If The Harder They Fall occasionally feels like a collection of music-video riffs, each with its own momentum and rhythm, and it drags a touch in the middle, that stylised energy and ridiculously charismatic cast makes it a ride.

Ultimately, it’s [Okada's] attention to the emotional content, honed over years of writing romantic youth dramas (both animated and live action), that makes ‘Maquia’ so compelling. It’s a coming-of-age story, of sorts, even if the main character can’t age.

It’s defiantly cheesy and very hard to resist.

As you’d expect from Kore-eda, it’s all told with the utmost detail and care, and a gentle score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto only adds to the overarching air of thoughtfulness and empathy.

Into the Abyss is too self-admiring of its own loose ends to come to the indictment that would put it in the company of "The Thin Blue Line," but these personalities stay in your head - which is the whole point.

If the film ends up somewhere a little too neat, Comer makes the journey always worthwhile.

Blessed with a wealth of golden b&w footage (Lambert and Stamp always planned to document their managerial brilliance), James D. Cooper’s poundingly fun, scrappy profile has an unusually satisfying nuts-and-bolts perspective on the ’60s fame machine.

Watching the first hour of I Was Born, But… (unspooling with a bright, new piano score by Donald Sosin) might remind you of a subdued “Our Gang” skit, and not unpleasantly.

There are strong shades of Bo Burnham’s 2018 movie Eighth Grade here. That’s not to call Dídi derivative at all, but to say that it nails that high-school yearning to be cool and complete lack of any idea how to get there, making things worse for yourself with every attempt.

Free Solo is about getting dangerously close to the edge, where some people feel most alive. We get to experience that thrill secondhand, and that’s enough.

Its dreamlike realism is also to be enjoyed: when lovers appear to walk across a crowded city street, into (superimposed) fields, and back to kiss in a traffic jam, you have an example of True Love styled to cinema perfection. Simple, and intense images of unequalled beauty.

Much like climbing a mountain, the two-and-a-half-hour runtime may occasionally feel arduous, but the emotional release is worth it once you reach the peak.

The Bay, a real creepfest, joins the suggestive company of eco-terror entries like Hitchcock's "The Birds" and 1979's "Prophecy."

The Hunting Ground still shocks and awakens its audience in all the right ways, bringing the recent headlines of a Columbia University rape survivor carrying her mattress around into irrefutably urgent, sharp focus.

Moral inquiry, wry comedy and sheer cinematic poetry make for a film whose modest form conceals a sharp mind and a wonderfully generous heart.

When Stiller indulges in moments of unfulfilled rage, this has real desperation.

A near non-stop cycle of batsh*t stunts, slathered with enough grease, oil, fire and sand to leave you gasping for air.

Director Morley has at least restored something of a soul to her subject.

The Woman King is a story of sisterhood and racial identity that deserves to pack in the crowds. About time, indeed.

By keeping the camera in the vehicle, hauntingly lit with the blur of passing houses and the glow of the mobile phone, Hallow Road invites you to fill the scene at the other end of the line with a shadowy menace that the final stretch really delivers on.

Uniting Sacha Baron Cohen's daredevilry with Werner Herzog's bombast, Brügger aims to expose "the evilness of North Korea" with a gloriously incoherent, kazoo-and-whoopee-cushion–inflected stage show starring a self-proclaimed "spastic."

With top performances and real heart, American Fiction is a film that diagnoses the problem and presents a cure.

The film isn’t exactly rousing in its conclusion, but it’s always respectful: a serious ethical inquiry into matters of women’s choice, both imposed and seized upon. Check it out.

If ever a film puts its arm round a kid and says: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got you’, that’s Bird and Bailey. She’s a character you feel Arnold would lie on railtracks to protect – and that’s a powerful, moving instinct to share.

If Wu is compelling as Destiny, Lopez is magnetic as her savvy mentor. It’s her most authoritative role since Out of Sight. The plot, in contrast to the stars, sags in the middle and there are a few more celebratory hang-out scenes than we need, but the gang is so charismatic, it’s no great chore to spend extra time with them. Some people would pay thousands for just a few minutes.

Dennis Potter's remarkably intelligent transatlantic adaptation of his BBC serial turns the pitfalls of 'Hollywoodisation' into profit, now stressing the 'pennies' over the 'heavenly' symbolism by specifically locating Arthur Parker's grubby melodrama in the Chicago of the Depression, and culling his liberating daydreams from not only the era's popular music, but its even more culturally resonant musicals, recreated with both MGM opulence and biting Brechtian wit.

It’s an unabashed celebration of a maverick talent, with all the highlights you’d expect from an extraordinary career.

Taut and gripping.