Christopher Machell

Its quiet visuals are at the heart of Benediction’s sense of dignity and remembrance. Its language is not the passionate rage of Sassoon’s youth, but rather of the quiet, profoundly sad reflections of his later years.

She Dies Tomorrow is billed as a horror, and its scenario certainly is that. But the word ‘horror’ denotes active subjects – even if their activity is mainly screaming and running – whereas there’s a melancholy to Seimetz’ film that feels too fixed in place for the instability of horror.

A basically entertaining, but flimsy and shallow object, The Flash may not be the final entry in this long-beleaguered franchise, but it might as well be.

Nowhere Special is driven by the primal emotion of its child-parent dynamic and moving performances from both its leads, while the theme of social class resonates throughout.

A pointed, revealing study of selfishness and an all-too familiar portrait of emotional indulgence, bolstered by three excellent lead performances.

White Riot is a belligerently hopeful film: Shah vividly depicts the insidious violence of racism, but she also renders its futility in the face of community, and of music’s limitless power to unite and strengthen.

Bergman Island is at once an ambivalent love-letter to the Swedish master director Ingmar Bergman and a charming study of the complexities of relationships, the creative process, and the ways that one invariably influences the other.

Gerwig has crafted a warm, funny and cinematically rich film – if one whose narrative and political ambitions are far less radical than it would like us to suppose.

Setting his film largely on the dingy confines of an overnight train, Kuosmanen kindles a tender love story between two lost souls.

Despite the golden cast, this is Redford’s show, bolstered by a life-long career of effectively playing younger versions of Tucker.

A near-wordless study of dairy cow Luma’s life and shot from a bovine-eye view, Cow resists the urge to anthropomorphise Luma while eliciting deep empathy for this non-human animal.

The Lost Leonardo is about obsession, ego, power and greed. For almost all of the film’s characters, Salvator Mundi represents nothing more than opportunity.

The film conjures a man who is fundamentally, simplistically decent, while his demons only intrude on his integrity in the most superficial ways. Yet, in the end, Mank is not about capturing the totality of a person, but leaving an impression of one, and in that it is certainly successful.

Ava is a singular vision marking Foroughi as a talent to watch.

For most of his career, Paik was dismissed by critics and struggled financially, but as director Kim amply demonstrates, his work has had tremendous influence on both fine art and popular culture. Moon Is the Oldest TV is at once a celebration of that work and testament to its incalculable value.

The magical realms of Justino’s stories are echoed in the real world, where spaces are enclosed but liminal, defined by uneasy boundaries that are easily breached.

There is a great deal to enjoy here for devotees of Strickland’s work and the film feels destined to be described as his weirdest piece yet. But underneath that surface strangeness, Flux Gourmet doesn’t quite satisfy the appetite.

Petrov’s Flu finds its meaning through sensation, memory and aesthetics, depicting social and political decay in its purest form stripped of the comforting scaffolding of linear narrative.

Quietly raging, The Assistant is a bleakly precise study of complicity in workplace abuse.

Shiva Baby is ostensibly a comedy yet has all the tension of a thriller. At its most emotionally fraught, it uses the visual and aural grammar of horror cinema.

As historical noir, Martelli’s film is thrilling, but as a document of the comforts of complicity and the terror of resistance, 1976 is visceral.

As a study of injustice and systemic deprivation, and in its description of the conditions necessary for revolution, Ly’s film is in its very being a modern Les Misérables.

A good two-thirds of Top Gun: Maverick is very solid, if unremarkable, but what really gets it off the ground are its top-drawer flight sequences, staged thrillingly by director Joseph Kosinski.

The film that made Jackie Chan an international star, Police Story fully embodies the martial artist’s spirit of entertainment – equal parts endearing, goofy and packed with eye-popping kung fu action.

In one sense, Il buco is a testament to human hubris, contrasting the self-satisfaction of our own temporary structures with the unknowable depth of nature’s works.

Whereas Bait was a lament for a way of life swallowed up by mindless urbanite tourism, Enys Men is a hymn to sublime, endless time and the hauntedness of existence.

This is fan service elevated into an art form, transcending winking self-aggrandisement to become something of a reflection on the past eleven years, a chugging, tooting, spectacular train of a franchise, careering indefinitely forward.

Its social reality – that of the emptying and decline of rural regions in Italy – is contemporary and vital, but there is something deeper and simpler at play here. In that simplicity, with its notes played purely, there is no need of distortion or abstraction to justify itself.

With surprises, compelling performances and strong visuals across the board, Barbarian warrants recommendation but with serious caveats.

Away combines Zilbalodis’ signature minimalist style with the structure of a classic survival story.

Drily narrated by Udo Kier, Hitler’s Hollywood is not a film about the rise of Nazism, nor even a linear history of the era’s cinema. Rather, it seeks to capture its spirit, interrogate its aesthetics and finally, to try to understand the insidious power of its propaganda.

What Denis’ film is concerned with is the visceral bodily experience and the claustrophobia of living in the middle of the infinite. If outer space is a cold and vast external of nothingness, then there is also an interior space of bodies, living, writhing, and fluid.

Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency is a sombre, layered study of the human cost of capital punishment. One of this era’s most powerful actors, Alfre Woodard, leads with one of her best, most understated performances yet.

As far as film theory goes, it’s hardly revolutionary, but as science fiction, Nope is smart and entertaining as we’ve come to expect from an increasingly captivating filmmaker.

Polley is not especially subtle in her allegory, and nor does she need to be: the exceptionally well-made Women Talking gets to the point in its sheer, righteous invective.

In seeking to understand both abuser and abused, Slalom offers a truly nuanced picture of abuse without sacrificing indictment.

The Harder They Come‘s two defining traits – violence and style – inform almost all of Ivan’s behaviour as he adopts the fashions and nihilism of the heroes of American and European cinema. Yet the world around him remains dully ambivalent and cruel in ways more complex and unpredictable than the characters he replicates.

Olga’s final sequences suggest a hope for the future, but there is an underlying irony to the superficially-peaceful imagery, rendered horribly prophetic in the current moment.

This is pop-punk filmmaking – vibrant, disposable, and shallow. Still, it’s difficult to care about the nutritional content of your confectionary when it tastes this sweet.

All Light, Everywhere is, most importantly, a history of our technological attempts to offer objective views of the world. But instead of charting our striving to capture of reality, what is revealed is its fabrication.

John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film is a stately and moving depiction of the man’s capacity for dignity and improvement.

Not only does it represent some of Sorkin’s best work for years, but in this time of civil unrest and with the dark clouds of November nearly upon is, this reminder of the right to resist the state could not be timelier.

In all this, there is an implicit if undeveloped criticism of the way that power and capital are so often the spoils of posturing masculine insecurity.

This western-tinged, visceral Icelandic drama deserves as large an audience as possible.

The Temple’s antics are a hilarious middle finger to the establishment, while, their stand against hypocrisy and the Evangelical Right’s blatantly theocratic mission to take control of the levers of power feels vital.

A stylish and fitfully engaging crime thriller with a great concept, let down by incoherent plotting and impenetrable characterisation.

What keeps Green's film just about on the right side of rote is a trio of solid performances, a sensitive, fair portrayal of Jeff's relationship with Erin with some standout scenes between the two, and a focus on the personal over the political.

Pearl is notable as a pandemic film, situating itself in the middle of the Spanish flu outbreak, though much like its engagement with sex, violence and entertainment, and its treatment of women, the film sets the table for a discussion but doesn’t quite make a full meal of it.

Paris, 13th District is a paean to the freedoms, the heartaches and the confusion of singledom.

A searing indictment of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism. Inherit the Wind’s relevance continues beyond its immediate parallels with McCarthyism.

The Kindergarten Teacher evokes sadness and horror in equal measure, but not always a great deal of understanding.

Albert Serra’s latest is a hazy fever dream of post colonialist politics and ambition that in its final minutes lurches into apocalyptic mania.

Largely uninterested in the humanity of its characters, too often Sigurðsson is content to skewer his subjects without trying to understand them.

A flawed film to be sure, but one with flashes of inspiration, occasionally stunning visuals and a Shakespearean sense of claustrophobia.

Benedetta has its cake and eats it, with gratuitous nudity and violence offered up to the audience as a base feast for the eyes. Yet in this indulgence, Benedetta eschews simplistic moralising in favour of a complex vision of female sexuality that is as problematic as it is compelling.

Pleasure is not a morally proscriptive film and seeks neither to venerate nor condemn pornography, but to depict its hollowing effect on those who make it. The film’s title is not accidental; at a time when porn is freely and ubiquitously available, the price of gratification may be cheap, but there is always a cost to be paid.

A Chiara is arguably Carpignano’s most accomplished work to date, pressing ever further into the interior psychologies of his characters.

Civil War, though imperfect, is a biting, satirical blockbuster that is as much about the alienation of modern media as it is about imagining a second American Civil War.

This is vital filmmaking; Blindspotting is undoubtedly part of a new moment in American cinema and is a fierce, complex satire in it own right.

In its surreal rendering of space and character, Fingers in the Wind offers enough ambition, intelligence and unvarnished authenticity to warrant recommendation.

Elevating silliness to the level of profundity, House doesn’t so much serve its swirling madness to you as it dunks your head into a cauldron full of it.

Among all the violence, body horror and Giger-esque sexuality, Titane’s most surprising quality is its tenderness.

Grander in scope than any of Villeneuve’s work yet, Dune is proper, ambitious blockbuster filmmaking for grown-ups.

Labyrinth of the Turtles is a charming and occasionally moving love letter to the legendary Spanish-Mexican surrealist, and at a spry 80 minutes, doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Though its 60s-inspired, Gilliam-esque animation style is certainly awkward enough to draw the notice of the arthouse and indie crowds, Cryptozoo’s storytelling and themes fail to come up to the complexity of even a middling Pixar effort.

Though the grins, laughter and cheering of the film’s climax is a little too heavy on the sweetness, it’s a harder heart than mine that would fail to be just a little moved by Bunton’s speech about our dependence on one another.

Later remade as The Bird Cage, this first adaptation of Jean Poiret’s play is as moving as it is hilarious in its depiction of moral hypocrisy and familial love.

Structured in parts like a thriller, Sweat is truly most successful as a character study, while its representation of social media gives rise to a nuanced understanding of contemporary anxieties over isolation and intimacy.

Beast is rough around the edges but as a feature debut marks out its director as one of the most intriguing new talents in British filmmaking.

Bad Luck Banging may appear to be deeply cynical of human nature, but in fact its real targets are the flimsy discourses that we build to obscure and justify our baser urges, couched in illusions of history and morality.

Queen & Slim is consciously political – powerfully so – but it is simple human survival that drives the two protagonists.

Fundamentally, On the Rocks understands that the rich complexity of long-term relationships – both paternal and spousal – can never truly be captured, only gestured towards. The result, on screen, is deeply warm, funny and comforting, and among Coppola’s finest work.

The screenplay balances the big narrative beats that this kind of broad crowd pleaser demands, along with posing more difficult social questions to which there are no easy answers.

Spaceship Earth deftly captures the sincere wonder and optimism of those who believed in the project. There’s simply no denying the sheer ambition of the damn thing, let alone that they more or less pulled it off.

Conceived, written, shot and released all in the early months of the Covid crisis and taking place entirely on a Zoom call, Host is about as contemporary – and chilling – as it gets.

Precision, energy, and innovation move the components of John Wick, but the synergy that comes from their singular motion transcends mechanistic clockwork into vital, aesthetic flow.

Kline perfectly captures the out-of-jointness of our age, defined by a generation caught by social and economic decline in a state of permanent instability.

This biopic is a well-mounted and handsomely shot study of men obsessed by their work, but never fully hits top gear.

Journey’s End is a worthy adaptation, offering a sombre psychological depiction of innocence lost.

Andrésen became an overnight worldwide sensation and, through the lens of documentarians Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri, an object lesson in the exploitation of children by the entertainment industry.

Despite its bland paperback title, French writer-director Stéphane Demoustier proves hasty assumptions wrong with his gripping, thoughtful third feature, courtroom drama The Girl with a Bracelet.

Fire Will Come is of an enigmatic and poetic cinema, borne of fierce, barely-contained vision.

The film uses the Troubles and Brexit to frame its understanding of the past and the present. Brady suggests a liminal psychological space – much like the liminal political space that Brexit created – through which Lauren and Kelly’s traumas move and, perhaps, can be understood.

The grimy, crime-ridden cesspool of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s is a well-worn cinematic setting, but in her debut 1982 feature Smithereens, indie director Susan Seidelman used guerilla filmmaking techniques and a faux-documentary style to unearth the vitality and the verve of urban life at the bottom.

Herzog has a knack for extracting pithy, poetic responses from his subjects, but here he outdoes himself.

An uneasy and messy union of genre and arthouse, Possessor disturbs, thrills and eludes us in equal measure.

Just as we feel that we have grasped the truth behind the image, it vanishes into thin air: The Real Charlie Chaplin is a Sisyphean task of the directors’ own making.

Aster has concocted a weird mixture of dread, black humour and pathos, conjuring sympathy for the devil in a feverish hallucination.

Okuno’s Watcher is smart, engaging and intelligent, and it’s especially refreshing to see this sort of mid-budget, grown-up genre film getting a proper theatrical release.

By situating the film in the context of domestic abuse, Whannel avoids cliché by evoking the way that distressed women are routinely treated as irrational and disreputable – a theme carried through to the film’s inspired conclusion.

The film is strongest in its first half but the double act between Wright and Pattinson sustains throughout: never has the Bat-Gordon partnership been so well-realised. Inevitably the door is left open for sequels, but The Batman stands up as an incredibly satisfying, grown-up vision of its own.

Endless drone shots, perspective switches and too many CGI animals undercut any grit or claustrophobia that Trachtenberg – director of the brilliant 10 Cloverfield Lane – might otherwise have crafted. Meanwhile, the interminable score refuses to quiet down and let the images or emotions speak for themselves.

No Way Home feels like a full and complete film in a way that earlier MCU entries failed to. No Way Home takes a cynical corporate elevator pitch and uses it to examine what it means to be Spider-Man in a world where Holland’s Peter isn’t the only hero.

A rollicking masterclass in escalating tension.

The film’s doggedly chronological structure – at odds with its ostensible privileging of psychology over history – sometimes leaves its personal observations feeling superficial.

This version of Emma. is unlikely to win any accolades for invention. Indeed the 1996 film Clueless arguably remains the most exciting version of Austen’s novel. Nevertheless, de Wilde’s version is a confident and lively translation of Austen’s wit on to the screen.

Teemu Nikki's Euthanizer reveals itself to be an affecting examination of cruelty.

With Sorkin's signature whip-crack dialogue driving an astonishingly assured directorial debut, Molly's Game is an exhilarating, superbly crafted crime drama.