Combining laughs and thrills with plenty of verve, Ben Affleck continues his smart directorial career with a stylish, gripping hostage drama.

With potent performers and poetic visuals, Anderson has made the boldest American picture of the year. Its strangeness can be hard to process, but this is a shattering study of the impossibility of recovering the past.

One of [Hawks'] finest pictures: a swoony saga of fatalistic flyboys and the women who try to keep their feet on the ground.

Paul Schrader’s best for 20 years. A stunning study of one man’s flaws and an apocalyptic vision of mankind’s fate.

Crime, romance, fast cars, hot tunes... slicker than your chrome hubcaps, Baby Driver is the summer’s coolest movie.

It’s packed with in-jokes and lightly disguised portraits of real-life Tinseltown figures; Douglas’ character is reckoned to be across between David O.Selznick and Vallewton. But even without a knowledge of the background, this is sharp, cynical fun.

FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), brainiac cannibal Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and tackle-tucking serial killer Jame Gumb (Ted Levine) make for one of cinema’s great ménages à trois.

Despite its hard-scrabble setting, eco-gloominess and dystopian story, this dark fairytale is engagingly vivid and life-affirming. An ambitious love letter to a Louisiana way of life that's being literally washed away.

It explores two of the filmmaker’s pet themes – the impossibility of true communication, the futility of art – and is set against the Vietnam War. Extraordinary.

The Double Life of Véronique makes the familiar seem extraordinary and memorably conjures up the sense of metaphysical forces guiding its characters’ everyday lives.

While the film occasionally pushes you to feel as deeply as Benji, something it can’t quite pull off, there is a profundity to David and Benji’s pilgrimage that leaves an unmistakable impression.

Sparse and intricate, it’s a study of judgement, of ‘honour’, of Emad’s own fragile masculinity; one paralleled cleverly by his role in a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

It lacks the subtlety of Night of the Living Dead, but deftly balances laughs and bloody thrills.

Spielberg lovingly restages the classic musical – but while the songs still soar, it feels more indulgent than essential.

Kapadia lays bare the tragedy of Winehouse’s story. It’s a tough, unfiltered watch but a thoughtful, thorough, feeling one.

As their early fights give way to growing respect, it’s a beautifully calibrated relationship, with small moments gradually building into something much bigger. A gem.

The footage – discoveries made by the Allies in the liberated Nazi camps during 1945 – is graphic, terrible, unforgettable.

There's much to relish here: a script which mixes pungent humour and tension, the pervading atmosphere of corruption and obsession, and a perfectly judged, tragically stoical performance from the sleepy-eyed Mitchum, not to forget Nicholas Musuraca's suitably shadowy cinematography.

It’s great to see a gritty girl-gang story that’s not a fingerwagging cautionary tale, or a grrrlpower fantasy. Sciamma finishes her coming-of-age trilogy on a high note.

Plays like an elegy for the demise of the cool, thick with the small-hours allure of addiction and infatuation but smart enough to see clearly.

Compared to the average family-friendly animation, this is very much an upgrade.

Whilst there is plenty of swordplay involved, it's the war of words and ideals that really captures the imagination here.

Here is a film where every frame feels individually designed, with saturated colour and symmetry reflecting the texture and natural wonder of the environment.

A visually stunning directorial debut that’s too intimidated by the original source material to be effective.

Beautifully animated, scored and written, Barras’ little movie has a big heart. C’est fantastique.

A surreal head-scratcher that'd make Luis Buñuel smile, it may not be perfectly formed, but there's no denying its fierce originality.

Let it be said that it’s such a fearless, fierce, menacing turn that comparisons with Jack Nicholson don’t come into it. This is the definitive Joker.

Everybody in Everybody smashes it out the park, playing dreamers who exhibit a voracious lust for life as they quest for identity. Well, these actors might have found theirs – the next generation of leading men.