Clarisse Loughrey

Emancipation never feels as if it’s truthfully telling the story behind the photograph. Or how one man’s pain became emblematic of an entire nation’s evil.

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.

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

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

As imperfect as Armageddon Time is, its director’s honesty is something to be appreciated.

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.

There’s more than enough wit, beauty, and imagination to Wakanda Forever to outweigh its weaknesses.

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

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.

As a filmmaker, Cregger seems conscious of embracing and then twisting an audience’s expectations, leaning into certain tropes of the genre before forcefully pushing towards something far more realistic.

That one already notorious sequence aside, Triangle of Sadness feels a little like gnashing at air.

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

Why is Dwayne Johnson delivering every line here in an exhausting monotone?

Though it takes a liberal approach to biography, it’s so attuned to Emily’s creative spirit that it’s not implausible that this is how the author might have chosen to envision her own life if given the chance. Emily captures the soul of the artist, if not her reality.

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

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.

Considering every horror film these days seems to be “about trauma”, Smile suffers from never evolving past the basics – that trauma begets trauma and, if left unchecked and unexamined, can consume a person’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.

As After Yang gently suggests, there’s no longer a way to conceive of ourselves that’s entirely detached from technology. Nerves and circuits, inevitably, all work towards the same goals.

Birdy, in many ways, is basically a pint-sized Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s onscreen alter-ego and the de facto lead of Girls. Both wrestle with the insecurities that stem from never quite aligning with traditional expectations of femininity. Both refuse to ever consider that the blessings and burdens they carry may not be universally shared among their acquaintances.

All in all, the film is exactly as you’d imagine a Hollywood remake to be. It’s too po-faced, too stripped of its meanness. And so drearily inevitable.

It’s a joy to watch Julia Roberts and George Clooney fall in love. It’s an even greater joy to watch them bicker.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is damn funny, often deliriously so.

The film’s so plain in its ambitions – in its sense of giddy, well-intentioned fun – that it feels a little pointless to scorn its more superficial choices.

It is a messy, convoluted affair with some very contrived plotting.

It’s obvious why this cast were attracted to The Forgiven – an actor’s most thrilling challenge is to find the brokenness hidden in between the cruellest of words. Fiennes and Chastain have always excelled in this area, as they do here. But the ugliness quickly wears thin.

What’s surprising is that, though Miller’s imagination remains entirely untarnished, Three Thousand Years of Longing stands in defiance of all of Fury Road’s sagest lessons. The film sags where it should speed; it mumbles when it should pronounce; it narrows when it should expand.

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.