There are many reasons why Wonderstruck fails so disastrously, why it is by a wide margin Todd Haynes’s worst film to date and an eye-popping come-down from his widely-beloved Carol, but the most important reason presents itself fairly early.

Stronger feels, in most every respect, like a film that overlays the known facts of Jeff Bauman’s trauma and recovery on top of a conventionally satisfying dramatic structure.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a film that presented a fairly straightforward, coherent narrative that was so unswervingly and gleefully willing to break rules of craft as The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

A film that radiates compassion and nuance in every moment it spends with its Parkinson’s-afflicted mother Judy (Shirley Henderson), even as the means of telling the story can waver in effectiveness.

The camera of Antoine Bourges’s freshman feature Fail to Appear observes offices and coutroom halls and plain-walled living rooms and the people inside them patiently, dispassionately, gently.

If you were to concoct a movie concept for Christopher Nolan to direct that would play to his strengths and mitigate his weaknesses, you could certainly do far worse than Dunkirk.