The blend of humor, pathos and wall-crawling antics is perfectly judged. After a handful of overblown misfires, Marvel appears to have rediscovered its heart.

This potent emotional undercurrent goes a long way toward counteracting the movie’s clumsier moments, carrying us aloft to a finale that, in its strange mix of trepidation and tenderness, is truly sublime.

Occasionally, the dizzying filmmaking style, a mix of practical stunt work and invisible VFX, feels like a video-game cutscene. More often, it just sucks the air from your lungs. The ending gestures pretty firmly at another sequel to come. It’ll have a tough job upping the ante on this.

There's some beautiful dancing and a wealth of detail about the world of classical ballet. Interesting and entertaining.

Musically, it's a matter of opinion, but from the sparse funk of the title tune to the bebop blow-out around Charlie Parker's Now's the Time, this guiltless grooving in Eden fizzes with brilliantly choreographed wit and invention.

Angio reveals a band that is still committed and, almost without precedent, still seems to get along. “We weren’t musicians,” singer-guitarist Jon Langford admits. “We were just seeing how far we could take it.” If revenge can be measured in years of continued creativity, this film shows the Mekons have had theirs.

For the majority of the film, Östlund’s combination of sledgehammer and scalpel work a treat. They’re fast becoming the hallmarks of a satirist who’s unlikely to run short of subject matter any time soon.

Crawford has produced an inspiring primer, sure to remind viewers that the power has always been in their hands.

The Brothers have never been so chaotic or so aggressively funny.

Winner of the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, Young Mothers brings nothing new to the Dardennes’ canon, but there’s comfort in the familiarity of their methodology. They’ve always had a knack for coaxing tremendous performances from even the youngest of actors, and the cast here is uniformly excellent.

Beyond the regular crunch of fist on bone, The Smashing Machine is an unexpectedly gentle, soulful character study that has Johnson undercutting his crowd-pleasing ‘The Rock’ persona with vulnerability and boyish uncertainty.

A moving meditation on history, knowledge and mortality.

Provocatively, the film suggests that winning small battles was victory enough; Saigon natives, also interviewed, were left behind to endure death camps.

From the (prolific) output of a largely unfashionable director, Wyler's Wuthering Heights has a distinctive look that elevates it above the blandness Goldwyn productions are so often charged with.

You’ll find yourself scouring the frame for this malign force in the tiniest refraction of light. Whannell knows you’re doing it, too, and lets scenes go on so long, you start to doubt your own eyes. There shouldn’t be any doubting the magnetic Moss, though: she’s the real deal.

The Human Voice is the Spanish director’s first English-language film and you’ll inevitably go away yearning for more as soon as the half hour is up.

De Niro's gift for pantomime, glimpsed in his plumber for Brazil, is a non-stop bombardment of mugging on the silent screen scale. There isn't much left for Penn, which is okay by me. Very entertaining.

Unusually moving (not only to stray film critics in your crowd), director Steve James's keen profile of the late, great Roger Ebert works both as a compact appreciation of the reviewer's vast public impact, as well as an unflinching peak into a cancer patient's final months, fraught with pain, hope and constant treatment.

The tone sometimes wavers into self-parody, and there are occasional crude patches, but overall this edge-of-seat revenge movie marks the most exciting debut from an Australian director since Peter Weir.

By boiling a dysfunctional couple down to a worst-hits clip reel, the director created one painful autopsy of an affair, the polar opposite of those frolicking montages so prevalent in American rom-coms. (He's also gave his actors a hell of a valentine; neither Yanne nor Jobert has ever been better.)

The welter of meticulously researched, perfectly chosen interview material cements Richard’s status as chat show gold – he initiated the term ‘Shut up!’ and could have probably made ‘fetch’ happen too – an endlessly engaging raconteur.

Dan Stevens turns in a vibrant comic performance as Charles Dickens in this drama about writerly inspiration that plays like a smarter Shakespeare in Love.

Never extraneous, Flee’s smaller details make this true-life story buzz with life.

The disparate styles and the absence of clear links between the stories make for unusually provocative viewing, because their shared themes (deviancy, alienation, persecution, monstrousness) are merely implied through the cutting. Compelling and quirkily intelligent; Genet, one feels, would have been impressed.

A sharply observed rites-of-passage comedy set in Brooklyn in 1965.

Martel’s forensic doc shatters any sense that, for her fellow Argentinians, the colonial burden has been lifted. It’s an intimate pinhole camera capturing an IMAX-sized story.

There are splendid economies, too: Rogers' mirrored dressing-room registers first as a social humiliation for the cop, who can't find the exit, but later his intimacy with her surroundings gives him an edge over a killer. There's little waste, though the thriller element could have been tuned up a bit.

Beyond the music, Meet Me in the Bathroom makes a compelling study of the whole idea of a ‘scene’: how does it happen, why does it end and what’s it all about?