Clarisse Loughrey

Despite the drip-fed reminders of contemporary history (the Cuban Missile Crisis! the Kennedy assassination! Weren’t the Sixties wild, man!), A Complete Unknown struggles to fully engage with Dylan’s relationship to that intersection between politics and music.

To the film’s credit, there’s also real style tucked into the periphery, as characters breeze past Richard Quinn florals and Lady Gaga, still in her Tim Burton demon era, performs on a runway of models in loose, patterned Seventies gowns and oversized hats. It’s a compromise. But, then, that’s what The Devil Wears Prada 2 has turned out to be all about – it’s artistry snuck in beneath the commerce.

Audiard’s efforts don’t always pay off, and in Emilia Pérez they come across as impassioned but featherweight.

Del Toro can do worldbuilding in his sleep, but you might also find Cooper’s brittle performance, filled with such elemental sadness, hard to shake off. Nightmare Alley is the shadow that lingers.

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.

Radcliffe, who remains movie-star ripped for the film’s duration, is a genius casting choice. He has pitch-perfect comic timing without necessarily coming across as someone trying to tell a joke. There’s a real sincerity to him and he has the eager grin of a Broadway performer about to take their bow.

Garland’s film, at times, feels a little like provocation for provocation’s sake. It suggests that all a male filmmaker needs to do to earn his feminist credentials is to show us men doing bad things. Think Bugs Bunny chomping on his carrot and, with a wink to the audience, declaring, “ain’t I a stinker?”

All that’s really changed is that How to Train Your Dragon is now distinctly less charming and less playful than before, with even its pièce de résistance Toothless losing some of the cute factor (he looks real mean when he growls).

While Honey Don’t! prods at something new and quite poignant, an idea about how survivors see themselves and that loaded word “victimhood”, it ultimately struggles to make much sense out of itself and its oddball cast.

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

Bodies Bodies Bodies is damn funny, often deliriously so.

Sickeningly effective.

What lends Dead of Winter its evocative chill is the way all three women here – kidnapper, kidnapped, and rescuer – are left with nothing but themselves to rely on. There’s no one out here to care for or support them, turning survival into a daily matter of physical and psychological endurance.

Loach is so cohesive here, in accommodating the expansiveness of all these social ills, that characters have an unfortunate tendency to become mouthpieces.

A great actor shouldn’t only be judged on what they can do with a masterful script, but also on how they can take a lesser work and still let it soar. Anthony Hopkins has achieved this with grace in One Life, a somewhat thin, reductively sentimental retelling of the life of British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, which its star has empowered with raw, much-needed complexity.

Even when Leonard’s chatting away with his semi-captors, his words seem rather weightless, as if they were something simply to fill the air while his mind quietly calculates his next move. He’s like a chess master, in a way, and few actors could maintain that magnetic stillness quite like Rylance, who always seems to express so much while doing so little.

Every aesthetic decision here seems carefully made, even down to the brightly painted frontier towns (the historically accurate choice), which play in jokey contrast to a literal “white town”, in all meanings of the phrase. That’s what makes The Harder They Fall feel so thrilling – it’s a film that exists in the past, present, and future, all at the same time.

Considering every horror film these days seems to be “about trauma”, Smile suffers from never evolving past the basics – that trauma begets trauma and, if left unchecked and unexamined, can consume a person’s life.

Thunderbolts* does feel different to what’s come before, not because of those indie credentials, but because it’s the first of its kind to seem genuinely self-aware.

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.

True Things isn’t quite as effective as the director’s 2018 debut, Only You, which tracked the fluctuating desires of a couple (played by Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor) undergoing IVF treatment. But it does reiterate Wootliff’s fluency in the unvarnished, messy spaces of female desire, operating in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the actual sexiness of her work.

Esmail goes big and bold with his Hitchcock allusions and showy camera work, not unlike M Night Shyamalan. At times, he’s a little on the nose, also not unlike M Night Shyamalan. It suits his vision.

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.

While director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda can certainly shoot cars as well as they can planes – it’s all plumes of smoke from the tyres and the bone-rattling rumble of starting engines – F1 represents the spiritually bone-dry, abrasive inverse to all of Maverick’s giddy pleasures.

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.

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

Cary Joji Fukunaga has made a smashing piece of action cinema with No Time to Die – it’s just a shame it had to be a Bond film.

Hugh Jackman’s return as Wolverine is appropriately intense – but shortchanged by the fact that the character went through the exact same emotional beats in 2017’s ‘Logan’.

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.

What really caught me off guard about The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is its sweetness.

Where in the public consciousness is the line drawn between thief and Robin Hood? Van Sant may ask the question, but his vision’s too narrow to answer it.

Cameron, at this point, seems interested less in being an artist than a cinematic frontiersman. That’s the point of The Way of Water – it’s not about what the film has to offer us now, but what it tells us about the future.

In The Idea of You, it’s actually fun to buy into the fantasy.

The Last Duel is perfectly engrossing as a slice of historical intrigue, a clash of iron wills and iron swords, all muddied on the battlefields of medieval France. But there’s a tendency here for the film to present basic facts about contemporary gender politics as some earth-shattering revelation.

To frame it in Fresh’s own language, all we get here is a single bite – not the whole steak.

Thankfully, Quantumania coughs up a decent amount of the mania promised in its title – it’s done a far better job, at least, than last year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which was miserably sane.

So much time in The Legend of Ochi is spent traversing these beautiful landscapes looking for something to grab onto – a thought or an emotion – but there’s nothing really here other than the simple conflict between nature and the men quick to whip out their shotguns when faced with the unknown.

The Surfer is what you might call a slow-burn Cage. There’s the manic, hollering prize at the end (and even a line of dialogue worthy of a future meme), but also plenty of the actor’s more undervalued speciality – the expression of gargantuan helplessness, the look of a fish who’s been thrown to land and left to die

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.

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

There is something nostalgic about Rebirth. And yet that cosy feeling is achieved primarily through composer Alexandre Desplat’s targeted deployment of John Williams’s original theme, and through the way Koepp and Edwards lightly pay homage to certain, familiar sequences (there’s a scene of a kid dodging between aisles here, too, just like with the raptors in the kitchen).

For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience.

While this might be a flashy, American production (courtesy of Blumhouse, behind the Insidious movies and Get Out), it’s also the distinctly observational work of a British writer-director. And then there’s McAvoy, delivering one of the most impressively repugnant performances of the year.

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

The very best moments of Cyrano take place in near-silence, when all we can hear is the breathing of lovers enraptured by each other’s gazes.

As Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die gets weirder and weirder, it only further provides the evidence of its own thesis.

The Oompa Loompas are still problematic, but director Paul King’s follow-up to the Paddington movies can’t help but charm.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers sees fit to both indulge in nostalgia – largely through Ellie’s wide-eyed adoration of the old show – and poke fun at it.

The film’s most interesting onscreen partnership is Ali and, well, Ali. He essentially delivers the same performance twice, but with variations so minute that you’re left to wonder whether you simply imagined them.

The tension of Thirteen Lives is implicit, and ramps up like a vice – how long until all these people’s luck finally runs out? But I do wonder whether all this soberness has prevented a good film from being an extraordinary one.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a patchwork quilt of familiar notions.

Steve is a thoughtful, impassioned film in practice. Yet it’s deliberately made itself secondary to its source material.

This is about as graceful and fitting an endnote as you could hope for.

It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year.

The Toxic Avenger is funny and charming, with a joke rate as consistent as this year’s The Naked Gun, and snappy editing that mimics the Edgar Wright brand of genre parody.

Really, all you can do is take what joy you can from Paddington in Peru, because its pleasures are rarer but still sweet.

Belo and Birch, and their star Jodie Comer, breathe life and fire into the mothers typically left stagnant on the apocalypse’s sidelines.

Does the fact the film largely ignores the book’s treatise on nature and virtue absolve it of all connections to Owens’s real-life controversies? It certainly doesn’t, on an artistic level, improve what’s already contained on the page. Newman’s vision of rural South Carolina is scrubbed so clean you might as well call it #swampcore – the Spanish moss looks bright and pristine, the flower petals on the water almost consciously arranged.

Paul Feig nods to ‘Rebecca’ and ‘Vertigo’ in this pulpy adaptation of the Freida McFadden bestseller, which has a secret weapon in the form of a quite brilliant Amanda Seyfried.

Whatever the genre, Aronofsky tends to oscillate between two modes: the savagely harrowing or the savagely sentimental. And it’s all there in Caught Stealing, but at such a low simmer that the film feels almost vacant.

There’s a mainstream, global scope to the film, but Smith and Peter Bayham’s script isn’t without the small quirks and observations native to British comedy.

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.

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.

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.

The film is also bold and clear cut about the way women’s bodies are made into objects of both reverence and shame – but its pièce de résistance is the shot of a vagina during birth, an entirely natural part of human existence that, in America, caused such a fuss that The First Omen was nearly slapped with an extreme NC-17 certificate. What a way to prove this film’s point.

In fact, all the ingredients are perfectly lined up here, and, in the right combinations, and with the pure wonderment of Michael Giacchino’s score, The Fantastic Four: First Steps does shimmer with a kind of wide-eyed idealism. And that’s lovely.

What’s frustrating about Romulus is to see that the reaction to unpopular ideas wasn’t to come up with more, but to simply recycle the old ones as nostalgia.

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

With Fraser as her figurehead, it’s certainly a work of broad and deep compassion. But there are self-imposed limitations that you’d wish Hikari and her co-writer Stephen Blahut would cross, if not purely out of curiosity.

The Bad Guys 2 has just enough wit and spirit that you can take your kids to see it without feeling like you’re doing a disservice to their intellectual development.

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.

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.

Gladiator II, in short, shows us how to make cinema with a capital “C”.

The Apprentice’s most effective takedown of Donald Trump is how unremarkable it makes him seem. This may render Ali Abbasi’s portrait of the early days of the former president and current presidential candidate a little monotonous, but it makes its point succinctly.

Edwards presents himself as an ideas-on-his-sleeve kind of guy, who’s invested in readdressing the meaning behind some of the most commonplace sci-fi imagery.

It was Gyllenhaal, here in a producer role, who initially bought the rights to Gustav Möller’s Danish film. You could call this a vanity project, but at least his presence adds a dose of originality to this carbon copy remake.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget may not quite rise to its predecessor’s level, but if this is the closest Aardman ever comes to selling out then, well, there’s still hope for animation’s future.