Shot on digital video with a non-professional cast, Lovely Rita intelligently conveys the stifling nature of Rita's home and educational environments, and benefits from refusing to spell out character motivations. Newcomer Osika's subtle and often wordless central performance, meanwhile, seals the film's success.

The final minutes turn Talk to Me into something almost lyrical, a kind of urban myth you could imagine being shared between parties and campus halls. The filmmakers also blow out the candle at a flab-free 95 minutes. Turns out that’s enough time to get inside you and take possession.

Taken as a throwback to the thrillers of Carpenter and Spielberg’s cinema of wonder, it is special indeed. Not least because it honours its influences and yet remains, first and foremost, a Jeff Nichols film.

Farrier doesn’t overlook the amusing oddness of such a strange corner of the internet, but treats the subjects of the videos respectfully.

Cool as you like one second, camp as Christmas the next, this entertainingly overpumped action-horror will have genre fans (and their mums) grinning from ear to ear.

Gadot is a godsend, Pine charms, and Jenkins delivers old-school thrills with heart and conviction.

Astounding. With a director, DoP and cast at the top of their game, The Revenant is a filmmaking triumph.

While the biopic is determinedly feel-good, and sometimes a little over the top, Williams holds true to the spirit of someone who - like Gael García Bernal - was a born entertainer.

An intriguing forerunner to François Ozon’s Swimming Pool, it’s languidly paced and elegantly lensed, though its prize asset is Delon/ Schneider’s sexual sizzle.

Gyllenhaal is outstanding in this inspiring warts-and-all story of a Boston bombing survivor’s recovery battle.

The film belongs to Arena, outstanding as a man growing ever more delusional in his quest to acquire celebrity status.

Aronofsky’s maternal horror is the most out-there studio movie of the year. You won’t believe your eyes.

While it paints a convincing vision of lives ruled and ruined by the bottle, none of this makes for compelling viewing. Certainly not an hour-and-a-half of it.

Sharp as fangs, warm as fresh blood, this could be the funniest movie of the year. New Zealand’s answer to Edgar Wright.

As unnerving as it is surprising.

Most alluring are the crumbling neon cityscapes, real world/cyberspace fusion and the musings on identity.

More accessible than "Take Shelter" but not as powerful, Mud boasts stunning photography, a mesmerising lead and a strong evocation of Americana. McConaughey’s gold run continues…

Gyllenhaal is sensational headlining a pitch-black satire with its finger on the pulse.

Anderson visits fresh frontiers with a close encounter of the quirky kind, holding wit, whimsy and sly wisdom in supple balance.

The electric, forthright How to Blow Up a Pipeline excels as both truly riveting entertainment and an energizing call to action, in part through the cleverness of its genre conceit: what could be a better fit for a story about collective action and fighting the system than a heist movie?

Catching Fire delivers on all the promise of Part 1 with a gutsier, tougher, better round of Games.

Clever, violent, and wicked, with a fabulously unhinged turn from Goth, West’s period psycho tale truly does have the X Factor.

Recasting studio formula in fresh, dazzling shapes and shades, Encanto is high-tier modern Disney.

As Jonathan Pryce reads passages and academic voices take turns to chew over Sebald's visionary opus, B&W footage of country roadsides and wind-blasted coastlines turns rural Suffolk into something truly otherworldly.

Quillévéré’s elliptical plot isn’t always spot-on, skipping years to a near maddening degree. But treading a fine line between poetry and realism, it’s still heartfelt and harrowing.

A stylish black-and-white prison romp with a sense of humour as offbeat as its perfectly cast stars (John Lurie, Roberto Benigni and singer Tom Waits).

Gently joyous, from soup to nuts. Take your grandparents and they’ll enjoy it as much as you.

A touch too long, yet never slack, at three hours, TWOWS benefits from independent funding, Scorsese’s brass balls and an A-grade cast’s turbulent improvisations to emerge as an epic, boldly broad screwball comedy about the state of America, then and now.