Christopher Machell

Happening is a naturalistic, heart-breaking and relentless account of the multiple traumas and injustices that cascade when women are denied their basic bodily autonomy.

What is most satisfying about the film is its full and non-ironic commitment to a ludicrously operatic masculinity. There is surely no other way to end such a piece than the way it does.

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.

Prayers for the Stolen is fundamentally an account of powerlessness, of the insidious ways that forces act invisibly, immeasurably, and often horrifically on those with the least ability to resist them.

Setting his film largely on the dingy confines of an overnight train, Kuosmanen kindles a tender love story between two lost souls.

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 rollicking masterclass in escalating tension.

Olga’s final sequences suggest a hope for the future, but there is an underlying irony to the superficially-peaceful imagery, rendered horribly prophetic in the current moment.

Paris, 13th District is a paean to the freedoms, the heartaches and the confusion of singledom.

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.

The film is strongest in its first half but the double act between Wright and Pattinson sustains throughout: never has the Bat-Gordon partnership been so well-realised. Inevitably the door is left open for sequels, but The Batman stands up as an incredibly satisfying, grown-up vision of its own.

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.

Though the grins, laughter and cheering of the film’s climax is a little too heavy on the sweetness, it’s a harder heart than mine that would fail to be just a little moved by Bunton’s speech about our dependence on one another.

Just as we feel that we have grasped the truth behind the image, it vanishes into thin air: The Real Charlie Chaplin is a Sisyphean task of the directors’ own making.

Petrov’s Flu finds its meaning through sensation, memory and aesthetics, depicting social and political decay in its purest form stripped of the comforting scaffolding of linear narrative.

Telling the story of women bound by oppression, Lingui, The Sacred Bonds is an astonishing film of female resistance and survival.

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.

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

A near-wordless study of dairy cow Luma’s life and shot from a bovine-eye view, Cow resists the urge to anthropomorphise Luma while eliciting deep empathy for this non-human animal.

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

A joyous, hazy and nostalgia-inflected romantic drama.

Among all the violence, body horror and Giger-esque sexuality, Titane’s most surprising quality is its tenderness.

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.

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.

No Way Home feels like a full and complete film in a way that earlier MCU entries failed to. No Way Home takes a cynical corporate elevator pitch and uses it to examine what it means to be Spider-Man in a world where Holland’s Peter isn’t the only hero.

Suffice to say, There Is No Evil is a deeply felt study of the effects of state violence on the individual. While the cost of resistance is high, the price of compliance may well be greater.

Bad Luck Banging may appear to be deeply cynical of human nature, but in fact its real targets are the flimsy discourses that we build to obscure and justify our baser urges, couched in illusions of history and morality.

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.