Barry Hertz

There is a joy watching interesting people change for the better while in a carefully crafted environment . . . and Payne knows just how to balance the sour and sweet.

The brutal, bloody and bare-chested revenge thriller is essentially one big, long war cry – a guttural, primal grunt of a movie that is all raging testosterone and incendiary machismo. And I loved nearly every minute of it.

Whether, in making Saint Omer, Diop has found the answers that she’s been searching for since 2016 remains an open question. But the truth of the film is that she has certainly compelled her audience to take a complicated, fraught, and harrowing journey of their own.

Writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s feature is built on a number of sly narrative and stylistic tricks that gradually cement its status as a new action classic full of nasty surprises.

Guts will be busted, and sides will be split. Heck, moviegoers might even learn to kiss and make up with comedies for good.

This is a film containing oceans of truth, centuries of longing and vast feelings of open-hearted tenderness.

In its bold aesthetic courage and rigid thematic spine, Khatami’s movie is a full-body experience that leaves you fully alive.

Shot entirely in the director’s home country with a largely amateur, untrained cast, the film blends a striking sense of street-level realism, political commentary and poetic nostalgia for the naive innocence of youth.

The result is a magnificently off-the-rails poison pill of a film, one that skitters from paranoiac thriller to reactionary satire to something far more caustic and unnerving. It is the cinematic equivalent of long COVID – lingering, haunting, and demanding rigorous, skeptical investigation.

The story is captivating, the characters are magnificently fleshed out, and the emotional stakes are entirely, utterly believable.

If watching mass-murdering maniacs get absolutely destroyed on-screen is your thing – and it very much is mine – then Sisu is a perfectly depraved night out.

New Order might go down as the most uncomfortable watch of the year. Sadistic and ugly and crushingly depressing. But also demanding of your engagement. The reward? A master-class in high-anxiety cinema, and enough fodder for a thousand uncomfortable conversations.

Priscilla the movie is as complicated and beguiling as Priscilla the woman.

The new comedy Kneecap is a riotous delight that will have even the most staid audiences ready to flip the bird.

Frightening and romantic, dreamy and dreary, the film laces the gore of a zombie movie with the magic-hour sunsets of a Terrence Malick film, plus a healthy amount of 1980s needle-drops. It is, in so many ways, one of the most unusually beautiful and violently sensual films in recent memory.

In an era where studios are obsessed with reviving ostensibly comforting intellectual property, Goldhaber has twisted the end-goal of modern Hollywood radically and beautifully.

There is an unshakable and electric hum to Foe that ensures director Garth Davis’s work will stay with audiences attuned to its distinct frequency for days, months, perhaps ages.

The most derivative but finely tuned of superhero movies to come out in ages.

Monos sinks you into its mud until the dirt stuffs your mouth. You won’t be able to breathe – but you’ll be thanking Landes for the cinematic suffocation all the same.

A delirious, disgusting and delightfully dark concoction, this low-budget movie is the latest throwback creation from Steven Kostanski (Manborg, The Void), whose artistic vision seems perma-stuck in the sugary-cereal haze of a Saturday morning circa 1989.

Queen & Slim’s ultimate route is a powerful one – a drive meant to be shared, and discussed, long after the road ends.

Once Rufus Norris’s film gets going, it quickly reveals itself as a vibrant, almost revolutionary work. Shame, though, that Tom Hardy is only onscreen for a single scene – though his intentionally nerve-racked warbles prove once and for all that he’s a master vocal manipulator.

With its gore and brutality and general nihilistic sensibility – not to mention an eyeball scene that would make Bunuel blush – Becky is not fit for 95 per cent of the populace, especially those who might innocently click on the title after recognizing the star of their favourite CBS sitcom. But for those who like to get dirty with this kind of scuzzy chaos, then this is near-perfect slimeball cinema.

For 2020, though, this new and unexpected Borat is a nice surprise. Very niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

Nearly every performance here is excellent, a beautiful balance of nerves and neuroses.

As unflinching as it is empathetic, Four Daughters is the best and slipperiest kind of film, whether you want to label it a documentary or not.

Although Abbasi and his co-writers fall into a slight genre trap toward the end – one familiar to any fan of traditional crime thrillers – Border is otherwise a work of spectacular, unclassifiable artistry. Don’t read another word about it: just go.

Yet the most striking, shaking moment in Annihilation has nothing to do with Area X or the perverted flora and fauna within it. Rather, it's when the film's spare score is interrupted by the folksy strains of Crosby, Stills & Nash's Helplessly Hoping.