Jonathan Romney

Dig this: The subject of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s film is exactly what the title suggests: it’s about the planet, but also sod, stone, coal, and minerals

Shaken, not stirred: Sam Mendes’s pulse-quickening war movie is an adventure yarn about an altogether Bond-style mission

All in the family: Greta Gerwig brings a nuanced sensitivity and shrewd reframing to Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel

Saturation point: the colors of Karim Aïnouz’s melodrama ebb and flow in a delirious tide of euphoria and solemnity

Ordinary people: Wang Xiaoshuai’s new film is an expansive, though fragmented, vision of contemporary China

Dressed to kill: Peter Strickland’s latest is an essay in comic horror, pairing two stories about an apparently cursed or haunted red dress

Lifetime piling up: Michael Apted's historic experiment in long-term biography enters the silver age with another ripping good installment, 63 Up

Pointy objects: like a clever piece of stage conjuring, Knives Out is slight but hugely enjoyable

Dancer in the dark: Mati Diop’s debut feature is undeniably one of the boldest films of the year, crackling with invention, beauty, and anger

Love on the rocks: Noah Baumbach’s latest is witty, reveling in a mischievous sense of fun, and harrowing in its view of spousal difference

It is what it is: Martin Scorsese’s epic is an extraordinary feat of rejuvenation, and not just because of the digital effects that turned its lead actors back into young(ish) men

Saving grace: 19-year-old Phillip Youmans’s debut has a rough-edged dynamism and emotional intensity

Little monsters: Taika Waititi's latest seems to believe that fascism is a bad joke that can be overcome with good humor

Last man standing: Ulrich Köhler’s latest is an unusually low-key vision of the end of the world—or at least, the end of someone’s world

Hall of mirrors: Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor continue to cultivate an uncanny echo-chamber effect in their latest project

Typical perversity: Takashi Miike’s 103rd film is best encapsulated by a close-up of a severed head wreathed in a goofy grin

Child is father to the man: James Gray’s cosmic adventure flick is, at heart, a primal tale of a boy and his dad

Listen up: Michael Tyburski’s first feature is a delicate character study that yields strange, stimulating ideas about noise and quiet

Faith healer: director Shannon Murphy's Venice competition debut turns the story of a stricken teenager and her wild paramour into something fresh and bright

Courtroom drama: Roman Polanski's latest film, a Venice world premiere, surehandedly recounts the Dreyfus Affair and its story of a French army captain's anti-Semitic persecution