Christopher Machell

In sensual romantic drama Simple Passion, Lebanese-born director Danielle Arbid captures viscerally that peculiar detachment that comes from romantic and sexual infatuation.

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 faultlessly fun genre picture.

A rollicking masterclass in escalating tension.

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.

An unsure narrative hampers Age of Innocence’s ability to stand with the director’s more assured work, yet Scorsese’s period drama is a deeply cinematic experience, at once beautiful, oppressive and rich.

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

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.

A Night of Knowing Nothing is a celebration not merely of resistance, but also of joy and art as a political act in the face of despair.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Chaplin built his reputation of finding the poignant humour in poverty, and many screwball comedies of the sound era invariably touched on the Depression, none more so than Gregory La Cava’s 1936 My Man Godfrey.

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.

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.

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.

Oyate isn’t an extraordinary documentary, but in telling the story of some of the United States’ most marginalised and persecuted people, it is certainly an important one.

With One Fine Morning, celebrated French director Mia Hansen-Løve presents complementary accounts of infatuation, love, and loss in a nuanced, moving study of the ways that love can sustain and consume us.

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.

Like the best film noir, with which this in undoubtedly in dialogue, Trenque Lauquen is a film about affect and textural cohesion moreso than logic and catharsis.

Through a series of vignettes hung together by the widow of a noodle chef, this ramen-western explores how the pleasure and meaning we derive from food are vital and enriching components in the human experience.

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

Argentinian director Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen is an enigmatic, semi-absurdist puzzle that defies the allure of narrative solution in favour of the liberation of loose ends.