It’s a film that doubles and trebles in complexity as it dives inward to a place of strange intimacy, one that’s a lot like Spike Jonze’s "Her": manufactured, yes, but no less affecting for its desperation.

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

Steve Jobs the movie is a lot like Steve Jobs the person: astonishingly brilliant whenever it’s not breaking your heart.

The tunes, flooding every frame, remain perfect.

This is textbook Kaurismäki, neither fresh nor unwelcome.

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.

Spanning four years, To Be Heard has a large enough scope to map its subjects' rocky road to reinvention, concentrating on various bumps along the way.

Zinnemann's customary care for detail pays occasional dividends, but the film goes on rather too long.

Time and changing tides have been kind to Graceland (and to the local musicians who've since become internationally renowned), but an on-camera meeting between the songwriter and ANC leader Oliver Tambo finds their conflict between creative freedom and revolutionary solidarity fascinatingly unresolved.

Look into Ivor Novello’s haunted, kohl-rimmed eyes in Hitch’s most overtly Hitchcockian silent film – his first of many ‘wrong man’ mysteries – and you can see generations of matinee idols coming full circle.

No side overwhelms the other in the back-and-forth; you feel more like a profoundly uncertain moment is being marked, with little concrete sense of the outcome beyond mankind's enduring hunger for moving pictures.

Like Barry Jenkins similarly set Medicine for Melancholy, The Last Black Man in San Francisco supplies positivity to the struggle.

As ever with this filmmaker, symmetry is a hallmark, though both visually and narratively, this busy film lacks the serenity and jaw-dropping beauty of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Nor is Isle of Dogs as well-rounded and satisfying as Fantastic Mr. Fox. But as its curious canine cousin, it’s a movie that Anderson fans won't want to miss—as if they could anyway.

A train station finale is textbook tearjerker territory, but it still teems with exquisite sorrow.

Comfortable with subtle Proustian detachment, the director has taken another stab at colossal scope, this time getting lost in the cerebral folds.

Witty, touching and perceptive as he contrasts the rural village and its strange but generous-hearted eccentrics with the harsher realities of the city, Hallström makes it a seamless mix of tragedy and humour.

The film allows naiveté and knowingness to coexist. Only when it goes all out for cold Batmanesque villainy in the second half does it narrow its focus and lose its way.

The animation initially looks like something produced on an early Nintendo console, but what it lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in feeling. It makes sense of how a small child sees the world, saturated and magical but not yet subtly detailed.

Love Is Strange emerges as a total triumph for Sachs and his co-leads, John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, who, despite lengthy filmographies, turn in career-topping work. a sensitive domestic tragedy about the finite nature of any union.

Navalny is a barely believable brew of activism, resistance, poisonings, death squads, exiles and homecomings. Most of all, it’s a story of courage in the face of ruthless repression and one of those all-too-rare geopolitical stories where the bad guys actually get some comeuppance.

Not one of the director's very greatest films on desire (see Letter from an Unknown Woman and Lola Montès for those), Ophüls' circular chain of love and seduction in 19th century Vienna is still irresistible.

As often with Antonioni, a film riddled with moments of brilliance and scuppered by infuriating pretensions; full of longueurs, it works neither as a portrait of Swinging London, nor as a bona fide thriller.

Having all the strengths and excesses of a middlebrow film (visual beauty, lush soundtrack, arty direction), this adaptation's appeal to the senses leaves them cloyed.

Director Paul Greengrass remains a genius of claustrophobia, yet his better films — "Bloody Sunday," "United 93" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" — all beat with a stronger sense of central identification. He doesn’t have as much to work with this time, and his solution is to slow down the pace. The result is more clarity, but also more monotony.

It’s a superb morality play that immerses us deeply in a society’s values and rituals and keeps us guessing right to its powerful final shot.

Make it your destiny to see this blood-soaked odyssey along the edge of the world as soon as possible.

The most dementedly elegiac thriller you've ever seen, distilling a lifetime's enthusiasm for American and French film noir, with little Chinese about it apart from the soundtrack and the looks of the three beautiful leads.

Tonally, it’s a touch awkward (like the movie as a whole), but Larraín’s endgame set on a snowy mountainside is as abstract as the final moments of "The Shining" — a film that’s also about the life of the mind.