Clarisse Loughrey

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.