Christopher Machell

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.