Caryn James

At times it's as if the film itself was stitched together from the parts of other movies, but collecting all those bits and pieces is a sign of Gyllenhaal's huge scope and ambition.

Starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, Emerald Fennell's new take on the classic romance is far from faithful to the original book – but it is "utterly absorbing" in its own right.

The film’s first-person approach and dynamic visual style make it more engaging and livelier than you might expect such a well-researched documentary about this serious subject to be.

Josef Kubota Wladyka, the director and co-writer, shifts from poignant emotion to comedy to surreal scenes that take us inside Haru’s fantasies just as gracefully as the dialogue shifts from Japanese to Spanish and English.

The film is lovely in the graceful way it executes its unsurprising content, and the actors make it soar even at its most predictable.

Marty Supreme has such scope, ambition and humour that its flaws, as with those off-screen Timmy exploits, are easy to overlook.

This film is as slick and shiny as Glinda's lip gloss, but it may also be just what its many fans want.

The Lost Bus doesn't have to bludgeon viewers with a message or with its timely resonance. Greengrass lets us feel it.

Its humane message is potent even though it comes in the offbeat package of this gleeful, violent but entirely successful dark comedy.

American society, in all its strengths and missteps, has been a major theme for both Pynchon and Anderson, and it grounds Anderson's dazzler of a film, giving it an emphatic, unmistakable political charge.

A ghostly story that’s not exactly a ghost story, Rose of Nevada is a typically imaginative film from the director Mark Jenkin.

With its Gothic atmosphere and deeper themes, Wake Up Dead Man has a darker tone than the previous Knives Out films. Yet it is also the funniest and most playful so far.

Caught Stealing is an anomaly, a dark soap bubble of an entertainment. And that weirdness makes this unlikely film sparkle.

Throughout, Colman and Cumberbatch's performances make the dialogue much funnier than it sounds in print.

A mystery about retirees who solve cold cases for fun, it is as gentle as a game of Clue and as cozy as an Agatha Christie novel, but its glittering cast and a touch of self-awareness make up for that lack of originality. This modestly entertaining film is uncool and filled with stock tropes, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything more.

Without for a minute undermining Ride’s importance, this clear-eyed film doesn’t sugarcoat her sometimes prickly personality.

The film approaches its action tropes with an effective sense of absurdity, but it’s the stars’ kinetic commitment to the bit that makes this relentlessly silly film work.

Moving on from its cynical beginning, Materialists takes the long way around to an ending that is decidedly hopeful. It offers an unblinkered, earned romanticism that suits this moment, and bolsters Song's reputation as one of our most astute observers of relationships.

Mountainhead may seem to be an argument for fast-turnaround films, but few writers and directors could do it with Armstrong's sharp eye and intelligence, as he entertains us with these heartless, all-too-convincing megalomaniacs.

Together, Garland's virtuosity and Mendoza's first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more important, emotionally harrowing.

That interplay between work and life gives the project its distinctive perspective and offers the most acute revelations. The lack of talking heads commenting on her enhances the intimate feel.

Under its crowd-pleasing surface, though, the film's theme of political power, of who wields it and how, is strong and purposeful, even if Scott cagily weaves it into the colourful show.

There is more of Fuller’s memoir that might be a source for other adaptations. It is hard to imagine any would be more beautifully realized than this.

Coppola depicts their lives with sympathy but also with clear-eyed honesty about the dreams they never achieved and the youth that's impossible to reclaim.

Leigh's strategy of taking us into his characters' world without prelude or explanation, letting the revelations and backstory waft out, help make his films feel authentic. He seems to have a magical ability to make the everyday captivating to watch

This is a fresh, unsentimental yet touching story.

Walker and her editors have created an absorbing narrative, so the film never feels as cobbled together as it actually is.

The movie star Taylor is the one who most often comes through in the film, but that is engaging enough.

It is a small movie with steep odds against it, but it is also extraordinarily accomplished.

Despite that ominous theme, The Great Lillian Hall is a lovely tribute to life in the theater, with all its personal compromises, and a showcase for Lange, who deftly shows the character as a vulnerable woman and also displays the distinct style of Lillian the bravura actress.

Even when it chooses to put the rosiest gloss on things, though, the film is bracing and inspiring, giving some talented conductors much-deserved visibility.

Full of affection for big Broadway-style tunes, with a heroine whose dream man is soft-hearted but also not human, it is a sharp, witty confection.

Haigh and his cast, including Paul Mescal as Adam's new lover, give this film about loss, enduring love and hope for the future such truth and poignance that it is easily among the best of the year.

The Color Purple is a big, brash spectacle, an extravaganza blending the styles of Broadway musicals, Hollywood studio movies and music videos, with a mix of gospel, pop, blues and ballads, all of that coming together smoothly in one exuberant film.

Esmail's adaptation of Rumaan Alam's 2020 novel adds a playful Hitchcockian spin and the starry cast of Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali to create a psychological thriller about family, technology and life in the 21st Century.

This absorbing film is likely to stay with you. It's a compliment to say that you may walk away with the off-kilter feeling that you have been in another person's dream the whole time.

The war scenes speak loudly on their own, with no need to add dramatic emphasis. Alexandre Desplat's score matches that style, with a subtle, piercing beauty. If the first half of Lee had been as dazzlingly effective as the second, it might have been a great film instead of a very good one.

Finally Dawn is uneven, and at 2 hours and 20 minutes indulgently long, but it is also full of texture, wit and a few done-to-perfection set pieces.

This may be Miyazaki's most expansive and magisterial film. If it is not the most instantly stunning, that might be because he takes the time to deliver worlds within worlds, layers under layers, to create an overwhelming experience by the end.

Like other love stories of the period, Gueule d'Amour has a melodramatic surface, yet it hits a nerve in anyone who has ever spent too much time thinking about the wrong person.

It's boldly imaginative and his most mature work yet.

Defying any logical narrative, the film relies on poetic images and associations. It suggests that the most frightening thing in the world can be in your own mind.

Running at 2 hours and 49 minutes, it is bigger than the previous films in every way ­– not better or worse, just more.

In poetic fashion, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt asks for interpretation, making ordinary explanations unnecessary.

Hewson takes a flawed but good-hearted mess of a character and makes her sympathetic, likable and fully human.

Alice Englert expertly finds the line between satire and sincerity, mocking the slipperiness of the spiritual-enlightenment industry while acknowledging the serious intentions of the people — in this case very well-heeled customers — who think it’s at least worth a try.

At its best, Chazelle's film is a cinematic marvel, evidence enough that movies are magical, as it sweeps us into the beautiful, terrible world we recognise as Hollywood even now.

Bros races along almost until the end when it embraces romcom elements, including a montage, that land as more clichéd than subversive. But that doesn't make the rest of this charming film any less entertaining and effective.

The Woman King leans toward fantasy in its heroic moments, but is rooted in truth about war, brutality and freedom. It is a splashy popcorn movie with a social conscience.

An eloquent meditation on loss, memory and how film can shape them.

It's hard to create tension when the stakes are so low. But the film's breezy tone and ultimately strong emotional depths make up for that flaw. This big-hearted Thor, thundering and sensitive, may be just the diverting hero we need right now.

A glib misreading of Men might reduce it to: "Ha! Men! They're all alike." But the film's ending emphasises how much Harper's trials and Garland's film have been about her profound tangle of love, grief and understanding.

For many of us, especially in the West, the film is likely to be confusing here and there. It would have been helpful, for example, if the subtitles had let us know who's speaking Russian and who's speaking Ukrainian. But it is worth a bit of confusion for a film so powerful and immediate, and made with such a lucid artistic vision.

Writer and director Andrew Semans puts Hall in every scene of this modest but effective thriller, and she comes through with a stunning, charismatic performance.

Stolevski depicts the young creature’s journey toward humanity with sensitivity and increasing investment.

The story has its moments of suspense, especially when Nina's child wanders off from the beach. But the soul of the film exists in the small exchanges and tensions between characters.

Full of energy, wit, passion and tragedy, looking backward and forward at once, it is one of the most moving films of the year.

While its mystical subject defies logic, Sara Dosa’s verite film is cogent and appealing thanks to a savvy strategy. Dosa respects Ragga’s beliefs without endorsing them, and positions her activism as a metaphor for saving the environment.

There are great concert movies and great socio-political documentaries, but Summer of Soul combines both in one gloriously entertaining and intellectually astute film.

Black Widow does become typically Avengers at the end, with an overwrought, too-long action scene that plays like a festival of stunt doubles tossing each other around a Russian lab. The real ending is better: a post-credit sequence brings back Pugh as Yelena in a tease that is not terribly surprising but is extremely welcome.

Duty Free is warm, personal, beautifully structured and socially relevant as it creates a vivid portrait of its real-life heroine and the ageism she encounters. Smoothly edited into a swift 71 minutes, the film rarely goes beneath the surface of its issues, but that surface is smart and, taking its cues from Rebecca, refreshingly unsentimental.

Writer and director Sam Levinson, who also created the audacious and enthralling HBO series Euphoria, gives the familiar story a makeover with dynamic, sensitive performances from its hugely talented stars, and a story that broadens to include race and the new Hollywood.

McDormand’s commanding, deeply empathetic performance holds the film together. She is so convincing and unaffected that it feels as if Fern is another non-actor whom Zhao magically gets to be natural on screen.

The documentary does not display artistic flair or innovation, but that is not its purpose. It is solid and straightforward in style, but extraordinary in its access and in how clearly her personality and philosophy emerge.

Although the individual episodes are gripping, the plot trajectory is obvious, especially when we arrive at an ending that's easy to see from the start. But it works because there is something quietly miraculous about the way Hanks embodies this character, making him the stirring and fresh emotional centre of a beautifully old-fashioned Western.

The film takes place largely in two down and dirty rooms, the recording studio and a basement where the band rehearses, but it doesn’t feel stage bound. Wolfe finds the right balance between letting Wilson’s trademark monologues flow and shooting them in a cinematic way that keeps the film moving.

On the Rocks is practically a distillation of Coppola’s Lost in Translation style. Each scene is compact and feels lived in, without any urgent narrative drive. That elegant surface makes it seem like a trifle, but there are layers beneath.

I Am Greta is a smoothly constructed view of a heroine in the making, and of how the world largely embraced and sometimes dismissed her.

One of Lee’s brilliant choices is to refuse to put a soppy romantic gloss on the affair. He suggests instead that passion can blind lovers to a true understanding of each other as easily as it can open their eyes.

Writer and director Richard Tanne (Southside With You, about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date) takes what sounds like a terrible idea and transforms it into a sleek, well-played romance that largely makes the cliches believable.

The slow-burn film features superbly understated acting and astute visuals. This is Mariani's first fiction film after having made two documentaries and shorts, but its ambition and accomplishment are fully formed.

Da 5 Bloods is Spike Lee at his mature best, made with his distinctive, passionate voice and kinetic artistry.

The flaws in The Garden Left Behind should not prevent anyone from appreciating the rich, compassionate story Alves has brought to the screen with such assurance, or the heroine Guevara has brought to life with such realism.

De Wilde and Catton deliver a largely faithful and unchallenging adaptation, beautifully staged and sharply acted by a cast adept at balancing wit and romance.

Perhaps no film can capture the enormity of that war, which left around 17 million dead, and generations to grieve. Director Sam Mendes wisely takes the opposite approach, personalising the experience through two young British soldiers sent on a harrowing, high-stakes, night-long mission, he creates a film that is tense, exhilarating and profoundly moving.

Gerwig’s smart, delightful film seems on its way to becoming a classic.

The film succeeds as an astutely constructed, sensitive piece of journalism that becomes a moving account of dealing with grief and irreparable loss.

Fayyad and his cinematographers and editors wield the cameras and shape the scenes in the documentary so beautifully that The Cave is both intensely real and a carefully wrought work of cinema. A kind of counterpart to Last Men, the new film is perhaps more wrenching and even more ambitious in its visuals.

The documentary rarely presses its larger points. But it calmly reveals how much journalism has changed since Ivins started out in the late 1960s, yet how relevant her observations about the blight of corporate money in politics and threats to the First Amendment remain today.

Full of eye-opening musical performances, the film also sparkles with tongue-in-cheek humor, and features contemporary interviews that are often far from what they seem. You have to go back to After Hours to find a Scorsese film with a similarly mischievous wit.

A drama with dazzling visuals, subtle performances and deft nods to classics like Days of Heaven and Bonnie and Clyde. ... While Dreamland doesn’t entirely overcome its familiar trajectory, the film is so stunning in every other way that its narrative shortcoming hardly matters.

Cinematically modest but full of social and political urgency.

Batra turns a story that sounds tired and goofy into a lovely film with a tone of tender sadness.

Mixing archival material and fresh interviews with Edwards and her crewmembers, Holmes creates an engaging, suspenseful story with layers of social resonance. Maiden is gripping and effective even if — maybe especially if — you have absolutely no interest in sailing.

Miller Costanzo’s debut is more than promising. It should stand as a wonderfully accomplished launch to a bright career.

After a creaky start, Egg comes through with terrific performances from Reiner and especially Hendricks, and with some scenes of piercing honesty.

The sequel has better and at times galvanizing special effects, a darker tone and a high-stakes battle between good and evil. Best of all, its characters are more vibrantly drawn, and tangled in relationships that range from delightful to lethal.

[A] solid, straightforward history of abortion rights in America.

This intelligent, revolting, artistically made and entirely empty look at a murderer comes close to a cinema of pure technique. It is profoundly disturbing, even more for the questions it raises about the use of film than for the mutilated bodies that litter the screen.

Hoop Dreams affirms the role of film as a medium for exploring social issues. And like any important documentary, this one raises crucial questions beyond what is on screen.

Though ''Roxy Carmichael'' is never as fresh or powerful as it might have been, it is a sweetly engaging film in the Barry Levinson school: just when you think it might fall into a bottomless pit of sentimentality, it stops short.

Like Mr. Wenders's previous film, last year's "Until the End of the World," this one begins as a swirl of dazzling ambition and at midpoint turns into a mess. Even so, and even at 2 hours and 20 minutes, it is one of the more intriguing messes on screen.

This atmospheric, expertly crafted little New England noir has droll dialogue, a female empowerment theme and a sly use of crime elements.

[A] witty, entertaining remake.

It is refreshing to see so much style and life in the old undead tale, and to watch this strong cast with its perfect deadpan attitudes.

With the best material used up, That's Entertainment! III cleverly focuses on outtakes, unfinished numbers and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the old musicals. This results in a lively and funny compilation of curiosities suggesting what might have been.

Flight of the Navigator may not have the originality of a true classic; and while its special effects provide some dazzling moments, they are not quite fresh enough to be brilliant. But the film is so absorbing, such constant fun, that it may well be the best family film around.

It is a dark, lurid revenge fantasy and not the breakthrough, star-making movie some people have claimed. But it is a genre film of a high order, stylish and smooth.