Clarisse Loughrey

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

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.

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

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

The Outrun’s true tether, however, is Ronan, and here she works to all her greatest strengths. The film wraps entirely around her, yet she’s far too honest an actor to ever play up to the audience’s expectations of a woman in crisis.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem blends a hyper-aware but affectionate love of the franchise’s past with the look and lingo of the present. It’s learnt all the right lessons from the current Spider-Verse craze.

In short, it’s the life of Napoleon as only Scott can tell it, full of verve, spectacle, and machismo. Its battle scenes are thrilling, a throwback to the sort of spectacle no one in Hollywood – save, well, Ridley Scott – is interested in anymore. But it can be equally dispassionate, in a way that duly and accurately captures the man one contemporary described as “a chess master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity”.

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

It’s a feverish, agonised document of addiction and abortive passion, into which the director has weaved further elements of the author’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.

What keeps the film’s heart tender is the fact that, even if Linda’s been reduced to a husk, she’s still a mother who loves her daughter; who knows she’s in pain and can’t help her outbursts. She still sits at her daughter’s bedside and sings, gently, like a bird. She still wants to try, even when she fails. And that’s something to count on.

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.

Obsession is delicately handled work, unafraid to find pockets of humour. Customer service is hilariously inept, even when it’s a matter of life or death. But Barker, both as its writer and its director, is also interested in how the dynamic between Bear and Nikki starts to reflect real-life toxicity, and never plays too recklessly where it really matters.

Jacobs delicately toys with the boundaries between truth and artifice, between dishonesty and vulnerability. Our intimacy with these characters is earned by their own efforts to shed their steel-built defences. And it’s all the more rewarding for it.

The Wedding Banquet old and new may take different paths, but they end with the same conclusion: there is indefatigable strength in the chosen family.

Cal McMau’s debut takes the well-worn path of prison dramas, focusing on a violent feud waged between cell block bunkbeds. But there’s enough of a noxious stink in the air – the sense that all the system does is create a microcosm of the state, with even less power to scrap over – that Jonsson has the material he needs to fully mesmerise.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

As a class satire, it reaches no conclusions. But it’s filled to the brim with darkly funny, bile-slicked revulsion.

In the end, Dìdi favours sentimentality, but it doesn’t strictly feel as if it were shot through the distanced, nostalgic lens of a filmmaker in reflection.

Buckley, already a frontrunner for the Academy Award for Best Actress, lives up to all the chatter and more. Like Mescal, she’s well-placed to express Agnes’s particular grief.

Maria is a tragedy, but not because of one of life’s piteous events. Instead it’s the tragedy of a woman’s failure to heal her wounds with her art.

Torres, in her masterfully controlled performance, offers up all we could possibly require.

Lovely, immaculate, and extremely faithful.