Clarisse Loughrey

The mind, too often, moulds memories into prophecies. Colours get dialled up. Emotions solidify. It’s a hard thing to talk about, let alone visualise. That’s why Aftersun, the debut of Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, is so astounding. She’s captured the uncapturable, finding the words and images to describe a feeling that always seems to sit just beyond our comprehension.

Does she actually love Hae Sung? The answer to that question eludes Nora, Past Lives, and the director herself, as Song’s script allows these strikingly mature and reasonable adults to work through some very difficult emotions.

It’s a film that feels like a long exhale, the moment of unburdening after a tight embrace. It’s beautiful.

The film magnificently frames modern life as a world of illusions, where a busy life equates to a successful one and the gamble always pays off. It’s an almost punishingly chaotic film, though each line of overlapping dialogue and jittery camera move is carefully orchestrated.

Cate Blanchett swallows Tár whole and spits out bullets in return.

The Zone of Interest . . . issues a warning from just outside the walls of Auschwitz, spreading its soul-sickness across each frame.

It’s a film of overwhelmingly visceral emotion; impossible, then, to separate from what we imagine Panahi must feel himself. And yet, so often, we’ll see characters clamber over each other and wheel around their limbs like they’re in a Buster Keaton comedy.

A feat of full-bodied immersion, using a point-of-view camera, finely tuned sound design, and cinematic illusion to create a reality that takes hold of and then never quite leaves its audience’s souls.

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron contains multitudes. It is beautiful, tortured, whimsical, and stoic.

Madison takes a character trained by life to always pounce – on an opportunity or a threat – and subtly, but consistently, reveals to us her softness and her soul.

It’s not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There’s such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity.

There’s something to this film, and to director Alice Rohrwacher’s work at large, that feels as delicate, as enigmatic, and as spiritually charged as these millennia-old artefacts. It stirs up a fierce protectiveness in the viewer. Treasure this now, hold it, turn it, and examine it from all sides, or it may slip beyond your grasp.

The Worst Person in the World carries a shimmery feeling of definitiveness to it. It’s the rare piece of art actually invested in why an entire generation can seem so aimless and indecisive.

In Andrew Haigh’s melancholy ghost story, where real ghosts are out-haunted by words left unsaid, Scott, an actor of fierce intelligence, channels shrewdness into tragedy for the greatest performance of his career.

Cillian Murphy allows the light to dim from his eyes in every subsequent scene, but it is Robert Downey Jr who is titanic here.

Sorry, Baby is funny in that confrontational way where your body moves to laugh, but you feel a little guilty for letting it out. That’s life, though. Mining misfortune for a punchline is its own survival skill. And Victor doesn’t chase after subjectivity.

DiCaprio and De Niro are brilliant, but it is relative unknown Lily Gladstone who is truly extraordinary.

It spins out like a fairytale penned by someone midway through a stimulant-induced panic attack.

Hard Truths withholds catharsis, instead choosing simply to let the shutters swing open on its protagonist’s psyche for a brief interlude.

Parallel Mothers, in that way, brings a new sense of depth to Almodóvar’s gallery of fearless women – suggesting that their strength is not always by choice.

In short, it’s the life of Napoleon as only Scott can tell it, full of verve, spectacle, and machismo. Its battle scenes are thrilling, a throwback to the sort of spectacle no one in Hollywood – save, well, Ridley Scott – is interested in anymore. But it can be equally dispassionate, in a way that duly and accurately captures the man one contemporary described as “a chess master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity”.

Go back to your roots, we’re always told, and you’ll find your heart’s true home. But in Davy Chou’s daring and mesmeric Return to Seoul, an adoptee’s search for her birth parents tears open wounds and unearths neither meaning nor resolution.

The Banshees of the Inisherin is really a beautiful work to behold.

Oakley’s film ends on an ambiguous though hopeful note. Usually, this sort of conclusion risks coming across as a little mechanically inspirational. But Jean is a complicated sort of hero, full of indecision and regret. It’s something bracingly captured by McEwen, who plays her as someone in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight.

McDormand carves out a little space for anger, though underplaying her performance so early on gives her further to leap when Lady Macbeth must succumb to her eventual madness. But, if anything, it only adds to the terrible weight of inevitability that hovers over Coen’s film.

It’s hard not to be drawn in. That’s the trick of Anatomy of a Fall. Sandra is a fascinating, one-woman puzzle box, thanks largely to the strength of Hüller’s performance.

This is, dare I say it, how fan service should be done. It’s far easier to overlook the usual nostalgic pandering when it’s taken a backseat to genuine creativity.

I Saw the TV Glow speaks so powerfully to the curse of denial that the words “there is still time”, scrubbed in chalk on a suburban street, can have an almost magical effect on the viewer.

That’s the wonderful thing about The Lost Daughter – it embraces thorniness. It treats it not as a personality flaw but as a badge of survival. Sadness is lanced through the heart of Gyllenhaal’s film, which she both adapted and directed, but it’s rich and luxurious in its texture.

Sentimental Value doesn’t argue that art heals all wounds, but that it’s sometimes the only recourse for honest expression.

The irony of being intimately connected while desperately lonely can be a hard one to digest. Yet director Mia Hansen-Løve prods at the concept with the same tenderness that she applies to all her films – each of them united by the pains and pleasures of interconnectivity.

Park has a galvanising kind of curiosity behind the lens, pairing here with cinematographer Kim Woo Hyung. There’s always a new, unexpected angle to either watch Man Su or see his point of view.

Eisenberg fills that anxious blank space with genuine questions seeking genuine answers, delivered by the comforting typewriter patter of his own voice, and a poignant, wrecking ball performance by Culkin.

It preserves DreamWorks’s broad, direct appeals to sentimentality while weaving in a little more of the thematic maturity and subtlety you might see over at Ghibli or Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon.

Passing is as richly felt as it is carefully conceived.

What Lighton has achieved here is incredibly delicate, intuitive work, which never compromises on the story’s explicit nature or in the specificities of its subculture.

While the supporting cast are impeccable across the board, it’s really Blanchett and Fassbender’s film to command, with performances that drip with old-school star power.

Lovely, immaculate, and extremely faithful.

Spielberg’s motivation for The Fabelmans has little to do with cementing his own myth – it’s a more tender, more bittersweet journey towards the realisation that, though the camera never lies, what it shows us can be hard to swallow.

Torres, in her masterfully controlled performance, offers up all we could possibly require.

It’s a phenomenal performance from McAdams, subtle and gentle in its heartbreak.

Its opening monologue speaks of music’s ability to “pierce the veil between life and death”. Sinners, in all its beauty and horror, proves the same can be true of film.

Buckley, already a frontrunner for the Academy Award for Best Actress, lives up to all the chatter and more. Like Mescal, she’s well-placed to express Agnes’s particular grief.

Jacobs delicately toys with the boundaries between truth and artifice, between dishonesty and vulnerability. Our intimacy with these characters is earned by their own efforts to shed their steel-built defences. And it’s all the more rewarding for it.

Vengeance Most Fowl sees Aardman return to their tried-and-tested formula. Yet, it’s also the source of the studio’s continuing brilliance – somehow, the familiar always feels new, and the craftwork never tires.

The emotions in Janet Planet creep up on you.

Arjona matches Powell’s passions, while Linklater, with a touch of his signature nonchalance, sprinkles in a few of Gary’s classroom musings on whether people can truly change.

Is Noé suddenly feeling self-reflective? Not to be contrarian for the sake of it, but I struggle to find anything gentle or humanistic in Vortex. That’s what’s so mesmerising about it. It is the ringing of the death knell, a memento mori in action, and an alienating if ultimately deeply humbling experience for its audience.

We’re constantly reminded that there are hundreds more stories weaving in and out of these streets, existing beyond Yas and Dom’s. This romance is special. But it also sort of isn’t. It’s exactly the kind of hope the most lovelorn in Rye Lane’s audience might be looking for.

Rose of Nevada is Jenkin’s most conventional narrative film so far, which is to say it’s still filled to the brim with dreams, visions, and ambiguities. It’s a Cornish The Great Gatsby, in its own mesmeric way, though its boat bearing us back ceaselessly into the past is a literal one.

C’mon C’mon is a great big bear hug wrapped in celluloid.

It’s the most gripping sports movie in years.

It’s lovely, if a little practised. Yet, the real gutting here comes courtesy of the film’s miniature thesis on grief, and how privilege determines the channels of its pain.

It’s a big risk to spend that much cash on an auteur-driven historical epic at a time when historical epics have largely fallen by the wayside. But what a beautiful risk it is. I call upon Odin: may The Northman make a billion dollars.

Zach Cregger’s follow-up to the monstrous Airbnb hijinks of 2022’s Barbarian is easily as weird, wicked, and fun – what it’s not, however, is the chilly, nightmare headf**k we’ve been told it is.

Everything Everywhere All at Once exists in the outer wilds of the imagination, in the realm of lucid dreaming and liminal spaces. It bounces off familiar representations of altered states, whether it be The Matrix or the phantasmical films of Michel Gondry, while feeling entirely unclassifiable. It’s both proudly puerile, with a running joke about butt plugs, and breathlessly sincere about the daily toil of intergenerational trauma.

To reduce the film simply to its outlook on race ignores both its content and its message, as some of its most rewarding elements follow Monk back to his family, for a funny, touching portrait of a man attempting to fine-tune his relationship with the world.

It’s a film that’s lighter, brighter, and far more straightforwardly comic in approach, trading its predecessor’s shadowy, creaky Massachusetts mansion for the Mamma Mia splendour of a private Greek island. Knives Out may have bottled a cultural moment, but Glass Onion seems built for longevity: it’s populist entertainment with its head screwed on right. And there’s plenty of value in that.

You will leave Dead Reckoning the same way you always do: wondering how Cruise could possibly outdo himself in the next one – until inevitably, he does.

Benediction isn’t a cradle-to-grave biopic, nor does it dramatise a single, pivotal event. It’s one man’s breathless search, careening back and forth through the chapters of his life in search of something concrete and true. It’s beautiful, but only in the way it tends to its tragedies with such care.

Hermanus is more than happy for his film to live in the shadows of Kurosawa’s. There’s still much to savour.

Nitram is a stark, difficult, but deeply reflective film that asks sincerely why we describe these crimes as incomprehensible at the very same time as we watch the same patterns unfold, again and again.

It’s rich thematic territory for the series, and slowly amps up the audience’s anticipation for the moment these two finally cross paths. When they do, it’s spectacular and audacious.

Wake Up Dead Man extends its usual punchline denouement with a poignant examination of what it means to be truly righteous in an unrighteous world.

Fastvold circumnavigates the lack of historical evidence of Lee’s life by building on what is known via compassionate imagination.

When the inevitable comes for our protagonist, The Mastermind delivers it as one of the smartest, wryest punchlines of the year.

Passages is smart and precise about other people’s messes. It’s a way to indulge in the most volatile parts of ourselves without ever feeling like we’re about to lose control.

While it’s impossible for any studio film to be truly subversive, this Mattel-approved comedy gets away with far more than you’d think was possible.

The future presented in The Beast, Bertrand Bonello’s mesmeric blend of sci-fi, horror and romance, feels frighteningly plausible.

Arnold’s Cow is grimy and unvarnished where it counts, laced with poeticism whenever the banal cruelty threatens to leave its audience numb.

Nothing is off the table, really, ethically or psychoanalytically. Yet Babygirl isn’t guiding us confidently to some fixed destination. It’s simply feeling its way forward, orgasm by orgasm.

I wonder how much Soderbergh connects to the material there. He’s a filmmaker who almost moves too fast to be known. But I’m certain there’s a piece of his soul in The Christophers, if you look hard enough.

Part Two is as grand as it is intimate, and while Hans Zimmer’s score once again blasts your eardrums into submission, and the theatre seats rumble with every cresting sand worm, it’s the choice moments of silence that really leave their mark.

It’s such relentless comedy that it starts to imitate the beats of a horror film: when there’s no joke on screen, the body starts to tense up in anticipation of what’s inevitably around the corner. You leave the cinema half expecting somebody to have snuck a fart machine into your pocket.

What isn’t said in How to Have Sex, and what isn’t openly felt, is the stuff that really hurts.

Soderbergh may not have intended Kimi to be a film primarily about the pandemic, but it understands intimately what it’s felt like to live through it.

Official Competition may be yet another satire on filmmaking, but it’s the rare iteration that’s nuanced enough to understand that self-awareness does not equal absolution.

A Different Man layers idea onto idea, then inflates them to the point of satirical absurdity.

Top Gun: Maverick really isn’t packed with the kind of craven nostalgia that we’re used to these days. It’s smarter, subtler, and wholly more humanistic.

In the end, Dìdi favours sentimentality, but it doesn’t strictly feel as if it were shot through the distanced, nostalgic lens of a filmmaker in reflection.

As After Yang gently suggests, there’s no longer a way to conceive of ourselves that’s entirely detached from technology. Nerves and circuits, inevitably, all work towards the same goals.

Empowerment is only one piece of the puzzle, which together forms a refreshingly nuanced portrait of sex work, desire and self-perception.

Even at its nearly three-hour runtime, John Wick: Chapter 4 commits so nobly to its self-seriousness that it almost borders into camp. And yet, the franchise possesses both the self-confidence and the ingenuity to earn its boldness.

Enys Men is so rich with symbolism that there’s a real satisfaction to be gained from rifling through the clues.

It’s a real feat that Griffith always manages to steer the boat away at just the right moment, choosing emotional nuance over manipulation.

As a filmmaker, Cregger seems conscious of embracing and then twisting an audience’s expectations, leaning into certain tropes of the genre before forcefully pushing towards something far more realistic.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair doesn’t quite go where it’s expected, or hit the most obvious talking points. It offers something all the more intriguing – a last-minute twist that forces us to reexamine what we’d already accepted as either truth or fiction.

What keeps the film’s heart tender is the fact that, even if Linda’s been reduced to a husk, she’s still a mother who loves her daughter; who knows she’s in pain and can’t help her outbursts. She still sits at her daughter’s bedside and sings, gently, like a bird. She still wants to try, even when she fails. And that’s something to count on.

Depp does magnificent work in embodying the sense of existing out of place, not only in the violent contortions and grimaces of supernatural possession, but in the way Ellen’s gaze seems to look out beyond her conversation partner and into some undefinable abyss.

Obsession is delicately handled work, unafraid to find pockets of humour. Customer service is hilariously inept, even when it’s a matter of life or death. But Barker, both as its writer and its director, is also interested in how the dynamic between Bear and Nikki starts to reflect real-life toxicity, and never plays too recklessly where it really matters.

Peele, really, is the magician disguised as a filmmaker. Nope is the sleight of hand so slick you’ll never question how the trick was pulled off.

Nicolas Cage stars as a Satanic serial killer in a movie that is nasty, precise and as subtle as a magic trick.

With Alice, Darling, director Mary Nighy (daughter of actor Bill) delicately exposes how internalised and invisible the experience of narcissistic abuse can be.

Dickinson doesn’t end Urchin on a note of sentiment or tragedy, but somewhere in the very human middle of it all – and in doing so announces himself as a director with real guts.

The unexpected advantage here is that, when Williams wants to be truly upfront about his struggles, that veneer of fantasy shields us from the more harrowing details of his life, so that we can confront them yet still enjoy that “right f***ing entertaining”.

Presence’s greatest feat, and presumably Soderbergh’s main interest in the project, is in how alive and defined a character our ghost is.

Cinema is in a precarious position right now. And, just maybe, Project Hail Mary will remind people why they ever fell in love with it in the first place. Sometimes, to move forward, it helps to look back.

Love Lies Bleeding bottles that hot, feverish, salvatory desire, only to shake it like soda pop and then ping off the cap.