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.

A work of staggering mystery and power, with an epic scope and a visual style to match, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is old school in the best possible sense.

This is not some deification story, even though it often regards Dylan’s capacity for musical storytelling with something akin to worship. Mangold steers the ship into harbour competently, even if I have some niggling questions about why the Dylan myth requires yet another movie.

You don’t have to profess any special interest in the subject to have a fantastic time at the cinema with Conclave, which is part political thriller, part catfight, and utterly compelling.

Obsessed by rooting his supernatural folk tales in the realities of historical life, Eggers turns Nosferatu into a gothic horror fairy-tale. It’s retro in the best sense of the word.

Jenkins is the kind of talent who can turn his hand to almost anything and Mufasa is a respectable film as a result.

It rewards the viewer with a sense of the vast beauty – and sadness – a fleeting love affair might provide. It’s a brief thing, maybe, but it also lasts a lifetime.

I didn’t want this movie to be dull – I would have settled for enjoyably bad – but unfortunately, it doesn’t even manage that.

When Heller is metaphorically exploring the potentially horrifying physical transformation of pregnancy and post-partum life – and the personal sacrifices of identity, career, and self that women face when they become mothers – Nightbitch has a lot of smart, real things to say.

Joy doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it satisfyingly brings these stories to the screen in a typically prosaic, no-fuss British manner.

Exhilarating, satisfying, classical with a touch of tongue-in-cheek: Gladiator II ticks all the boxes, and does it with panache.

A beautifully simple story of moral courage in the face of complicity, Small Things Like These is one of the best films of the year.

Mikey Madison gives a sparky, vulnerable, devastatingly real breakout performance as a strip-club dancer and sometime-sex-worker. Filmed with neon-lit nocturnal verve, Anora is as gorgeous to behold as it is deranged.

The film’s inability to find a single tone – comic, cathartic or otherwise – makes it feel like a failure on all fronts, and the constant intrusion of loud, obvious pop needle-drops (and even a full disco-dancing sequence) don’t help.

A fresh Stephen King adaptation should be exciting. It’s a shame, then, that Salem’s Lot – a small-town vampire chiller set in 1970s Maine – has absolutely zero new ideas or even a particularly frightening take on the old story.

Glossy, grotesque, and intriguing even as you hate yourself for getting sucked into it, this isn’t an awful film. It just shouldn’t exist.

What a staggeringly stupid film. Joker: Folie à Deux is a sequel that did not need to exist. It’s an unspeakably self-indulgent, two-hour-plus beast of hodge-podge musical numbers wedged between drab prison and courtroom scenes.

There’s a sense of tinkering originality to the film that feels unlike anything else being made at the moment.

The plot isn’t always watertight, but The Substance nails the way female youth and beauty can steam-roll and flatten out the existence of older women.

For every engaging character-driven moment or bit of warm humor (Giovanni angrily shouting “I’m going to call Martin Scorsese” certainly got the audience in Cannes laughing), there’s unearned, even irritating quirkiness.

Most of the movie’s machinations seem merely in service of deepening the central gambit, which is to follow Mona’s journey and to look cool while doing it. On that front, it succeeds, but the movie’s charms are limited when the originality it purports to offer only feels like a bit of a costume.

Old Henry is a retread of the same dusty plains and macho bonds we’ve seen too many times before. It tells its slim story competently, but it does so little beyond that that it can’t help but feel mediocre.

A complete, if slightly overlong, view of Tina Turner’s life and career, the film is a deeply felt portrait of audacious talent and reinvention. The results are incredibly poignant.

This stylish, quietly suspenseful crime film offers a rejoinder to the typical macho ’70s genre, focusing on the female experience in a compelling, nuanced way.