BBC film critics Caryn James and Nicholas Barber pick their cinema highlights of the year so far, from a brutal war epic to an ambitious period vampire drama.

The sharpest American indie film of the year so far, Companion stars Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher as a devoted young couple who go to stay with some friends in a Russian tycoon's remote forest getaway. (Rupert Friend has a hilarious cameo as the mulleted oligarch.) As a drunken evening of confessions, suspicions and disagreements unfolds, it seems at first if the film might be a romantic comedy, or maybe a noirish thriller about a robbery gone wrong. In fact, Companion is a science-fiction comedy thriller – but beyond that, the less you know about the film in advance, the more enjoyable its many ingenious twists and turns will be. Suffice it to say that the big-screen debut of writer-director Drew Hancock is a sparklingly entertaining satire on modern technology and the never-more-relevant topic of how entitled and misogynistic certain insecure young men can be. And it packs all of its ideas into 97 minutes. (NB)

As stunning as Ryan Coogler's Black Panther was, he has outdone himself with Sinners. Michael B Jordan is slyly convincing as twins named Smoke and Stack, who return from Chicago to their home town in Mississippi, in the Jim Crow South in 1932, to open a juke joint. With huge ambition and imagination, Coogler swirls familiar genres and tropes into a wholly original film that blurs the real and the supernatural. Sinners is a period piece as well as a vampire film. It is a drama about racism, family, superstition and spirituality, and it comes with passionate sex and exhilarating blues music. Coogler directs with brio, at times creating a phantasmagoria in which robed African musicians appear next to rappers. The first hour is so full of texture it could stand alone as a period film, but the supernatural eventually intrudes, leading to a finale of action, blood and vengeance. Jordan is surrounded by a superb supporting cast, including Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Musaku and Hailee Steinfeld. Sex, blues and vampires at the door? What more can anyone want from a film? (CJ)

Miranda Yousef's riveting documentary tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Thomas Kinkade, one of the biggest-selling artists in history. Critics dismissed his work as nauseatingly sickly, but in the 1990s and 2000s, there were shops all around the US devoted to Kinkade's sentimental pictures of cosy country cottages. Art for Everybody asks fascinating questions about who gets to decide what counts as legitimate art, and whether some paintings can be more moral than others – questions that resonate today, in light of the continuing culture wars in the US . But Yousef's delicately balanced and sensitive film is just as fascinating on personal issues as it is on sociopolitical ones. A key part of Kinkade's marketing was his carefully constructed public image as a devoutly Christian, all-American family man, and yet the so-called "Painter of Light" had a dark side, too. Did the pressures of being a squeaky-clean Dr Jekyll push him into becoming a self-destructive Mr Hyde? (NB)

Alex Garland, the writer and director of Civil War, and Ray Mendoza, a veteran who was that film's military advisor, have created a harrowing, visceral, real-time drama that recreates an actual battle between........

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