Clarisse Loughrey

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.

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

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.

Elemental overcomplicates itself. It’s a straightforward romcom that’s also about culture clashes. And the systemic racism in city infrastructures. And the expectations immigrant parents place on their children.

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.

Run Rabbit Run is certainly fluent in the visual language of eerie, effective horror. Its metaphors, though, are all mumbled.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken fails to see its own potential – it’s never quite sharp enough to work as a parody, nor sincere enough to make its adolescent insecurities relatable.

Behind the lazy, shock-tactic humour lies a streak of genuine humanity, something to carry the film beyond mere butts and boobs.

The most effective scenes in Flamin’ Hot prod gently at how disharmonious the relationship between the man on the floor and the man in the boardroom can be.

Ramos and Fishback are talented enough actors that they are able to perforate the chaos with some genuine emotion.

The Boogeyman is conventional horror, comfortably elevated – the same old monster in a shiny, new hat.

Blighted by development problems and a star whose downward spiral has been widely dissected by all, this superhero blockbuster emerges just as confused as predicted.

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.

Nice casting can’t cover up the ugly visuals and lack of creative risk.

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

Beau Is Afraid is an Oedipal farce hysterically outsized in its execution.

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

No, there are no dinosaur cameos, but this 10th lap – now with added Brie Larson – is relentlessly fun.

Their film is so stuffed with incident – all of it preposterous, and occasionally insulting to the intelligence of its central quartet – that it sours what could (and should) have been a joyful celebration of desire and indulgence at any age.

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 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.

Manzoor’s film, with a roundhouse kick to the heart, both parodies the generational divide with its fantastical plot and finds sympathy for what makes parents domineering.

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

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

There is no chemistry, sexual or otherwise.

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.

It’s only regrettable that the film itself didn’t heed one of cinema’s most important lessons – when you put Nicolas Cage in a movie, it’s guaranteed no one will care about anything other than Nicolas Cage.

It’s hard to land on a reason for any of this to exist beyond a goosing up of Nike’s own image.

It’s hard to demand all that much from a Mario Bros film when its source material has been historically devoid of plot, but shouldn’t we be allowed to demand a little more than mere competency?

In a blockbuster landscape that’s become depressingly monotonous, it’s a blast of fresh air straight from a spellcaster’s staff.

No one involved in Murder Mystery 2 seems to have worked with any real sense of direction, since the film is more than happy to let Sandler and Aniston take the steering wheel. There’s an easy chemistry to the pair.

A Good Person has a tendency to approach moral complexity as a checklist.

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.

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.

Pearl’s torment – empathetic, frightening, and ludicrous all at the same time – is believable largely because Goth single-handedly wills it to be.

Fury of the Gods lands in the frustrating middle: a film that isn’t without promise, but feels far too messy and corporatised to have any real affection for.

When it comes to “The Friends”, there’s some great comic timing – Iannucci, Tevlin, and Metcalfe are particular stand-outs – but it’s hard to shake how frequently these jokes are written at their expense.

It’s both wholly satisfying and ridiculously fun.

The budget’s been upped considerably. Hollywood’s own Andy Serkis and Cynthia Erivo have been air-lifted in for support. And it’s fun, in the patently ridiculous way these sorts of zhuzhed-up thrillers tend to be.

Man of the moment Jonathan Majors somehow manages to out-charisma both Michael B Jordan and Tessa Thompson here.

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 Son is an ugly, blaring question mark of a film, and inexplicably terrible considering the talent involved.

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.

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.

The aggressive air-humping of its past films is replaced by ballet and interpretive dance in this sanitised final instalment.

The Last Wish is visually gorgeous with an attention to detail you might not expect given it’s a sequel to a spin-off of a two-decade-old film.

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.

Plane is stifled by just how ordinary it is, and how closely it hews to the standard tropes of action films with longer, more descriptive – yet less ridiculous – titles.

You People carries the unresolved, disjointed tension of a sitcom that’s been stretched to the two-hour mark.

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

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.

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

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

Mendes’s script, his first as a solo writer, deals with a sort of formless empathy – what it’s like to witness injustice and feel very, very bad about it. But it lacks necessary self-interrogation. There’s no real sense of purpose beyond the soothing of a privileged viewer’s guilt. The emotions are too thin, a set of codes to interpret rather than anything raw or real.

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

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.

It’s a handsome adaptation, albeit with an unnecessary bit of literary celebrity dragged alongside it.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody strips Houston of her messy, beautiful humanity. All it offers instead is a product to market.

The film’s vision of the Twenties may be propelled to the very border of believability, but it’s rarely inauthentic. This is a work of studious imagination.

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.

Emancipation never feels as if it’s truthfully telling the story behind the photograph. Or how one man’s pain became emblematic of an entire nation’s evil.

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.

With Bones and All, Guadagnino has pulled sweet tragedy out of marred and bloodied flesh.

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

As imperfect as Armageddon Time is, its director’s honesty is something to be appreciated.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

That one already notorious sequence aside, Triangle of Sadness feels a little like gnashing at air.

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

Why is Dwayne Johnson delivering every line here in an exhausting monotone?

Though it takes a liberal approach to biography, it’s so attuned to Emily’s creative spirit that it’s not implausible that this is how the author might have chosen to envision her own life if given the chance. Emily captures the soul of the artist, if not her reality.

This is kinetic, muscular, easy-to-cheer filmmaking applied to a story ready-made for the silver screen.

This is the rare musical that actually allows its performances room to breathe. There’s an inherent theatricality in the staging and a complexity in the choreography.

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.

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.

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.

Birdy, in many ways, is basically a pint-sized Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s onscreen alter-ego and the de facto lead of Girls. Both wrestle with the insecurities that stem from never quite aligning with traditional expectations of femininity. Both refuse to ever consider that the blessings and burdens they carry may not be universally shared among their acquaintances.

All in all, the film is exactly as you’d imagine a Hollywood remake to be. It’s too po-faced, too stripped of its meanness. And so drearily inevitable.

It’s a joy to watch Julia Roberts and George Clooney fall in love. It’s an even greater joy to watch them bicker.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is damn funny, often deliriously so.

The film’s so plain in its ambitions – in its sense of giddy, well-intentioned fun – that it feels a little pointless to scorn its more superficial choices.

It is a messy, convoluted affair with some very contrived plotting.

It’s obvious why this cast were attracted to The Forgiven – an actor’s most thrilling challenge is to find the brokenness hidden in between the cruellest of words. Fiennes and Chastain have always excelled in this area, as they do here. But the ugliness quickly wears thin.

What’s surprising is that, though Miller’s imagination remains entirely untarnished, Three Thousand Years of Longing stands in defiance of all of Fury Road’s sagest lessons. The film sags where it should speed; it mumbles when it should pronounce; it narrows when it should expand.

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.

Beast represents the apex of low-expectation cinema.

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.

The film’s distractingly scattered in its attempt to capture the full breadth and width of its social commentary. In fact, it’s so stuffed with tangentially related ideas that even its timeline feels confusing and difficult to follow, signalled only by the erratic changes in McKay’s hair colour.

There’s a surprising amount to enjoy here, with director William Brent Bell (behind The Boy franchise, with its equally ludicrous premise centered on a haunted doll), making the smart decision to turn the unintentional camp of Orphan into intentional camp, alongside adding a dose of satire about the corruptive pressures of the nuclear family.

And I hate to ask for this, in a world where an excess of lore has been the downfall of so many projects, but Day Shift lacks any sense of context to what exactly this vampire hunter union is or does.

As its intricate hand-to-hand combat sequences play out, the crunch of bones seems to ricochet around the room you’re in – as does the satisfying thud of a throwing axe as it embeds itself into a tree trunk.

Pitt’s funny here – there’s a precise comic timing to the way he shoves a venomous snake down a toilet bowl – but Bullet Train feels so try-hard in its quirky theatrics that it’s a little like watching a kid repeatedly calling for their mother’s attention before they cartwheel into a brick wall.

While the calibre of star voices here is superb, it seems odd to centre the entire film around Johnson and Hart. So much of their chemistry in Jumanji or Central Intelligence was rooted in odd-couple physical comedy – a guy who’s always cracking jokes about his own short stature versus the closest we have to a living demi-god.

It’s hard to treat Joyride just as a pleasant but easily disposable romp, especially when Reynolds loads up the film with so much cheap symbolism.

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.