Benjamin Lee

There’s an almost meta-maturity, as if Scorsese is also looking back on his own career, the film leaving us with a haunting reminder not to glamorise violent men and the wreckage they leave behind.

Song is a writer of elegant restraint and as the final act progressed, I worried that perhaps this restraint might end up a little too delicate for the years that have preceded and the feelings that have amassed. But then in a bar scene for the ages, we find ourselves floored, a slow buildup that finally hits like a bus.

Lady Bird doesn’t exist as a twee indie movie construct, it feels thrillingly real and deeply personal, every single beat ringing true.

It’s a remarkable match-up between film-makers and actor and reaffirms the importance of that partnership, especially for a movie star stuck in a profitable rut. Sandler deserves more, and if he wants us to keep watching, then so do we.

Flee is a remarkably humanising and complex film, expanding and expounding the kind of story that’s too easily simplified.

There’s a rare unpredictability that initially proves alluring, at least until that confusion starts to feel less intentional.

Chung’s nuanced portrait of a family figuring out their place in the world is both small and somehow rather grand.

It’s a slight film at times but one that builds to a crescendo of emotion.

Frank & Louis is a solidly made drama, but Ben-Adir and Morgan are something special.

It’s a difficult, often quite brutal, viewing experience, as it needs to be given the subject matter, not only because of the fractured storytelling but because of the devastating lead performance from Hopkins.

It’s a film with love at its root, both familial and romantic, and Jenkins fills so much of it with a radiating warmth.

Sometimes the shagginess of the film can make it feel a bit slight and at times it does work better as a concentrated character study, but it’s such a joy to spend this time with McCarthy, drunkenly scheming and grumbling, that it’s hard to complain.

We should be on the edge of our seat but every should-be set piece falls flat, the choreography always feeling a little off and the editing never works as tightly as it should.

I Saw the TV Glow marks a remarkable progression for Schoenbrun as both writer and director, a more substantive, if still challenging, narrative married with an incredible, expanded ability to fully immerse us in the visuals they have created. It’s made with such transportive precision that I can still feel it as I write.

The “more is more” approach (hallucinations, orgies, pissing, stabbing, shooting, splitting, piercing etc) is attention-securing in the moment but oddly forgettable after, like waking up from a nightmare you can’t remember. Infinity Pool is too hectic to truly haunt.

It’s as involving as it is necessary, a rare ray of sunshine on yet another cloudy day.

As compelling and as complicated as this fraught friendship might be, Hall’s script can’t quite find a way to take it – and the other pieces of Larsen’s novel – and turn them into something deservedly substantial.

There remains a remove though still, Spielberg giving us a slightly too stage-managed version of himself and his family, some gristle missing from the darkest moments.

Sarandon’s force and confidence are undeniable, and she easily holds her own against Burt Lancaster.

Given the nudity on show, some are already quick to criticise Park’s direction as gratuitous and to claim that his male gaze is affecting the depiction of lesbian romance. But the impotency of the male characters helps to counter this while the sex scenes themselves, as lovingly shot as they might be, feel vital to the narrative.

Her film reaches the audience-friendly highs of a studio comedy while retaining an indie sensibility, both in its visuals and its tone, and coupled with the script’s rooted awareness of the moment we’re now in, it feels fresh, a film that will be rewatched and quoted, held on a pedestal by those who understand its necessity.

There are so many characters at play here and McQueen and Flynn’s script manages to let them all breathe, giving each actor small defining moments and given the exceptional cast involved, it makes for a richly rewarding experience.

In many increasingly overcrowded fields – trauma horror, curse horror, gay horror, Sundance horror – Leviticus stands tall.

It’s an earnest tribute to a lot of things – a city, a time, a genre, a mentality, an actor in Turturro – and while we’ve definitely been here before, it’s nice to come back.

The journey is slick and diverting, and at times incisive, but Turning Red is yet another Pixar film that coasts rather than glides. Hopefully its next offering can turn into something more.

There’s probably a semi-decent creature feature here and maybe, with a hefty amount of redrafting, a semi-decent human drama but as it stands it fails at both, a satisfying, coherent film buried underneath copious amounts of animal guts.

It’s a goofy, drunken scrap of escapism and while the romantic comedy is not fully back, despite think pieces assuring us that it is, Palm Springs energetically reminds us, yet again, that it’s never really going away.

It’s a deft and thrilling conceit, experiencing the highs and lows of life through different people. Stolevski, in a film that feels less like a debut and more a late-stage magnum opus, has found an ingenious vessel to make profound observations on gender, sex and being.