Clarisse Loughrey

This is a story, ultimately, that drives home the idea that solidarity can exist even when there’s no sense of community – and particularly when that community has been systematically dismantled by the powers that be.

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

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.

Elemental overcomplicates itself. It’s a straightforward romcom that’s also about culture clashes. And the systemic racism in city infrastructures. And the expectations immigrant parents place on their children.

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.

Run Rabbit Run is certainly fluent in the visual language of eerie, effective horror. Its metaphors, though, are all mumbled.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken fails to see its own potential – it’s never quite sharp enough to work as a parody, nor sincere enough to make its adolescent insecurities relatable.

Behind the lazy, shock-tactic humour lies a streak of genuine humanity, something to carry the film beyond mere butts and boobs.

The most effective scenes in Flamin’ Hot prod gently at how disharmonious the relationship between the man on the floor and the man in the boardroom can be.

Ramos and Fishback are talented enough actors that they are able to perforate the chaos with some genuine emotion.

The Boogeyman is conventional horror, comfortably elevated – the same old monster in a shiny, new hat.

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.

This is, dare I say it, how fan service should be done. It’s far easier to overlook the usual nostalgic pandering when it’s taken a backseat to genuine creativity.

Nice casting can’t cover up the ugly visuals and lack of creative risk.

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

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

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

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

Their film is so stuffed with incident – all of it preposterous, and occasionally insulting to the intelligence of its central quartet – that it sours what could (and should) have been a joyful celebration of desire and indulgence at any age.

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.

The Guardians films have always been about the fact that many of us are like putty – shaped not by where we’ve come from but where we are and could end up. Vol 3 should make audiences thrilled about what comes next for Gunn in his new position as co-head of DC Studios. As for Marvel – well, it’ll be their loss.

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.

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

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

There is no chemistry, sexual or otherwise.

The irony of being intimately connected while desperately lonely can be a hard one to digest. Yet director Mia Hansen-Løve prods at the concept with the same tenderness that she applies to all her films – each of them united by the pains and pleasures of interconnectivity.

It’s only regrettable that the film itself didn’t heed one of cinema’s most important lessons – when you put Nicolas Cage in a movie, it’s guaranteed no one will care about anything other than Nicolas Cage.

It’s hard to land on a reason for any of this to exist beyond a goosing up of Nike’s own image.

It’s hard to demand all that much from a Mario Bros film when its source material has been historically devoid of plot, but shouldn’t we be allowed to demand a little more than mere competency?

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

No one involved in Murder Mystery 2 seems to have worked with any real sense of direction, since the film is more than happy to let Sandler and Aniston take the steering wheel. There’s an easy chemistry to the pair.

A Good Person has a tendency to approach moral complexity as a checklist.

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.

We’re constantly reminded that there are hundreds more stories weaving in and out of these streets, existing beyond Yas and Dom’s. This romance is special. But it also sort of isn’t. It’s exactly the kind of hope the most lovelorn in Rye Lane’s audience might be looking for.

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

Fury of the Gods lands in the frustrating middle: a film that isn’t without promise, but feels far too messy and corporatised to have any real affection for.

When it comes to “The Friends”, there’s some great comic timing – Iannucci, Tevlin, and Metcalfe are particular stand-outs – but it’s hard to shake how frequently these jokes are written at their expense.

It’s both wholly satisfying and ridiculously fun.

The budget’s been upped considerably. Hollywood’s own Andy Serkis and Cynthia Erivo have been air-lifted in for support. And it’s fun, in the patently ridiculous way these sorts of zhuzhed-up thrillers tend to be.

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

Cocaine Bear is a film worthy of its title, and perfectly constructed to feel like the kind of cult horror movie you’d find on a dusty VHS tape somewhere in a stoner’s basement. It’s bloody and grotesque, at times quite dark, but also surprisingly endearing.

The Son is an ugly, blaring question mark of a film, and inexplicably terrible considering the talent involved.

Thankfully, Quantumania coughs up a decent amount of the mania promised in its title – it’s done a far better job, at least, than last year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which was miserably sane.

Oakley’s film ends on an ambiguous though hopeful note. Usually, this sort of conclusion risks coming across as a little mechanically inspirational. But Jean is a complicated sort of hero, full of indecision and regret. It’s something bracingly captured by McEwen, who plays her as someone in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight.

The aggressive air-humping of its past films is replaced by ballet and interpretive dance in this sanitised final instalment.

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.

With barely a twist to speak of (at least in the traditional sense), his latest film Knock at the Cabin feels like a repudiation of the past.

Plane is stifled by just how ordinary it is, and how closely it hews to the standard tropes of action films with longer, more descriptive – yet less ridiculous – titles.

You People carries the unresolved, disjointed tension of a sitcom that’s been stretched to the two-hour mark.

With Alice, Darling, director Mary Nighy (daughter of actor Bill) delicately exposes how internalised and invisible the experience of narcissistic abuse can be.

Spielberg’s motivation for The Fabelmans has little to do with cementing his own myth – it’s a more tender, more bittersweet journey towards the realisation that, though the camera never lies, what it shows us can be hard to swallow.

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

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

Mendes’s script, his first as a solo writer, deals with a sort of formless empathy – what it’s like to witness injustice and feel very, very bad about it. But it lacks necessary self-interrogation. There’s no real sense of purpose beyond the soothing of a privileged viewer’s guilt. The emotions are too thin, a set of codes to interpret rather than anything raw or real.

Picture the ‘Mean Girls’ queen bee Regina George if someone had given her a knife and a death wish. And she was an android.

History might not have allowed Elisabeth the kind of power she wanted, her death in 1898 also bringing her life to a violent close. But Corsage reimagines it all, granting her unexpected agency and, in eventual death, one moment of pure, well-earned freedom. There’s something magnificently empowering about that.

It’s a handsome adaptation, albeit with an unnecessary bit of literary celebrity dragged alongside it.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody strips Houston of her messy, beautiful humanity. All it offers instead is a product to market.

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.

Cameron, at this point, seems interested less in being an artist than a cinematic frontiersman. That’s the point of The Way of Water – it’s not about what the film has to offer us now, but what it tells us about the future.

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.

Beast represents the apex of low-expectation cinema.

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.

The film’s distractingly scattered in its attempt to capture the full breadth and width of its social commentary. In fact, it’s so stuffed with tangentially related ideas that even its timeline feels confusing and difficult to follow, signalled only by the erratic changes in McKay’s hair colour.

There’s a surprising amount to enjoy here, with director William Brent Bell (behind The Boy franchise, with its equally ludicrous premise centered on a haunted doll), making the smart decision to turn the unintentional camp of Orphan into intentional camp, alongside adding a dose of satire about the corruptive pressures of the nuclear family.

And I hate to ask for this, in a world where an excess of lore has been the downfall of so many projects, but Day Shift lacks any sense of context to what exactly this vampire hunter union is or does.

As its intricate hand-to-hand combat sequences play out, the crunch of bones seems to ricochet around the room you’re in – as does the satisfying thud of a throwing axe as it embeds itself into a tree trunk.

Pitt’s funny here – there’s a precise comic timing to the way he shoves a venomous snake down a toilet bowl – but Bullet Train feels so try-hard in its quirky theatrics that it’s a little like watching a kid repeatedly calling for their mother’s attention before they cartwheel into a brick wall.

While the calibre of star voices here is superb, it seems odd to centre the entire film around Johnson and Hart. So much of their chemistry in Jumanji or Central Intelligence was rooted in odd-couple physical comedy – a guy who’s always cracking jokes about his own short stature versus the closest we have to a living demi-god.

It’s hard to treat Joyride just as a pleasant but easily disposable romp, especially when Reynolds loads up the film with so much cheap symbolism.

The tension of Thirteen Lives is implicit, and ramps up like a vice – how long until all these people’s luck finally runs out? But I do wonder whether all this soberness has prevented a good film from being an extraordinary one.

It feels like She Will spends its entire runtime on the very cusp of a completed sentence. I was desperate for an explanation, but the film is frustratingly secretive – those answers, it seems, are still buried deep.

Does the fact the film largely ignores the book’s treatise on nature and virtue absolve it of all connections to Owens’s real-life controversies? It certainly doesn’t, on an artistic level, improve what’s already contained on the page. Newman’s vision of rural South Carolina is scrubbed so clean you might as well call it #swampcore – the Spanish moss looks bright and pristine, the flower petals on the water almost consciously arranged.

The Railway Children Return is part-sequel, part-remake, with a carefully selected smattering of callbacks for the fans.

Everywhere looks so slick and empty that it’s impossible to differentiate any scene from your standard luxury hotel ad.

Above all, at no point during Carrie Cracknell’s directorial debut do you ever get the sense that anyone’s actually read Persuasion.

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.

There’s nothing all that special about The Rise of Gru, but it runs like a well-oiled machine.

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.

As with Derrickson’s previous collaboration with Hawke, 2012’s Sinister, the director proves he can deliver an effective jumpscare – slick, and not too telegraphed. But there’s a thematic weight here that elevates The Black Phone above any of his previous work in the genre, a dark reminder of how often moral panics and bogeymen are conjured up in order to turn a society’s eyes away from the real and inescapable violence happening in people’s own homes.

Empowerment is only one piece of the puzzle, which together forms a refreshingly nuanced portrait of sex work, desire and self-perception.

Nostalgia rarely factors into Lightyear, which makes the franchise connection feel almost like a bit of window dressing slapped on to an entirely unrelated sci-fi story. Maybe that’s the only way to get butts in seats these days. Especially to watch what is, at the end of the day, a film that does the job it needs to do but without a crumb of anything more.

Kappel’s astounding performance constantly draws the film’s energy back to her in a way that ensures the audience is never in doubt of Linnea’s own agency, even in her most vulnerable moments.

Audiences may spend the running time of All My Friends Hate Me waiting impatiently for the shoe to finally drop. But Stourton and Palmer’s script points heavily at a secret that’s far less satisfying in the reveal than it is in the build-up. Maybe that’s the point. Here’s a film that leaves you with the same sickly, hollow feeling you might get spending time with the ghosts of your own past.

Though Dominion marks the end of the Jurassic World trilogy, I can’t imagine this is the last we’ll see of the franchise. As they say, life finds a way. Hopefully next time they’ll have actually figured out what they’re doing.

Dashcam is pure chaos, headlined by a character with a maelstrom for a personality.

Garland’s film, at times, feels a little like provocation for provocation’s sake. It suggests that all a male filmmaker needs to do to earn his feminist credentials is to show us men doing bad things. Think Bugs Bunny chomping on his carrot and, with a wink to the audience, declaring, “ain’t I a stinker?”

Fire Island is a true, escapist romcom at a time when audiences are still undernourished when it comes to queer romances that don’t end in death and despair.

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

By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war.

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.

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers sees fit to both indulge in nostalgia – largely through Ellie’s wide-eyed adoration of the old show – and poke fun at it.

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.

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.

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.

It turns out that the point of the multiverse, and of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, isn’t its creative potential. It’s its cameos. A million universes could exist, and they’d all contain surprise appearances by people and things fans can hoot and holler over, before being purchased as toys on the way out of the cinema.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair doesn’t quite go where it’s expected, or hit the most obvious talking points. It offers something all the more intriguing – a last-minute twist that forces us to reexamine what we’d already accepted as either truth or fiction.

Downton Abbey: A New Era is whatever the opposite of a French Exit might look like. Rather than a party guest slipping out quietly, it’s the bumptious visitor making their final, sluggish turn around the room.

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

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.

True, grief is universal – but To Olivia never embraces the fact that stories draw their power from specificity. It’s what makes them feel real.

Unfortunately, the further away from Tatum and Bullock you get, the more the film struggles.

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.

Even when Leonard’s chatting away with his semi-captors, his words seem rather weightless, as if they were something simply to fill the air while his mind quietly calculates his next move. He’s like a chess master, in a way, and few actors could maintain that magnetic stillness quite like Rylance, who always seems to express so much while doing so little.

True Things isn’t quite as effective as the director’s 2018 debut, Only You, which tracked the fluctuating desires of a couple (played by Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor) undergoing IVF treatment. But it does reiterate Wootliff’s fluency in the unvarnished, messy spaces of female desire, operating in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the actual sexiness of her work.

At no point here – or during the last film – does it feel like anyone actually figured out how Sonic works as the centre of a live-action movie.

‘Spider-Man’ spin-off is too flavourless to even be the wild, untethered disaster some were secretly hoping for.

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.

Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.

To frame it in Fresh’s own language, all we get here is a single bite – not the whole steak.

Lyne can laugh at these people because he holds little respect for them, and there’s a general sense of revulsion directed here towards the rich and reckless. His camera navigates queasily through the film like he’s capturing a natural disaster in action.

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

The tone here aims for a vague combination of time-travelling romps like Back to the Future and Flight of the Navigator plus time-travelling weepies like Forever Young and The Lake House. It wears both those tones unconvincingly, like a serial killer in a skin suit.

The Duke reminds us once more, [Michell] knew how to get the very best out of his actors without forcing unnecessary dramatics.

Matt Reeves’s take on the Caped Crusader may not be a genre-defining miracle, but it delivers a tapered-down, intimate portrait, while Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman brings an almost-extinct sensuality to the role.

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.

The conclusion that Chaplin remains inscrutable feels neither new nor substantial.

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.

There’s a lot, in fact, to Uncharted that feels haphazard or under-considered.

The film is perfectly adequate. Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 murder mystery is texturally conventional, even if he’s made his own adjustments to the cast of suspects.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye has done right by its subject, but only at the cost of shrinking down her world.

It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. And it’s exactly as absurd as you could ever hope it would be.

In Sing 2’s defence, the film is at least enthusiastic about its own overabundance, and the new celebrity voice additions – Halsey’s mollycoddled, rich-girl wolf or Letitia Wright’s street-dancing lynx – fit nicely into the mix.

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.

Branagh doesn’t seem as eager as Cuaron to interrogate his own memories, or to reckon with how the protective veil of one’s parents can shield a child from reality.

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.

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

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.

The film is always on the move, and yet somehow oppressively claustrophobic, as the tension gradually builds to the point of no return suggested by its title.

The 355 is a mark of progress only in how wholly unremarkable it feels.

Boxing Licorice Pizza inside the realm of juvenile memory more often feels like an excuse than a conceit.

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.

It’s a body horror that’s really a family drama; that’s really a sly comedy about the discomfort of being trapped inside all this vulnerable, imperfect flesh.

McDormand carves out a little space for anger, though underplaying her performance so early on gives her further to leap when Lady Macbeth must succumb to her eventual madness. But, if anything, it only adds to the terrible weight of inevitability that hovers over Coen’s film.

The fourth ‘Matrix’ film offers a volcanic cluster of ideas with ambition – and a reminder that long black coats and tiny sunglasses are, indeed, very cool.

The film’s most interesting onscreen partnership is Ali and, well, Ali. He essentially delivers the same performance twice, but with variations so minute that you’re left to wonder whether you simply imagined them.

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.

Most of the callbacks are played for light humour, not self-importance. Yes, it’s easy to tell you’re being manipulated. But it’s just as easy to respond with: so what?

All the pleasures of The King’s Man find themselves inevitably undermined by its hollowness.

There’s something oddly satisfying about the way McKay's film lets us laugh at our own doom.

It is, at the very least, far more interested in words than ideas – perhaps the defining feature of Sorkin’s work.

Robin Robin may be short, but it’s rich and satisfying – maybe one to serve alongside the pudding on Christmas Day.

It’s surprising how much the film can flit between clangingly obvious bits of exposition – aha! The source of the floppy red hat! A reindeer that happens to be named Blitzen! – and more mature perspectives on the holidays.

It’s a rare achievement contained within an even rarer type of film: a Black-led, British romantic comedy. But there are, unfortunately, limits to how new and invigorating Boxing Day actually feels.

Most of Silent Night’s pleasures are to be found in the strength of its cast – Knightley, whose comic talent is frequently underused, can turn on a kind manic perkiness that’s as endearing as it is absolutely terrifying. It’s a smile that says, yes, if I ever were to murder you, they’d never find the body.

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

All those technical triumphs only complicate what feels like an unanswerable question: how can a film look this good, feel so moving, and still come up lacking?

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.

No, the problem with Home Sweet Home Alone isn’t that it had the temerity to encroach on a holiday classic. It’s that they bungled the whole thing so badly.

Encanto bursts with colour and abstract flights of fantasy.

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.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is simply the things you already knew and liked, but repeated with unearned gravitas.

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.

The irony of Eternals is that, despite its characters explicitly tussling with their own lack of humanity, Zhao has delivered one of the most emotionally grounded entries in the entire franchise. She puts into full view the kind of moral quandaries that Marvel’s only ever really danced around in the past – the cost of individual life, or whether humanity is even worth saving in the first place.

This action caper is less a film than a collection of buzzwords.

The Card Counter is claustrophobic, certainly – but not always in the right ways.

There are measured performances here by both Russell and Plemons, two unfailingly talented actors, and a host of well-crafted practical effects that explain why producer and horror veteran Guillermo del Toro would take such an interest in the project. But all the trickery in the world can’t conceal how inauthentic Antlers feels at heart.

Passing is as richly felt as it is carefully conceived.

When all roads lead back to Evan, and to Platt’s misstep of a performance, the film becomes one giant gamble that’s quite disastrously failed to pay off.

As a thoroughly modern, self-reflective revival of one of the most famous horror films of all time, 2018’s Halloween felt like a small miracle. Its sequel suggests that Green shouldn’t have pushed his luck.

The Last Duel is perfectly engrossing as a slice of historical intrigue, a clash of iron wills and iron swords, all muddied on the battlefields of medieval France. But there’s a tendency here for the film to present basic facts about contemporary gender politics as some earth-shattering revelation.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a love story written in blood, sweat and the slime of half-eaten brains.

Every aesthetic decision here seems carefully made, even down to the brightly painted frontier towns (the historically accurate choice), which play in jokey contrast to a literal “white town”, in all meanings of the phrase. That’s what makes The Harder They Fall feel so thrilling – it’s a film that exists in the past, present, and future, all at the same time.

There’s a mainstream, global scope to the film, but Smith and Peter Bayham’s script isn’t without the small quirks and observations native to British comedy.

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.

Director Pascual Sisto has achieved something a little more clever than pure imitation. He takes his audience’s expectations, that his film can only lead to bloodshed and despair, and leaves them hanging in the air for as long as he likes – it’s both tantalising and deliberately unsatisfying. You’re never given the comfort of knowing what comes next.

No Sudden Move may be a fairly minor entry in his filmography, but it’s well-crafted and thrilling in a way that feels oddly reassuring.

These animated outings will always feel like a flash in the pan if they continue to rely on contemporary nods as a source of cheap humour.

The Tender Bar is uneventful. But its performances have such an easy, lived-in quality that it wouldn’t be fair to call it inauthentic – just a little rosy in its outlook, perhaps.

This project should have been relatively straightforward: to provide a worthy showcase for Hudson, who is tremendous in exactly the kind of way that grabs the attention of awards show voting bodies.

The Many Saints of Newark is both instantly recognisable and somehow unplaceable. It’s fierce and brilliant, too – a work that both expands on and complicates the cultural legacy of The Sopranos.

A wrong turn was taken. And The Starling has come out the other side an utterly bizarre, tonal misfire that fumbles through several ideas before implying that it’s perfectly OK to berate the suicidal for being so suicidal.

There’s enough warmth to Guerrero’s script, co-written with Shane McKenzie and Perry Blackshear, to paper over the odd rickety effect or wooden performance.

It was Gyllenhaal, here in a producer role, who initially bought the rights to Gustav Möller’s Danish film. You could call this a vanity project, but at least his presence adds a dose of originality to this carbon copy remake.

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

Cary Joji Fukunaga has made a smashing piece of action cinema with No Time to Die – it’s just a shame it had to be a Bond film.

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.

Its self-congratulatory crusade to restore its subject’s reputation has, for the sake of entertainment, distorted reality to the point that it borders on farce.