It's after the sex friends go back to being just friends that the film really hits its stride, and that's also when the excellent Patricia Clarkson and Richard Jenkins enter the picture as loving but imperfect parents who help explain what's made both leads so gun-shy.

The Last Showgirl may begin – as its ever-romantic heroine exclaims – with a shiny celebration of ‘breasts and rhinestones and joy!’ But in Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) sensitive telling, the glitter swiftly disperses to reveal an elegiac meditation on memory and age, femininity and beauty.

Watching the formerly spry Harris struggle to maintain a normal life (he's frequently glassy-eyed and jacked on painkillers) emphasizes the underappreciated sacrifices our men and women in uniform make in the name of vaguely defined ideals.

Delon and Crenna paint an idealized portrait of masculine camaraderie, one that’s exposed at the end of Melville’s bracing last testament as a soul-shattering illusion.

Organizing the mercurial emotions and tics is director Joachim Trier, making good on the promise of his 2006 feature debut, the lit-related drama Reprise. This one's even better-it's about the honesty that often takes root in survivors, a rarely explored subject-but Oslo, August 31st is not an easy film.

With Slate, his co-creator, co-writer and ex-partner, director Dean Fleischer Camp charts a world in which a semi-orphaned talking shell not only makes perfect sense, but becomes a perfect vessel to share painful, relatable truths about life. Dementia, loneliness and heartbreak are all writ large in Marcel’s world.

Absolutely irresistible.

This is Seagal's best movie since Out for Justice.

Cary's charm works as successfully upon audiences as it does upon the film's characters, and his relaxed wit plus Loretta Young's delicate loveliness makes for a frothily touching comedy.

The film's strength now derives less from its admittedly powerful but highly simplistic utterances about war as waste, than from a generally excellent set of performances (Ayres especially) and an almost total reluctance to follow normal plot structure.

It's in between the lines that this movingly perceptive film scores a TKO.

In combining video, surveillance footage and her own 8mm family memories, Heart of a Dog quickly accesses a realm of ideas that vault it far higher than mere sentiment would allow.

Sure, Juror #2 appears to be yet another polished, predictable courtroom drama; the kind we got a lot of during the ’90s. But thanks to Eastwood and first-time screenwriter Jonathan A Abrams, it’s a deeply involving and thought-provoking new spin on the genre, which serves up a ripe moral quandary that goes deeper than anything John Grisham ever managed.

American Sniper is a superbly subtle critique made by an especially young 84-year-old.

Never has the thrum of distant lawnmowers taken on such inherent menace as their wasp-like buzzing in director Justin Kurzel’s latest Australian nightmare, Nitram.

Barely 17 when she had Thomas, she's more like a peer than a parent, enough so that their uncomfortable relationship starts to take on a smattering of sexual tension. There's a nagging vagueness to this aspect of the movie, one that's difficult to square with the opening claim that it's based on real events; at a certain point, you may wonder which events they mean.

Into the Inferno may be relatively minor Herzog — it’s sweet and rambling rather than laser-bolt intense like "Fitzcarraldo" or "Grizzly Man." But it is enormously satisfying, filled with wisdom, insight and molten lava.

The movie does have an air of cautiousness about it, trying so hard to be a respectful, definitive statement on WWII (and often succeeding) that it sometimes feels cadaverous.

It’s a quiet tragedy that’s rendered close to uplifting by its gentle grace and compassion.

The recreation of the murder and the subsequent investigation uses the techniques of an American thriller to gripping effect, though conspiracies are so commonplace nowadays that it's hard to imagine the impact it made at the time.

The movie exemplifies everything that was great and grating about the filmmaker’s artistry: his impeccable physical slapstick (see the boxing match) and his overreliance on embarrassing sentimentality; his intuitive understanding of the medium and frequent displays of the mammoth martyr complex that informed the comedian’s every move.

With his energised 2021 breakthrough Sweat, von Horn followed a young influencer grappling with the dark side of online life. This period piece offers a very different kind of female odyssey through a lonely and forbidding world. The result is harrowing but seriously impressive.

Serenity, wonderment and worry mix in this awe-inspiring, musical tour of the Earth’s waterways.

What makes Always Shine transcend, though, is its long-telegraphed yet still unexplained switcheroo — not exactly new to fans of "Mulholland Drive" (or even "Freaky Friday") but near-experimental in its implications, given the context of two women struggling to make their professional marks.

At heart, it is about the importance of nurturing relationships, an ode to decent people doing the best they can for others.

Cheaply made, disreputable, and blatantly anti-authority, it's a winner all the way, what with a stunningly laconic performance from Mitchum, white-hot night-time road scenes, and an affectionate but unsentimental vision of backwoods America rarely seen in cinema to this day.

Humane to the last, Earth Mama is a vital but all-too-rare exploration of Black motherhood struggling on the margins of American society. Hopefully, there’ll be many more to come.

It's easy to think of comics, especially time-tested ones like Rivers, as mechanical laugh-generators. Stern and Sundberg allow her to reveal the deep-rooted humanity of those ever-present quips, and the effect is humbling.