Borden charts the explosive coming together of the women as they forge their own liberation, handling her story with audacity and making even the driest argument crackle with humour, while the more poignant moments burn with a fierce white heat.

Far more than a sterile exercise in suspense: Communion constantly keeps the audience on its toes with a wealth of incidental detail, excellent set pieces and technical versatility.

Not a comfortable film, but humane and savagely beautiful.

The jokes and details are delightful, yet there's real anger behind them, and it bursts spectacularly into view in the concluding frames.

Never patronising his characters, Ang Lee combines comedy, both subtle and raucous, with acute social asides.

Every so often, you get the gift of watching an under-the-radar actor bloom into a critical-mass phenomenon before your bloodshot eyes: Franka Potente in "Run Lola Run," or Christoph Waltz in "Inglourious Basterds." Add Noomi Rapace to the list; what she does with the title character of this Swedish thriller-cum-pop-lit-adaptation will spawn cults of swooning Rapacephiles stat.

The various strands of plot are interwoven with phenomenal mastery, and Yang's images are as effortlessly precise as ever. It's his sharpest funny/sad vision of city life yet.

Though not as sharp or as unusual as Ritchie's earlier Smile, this is still a delightful, gentle satire on the American ideal of winning, which also takes broad but often hilarious swipes at fashionable health fads.

William Hechter and Peter Miller’s documentary explores an artistic life well lived, combining interviews (Leiber & Stoller, Jimmy Scott, Ben E. King) and footage of the man at work beside kindred spirits like Dr. John, to construct a moving, un-mawkish portrait of a songwriting icon.

Diwan was BAFTA nominated for the film, and it was richly deserved, while Vartolomei makes a luminous heroine full of gritty determination. Their collaboration makes for an atmospheric, gripping drama with a poignant contemporary relevance.

Pattinson is great in what is surely his best post-Twilight performance to date.

It’s a portrait that’s equal parts shtick and soul — in other words, exactly what "The Love Guru" should have been.

It is wittier, warmer and more unpredictable than it has any right to be.

A mostly CG-free, witty, grown-up drama that revels in strong, propulsive storytelling? Sometimes they do make ’em like they used to.

It's cheerfully nonsensical, of course, shot in a sun-drenched luxury compound straight from the big book of action movie clichés, yet lacking the flourishes of a John Woo or a Michael Bay.

Visually ripe and located just around the corner from melodrama, A Cure for Wellness is a cousin to Guillermo del Toro’s recent "Crimson Peak," another thriller nostalgic for the deep-pocketed lushness of ’30s-era horror-branded studios like Universal, the makers of "Dracula" and "Frankenstein."

If there’s one thing Rocketman does have in common with Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s a commanding central performance.

This level of mastery is timeless, and although the movie is overly deliberate at times, when it takes off, it really flies.

Combining footage of embattled town meetings and raucous boardwalk scenes with evenhanded interviews and visualized statistics, Zipper is a compelling argument for a populist Coney Island whose days are, alas, numbered.

If, like Alan Partridge, you believe that Wings were ‘the band The Beatles could have been’, Morgan Neville’s propulsively upbeat music doc is a total treat.

A rare delight that’s laced with melancholy and a suffocating sense of menace from its first scene straight through its shocking finale, Man From Reno is made special by the collisions between its characters.

Very probably the most clear-sighted movie ever made about the ways that shopfloor workers get f.cked over by the system.

The quintessential New York movie – with exquisite design by Alexandre Trauner and shimmering black-and-white photography – it presented something of a breakthrough in its portrayal of the war of the sexes, with a sour and cynical view of the self-deception, loneliness and cruelty involved in ‘romantic’ liaisons.

The man himself has rarely been profiled without noticeable reluctance, though documentarians Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein delve fairly deep by allowing their subject to guide them where he may.

Skilfully blending fairy-tale clarity with the skewed logic of nightmares, Craven also blurs the boundary between reality and fiction. There is creepy subversive stuff going on here, not to mention sly sideswipes at the censors.

After Carpenter and De Palma, it may seem a little dated; yet Edwards' classical feel for pure cinema remains unalloyed.

It’s a tale of lonely souls and literalized online dating, and you assume filmmaker Spike Jonze will characteristically mix high-concept absurdism with heartfelt notions. Unexpectedly, the latter dominates, thanks in no small part to Phoenix’s nuanced, open-book performance.

The tone couldn't be further from the self-congratulation of an exercise like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.