Christina Newland

Celebrating the triumphs of a brave female athlete, and boasting a strong central performance from a transformed Sydney Sweeney, Christy is a well-meaning but meandering feminist parable.

Tár is a film of rare and wild excellence.

Glazer’s uncompromising and chilling vision of evil is unlike any other film about Nazism.

Oscar Isaac is ideal as Dr Victor Frankenstein, a fevered, charismatic, and darkly obsessive oddball. He’s passionate and intense, driving the plot forward with powerful force.

It manages to avoid cliché, making Kerr tender in one moment and dubious the next, smashing in doors and, at his worst in the throes of addiction, collapsing into sobs

One Battle After Another is a film about legacy, about fathers and daughters, about the fight against an all-too-real American government hellbent on white supremacy, militarism, and oppression. Yet it also manages to be one of the most touching and absorbing thrillers of the year. Make no mistake: Paul Thomas Anderson is a genius.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues may not have the brown M&M joke or cultish appeal of its original, but it gets great and lovable mileage out of just how good those first jokes were – mini-Stonehenge replica included. You’d have to be a curmudgeon not to think it was fantastic fun.

Honey Don’t! is another misfire, feeling bizarrely like an ersatz Tarantino. Given the Coens’ track record of making some of the smartest crime films in recent memory, it’s troubling how flat this one feels. I sincerely hope Ethan Coen hasn’t lost his knack.

Caught Stealing’s zany mix of comedy and drama tests your patience at times – though its crackerjack sexual tension is hard to argue with, and Austin Butler is a genuine, stop-and-take-notice screen presence. His charisma may well hold the whole inchoate package together, as he stammers and shrugs his way through the electric energy of the city.

It quickly becomes difficult to care about any of it.

Song’s point about the impact of class, economics, and the insidious, algorithmic approach to finding a partner feels like an accurate one. Love should be about risk-taking, not box-ticking; Lucy learns that soon enough, and seeing it play out is compelling.

With its well-observed, often darkly hilarious details of oddball inhabitants and chilling deployment of the chaotic overwhelm of social media in our lives, Eddington walks a thin line between dread and comedy.

There’s too much focus on disturbing the viewer rather than illuminating anything for them. Bring Her Back is a film that knows how to provoke, but not how to provide much insight.

It is a convincing, emotionally arresting, and visually appealing antidote to the complex muddle of so many recent superhero films.

Whether you’re a racing fan, have watched Netflix’s F1: Drive to Survive, or are a newcomer to the sport altogether, F1 uses old-fashioned, engine-revving storytelling.

Boyle still has an eye for suspenseful action, and much of it is breathtaking.

The fact is that the restrictions and judgements around single motherhood are only compounded by the harsh reality of class and privilege. Surrounded by more bureaucratic red tape than common-sense empathy, Molly often struggles – but through grit and determination, she reaches a foothold for her family that promises a better future.

Made with Anderson’s typically droll tone, it’s often very funny and continually surprising.

There is monologuing, there is pacing the floor, there is possibly too much wordiness for what is ultimately a visual medium. But its characters and the performances are intriguing enough to keep the suspense going.

The Friend is a film that tells us that the only way out of heartache like this really is through. It may jump all over your bed and make you sleep on the floor, but weathering the hard part has its own kind of rewards.

Sinners is one of the most satisfying and fun blockbusters I’ve seen so far this year.

The twisty machinations are a bit too familiar, the pacing a tad too glacial before Odysseus’s revenge finally happens, the performances uniformly good but rather self-serious.

Even if the film can feel airless at times, with long, solid shots of the survivors’ banal everyday lives, it does have much to say on the foibles of mankind – and the way society may very feasibly backslide into, well, The End. That, to me, is worth giving a chance.

It’s great fun to watch two actors of such calibre play these wicked games of mistrust and deception – it’s even more fun to see Soderbergh handle his story so deftly.

The Monkey is surprisingly lacking in any good ideas. In fact, it’s the worst thing a horror film can be: boring.

There is a lot to garner from Anderson’s performance as a woman who has spent her life as the vessel of other people’s lust and projection; that is the main attraction of The Last Showgirl. But without the narrative scaffolding or depth to surround her character, Coppola’s film can often feel like a message in search of a movie.

This is a gnarly and fascinating thriller whose characters feel genuinely dangerous and unpredictable.

It’s a film about ordinary Londoners living ordinary lives and facing normal challenges, from mental health to domesticity. Baptiste is toweringly real: formidable and heartbreaking in her performance.