Christopher Machell

Although 12 Angry Men dismays at human weakness, it is fundamentally an optimistic film, celebrating reason and basic human decency in equal measure. In an era when both seem in short supply, Lumet’s film is a reminder that there is never a bad time to stand up for what is right.

Rocks is a faultlessly authentic study of contemporary young life in the inner city.

Collective is a brilliant documentary in its own right, but in this time of pandemic, scandal and democratic upheaval it is also the year’s most important.

His Girl Friday is satire of the highest order.

The director's technical mastery finally transcends craft to become art and, as a result, this is his best film to date.

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.

Past Lives, a film about love, friendship and fate, is an astonishing debut from South Korean-Canadian director Celine Song, and a devastatingly romantic one at that.

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.

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.

A lovingly observed, pitch perfect coming-of-age comedy, Gerwig's warm, astute account of the end of adolescence is a stunning solo debut.

Panahi’s courageousness as an agitator is matched only by his inventiveness as a filmmaker.

Detached, hypnotic and often oblique, the dreamlike Memoria is sure to enchant and mystify in equal measure.

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.

Drive My Car is not most films, its story told in minute, passing details that cannot help but grip the attention to the point that the emotional tension and catharsis feel so effortless that hours seem to pass in an instant. That very little happens in the way of narrative action speaks to how brilliantly Hamaguchi harnesses the emotions of his characters into compelling drama.

Rian Johnson’s film is the real deal, a bold, risky venture unafraid to tell its own story, freed from the weight of nostalgia and formula.

At the film’s centre are three irresistable performances.

A joyous, hazy and nostalgia-inflected romantic drama.

What we are left with instead is a story of astonishing tenderness; a study of love as a tempering salve to the sublime of history’s passing.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

At almost four hours in length, Mr. Bachmann and His Class is long, but its enormous characters and emotions more than fill the space, headed by an astonishingly charismatic and inspiring teacher in Dieter Bachmann.

Even the film’s weaknesses – a penchant for melodrama and a tendency towards the hysterical – work as remnants of their time and betray an earnest effort to emphasise with the characters and their heightened do-or-die mentality.

Conceptually, Azor, is brilliant and its dreamlike editing that joins one meeting to the next with little connective tissue is often intriguing. But as a viewing experience, it is roundly obtuse with a repetitious, meandering narrative.

In his astonishingly assured debut feature, French playwright-turned-director Florian Zeller handles the mental decline of an elderly man with sensitivity and insight.

Veteran Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, Parallel Mothers, is as much about his enduring fascination with motherhood as it is the capacity to heal through our connections to the past.