Taut and gripping.

Director Nora Twomey’s film is about the ways we try to cradle each other from the harsher realities of life. This is a day-to-day survival story that stirs the heart and fires the imagination.

Beach Rats could have explored that ethical quandary with more depth; instead it settles for something blocked, oblique and fascinating.

Period is tastefully evoked, and loving care has gone into the visuals; but crucially, a weak script (based on Elizabeth von Arnim's novel) lets down any spirit of adventure. Personalities clash but are cheerfully reconciled, and marital tensions are swiftly resolved.

Arid, crowd-pleasing stuff, in which the soul-searchings take place very conveniently on annual holidays in France and in a variety of luxuriously furnished interiors.

Cregger plays brilliantly with your expectations throughout. The characters constantly make the wrong choices – peeking round dark corners, going back to check out a noise – but those choices don’t go in the usual directions. Cregger isn’t smug or sly about that. He isn’t winking at the audience. He’s using your horror knowledge against you by rarely giving you what the genre has conditioned you to anticipate.

The filmmaker provides intellectual rigor to spare, yet precious little narrative focus (you virtually wander into plot strands) and there's a stiffness to the proceedings that neither Wilson's charisma nor Ulliel and Thierry's screen-ready beauty can remedy.

Fine biopic which showcases a brilliant performance by Busey as Holly, and conveys a real, raw feeling for the music.

Bronstein crafts a thriller of teeth-grinding magnificence centred on Byrne as the indefatigable figure at the centre of this whirlwind of unsolicited advice.

Transplanted Australian director Schepisi confidently threads his own route through Peckinpah territory (a Mexican patriarch demanding honour; a graveyard resurrection), less concerned with Peckinpah's gothic haunting than with teasing dark, absurd ironies from the symbiosis of sworn enemies.

As with The Shape of Water, del Toro makes no secret of where his sympathy lies and who the real monsters are, but there are surprises here. Not least of which is how moved you might feel in the end.

The documentary is strongest during these conference-room brainstorms, similar to those of a political campaign. (It could have used more of Boies’s witness-demolishing courtroom eloquence.) The draw here is watching a careful process unfold, regardless of the outcome.

Fans of The West Wing will really dig it. Director Dror Moreh rarely lets the news headlines intrude on the backstage bartering.

Costa and O’Connor are terrific.

Lent a stout overall unity by Ray Bradbury's intelligent adaptation, by colour grading which gives the images the tonal quality of old whaling prints, and by the discreet use of a commentary drawn from Melville's text which imposes the resonance of legend, it is often staggeringly good.

On the surface a glossy tearjerker about the problems besetting a love affair between an attractive middle class widow and her younger, 'bohemian' gardener, Sirk's film is in fact a scathing attack on all those facets of the American Dream widely held dear.

Away has the mild rush of a coming-of-age dream, the sort that lodges in your memory as symbolic and significant as you pass from one stage of life to the next.

1917 is a work of sweeping scale yet pinpoint intimacy.

These beasts awaken something within the people, making them kinder and more playful. If Kedi did the same for audiences, that wouldn’t be so bad.

If you see only one Sono film, check out this flick; you will have then seen them all.

It probably would have helped if Walker (who credits two other codirectors) had chosen just one of those avenues for deeper study; her doc has a vertiginous way of feeling arty and ephemeral at one moment, humane and maybe too earthbound the next.

The tone is incredibly specific – darkly funny, exuberant, sad and enraged – and the small cast nails it.

When the plot stops cold for a beauty-pageant performance of exquisite purity, you’ll feel like you’re watching the most American film of the year.

Despite a lightness of plot, it most beautifully captures the book's free-floating, fantastic sense of adventure and wonder.

Sparse in dialogue, High Life demands unrelenting restraint from Pattinson, whose Monte, an off-kilter ascetic, is fascinating.

Bitter-sweet and very charming.

This Nosferatu is a worthy modern addition to a classic horror lineage. Get lost in its shadows.

Spacek and Lemmon are fine as the missing man's wife and father, but what makes the film so overwhelming in places is its unending night-time imagery of a society coming apart at the seams. Costa-Gavras underpins his campaigning content with all the electric atmosphere of a paranoid conspiracy thriller, and ensures that Missing will remain the cinematic evocation of a military coup for years to come.