Clarisse Loughrey

It’s lovely, if a little practised. Yet, the real gutting here comes courtesy of the film’s miniature thesis on grief, and how privilege determines the channels of its pain.

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.

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.

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.

Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.

To reduce the film simply to its outlook on race ignores both its content and its message, as some of its most rewarding elements follow Monk back to his family, for a funny, touching portrait of a man attempting to fine-tune his relationship with the world.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It’s rich thematic territory for the series, and slowly amps up the audience’s anticipation for the moment these two finally cross paths. When they do, it’s spectacular and audacious.

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.

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.

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

When the inevitable comes for our protagonist, The Mastermind delivers it as one of the smartest, wryest punchlines of the year.

Passages is smart and precise about other people’s messes. It’s a way to indulge in the most volatile parts of ourselves without ever feeling like we’re about to lose control.

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.

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

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

The problem with this brand of Hollywood tale is that, by excessively romanticising their subjects, they diminish their humanity.

Nothing is off the table, really, ethically or psychoanalytically. Yet Babygirl isn’t guiding us confidently to some fixed destination. It’s simply feeling its way forward, orgasm by orgasm.

I wonder how much Soderbergh connects to the material there. He’s a filmmaker who almost moves too fast to be known. But I’m certain there’s a piece of his soul in The Christophers, if you look hard enough.

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.

It’s such relentless comedy that it starts to imitate the beats of a horror film: when there’s no joke on screen, the body starts to tense up in anticipation of what’s inevitably around the corner. You leave the cinema half expecting somebody to have snuck a fart machine into your pocket.

What isn’t said in How to Have Sex, and what isn’t openly felt, is the stuff that really hurts.

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.

Conclave turns ritual into the hysteria of a murder mystery, the tension of a political conspiracy, the pressurised force of a criminal heist.