekindle memories of old jeans commercials, but the film is so well-observed and so energetically acted by its young cast that mawkishness is kept at bay.

For about half the film, Carpenter's narrative economy and explosive visual style (incorporating some marvellous model work of the new Manhattan skyline) promise wonders. The trouble is that his characters neither develop nor interact dynamically, so the plot gradually winds down into predictable though highly enjoyable histrionics.

There’s nothing wildly original here, but it’s carried off with charm and wit, and two very enjoyable central performances.

The painterly camerawork shows the sheer sophistication possible these days with digital technology. The only conventional note in a highly distinctive film touched with wry humour is the too-safe choice of a Mozart music cue.

Cameraman and director Michael Heineman has created a riveting story of how, with awful inevitability, power always corrupts.

There is surely a sly attack here on the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin’s suppression of liberal values and demonisation of the LGBT community. As the tension escalates, there are some poking between the ribs questions too about free speech and facts in the post-truth era.

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 documentary twists and turns like a guy getting his armpits tickled, but its driving force is Farrier’s personal determination to reveal the manipulation of the athletes involved. It’s unexpected and brilliant.

The Guest is not new, exactly, but Wingard knows just which buttons to push, and he pushes them with gusto. Stevens, meanwhile, has never been better.

Rohrwacher draws us into this unusual world with the ease of someone who knows exactly what they’re talking about, neither judging nor celebrating and, at her best, just looking with tenderness and a winning sense of humour.

This really is Wonder Woman coming to the rescue of the DC Comics universe.

What makes this more than just a punishing, fearful, expertly crafted thriller focused on one man’s endurance is heavily down to Emmanuel Lubezki’s attractive, thoughtful photography.

Director Athina Rachel Tsangari keeps things brisk, maintaining an almost nature-doc distance from her subjects. Her affection for them is plain, but that doesn’t mean she lets them off the hook.

If director Thompson isn't quite skilful enough to give the film its final touch of class (many of the shocks are just too planned), the relentlessness of the story and Mitchum's tangibly sordid presence guarantee the viewer's quivering attention.

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 isn’t much more than a series of ridiculously dotty sketches, and might have worked better as a sitcom, but it’s surprisingly hilarious.

The plot is impossibly dense and the characters – perhaps appropriately – feel like little more than cyphers, but for sheer mind-expanding sci-fi strangeness this is hard to beat.

It’s a broader, starrier project than either of Nichols’s previous films, and he handles the transition to the major league with relative confidence.

Catching Fire looks and feels epic. Hands down it’s one of the most entertaining films of the year.

This is sombre, artful and winningly ambiguous.

Every emotion is bang-on; every scene unfolds grippingly and naturally; and by the end, these characters feel like people you know.

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 claustrophobic setting and semi-improvised tone might suggest something closer to sitcom than cinema (had Jarmusch seen Porridge?), but Robby Müller’s stately monochrome photography single-handedly lifts it into the realm of Proper Art. It’s a sad and beautiful world indeed.

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.

If anything, this doc reminds you that all relationships are strange, hopeful experiments in intimacy. And it’s that same hope the filmmakers lend to Dina and Scott’s story: you find yourself willing them along, wanting their marriage to work. You end up feeling honoured to have shared these special moments with them.

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.

Hull clearly had a profound and lucid response to his blindness, and this thoughtful, illuminating film goes some way to inhabiting his thoughts.

It’s a winning yarn, but Osmond has to crack the whip to get it over the finishing line.

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

Reiner captures just the right level of physical tension, but for the most part wisely emphasises the mental duels. Terrific.

This intimate documentary about the leftfield American filmmaker David Lynch is insightful and absorbing.

The tone careens from high seriousness to easy parody in a way that makes the film slightly imprecise and slippery. Still, nothing else quite like it out there, that’s for sure.

If the crime element feels like little more than a red herring, it’s the characters that give the film its appeal.

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

At its heart, is Danner’s lovely performance, vulnerable and smart behind the sarcastic façade, and sealed by a devastating karaoke performance of Cry Me a River that hints at the musical talent her character left behind in her youth.

A candid, often shocking documentary portrait of the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

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.

What a stupendously entertaining ride it is. Director and former stuntman Chad Stahelski is back in the director’s chair, and he knows his craft inside out: every punch lands hard, every gunshot roars like thunder.