Doctor Zhivago has the most irritating soundtrack in the history of cinema and yes, it’s old-fashioned and sappy. But it’s impossible not to swoon. This is a love story to sink your teeth into.

Perhaps too deliberately charming for its own good, but this adaptation of a Paul Gallico novel about a 16-year-old waif who falls unhappily in love with a carnival magician (Aumont), thus adding to the bitterness of the crippled puppeteer (Ferrer) who loves her from afar, is actually rather delightful, thanks to Caron's touching performance and Walters' delicately stylish direction.

Trainwreck, about a commitment-phobic NYC writer, is the funniest film of the summer — outrageous and out to make you think.

Rise of the Guardians is an effervescent dose of fantasia that’s pretty hard to dislike. Unless, of course, you’re a cynical grump.

It’s a moving, challenging watch.

Often, Faust plays like a lost cousin to Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunted Stalker (1979), catnip for the slow-and-low crowd. Settle in, because this requires your charity, but you’ll dream it all back up the next night.

Anne Fontaine’s biopic transforms the designer’s early life into highbrow guilty-pleasure gold.

Director Luca Guadagnino is having so much fun setting up the Kubrickian chill (even Barry Lyndon's Marisa Berenson is on hand) that when Emma and the much younger Antonio finally come together in warming Sanremo, their tryst almost sneaks up on you.

It’s both a sly piece of ethnography and a social satire that reads like a cosmic joke…right up until its climax makes the chuckle catch in your throat.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn, the prankster of last year's "Bronson," has never reduced his craft to such a sledgehammer of minimalism. Electric guitars drone on the soundtrack, bones crunch, and a mystical religiosity gathers around One-Eye; there's a midnight cult here for those who yearn for one.

The film has a traditional appeal that's wholly separate from its surface.

Most of all, it’s a colourful journey lit up with great tunes and a deep love of music – an ingenious, infectious new spin on the music doc.

The first part of Deathly Hallows has plenty of invigorating imagery alongside the pro forma narrative elements.

A darkly stylish horror film.

Connery and Caine (both excellent) become classic Huston overreachers, and echoes of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Moby Dick permeate the mythic yarn.

This romantic weepie is both moving and effectively stylish.

Eventually it’s go time, and if The East loses a little steam on the grounds of action mechanics (a skill these plots always require), it’s never dumb on the subject of covert allegiances.

Can a movie leave you with a comedown? If it’s as raucous and unruly as Kneecap, a nonstop blizzard of beats, bumps of white powder and punky defiance of the British and Belfast’s sectarian past, the answer’s a firm ‘yes’.

The real heat of The Sessions comes from its pitch-perfect sense of place, the free-spirited Berkeley of the 1980s.

The Piano Lesson strikes a perfect balance, showing us that the past isn’t just about trauma but is laced with moments of jubilance. It’s cathartic and moving – a reminder that strength and survival go hand in hand.

Rewriting the narrative through an anti-colonial, Black and feminist lens, Purcell bestowed a First Nations background and the moniker Molly Johnson on Lawson’s unnamed protagonist. Delving deeper into Molly’s troubles in the novel of the same name, this film marks her third spin at the material. It’s still riveting.

Whether you like motorcycle racing or not, Richard de Aragues’s debut is a must-see evocation of the event’s inherent dangers and the ‘balls to the wall’ bravery (or stupidity) of its adrenaline-seeking, carefree contenders. In the realm of the rousing sports doc, this truly excels.

20 Days in Mariupol can’t match For Sama for a Hollywood ending. That film sought to cut its bleakness with a whisper of hope – a new baby born in a shelled maternity ward – and a sense that something might, just might, survive the horror. Chernov has nothing as optimistic as that for us, just a fly-on-the-wall account of an unfolding atrocity. And it’s devastating.

Love, Simon feels lived-in and self-assured, two traits its fans will want to adopt as well.

What emerges is an illuminating, though terribly dismaying, portrait of the War on Terror’s lasting effects. Whether one retreats or steps out defiantly, there is no sanctuary.

Better Things creator Pamela Adlon’s directorial debut deftly juggles fast-paced anecdotal comedy with rich, moving character work, while upending pregnancy myths with the ferocity of a woman stamping on her oppressive breast pump. Scene-stealing work from the likes of Sandra Bernhard, John Carroll Lynch and Elena Ouspenskaia layer up the sense that, in the world of Babes, every life is a tiny miracle.

It’s a compelling, edgy story of exploitation with no easy answers.

If any film could convince people that ACID is the patron saint of tomorrow's Godards, it's this one.