Christopher Machell

Vesper is throughout a gripping post-apocalypse fable. Despite its mythological derivations, Buozyte and Samper’s world, grounded in blood, mud and viscera, is often uncomfortably close to our own.

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.

This is strong work for a debut feature, and while not presenting assisted suicide itself with the greatest of nuance, Plan 75 is an accomplished portrait of capitalist alienation.

Julia’s journey is one of nihilism having transformed into a quest for meaning: Rodeo’s final image speaks to both of these impulses.

La Mif refuses to proselytise on the moral character of its subjects; Lora’s terrible confession to the girls at the film’s climax is played not for tabloid revelation, but as a final expression of the flaws inherent in ourselves and the systems we depend on to protect us.

While Binoche is reliably magnetic and the fitfully pretty visuals match a ripped-from-the-headlines script, Who You Think I Am’s pot never quite comes to the boil.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa is at once a deeply satirical depiction of Hollywood and a sumptuous saga of the rise and fall of a star.

Del Toro’s latest ventures away from fantasy, revealing the monsters in this fable to be all too human.

More than a casual swipe at modern social trends, Rotting in the Sun exposes a kind of cruelty, alienation, and social stratification that is only as modern as the technology through which it expresses itself.

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.

While Sicilian Ghost Story doesn’t entirely fulfil its promise as a richly themed gothic romance, the visual craft on display throughout is more than enough to recommend.

The Defiant Ones combines Stanley Kramer’s trademark liberal politics with a picaresque adventure that is deftly entertaining, tense and heartfelt.

Aside from the film’s more immediate pleasures, what is perhaps most intriguing about Why Don’t You Just Die! is Sokolov’s almost visible attempt to find his own voice: among this melange of film-school influences, it’s undoubtedly there, though perhaps it hasn’t quite formed yet.

Only the Animals remains a highly satisfying and gripping thriller that, like the best of them, finds the time to properly contemplate the depths of its dominoes as they are arranged before the capricious hand of chance gleefully knocks them down, one by one.

If for no other reason than its place in comedy history, Here Comes Mr. Jordan is interesting, if dispensable viewing.

Nathan Grossman charts her rise in this perfectly enjoyable but ultimately unpersuasive and shallow documentary.

The fear of old age’s erosion of our faculties, our agency and our relevance is a potent, almost paralysing one: the way we perceive and treat our elders invariably reveals something about ourselves. In her charming and off-kilter documentary The Mole Agent, Chilean director Maite Alberdi confronts that fear literally through the eyes of her subject.

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

The In-Laws, while not quite a classic is a terrifically inventive and consistently funny comedy, with an oft-imitated but rarely matched star chemistry.

Youth is as sentimental as it is accomplished, but Xiaogang's mastery both of broad sweep and intimate detail proves an impressive feat.

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

The editing, too, is rough around the edges, but it all adds to the sense of madness that pervades El Salvador – a sense that only grows the more intense the further that Boyle journeys into this Central American heart of darkness.

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

A charming, deadpan study of national identities, an idiosyncratic love letter to his home and an unvarnished tribute to life’s universal absurdities.

Sharing its name with a 1950 Joan Crawford film, The Damned Don’t Cry has thematic resonance with its namesake as a study of women’s vulnerability in a patriarchal society and the criminalising of marginalised lives.

Herzog doesn’t quite hit the mark here: Family Romance’s denouement is certainly moving but its depiction of Ishii’s emotional conflict is undercooked and perhaps even a little trite. Nevertheless, on a formal level, it’s a fascinating study of the artifice of the genre, a deconstruction of the comforting contract between artist and viewer that guides us towards a particular kind of emotional or intellectual engagement.

The film as a whole is neither scary nor particularly interested in the nature of its ‘monster’, though it is undoubtedly strange and often unsettling.

Pieces may not be in the same league as the slasher classics but fans of the genre will find much to enjoy in this knowingly silly exercise in day-glo splatter.

Once again, it’s an unadulterated pleasure to watch Chan and his stunt team at work, jumping, contorting and throwing the human form around in ways that simply don’t seem possible.

Funny, exciting, and a little too long, Drunken Master is as charming as it is unbalanced, but its martial arts choreography remains unmatched.

Garrel’s The Innocent deftly mixes comic family melodrama with genre thrills in this pacy, emotive thriller with a killer cast.

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

While The Five Devils doesn’t quite have the clarity of vision of her previous picture, its emotion, erotically-charged themes and puzzle-box structure leave much to recommend.

As the credits roll on one of the most spectacular and unengaging films of the year, The Way of Water’s vision is as clear as mud. As Cameron has become more fascinated with the technology of storytelling, it seems he’s become less so by the actual storytelling.

William Golding’s tale of public schoolboys stranded on a desert island is an iconic depiction of fundamental savagery. More than fifty years on, Peter Brook’s 1963 Lord of the Flies remains the definitive film, its hallucinogenic brutality as terrifying as ever.

Sadly, despite some cultish potential this aptly-titled debut feature is indeed a lost cause: an incoherent, undisciplined and tedious mess with little about it to truly recommend.

The film ultimately ends up feeling like a shaggy dog story – a metaphor for Ted Kennedy, perhaps – engaging, charismatic, but ending with a whimper.

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.

As a mechanism the film functions very well indeed – but as a film, as “a machine that generates empathy” as Roger Ebert had it, Quantumania falls vastly short. Still, one might argue that we do not board roller coasters expecting art, and so as an entertainment at that level it is hard to deny that this latest entry fulfils its purpose handsomely, providing all the thrills and spills of the fair.

Calm with Horses’ driving concern – the corrosive nature of violence on the self – is rendered in brutal, empathic precision, while the recovery of its protagonist’s humanity as it teeters on the cliff edge is simply heartbreaking.

As just another entry in the MCU, Wakanda Forever is a very solid film. Entertaining and intelligent, it builds on the themes of its predecessor. Yet, navigating more than defying the Marvel machine, Coogler’s sequel becomes more than the sum of its parts. And so Wakanda Forever’s most important legacy is as a fine and fitting tribute to its erstwhile hero.

As moving and timely as The Final Year is, it doesn’t quite hit these marks.

The footage of Leclerc ascending sheer, near-featureless sheets of rock is so defiant of physics that it is easy to forget just how mind-bogglingly dangerous it is.

As a historical account it is unvarnished without feeling dry or academic, and as a coded satire of the contemporary British political climate it is urgent and deeply impassioned.

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.

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.

As a neo-noir Holy Spider offers a tightly-woven procedural crime thriller, bolstered by a superb central performance from Amir-Ebrahimi and gorgeous, lurid aesthetics. A steadier hand marshalling its themes and a more disciplined third act might have tipped Abbasi’s third feature into being something truly special: as it stands we are left a very solid, smart and satisfying thriller.

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.

There are glimmers of a more complex, empathetic film here: the main cast do fine work with what they’ve got and the film’s apparent detachment from its characters mirrors the empty indifference that often characterises depression. But any potential for complexity is undone by the film’s tacky reveals, mawkish speechifying and its often spiteful approach to its own characters.

Infinity War will likely be first choice for the summer season crowd, but Deadpool 2 wins hands down in terms of personal stakes and visual flair.

A sumptuously shot, nostalgic bildungsroman framed by a bitttersweet darkness, the film deploys many well-worn tropes of the coming of age drama. But they’re executed with such a light, self-aware confidence that Summer of ’85 has wit, warmth and charm to spare.

There’s little here to surprise anyone with a passing familiarity with the story, and its creepiest elements sometimes feel neutered. It may be heresy, but the body-horror of the Land of Toys and sublime terror of the whale were imagined far more viscerally in the Disney version.

As a comedy about contemporary American society it feels weirdly anachronistic, with an uninspired story told with little urgency or novelty.

In politics and the media, opportunistic hate-mongers whip up bigotry against gender non-conformity, while everyone in contemporary cinema is beautiful but no one is horny. In this context, Please Baby Please is a vision inspired by the past, but is undoubtedly a document of the present.

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?

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.

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.

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

A little overlong and lacking the thematic clout to justify its knotty plot, Atomic Blonde is nevertheless an exhilarating, visceral actioner, more than making up for its flaws with a surfeit of verve and style.

As a fable Amerikatsi hits the big emotional notes: it’s an American tale in reverse, told sincerely and personally. Sentimental, yes, simplistic too, but also honest and even affirming.

With LaBeouf giving the performance of his career and a well-told story that hits all the right beats, Borg vs McEnroe may just well go down as a great tennis film.

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.

The franchise reboot we never knew we needed, Resurrections is a wonderfully strange and baffling film, less of a fourth entry in an ongoing saga and more a personal reflection on the original trilogy.

Beyond its gender-swapped lead role, Peter von Kant never truly ventures into new territory and so never quite justifies its own existence.

Much of this documentary sequel to to Thomas Balmès’ 2013 film Happiness is beautiful and humane, but is more often simplistic and questionable in its exploration of the impact of technology on a traditional society.

In its totality Ava is a powerful and authentic depiction of a vital moment in a young woman’s life.

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.

Depicting a fictional uprising in an unnamed Mexican city, New Order ably depicts the terror, confusion and violence of political revolution, but stops short of offering meaningful context.

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.

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.

A faultlessly fun genre picture.

Una is undoubtedly a difficult watch, and its moral ambivalence may be beyond the pale for some. But the sensitivity with which it treats its subjects and the nuance that the film brings to the most incendiary of debates is admirable.

A Glitch in the Matrix’s incuriosity and unstructured approach to its material at best mirror its subjects’ modes of thinking; at worst, it is little more than a voyeuristic freak show.

It’s not that Abigail is terrible: all its pieces slip together where they should, but its for all its excessive violence and gore it is a dull, lifeless experience.

No amount of tight corridors and shots of CCTV monitors ever make protagonist Tatyana feel in peril: this, far more than derivative monsters and confusing themes, is Sputnik’s fatal error.

Six films in, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett deserve credit for crafting two set pieces that manage to emphasise their characters’ vulnerability and paralysing fear in surprising and unique ways.

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.

Bitch Ass is an off-the-shelf genre flick with some decent ideas and a fun cast, sadly lacking in sufficient inspiration or originality to merit recommendation.

Is Raimi’s latest effort as rich as Spider-Man 2, as revolutionary as The Evil Dead or as fun as Drag Me to Hell? No. But within the self-imposed confines of the studio machine, Multiverse of Madness is about as entertaining as it’s possible to be.