Christopher Machell

While Duarte and Stockler’s deeply-felt turns anchor the film from drifting into simplistic sentimentality, Hélène Louvart’s sumptuous cinematography elevates the script’s high-flung emotion with spaces that are often dreamlike; light is tangible like a haze, colours deep and tactile, and characters are glimpsed and doubled through screens, glass and mirrors, and Benedikt Schiefer’s classical score tenderly fills out and gives detail to the broader emotional brushstrokes.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’ vérité style belies a quasi-staged reality that challenges the distinction between fiction and documentary, studying the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world.

As a purely aesthetic cinematic experience, Beginning will surely number among the best of the year.

Great Freedom’s non-linear narrative is a worthy device for character development, allowing us to piece together a friendship that begins in suspicion and homophobia but develops over decades into something approaching love. But more than that, it is an expression of the shadows that the past casts over the present, the way that time and place weave themselves together, and their inevitable inescapability as well as how to resist them.

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.

Ever the craftsperson, rarely the artist, Nolan has constructed a grand and terrible machine, a fascinating object of cinema and a deeply frustrating work of imagination.

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

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.

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.

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.

Though Mudbound represent a period of injustice consigned to history, its examination of a toxic, racist masculinity stuck in the past could hardly be more relevant today.

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

On its own terms, M:I-7 is a superbly-crafted action thriller.

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.

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.

Dear Comrades! works well as an historical drama, a political satire and even a cold-war thriller. It’s brilliance, however, lies in its study of the profound cognitive dissonance that comes of all totalitarian systems.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A deeply felt, loving tribute to a truly remarkable woman.

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.

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

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.

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.

Sound of Metal is an astonishing accomplishment for both its long-nascent director and its British star, Riz Ahmed, for whom his turn as heavy metal drummer Ruben represents a career-best performance.c