It’s not judgy or lecturing, and there’s nothing too didactic here – and maybe not a lot to linger over either. But if you’re looking for a couple of hours of sexy Parisians hooking up, falling out and finding their feet again, all set to pulsing electro and with a baked-in romanticism that makes a built-up corner of Paris feel like Casablanca, Audiard and his co-writers have made the perfect film.

the animation itself is top-notch, and in a number of darker sequences (Snow White's terrified entry into the forest, for example), Disney's adoption of Expressionist visual devices makes for genuinely powerful drama.

If the film finally fails to shock or surprise, it's nevertheless both imaginatively shot and wittily scripted, and strikes a nice balance between gentle parody and a queasy unease associated with bona fide genre suspense. Superior performances by Quaid, Hurt and Madorsky.

My Favourite Cake is radical and heartwarming. Above all, it’s a reminder that in a world where everyone is scrutinised and judged, pure love remains timeless.

Push any guy long enough with alcohol and aggressive masculinity, the film suggests, and you'll find an XY-chromosomed predator lurking behind the mask.

But for all its flaws, it’s a colossally entertaining ride that never stints on its efforts to wow you with its scale and spectacle.

This is very effective, experimental filmmaking – and at 85 minutes it never becomes indulgent – and the most exciting thing Soderbergh’s done in quite some time.

Pfeiffer is nothing short of heartbreaking in a part that requires her to be completely unvarnished.

The film suddenly gains in power, until it fulfills the promise of its title with hard-hitting compassion and a crystal-clear sense of grace.

Arnold's vibrant, Malickian adaptation has another bold stroke worth mentioning: Heathcliff, a Gypsy in the original text, is now an Afro-Caribbean former slave, initially a bruised teen (Glave) and then an unusual, self-made man (Howson).

Tomboy may add little to conversations about gender or sexuality. It has everything to say, however, about that period of childhood when identity is at its most malleable.

You can expect Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman-like banter from Robert Kaplow’s finely-tuned screenplay, an expert evocation of the ‘40s.

Pakula's debut as a director, two years before making Klute, is one of those rare American films which manage to be gently observational without succumbing to the Europeanism of Mazursky or Cassavetes.

The filmmaking is patient and participatory, getting down in the dirt with the workers (in one case the lens is even soaked by a spray of sludge) and allowing several touchingly distinct personalities to emerge.

One of Godard's most open and enjoyable films.

Although there's a slight suspicion that (as in Rossellini's work from this period) the plight of children is being used as a sort of emotional shorthand, the integrity and moving effect of this piece is never really in doubt.

We want to be there with them in the fading light, and that’s the might of Sach’s quiet little ode to friendship.

It’s quietly absorbing and fitfully shocking as we experience the sights, sounds and smells of the streets where a one-year-old child can wander around alone without anyone stopping to wonder why.

Jendreyko elegantly sketches in the details of his subject's life and the historical events surrounding her coming-of-age-out of which emerges a fascinating subtext about the malleable powers of language.

Meier is clearly carving out a path all her own; the next one should be a gem.

Instead of a study of alienation and solitude, News of the World is about connection – about two traumatised people finding silent comfort in each other. About the promise of healing. It’s a long road, cautions this elegiac film, but it’s always easiest when travelled together.

With Gosling and Hüller to the fore, Lord and Miller have delivered a cosmic adventure with hope in its heart and a twinkle in its eye.

It’s all very theatrically crafted, with sweeping cameras and intricate design, and feels just the right side of an art-world joke: knowing and amusing at points, serious enough, never just a gag. Call me boring, though, but it could have done with some footnotes.

A moving and humorous coming-of-age story which is told with brio, avoiding the usual divots of social realism misery.

There are no lava-spewing natural phenomena or gut-wrenching slaughterhouse sequences in this unofficial companion piece, but you do witness sex tourists in Bangkok choosing numbered "girlfriends" as if they were picking out lobsters in a tank.

The plot is a touch obvious, but Menashe still plays like a more culturally specific Kramer vs. Kramer, setting up a testy, fascinating dynamic between micromanaging rabbis and a naturally warm dad with wisdom of his own.

It’s a weird and unusually honest film.

What makes Moore’s latest so ferocious—and pound for pound his most effective piece of journalism—is the way it pivots to a meaty central subject that isn’t Trump but has prescient echoes.

Betts aims divinely high and succeeds in both understanding and respectfully critiquing organized religion. Is faith escapism or an act of surrender? In grappling with the essence of spirituality, Novitiate—not unlike Martin Scorsese’s Silence—asks more questions than it supplies answers.

There's still tremendous vitality here, and Wheatley's avoidance of yet another Guy Ritchie gabfest is a pleasure in itself.

Succeeds best as a witty, knowing commentary on the genre itself. References to lycanthropic lore, literature and cinema abound; gags are plentiful; and the whole thing casts a pleasingly skeptical glance at various social fashions and fads of the times.

Though it’s divided into three chapters--“Voices,” “Recollections” and “Innocence”--the film takes a largely free-form look at a dying community that’s more reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s nonfiction case studies than the usual sociopolitical hand-wringing.

French director Léonor Serraille’s debut film could easily have been unbearably twee. The fact that it isn’t, at all, is a tribute both to her unsentimental storytelling, and to the prickly strength of Laetitia Dosch’s central performance.

Gun Crazy is a magnificently enjoyable film, distinguished by Joseph H Lewis’s restless, catch-all directorial style.

Hollywood movies have rarely spoken such tough and tender truths.

Traditional immigrant films from Hollywood (The Godfather?) end in fame, money and beautiful women for the inheritors of the new found land's promise; but El Norte gives us a vision of the downside of the American dream. The film's concentration on the plight of its young hopefuls, however, is done with much humour and compassion, so that the tragedy of its message is very bracing.

Great fun, with Wilder for once giving an impeccably controlled performance as the factory's bizarre owner.

At a seriously economical 72 minutes, director Daniel Vernon crams in a lot, leapfrogging between the tawdry racist subculture that spat out men like Copeland and London’s bubbly, multicultural communities that they hated so much. The courage and tenacity of anti-fascist campaigners like Searchlight gets its due, too.

Though the film wraps up its spinning-plates narrative a little too neatly, this is still a Scandi-noir to die for.

Fortunately, Oppenheimer keeps the film focused on the highly complicated Anwar — a charismatic devil if ever there was one — observing as this strange reckoning with the past slowly breaks down his defenses.

Being dead has never looked as fun as it does in Pixar’s latest adventure, bursting with skeletons, magical spells and Mexico’s annual Day of the Dead.

What’s different is the detail with which Loach and his collaborators examine the effects of work and society on the nuclear family.

It’s hard to draw too much old-school romance from this world of sponsorship, celebrity and sports washing, but F1 manages it on the back of Pitt’s earthy charm. Watch it rev into the canon of great sports movies. Motion sickness tablets recommended.

No one else has come close to translating England's homegrown blend of deadpan and madcap for a younger audience, much less with such impressive Claymated technique. You couldn't ask for better lesson in "Anglo-Absurdism for Beginners."

As well as properly rooting itself in the game’s lore – a win for its players, who will find plenty of geeky Easter eggs here – Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves crucially captures the spirit of the game: that sense of gathering with friends to embark on deadly quests, while also having a bloody good laugh.

The film occasionally skews a little on the PBS-dry side, but in terms of looking back on a legacy of American skullduggery and high-level shenanigans, its access and acknowledgment of our dark past make for one intimate indictment.

For the many people impacted by dementia, it won’t be an easy watch – and for those who have experienced it in the past, it may feel like a gentle pressure on an old wound. But it’s a real window into an affliction that is both commonplace and unfathomable. And in that sense, it’s a gift.

Through its powerful exploration of what defines familial ties and the tenacity of marginalised communities in one of America's toughest cities, A Thousand and One resonates deeply.

Although several sections deal with the Ceausescu-era party apparatus, Mungiu's interest lies more in how the nation's political confusion affected the general populace. It's history told from the bottom, where what everyone thinks happened matters as much as what actually did.

Short Term 12 isn’t without drawbacks, occasionally dipping into a too-neat narrative tidiness and a self-conscious sloppiness. Yet the film’s charms and ability to cut through jadedness despite the subject matter makes it a rarity — a modest indie that’s feels like it’s in it for the long haul.

Although the film takes place in a fantasy version of brownstone Brooklyn, it’s more cutting than the book, especially for the way it shuns the concept of a star vehicle and sharpens the material into a forum for several moments of guilt.

Wei is magnetic as the would-be killer who uses her patchy Korean as an additional smokescreen to manoeuvre behind. She ties the detective in knots, a shapeshifter whose true nature is beguilingly unclear.

Impressive adaptation of Steinbeck's novel, made at the same time as The Grapes of Wrath (though released earlier) and matching Ford's harsh lyricism in its evocation of the Depression, the desperation of the migrant farmworkers, their pipedreams of a little place of their own some day.

Local Hero, which concerns the frustrations of a Texas oilman's attempts to buy up an idyllic Scottish village, ranks as a lyrical anti-urban comedy in the great tradition of films like I Know Where I'm Going and Whisky Galore!; and its essential triumph is to prove that comedy can still contain a gentle, almost mystical, aspect without necessarily being old-fashioned.

Pictorially it's amazing, and even the script and dubbing are way above average.

A beautifully crafted love story, End of the Century has two understated, thoughtful performances at its heart. It explores its existential themes – of the passing of time and of roads not taken – with delicacy and deftness. It’s a road worth travelling.

At just over an hour, Diop’s strange, captivating and rigorously intellectual film leaves a mighty impression well beyond its compact length.

Do you work to live or live to work? If you’ve got a half-decent job, it might just be the latter. For young millennial Angela, a hard-pressed PA at a Bucharest film production company in Radu Jude’s self-described tale of ‘Cinema and Economics in Two Parts’, it’s barely even the former.

Blackfish, a troubling exposé of Sea World’s hazardous entertainment trade, does much to restore a realistic sense of danger, interviewing former park workers who detail their shoddy, nonscientific training, and chronicling the much-suppressed history of whale-on-human violence.

Nothing here is new, but you can’t call expert craft like this warmed-over. Solidly satisfying with ruthless forward momentum, the film plays like a minor triumph.

Coldly described, the set and costume design and the hothouse atmosphere represent so much high-camp gloss; but once again this careful stylisation enables Fassbinder to balance between parody of an emotional stance and intense commitment to it. He films in long, elegant takes, completely at the service of his all-female cast, who are uniformly sensational.

This captivating adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, which unfolds among the wild contrasts and contradictions of modern India, offers style, energy and bursts of goofy fish-out-of-water humour before landing on a vicious, dark streak of black-hearted cynicism.

There are sufficient question-marks inserted to lift it out of the routine: Eastwood's preacher man seems to carry the stigmata of a ghost; and he arrives as the answer to a maiden's prayer. Furthermore, his care for the landscape puts him in the Anthony Mann class. It's good to be back in the saddle again.

To the Wonder is arty for sure, but for the first time, its maker is working with anxieties we all feel. Let’s hope this Malick sticks around for a while.

Plays like a gothic prequel to David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method," one in which human flesh is viewed as both horrific and erotic terrain.

It’s a film defined by momentum, by the spectacle of an unformed young man rapidly becoming someone.

This documentary raises enough questions about the ends justifying the means during an era of endless war that it earns the right to be called essential viewing.

At 134 minutes, the film may seem challengingly long, but the strength of its ensemble cast and unusually evolving narrative results in a satisfying watch that’s reminiscent of tucking in with an engrossing book.

Richert's direction negotiates the plot's many pleasurably sharp bends with such skill that one emerges a little dazed, more than a little amused, and nagged by a worrying sense that it could just all be true.

Script, photography and performances (including Dillon before he decided to become a teenage Stallone) are all top notch, while Kaplan directs with pace, imagination, and a fine ear for dialogue and music.

Unlike "The Wrestler," which Siegel scripted, Big Fan has a way of making a socially marginal figure seem oddly charismatic without stacking the sympathy deck.

The real drama in Parnassus comes from the troupe of sideshow performers, led by a terrifically morbid Christopher Plummer.

Diop tackles serious issues in the framework of a touching and romantic drama with intriguing sways into genre territory, leaving the viewer much like Ada: a little confused, but oddly bewitched.

The man himself stares into Davis's lens, both confident and scared; for these moments alone, the movie is key.

Cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s handheld camera work, some really slick editing and canny use of real news footage, combined with impressive CGI, give it all a pulse-raisingly immersive quality, like a plunge into the underworld.

Sure, it gets a bit silly towards the end, and the promised post-credits scene is for the truly dedicated. But in a year when the cinemagoing experience could be categorised as ‘much too little’, you can’t really blame it for giving us a bit too much.

The year’s most shocking transformation arrives in the form of Gary Oldman’s Winston Churchill, a creation for the ages.

Fennell has captured something real about these unreal people and the world they live in. Her film slices with a scalpel, peels back the layers and finds only hollowness beneath. Maybe that’s the real twist.

The handling of the drama is always sensitive, anchored by a perception-busting performance from Efron. Even the High School Musical phobic would have to admit that he’s a revelation here.

It's the exuberant yin to the stately yang of Jackie Kennedy biopic Jackie, Larrain’s last film, and it’s full of the pheromones of sexual discovery and the piss and vinegar of toxic relationships.

It's an occasionally over-symbolic work (most notably in the opening nightmare sequence), but it's filled with richly observed characters and a real feeling for the joys of nature and youth.

It would have been great to have seen even more myth-busting around weight and health in this doc (presumably that’s covered in her book ‘What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat’), but Gordon is a funny and frank subject: a tour of her vintage diet book collection is a treat.

The pieces here are wonderful, even if the documentary fails to make any kind of overall analytical point.

It’s the two characters with no dialogue at all, Gromit and Feathers, who steal the show – a pair of silent cinema-style adversaries sparring in another joyfully Aardman nostalgic caper.

Ably aided by a fine cast and Jack Green's no-nonsense photography, Eastwood constructs a marvellously pacy, suspenseful movie which is deceptively easy on both eye and ear.

Cleverly written, authentically staged and sympathetically played, it's brave, uncompromising, and above all, frighteningly believable.

The Holdovers is a triumphant comeback story for Alexander Payne, too. The director bounces back from 2017’s misfiring Downsizing to find his tone – a rare kind of jaded hopefulness – with all his old assurance.

It wins you over with its scrappy underdog antics and then, later, bowls you over with its heavyweight insights.

His look at an Old World continent reeling from the New World values is both thrilling and damning.

It’s a tremendously enjoyable type of horror, full of giggle-inducing jump scares, but sending you off with some intelligent questions to gnaw on.

Whale does superbly by this much-loved Kern-Hammerstein musical, abetted by modestly handsome sets and lustrous camerawork from John Mescall.

A film of alarming intensity.

Maybe the film loses its head a bit at this point too, with its deeper message lost in the epic bloodshed, but the chances are you’ll be having too much fun to mind.

It’s a winning combo of satire and sleuthing – Succession with police tape – and a perfect slice of high-calorie escapism.

Kids train for guerrilla fighting in a gorgeously atmospheric film that feels like a transmission from the future.

A wittily efficient quickie, the film is a winner all the way - a surprise, since Starrett's career thus far had been the movie director's equivalent of a criminal record.

If this profile is marred slightly by thematic tidiness and a willingness to overglorify the champion's rise (Fischer didn't even write his best-seller, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess), it still supplies a cracked, conflicted genius trapped in his ceaseless endgame.

Deeply irresponsible, this a film that will give parents seizures-and Roger Corman a big old smile.