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.