Clarisse Loughrey

It’s a body horror that’s really a family drama; that’s really a sly comedy about the discomfort of being trapped inside all this vulnerable, imperfect flesh.

The thrill of Eileen lies in how McKenzie plays off the film’s inciting spark, a blonde-bobbed enigma played by Anne Hathaway.

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.

History might not have allowed Elisabeth the kind of power she wanted, her death in 1898 also bringing her life to a violent close. But Corsage reimagines it all, granting her unexpected agency and, in eventual death, one moment of pure, well-earned freedom. There’s something magnificently empowering about that.

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.

Lyne can laugh at these people because he holds little respect for them, and there’s a general sense of revulsion directed here towards the rich and reckless. His camera navigates queasily through the film like he’s capturing a natural disaster in action.

This is a story, ultimately, that drives home the idea that solidarity can exist even when there’s no sense of community – and particularly when that community has been systematically dismantled by the powers that be.

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

The film is always on the move, and yet somehow oppressively claustrophobic, as the tension gradually builds to the point of no return suggested by its title.

The callbacks, thankfully, are fairly minimal – but it’s still a comfortingly old school affair, in which its CGI feels at home next to a host of traditional practical effects, including that old gem of a slowly collapsing water tower. No bulging-to-the-point-of-bursting muscles needed.

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.

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

With barely a twist to speak of (at least in the traditional sense), his latest film Knock at the Cabin feels like a repudiation of the past.

If there are no other pleasures to Wicked Little Letters beyond the tome’s worth of expletives launched by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, then so be it. That’s plenty enough to sustain this witty, joyously written piece of forgotten history, scripted by comedian Jonny Sweet.

The pair operate at a low simmer of hysteria that feels farcical without ever losing believability, while treating sincere emotion like the bursting of a dam that threatens to drown them together. They love as they hate in The Roses, decadently and without restraint.

Robinson, really, is a genius at all this – the way he extends his “f***”s like he’s watching the fabric of the universe collapse around him, or how his smile can both burn with frightening intensity or the fragility of a lost little child.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While Marvel’s been busy flooding us with endless, exhaustive content, DaCosta’s movie offers us the one thing that made this franchise work in the first place – heroes we actually want to root for.

Cocaine Bear is a film worthy of its title, and perfectly constructed to feel like the kind of cult horror movie you’d find on a dusty VHS tape somewhere in a stoner’s basement. It’s bloody and grotesque, at times quite dark, but also surprisingly endearing.

The Final Reckoning, final or not, presents us with a fascinating contradiction: Ethan Hunt is both a pure singular and a state of mind. He’s cinema as the madman dreamer’s paradise.

By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war.

Crime 101 is sleek like a Michael Mann venture, but with a healthy dose of 2020s nihilism.

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.

Timestalker certainly puts on a show.

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.

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

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

The Fire Inside is a sports biopic with the nerve to ask, “What happens after the win?” It’s a simple shift in emphasis, but an unexpectedly transformative one, which forces us to reckon with how shortsighted we can be in our assumptions that victory creates a certain kind of immortality.

Despite the performative feminism, and beyond the black eyes and broken noses, the girls still work naturally towards clique-defying female solidarity. It’s the small, sincere thought behind the joke: you don’t have to master the theory to know that women are stronger together.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is damn funny, often deliriously so.

The emotions in Janet Planet creep up on you.

Scrapper is a solar system of a film, with Campbell’s playful and defiant Georgie shining bright at its centre. You’ll not find many characters this year quite as likeable.

In Christopher Andrews’s stark, haunted debut – anchored by two soulfully frayed performances by Abbott and Keoghan – violence becomes the only language left to speak when shame, resentment, and desperation have stripped the words right out of these people’s mouths.

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.

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

Theater Camp has no shortage of actors lining up to poke fun at the self-indulgence of their own vocation.

Picture the ‘Mean Girls’ queen bee Regina George if someone had given her a knife and a death wish. And she was an android.

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

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.

A Quiet Place: Day One can’t boast the freshness of concept of the first film, but, in pure emotional payoff, it’s the most satisfying of the series.

The Guardians films have always been about the fact that many of us are like putty – shaped not by where we’ve come from but where we are and could end up. Vol 3 should make audiences thrilled about what comes next for Gunn in his new position as co-head of DC Studios. As for Marvel – well, it’ll be their loss.

Kappel’s astounding performance constantly draws the film’s energy back to her in a way that ensures the audience is never in doubt of Linnea’s own agency, even in her most vulnerable moments.

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

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.

There’s more than enough wit, beauty, and imagination to Wakanda Forever to outweigh its weaknesses.

Sickeningly effective.

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.

It’s not a manifesto, really, but a matter-of-fact portrayal of the palpable anger emanating from a betrayed generation.

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.

Evil Dead Rise provides blood by the bucketful without ever crossing the line into outright cruelty.

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

The Outrun’s true tether, however, is Ronan, and here she works to all her greatest strengths. The film wraps entirely around her, yet she’s far too honest an actor to ever play up to the audience’s expectations of a woman in crisis.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem blends a hyper-aware but affectionate love of the franchise’s past with the look and lingo of the present. It’s learnt all the right lessons from the current Spider-Verse craze.

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”.

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

It’s a feverish, agonised document of addiction and abortive passion, into which the director has weaved further elements of the author’s life.

It’s a devilishly smart and self-aware take on the current trend for Eighties horror homage, lovingly adapted from Grady Hendrix’s 2016 novel of the same name.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Wedding Banquet old and new may take different paths, but they end with the same conclusion: there is indefatigable strength in the chosen family.

Cal McMau’s debut takes the well-worn path of prison dramas, focusing on a violent feud waged between cell block bunkbeds. But there’s enough of a noxious stink in the air – the sense that all the system does is create a microcosm of the state, with even less power to scrap over – that Jonsson has the material he needs to fully mesmerise.

Pugh is very much at home in this kind of role, but it’s no less arresting in its familiarity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rex actively underplays Mikey’s self-interest and cruelty, so that – in a way – the audience becomes an equal target of his manipulation.

As a class satire, it reaches no conclusions. But it’s filled to the brim with darkly funny, bile-slicked revulsion.

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.

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.

Maria is a tragedy, but not because of one of life’s piteous events. Instead it’s the tragedy of a woman’s failure to heal her wounds with her art.

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

Lovely, immaculate, and extremely faithful.

The fourth ‘Matrix’ film offers a volcanic cluster of ideas with ambition – and a reminder that long black coats and tiny sunglasses are, indeed, very cool.

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.

There’s no room for the sentimental here. No Grinch hearts suddenly grow three sizes. That’s not how it works in the real world, and Oppenheimer is interested instead in the smaller, more subtle shifts.

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.

Fair Play is not the erotic thriller Netflix’s algorithm so desperately wants it to be. There is sex, yes, and a psychological duel, but very little perverse desire. It’s ultimately a very ugly film. That’s not its failure, but its intention.

A thoughtful reframing of the Disney original’s metaphor for racism – with new character Gary De’Snake stealing the show.

Matt Reeves’s take on the Caped Crusader may not be a genre-defining miracle, but it delivers a tapered-down, intimate portrait, while Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman brings an almost-extinct sensuality to the role.

It’s surprising how much the film can flit between clangingly obvious bits of exposition – aha! The source of the floppy red hat! A reindeer that happens to be named Blitzen! – and more mature perspectives on the holidays.

It’s both wholly satisfying and ridiculously fun.

Robin Robin may be short, but it’s rich and satisfying – maybe one to serve alongside the pudding on Christmas Day.

H Is for Hawk concerns itself less with the healing of wounds, but rather with the prying open of them. Can we look so deep into the pulp that the fear of it eventually washes away?

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.

David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult lead a movie that doesn’t just serve as a referendum for superhero films, but for the cinematic future of DC as a whole.

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.

Passing is as richly felt as it is carefully conceived.

As with Derrickson’s previous collaboration with Hawke, 2012’s Sinister, the director proves he can deliver an effective jumpscare – slick, and not too telegraphed. But there’s a thematic weight here that elevates The Black Phone above any of his previous work in the genre, a dark reminder of how often moral panics and bogeymen are conjured up in order to turn a society’s eyes away from the real and inescapable violence happening in people’s own homes.

The director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer.

I Swear is a crowdpleaser that doesn’t make a spectacle out of its subject, nor mines the darker chapters of their life for tearjerking sentimentality.

One of Them Days is funny as hell, but it also speaks to something sharply honest when Dreux sighs and mutters, “It shouldn’t have to be this hard.”

This film is nasty, funny, and cogent about the era it’s set in.