Christopher Machell

Sea Fever proves better in concept than in execution, let down by a second act of fumbled editing and slackened tension.

A visceral, Atwoodian journey, The Other Lamb is as much an examination of narcissism and the existing structures of gendered power as it is of the limits of faith.

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

A work of astonishing aesthetic beauty, made up of static compositions and use of chiaroscuro that recalls the Dutch masters.

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.

Read as a loose adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Little Joe is a gripping and visually striking satire of essentialist maternal instinct and the contemporary anxiety of wellbeing.

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.

One of Birds of Prey’s great pleasures is that it tells a Gotham story without having to tell the Gotham story: the adventures of Harley Quinn and associates are not at the centre of some grand narrative, and they are all the better for it.

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

To the Ends of the Earth is a light, airy and fun journey with flashes of poetry.

The Rise of Skywalker offers us nothing but toadying supplication to the worst aspects of fan culture. There is no story to tell here, no characters to care about, no ideas to explore. The film is pure construct, a box built for its own sake, at long last opened with excruciating listlessness, revealing nothing but its own vapid emptiness.

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.

The Cave is a raw, urgent film about one of the great humanitarian crimes of our times, made all the starker for the utter lack of a global response.

With The Irishman, Scorsese offers us his first truly autumnal film – a picture about age’s slow, inevitable decline. There are the signature dolly shots, the period pop music, the bursts of brutality, but there is also a frail melancholy we have rarely glimpsed in even his statelier films.

In giving rope to Bannon and hoping that he’ll hang himself, we’re instead forced to watch him fashion a lasso and play at being John Wayne, with Morris seemingly powerless to stop him.

Memory certainly makes a good go of it, weaving together industrial production history with its mythic, pulp and artistic inspirations. The disparate strands of Alien’s origins have never quite been connected like this in a popular documentary, but billing this as the “untold story” of Scott’s film is a bit of a stretch.

Subsumed by the bigger picture, the plot resurfaces at the end to utterly devastating effect. Only a film with the epic sweep of So Long, My Son could pull off such a narrative feat so beautifully.

Saint Maud is the dive into obsession, isolation and urban deprivation that you need right now.

From five years-worth of footage, al-Kateab constructs a narrative of astonishing humanity, clarity and urgency, capturing a global outrage from the perspective of the human and individual.

As both director and performer, Waititi is on top form.

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.

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.

If there is any real complaint to be levelled at Color Out of Space, it’s that it has more ideas than it knows what to do with.

Despite its lunkish, ludicrous – and frankly cynical – qualities, this entry retains much of the appeal of previous entries.

A Jarmusch joint through and through, The Dead Don’t Die is as charming, affected and perplexing as we’ve come to expect from the long-time darling of US indie cinema.

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

In drawing on a melange of influences, Ho’s film succeeds in using fractured time as way of puzzling together the essential drives that move a city and its inhabitants.

Taking its cues from the cinema of Dario Argento and Italian horror, In Fabric, gives audiences the best British horror film since Don’t Look Now.

Far From Home nails its characters, chemistry and sense of humour, while fumbling the action and visuals.

It is dull, cynical and utterly mirthless.

While not entirely successful, the film’s sense of finality gives the main players space to grow, unhampered by the usual carousel of upcoming sequels and spin-offs.

Whether one can get on board with such nonsense determines the subjective success or failure of King of the Monsters.

Hawkins smartly keeps the details of Mannings’ leaks – both in their content and the manner of their distribution – to a tight segment at the film’s mid-point. The effect is to create space for the film to explore something altogether messier and contentious – Manning’s identities as a trans woman and a political activist, and the problematic, even dangerous, ways that her private self and public persona relate.

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.

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

Ash Is Purest White’s is an epic spanning decades and vast geography that ultimately gives way to the intimate and personal.

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

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.

Shazam!’s candy-floss sweetness rarely fails to hit the spot.

Us is a true genre flick, polished to a fine degree, a pure distillation of the essence of horror cinema.

A super sweet, affecting comedy with a magical premise and a terrific central performance from Larson herself.

Aside from its unremarkable presentation, Ben Is Back’s major hurdle, and the one that it never manages to clear, is that it’s yet another story of a rich, white young man wasting his future.

Accessible to newbies and satisfying to fans, it’s way past time that brilliant performers like Larson were given their time in the spotlight. But Marvel, please, can we sort out the colour?

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

Despite a few sentimental missteps and a second-act move away from horror that will upset some hoping for more slashing, Happy Death Day 2U is a fluffy and surprisingly smart, if shallow, tumble through genre tropes.

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.

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

As much a repudiation of auteur theory as a tribute to the imperfect process of creation, One Cut of the Dead is a thrilling reminder that of the beautiful, vital lie that is cinema.

Despite its myriad issues, Glass is often a hoot to watch – particularly once Elijah comes out of his self-induced fugue to wreak havoc on the facility, with Jackson hamming it up with infectious relish, bouncing off the gurning McAvoy.

At the film’s centre are three irresistable performances.

Perischetti, Ramsey and Rothman’s picture is an irresistible treat throughout, an unadulterated confection crafted with wit, vivacity and heart.

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

Rocky has always lived and died on its direct, unsubtle sincerity. It’s in these heartfelt moments where Creed II flies, underpinning its thoughtful climax and one of the series’ most surprisingly moving endings.

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.

Piece by piece, Assassination Nation lays out and deconstructs the misogynistic assumptions that underpin many of our reactions to the girls’ behaviour.

Outlaw King is proof positive that Pine is one of the most underestimated actors in modern cinema.

Possum’s evocation of wrongness, that unbalancing feeling that something is off – if only you could put your finger on it – lingers long after its overdetermined climax has resolved.

Caniba offers no trite explanations or condemnations of Sagawa. Instead, we are offered a small window into his reality.

Equal parts arthouse cinema and coming-of-age drama, the influence of his tribute to teen rebellion remains deeply felt.

We all know how this story ends, but in this fable of astronomic ambition it’s about the journey, not the destination.

A Faithful Man may tip its hat to the conventions of film noir – Abel as the patsy, Marianne as the femme fatale – but Garrel’s winking sensibility is far too fun for real darkness. Instead, he gives us a wonderful soufflé of a film – light, airy, and a rare treat.

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.

While Kursk doesn’t have the sufficient depth required for a truly effective historical drama it certainly works as a well-mounted and occasionally gripping, if somewhat formulaic thriller.

There are few outright surprises in Maya, and though things proceed roughly as we might expect there is a deeper sort of emotional revelation that comes from letting the story proceed on its own terms.

Free Solo goes some way to explaining just why someone would want to do such a thing, but is ultimately more captivated by the vicarious thrill of watching Honnold do his thing.

Genre film or not, Davis’ depiction of profound grief is tremendously effective, elicited by McQueen’s audacious direction.

The film’s biggest weakness is its reluctance to interrogate the personas of its supporting characters.

What begins as an intriguing premise is gradually squandered, used as little more as background noise for comic tics and lazy characterisation.

Out of Blue undeniably works as a stylish, psychological neo-noir, but significantly less so as metaphysical rumination.

While it may be a little better in concept than in execution, there’s enough energy, imagination and innovation here to satisfy any genre hound suffering fatigue from the endless wash, rinse, repeat cycle of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, et al.

With the imperfect but fascinating Endzeit, director Carolina Hellsgård ultimately guides her ravenous wanderers down an original and largely unbeaten track.

If Beale Street Could Talk is a rich, tender and poetic film as much about love as it is about injustice.

The Oscar-nominated Hedges is, as one would expect, superb in the title role, but performances across the board are excellent.

His scattershot approach means that the film frequently wanders off topic, in pursuit of a litany of social, economic and political injustices.

Far from perfect, and very rarely offering us anything unexpected, Beautiful Boy is nevertheless a well-mounted depiction of the terrible cycle of substance abuse.