Clarisse Loughrey

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s the most gripping sports movie in years.

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.

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.

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.

Paul Thomas Anderson has directed a swaggering, funny and timely action epic, where momentum never lets up and supporting actors Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor steal the show.

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

While it’s been argued that Lanthimos harbours active disdain for other people, Don reminds us that there’s a poignant streak of empathy to be found in even the most nihilistic of his stories. Hope, in Bugonia, is mostly lost. But not entirely.

Die My Love captures most meaningfully the feeling of spiralling mental distress as like a dam that’s about to burst with no river to carry its water.

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.

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.

It’s a war picture, in the more conventional mould, that feels new and revelatory purely because it’s being viewed through the eyes of its singular director – expressionist yet rarely sentimental, disquieting in its terrors yet tender in its hope, and profoundly interested in the ordinary lives of others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

For all the cruelty and buffoonery that might surround his hero, Bong lets us in on a revelation: what we’re really watching is a man learning that it’s OK for him to be happy.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It is a film of such literal and emotional largeness that it overwhelms the senses.

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.

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.

The sick body is represented as equally tragic and sexually desirable. It’s complex, but radical, too.

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

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.

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

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

It’d be uncharitable to call Hoppers derivative, when it’s otherwise odd and spiky enough to carve out its own niche.

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.

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).

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.

It’s a film that not only signals a major musical arrival, but ends up feeling a lot bigger than the conventional (and often confining) boundaries of the “music biopic”.

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.

Cuckoo isn’t a horror movie for people who dislike unanswered questions, since Singer, who also wrote its script, is far more interested in emotional logic than the literal kind.

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.

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.

It’s been told with enough wit and viscera to outpace many of its competitors.

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

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

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.

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

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.

It bleeds pure, righteous bitterness. Larraín jumps at the chance to turn political ideology into a literal horror show.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Hsu and Cola balance the mania well against Park’s straight woman sincerity, but it’s Wu, a rising star on the standup scene, who serves as Joy Ride’s surprise MVP.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

You’ll likely catch yourself, by the end, weeping while looking up at an alien squid blob who talks like a British Second World War general, one of the Communiverse’s many oddball residents. But that’s just Pixar doing its job, right?

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

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

As light as McAvoy’s touch might be – this is a film, after all, that features a James Corden cameo – there’s more to do here than simply cheer the boys on and hope they get one over on the Oxbridge elite. There are bigger questions to ask, and California Schemin’ is willing to ask them.

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”.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

There’s an argument to be made that Splitsville’s noncommittal on the subject of polyamory. I think that might, in fact, be the point: Covino and Marvin aren’t interested so much in whether polyamory is the solution to, or destruction of, a longterm relationship, but more the fact people’s stated beliefs and innate desires tend to be two entirely different and conflicted concepts.

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.

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.

Farnaby keeps it fresh and witty, combining the wordplay and low-stakes surrealism of his roots in The Mighty Boosh and Horrible Histories with a keen eye for literary adaptation.

Encanto bursts with colour and abstract flights of fantasy.

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.

When it comes to Mad About the Boy, it’s less that Bridget Jones has finally matured, and more that she’s shown us how human she really is.

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.

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

Sure, there’s a kind of “gotcha” twist here that tethers The Watched back to M Night’s work, but Ishana’s real focus is on where Mina’s sorrows take her, deep into the old, pagan world and its stories of slippery natures and shifting identities. Do we define ourselves or are we defined by others? It’s a pertinent question for the director, as she takes her first promising steps into the future.

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.

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.

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

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

Sure, there’s nothing in the film that matches the pure heartbreak of the first, when Riley’s imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) disappears into nothingness. But Inside Out 2 proves that it’s ludicrous, at this point, to accuse the studio of having run out of ideas.

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.