Clarisse Loughrey

The Railway Children Return is part-sequel, part-remake, with a carefully selected smattering of callbacks for the fans.

Everywhere looks so slick and empty that it’s impossible to differentiate any scene from your standard luxury hotel ad.

Above all, at no point during Carrie Cracknell’s directorial debut do you ever get the sense that anyone’s actually read Persuasion.

Of course, Ragnarok’s distinctive humour is carried over, and there’s a blissfully dumb running joke about a pair of giant, heavy metal-screaming goats. But, really, it’s the heart that matters here.

There’s nothing all that special about The Rise of Gru, but it runs like a well-oiled machine.

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.

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.

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

Nostalgia rarely factors into Lightyear, which makes the franchise connection feel almost like a bit of window dressing slapped on to an entirely unrelated sci-fi story. Maybe that’s the only way to get butts in seats these days. Especially to watch what is, at the end of the day, a film that does the job it needs to do but without a crumb of anything more.

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.

Audiences may spend the running time of All My Friends Hate Me waiting impatiently for the shoe to finally drop. But Stourton and Palmer’s script points heavily at a secret that’s far less satisfying in the reveal than it is in the build-up. Maybe that’s the point. Here’s a film that leaves you with the same sickly, hollow feeling you might get spending time with the ghosts of your own past.

Though Dominion marks the end of the Jurassic World trilogy, I can’t imagine this is the last we’ll see of the franchise. As they say, life finds a way. Hopefully next time they’ll have actually figured out what they’re doing.

Dashcam is pure chaos, headlined by a character with a maelstrom for a personality.

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?”

Fire Island is a true, escapist romcom at a time when audiences are still undernourished when it comes to queer romances that don’t end in death and despair.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie proves that more of the same is sometimes the very best thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It turns out that the point of the multiverse, and of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, isn’t its creative potential. It’s its cameos. A million universes could exist, and they’d all contain surprise appearances by people and things fans can hoot and holler over, before being purchased as toys on the way out of the cinema.

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.

Downton Abbey: A New Era is whatever the opposite of a French Exit might look like. Rather than a party guest slipping out quietly, it’s the bumptious visitor making their final, sluggish turn around the room.

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

In Benedetta, master provocateur Paul Verhoeven demolishes the line between the sacred and the profane. The breast becomes holy, a source of nourishment from which religious fervour can stem. The Virgin Mary, in turn, inspires not only boundless grace but sexual desire.

True, grief is universal – but To Olivia never embraces the fact that stories draw their power from specificity. It’s what makes them feel real.

Unfortunately, the further away from Tatum and Bullock you get, the more the film struggles.

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.

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.

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.

At no point here – or during the last film – does it feel like anyone actually figured out how Sonic works as the centre of a live-action movie.

‘Spider-Man’ spin-off is too flavourless to even be the wild, untethered disaster some were secretly hoping for.

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.

Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.

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

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.

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

The tone here aims for a vague combination of time-travelling romps like Back to the Future and Flight of the Navigator plus time-travelling weepies like Forever Young and The Lake House. It wears both those tones unconvincingly, like a serial killer in a skin suit.

The Duke reminds us once more, [Michell] knew how to get the very best out of his actors without forcing unnecessary dramatics.

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.

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.

The conclusion that Chaplin remains inscrutable feels neither new nor substantial.

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.

There’s a lot, in fact, to Uncharted that feels haphazard or under-considered.

The film is perfectly adequate. Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 murder mystery is texturally conventional, even if he’s made his own adjustments to the cast of suspects.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye has done right by its subject, but only at the cost of shrinking down her world.

It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. And it’s exactly as absurd as you could ever hope it would be.

In Sing 2’s defence, the film is at least enthusiastic about its own overabundance, and the new celebrity voice additions – Halsey’s mollycoddled, rich-girl wolf or Letitia Wright’s street-dancing lynx – fit nicely into the mix.

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.

Branagh doesn’t seem as eager as Cuaron to interrogate his own memories, or to reckon with how the protective veil of one’s parents can shield a child from reality.

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.

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

It’s a little metatextual analysis served up with a generous side of guts and gore, stabbing its cake and eating it with gleeful abandon.

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 355 is a mark of progress only in how wholly unremarkable it feels.

Boxing Licorice Pizza inside the realm of juvenile memory more often feels like an excuse than a conceit.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is also disarmingly tender, blessed with a deep affectation for its subject that feels fuller and more romantic in its nature than straightforward respect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most of the callbacks are played for light humour, not self-importance. Yes, it’s easy to tell you’re being manipulated. But it’s just as easy to respond with: so what?

All the pleasures of The King’s Man find themselves inevitably undermined by its hollowness.

There’s something oddly satisfying about the way McKay's film lets us laugh at our own doom.

It is, at the very least, far more interested in words than ideas – perhaps the defining feature of Sorkin’s work.

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

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 a rare achievement contained within an even rarer type of film: a Black-led, British romantic comedy. But there are, unfortunately, limits to how new and invigorating Boxing Day actually feels.

Most of Silent Night’s pleasures are to be found in the strength of its cast – Knightley, whose comic talent is frequently underused, can turn on a kind manic perkiness that’s as endearing as it is absolutely terrifying. It’s a smile that says, yes, if I ever were to murder you, they’d never find the body.

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

All those technical triumphs only complicate what feels like an unanswerable question: how can a film look this good, feel so moving, and still come up lacking?

Gaga plays the film’s early scenes with a winking, playful innocence, consciously mirroring Patrizia’s story with that of Ally, her character in 2018’s A Star is Born – another ordinary woman plucked from relative obscurity.

No, the problem with Home Sweet Home Alone isn’t that it had the temerity to encroach on a holiday classic. It’s that they bungled the whole thing so badly.

Encanto bursts with colour and abstract flights of fantasy.

Who’s really at the wheel of Richard’s ambition? His love for his children or his own ego? It’s a testament to both Green and Smith that the question is allowed to linger so potently.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is simply the things you already knew and liked, but repeated with unearned gravitas.

Miranda’s film finds a graceful balance between fact and fiction, framing art as a heightened form of self obsession and the most magical and important thing in the world.

The irony of Eternals is that, despite its characters explicitly tussling with their own lack of humanity, Zhao has delivered one of the most emotionally grounded entries in the entire franchise. She puts into full view the kind of moral quandaries that Marvel’s only ever really danced around in the past – the cost of individual life, or whether humanity is even worth saving in the first place.

This action caper is less a film than a collection of buzzwords.

The Card Counter is claustrophobic, certainly – but not always in the right ways.

There are measured performances here by both Russell and Plemons, two unfailingly talented actors, and a host of well-crafted practical effects that explain why producer and horror veteran Guillermo del Toro would take such an interest in the project. But all the trickery in the world can’t conceal how inauthentic Antlers feels at heart.

Passing is as richly felt as it is carefully conceived.

When all roads lead back to Evan, and to Platt’s misstep of a performance, the film becomes one giant gamble that’s quite disastrously failed to pay off.

As a thoroughly modern, self-reflective revival of one of the most famous horror films of all time, 2018’s Halloween felt like a small miracle. Its sequel suggests that Green shouldn’t have pushed his luck.

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.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a love story written in blood, sweat and the slime of half-eaten brains.

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.

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.

Like the very best of Anderson’s films, The French Dispatch is both utterly exquisite and deceptively complex – a film that, like the finest of dishes, is even richer in its aftertaste.

Director Pascual Sisto has achieved something a little more clever than pure imitation. He takes his audience’s expectations, that his film can only lead to bloodshed and despair, and leaves them hanging in the air for as long as he likes – it’s both tantalising and deliberately unsatisfying. You’re never given the comfort of knowing what comes next.

No Sudden Move may be a fairly minor entry in his filmography, but it’s well-crafted and thrilling in a way that feels oddly reassuring.

These animated outings will always feel like a flash in the pan if they continue to rely on contemporary nods as a source of cheap humour.

The Tender Bar is uneventful. But its performances have such an easy, lived-in quality that it wouldn’t be fair to call it inauthentic – just a little rosy in its outlook, perhaps.

This project should have been relatively straightforward: to provide a worthy showcase for Hudson, who is tremendous in exactly the kind of way that grabs the attention of awards show voting bodies.

The Many Saints of Newark is both instantly recognisable and somehow unplaceable. It’s fierce and brilliant, too – a work that both expands on and complicates the cultural legacy of The Sopranos.