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.