Christina Newland

Tár is a film of rare and wild excellence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Given the subject matter, it’s difficult not to stray into mawkishness of some kind. But even with mistakes, the power of the main narrative is hard to erode.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A wobbly and unstoppable juggernaut, barrelling ahead with the brazen confidence of a flashy Italian supercar with its ‘check engine’ light on, House of Gucci is a glorious, trashy crime melodrama based on real life. It pings from tragicomic to tragic to unintentionally funny from moment to moment: sometimes in the same scene.

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

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