Released at a time when the franchise had been overtaken in spectacle by Bourne and Mission: Impossible, Martin Campbell’s second slightly-harder Bond reboot wisely eschews a central action sequence in favour of an intimate and wonderfully tense extended poker game.

A thoroughly charming found-family Christmas anime which mines comedy from some very tragic scenes and finds a delightful balance between those tragicomic elements.

An American family discovers their ancestral Scottish titles and, to the delight of locals who love licking the boot of the British Empire, must decide whether to take on the vast tracts of land that their ancestors stole in the Clearances despite knowing nothing about the ecological responsibilities of Highland land ownership.

Fassbinder introduces Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) in bed, stripped of her wigs and her extravagant clothes. He then painstakingly builds the character up in layers to show us exactly who this horrible woman is before just as painfully stripping away those layers as part of her emotional downfall.

It’s such a pleasure to see a big movie take its time building up its characters and its setting so that the eventual kaiju action has emotional and thematic resonance.

A fairly languid biopic of Nora Barnacle (Susan Lynch) and her relationship with James Joyce (Ewan McGregor), a relationship that seemed as toxic as it was sexually charged.

An origin story in the mould of JOKER in that the events of the narrative do not make the character into the character we see in other films.

Olivier Assayas’ CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA has an ineffable quality that makes it an artwork that is more than the sum of its parts.

Nobody is out here portraying the despair and loneliness of existing in capitalist spaces like Kaurismäki. We hear raucous laughter and joy through a door that Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) holds open but chooses not to go through.

A Bond film infused with the spirit of New Labour from the opening action scene focused on the triumphalist national symbolism of the Millennium Dome and the economic regeneration of the Isle of Dogs to the scenes where MI6 sets up temporary headquarters in Scotland acting as an allegory for devolution.