David Jenkins

What’s surprising about the film is how hopeful it is, zeroing in on human creativity and resilience during the worst of times rather than wallowing in abject misery.

With the verve of a master classical storyteller, Citarella stages the unfolding of this eccentric mystery while processing the dizzying flow of information with a grace and precision that will have you hanging on every frame.

It’s compulsive and completely absorbing, and Laura’s dedication to this ad hoc investigation which may have no conclusion is echoed in a performance that empathetically redefines tired cinematic notions of obsessive behaviour.

One thing that lifts this above the type of hospital-based docu-drama that are ten-a-penny on the small screen is that Paravel and Castaing-Taylor locate a uniquely cinematic quality to the footage.

Drive My Car is endlessly fascinating and rich, the type of film which you could spend hours analysing and come no closer to feeling as if you’ve landed on its true intent.

It’s a beautifully written and executed work, one of Panahi’s most formally straightforward yet powerful, gripping and generous.

With Saint Omer, Diop not only refreshes and expands upon the tired conventions of the courtroom drama, but she really drills down into the fundamental gaps in our understanding of human nature and the tantalising but illusive ‘why?’ of it all.

It’s a love story for our time and for all time.

It’s an amazing, hypermodern concept for a film, one which operates as a brutal critique of the class system, while also acting as a metaphor for geopolitical relationships and the moral and ethical lapses we sometimes overlook in the name of making rent.

Licorice Pizza is a slow-release product, something that creeps up on you, inveigles its way into your conscience. It’s silky-smooth filmmaking perfection, bolstered by a full hand of remarkably charismatic star supporting turns.

It’s not a faultless film, but it’s one that sits within the higher echelons of the oft-tawdry biopic form, and also reveals hidden depths to the Nolan project and, excitingly, suggests that we should brace ourselves for anything the next time around.

This is on first impression perhaps a very good, uneven film rather than an unequivocally great one.

A few behind-the-scenes moments during weekends and holidays depict a more personal side to the otherwise-enigmatic Bachmann, but the picture that Speth paints of him is as someone who is casually fixated with this occupation – that the process of teaching is seeped into his very being and consumes his thoughts.

A fiery, confrontational missive from one of the finest dramatic writers in the business.

It’s perhaps one or two increments too obscure, too puzzling and too unwilling to give anything away that it seems to end mid-sentence, without any traditional closure. Yet it’s still a bold work that puts great faith in its cast to play along with this game of chilling insouciance.

Celiloglu’s carefully calibrated performance, combined with a screenplay which never descents to scurrilous signposting, makes Samet a person of endless literary intrigue – a monster and a martyr trapped inside the same body.

Every shot, every narrative beat, every decision exudes not merely confidence, but the touch of a master.

The film is ambling, gentle and doesn’t strain too hard to force a point, but allows you to appreciate the multifarious nature of life in a city where the spectre of destruction lurks ominously in the clouds.

Director Blitz Bazawule does well to draw out multifaceted performances from his cast, particularly Barrino and Brooks, and with them the big emotional beats all manage to land well enough. Yet the musical flights of fancy feel creatively bound by the stage adaptation and lack a certain eccentric pizazz.

It’s confident, classical filmmaking, yet despite its many formal and thematic pleasures, doesn’t offer a whole lot that’s new.

It’s a wonderful film with not an ounce of fat on the bone, and Kaurismäki still manages to thread the needle between a style of ironic detachment and emotions that are big, bold and instantly affecting.

This is not a politically didactic film, nor a lapel-shaking polemic, but a film whose obligation towards fine dramatic authenticity succeeds in convincing that this is the correct way of thinking, and any alternatives are incorrect.

The direction by Davies Jr is top-notch, not just in how he is able to capture the fine nuances of the actors on camera, but also in how they are immersed in the chaotic mêlée of Lagos at this powder-keg moment.

The film offers no explicit commentary or context, but instead allows the images to speak for themselves.

The film avoids polemic and instead presents itself as informed and inquisitive blueprint for the ways in which we discuss anti-colonialist action.

It’s a rare, backwards looking misfire for this director who has always been at the vanguard of cinematic innovation. The care and attention that has gone into the making of this film is undeniable, though at times it feels misplaced and others overwrought.

Fiume o morte! explores the dangerous, empowering nature of fascism, and how certain forms of aggression would seem fair game under a régime that rules by such inhumane edict.

One thing to emphasise is that this is a very funny film, yet the humour doesn’t ever come from jokes or contrived set-ups. It’s more a sense of looming realisation that this caper – explained and justified over a single pint in a pub – is even more flawed that we ever might have imagined.

What begins as an apparently modest, small-scale drama, ends in a moment of ethereal beauty, for both characters and viewers.

The film doesn’t strain for meaning or metaphor, instead just showing us the events over a certain period and allowing us to sample and chew over them as we would heaving plate of delicious food. Just a wonderful film.

Sometimes the filmmaking doesn’t quite do enough to elicit the requisite intensity from some key conversations, but it certainly lands its most important punch, which arrives at the devastating climax.

It’s a supremely well-made piece of work whose function and message never quite manage to transcend the prosaic. Still, in the strange times we’re currently living through, maybe it’s worth sounding that necessary siren one more time for luck.

Stalker is a movie to be watched as many times as physically possible, to be picked apart, discussed, argued over, written about, to inspire music, books, poetry, other movies, teachers, philosophers, historians, governments, even the way an individual might chose to live their life. It really is that astounding.

It’s a pleasant film, albeit one which makes its point fairly early on and then restates it in various, sometimes sentimental ways. The film lacks for a strong narrative arc, and instead opts to filter stories and histories through the present moment.

On the evidence of the astonishingly-assured debut, Earth Mama, we’ll be seeing work from writer-director Savanah Leaf for many years to come.

Sirât is a truly staggering and major film, one that has to be seen to be believed – a masterful gambit of affectionate character and community building that mutates into a work that deals with the primal instincts of human survival and the idea that we create our own gods through the things that we chose to worship.

Dosa’s film is a slick, moving and cutely Herzogian portrait of this loving, monomaniacal couple who straddled the line between the eccentric and the earnest.

In Hamnet, art is presented as a two-way whisper, as a codeword for connectivity and as a way to unlock doors to the future, and living.

The film is a celebration of her life and work, but for such a controversial figure it would have benefited from some dissenting voices on the panel of interviewees, or at least gone a little deeper into her homespun methodology.

How we deal with death in the absolute moment is a fascinating subject, and one that His Three Daughters has many original thoughts about. In the end, it tackles the howling messiness with an earned measure of levity and wisdom.

Tseden directs with a low-slung commitment to a dramatically heightened form of social realism, and this deceptively simple story ends up speaking volumes about how love, sex, marriage and parenting sit at a paradoxical remove from the dictates of the state, and the parochial attitudes of the older generation.

It passes the test that all these films must undergo with flying colours: yes, it makes you want to watch those incredible movies.

The 3D aspect is often used to mesmerising effect, and dovetails perfectly with an artist whose work often demands the viewer inspect it from multiple angles and vantages.

It’s Sonne’s remarkable, multifarious performance that really lifts this one above the pack. She uses her face with the expressiveness of a silent film actress, so when the big emotions eventually come they hit especially hard.

This tale of a tough loner forced to test his mettle certainly has political resonance beyond its intimate telling here.

With its vibrant use of colour, expressive character design and flights of expressionist fancy, Little Amélie offers a lyrical vision of early-years development and so much more.

Where Ozon presents as an ironist in much of his work, skewering genres and retro styles, there’s a refreshing seriousness to this mad endeavour that demands attention, even when some of the choices he makes don’t feel entirely right.

Hoskins performance shows a man who clearly believes that he’s on the right side of history, and once this big, good deal is done, he will have atoned for past sins. The film is brutal in the way it conclusively proves him wrong, right down to its iconic final shot in which Shand sits in the back of a car struggling to settle on the emotion that would amply capture his frazzled state.

Even though it’s a story that severely lacks for surprise, in both the silly nature of the tests and the question of Anna and Amir’s latent bond, the actors take the material seriously enough for the film to remain engaging enough.

It’s precision-tooled in terms of structure, almost to the point of airlessness, but you’d be hard-pressed to knock back the final 45-minute showdown as anything less than an impressive feat by a filmmaker orchestrating and charting the fine processes of an epic battle.

It’s refreshing to see a film like this which opts for an editorial line that’s not just wall-to-wall celebration, and actually attempts to dismantle and dissect its subject rather than merely lionise him to the hilt.

It’s another very special film from this exceptionally gifted and thoughtful (and extremely angry) director.

There are some great things in this film, yet its intentions are swept up in a mire of tonal indecision and cynicism masquerading as irony.

It’s a hard film to despise, and it works perfectly well as a supercharged Movie of the Week for the Hallmark Channel, but the lack of attention to detail and nuance mean that much of the film comes off as maudlin fluff rather than lightly philosophical tearjerker.

Its recourse to human suffering as a way to jerk a viewer to react feels tiresome after a while, and it’s not helped by an ending which serves as a quick-fix band aid suggesting that sublime happiness is just an unlikely plot twist away.

Glass Onion adopts the sturdy structural underpinnings of the Agatha Christie-like whodunit, and presents them with an ingenious mix of postmodern irony and bona fide awe.

It’s Fastvold who somehow makes all these elements coalesce with such brio and eccentricity, expanding the possibilities of filmed biography while also making a film that manages to land direct hits to the head, the heart and the gut.

With lots of appealing wildlife and landscape photography to keep things lively, there’s much to cherish in this charming little film.

The film makes for a involving and often mordantly funny three-hander, and Exarchopoulos and Whishaw are both superb despite being given the slightly thankless task of clearing things up in Tomas’s wake.

This is the western as a dried, coruscating corpse, left out for the buzzards to feed on.

As a follow-up to her exceptional – and sadly underseen – An Easy Girl from 2019, Other People’s Children could and should finally cement Zlotowski’s place in the top class of European auteurs.

The film’s thesis is often a little obvious, yearning for a return to a brand of architecture whose half-life isn’t so slim, but ignoring the arduous and exploitative construction methods that were used to produce those grandiose structures of yore.

It’s a compelling and immersive drama which attains a contemporary relevance without ever really trying too hard.

The first half of Dune: Part Two is among the best things that Villeneuve has ever done, though the sheer eventfulness of the plot and a bustling retinue of side-players (Austin Butler upgrading Sting’s cod-pieced ninny from the 1984 film into a hairless psychopath is worthy of mention) means that the final act does feel rushed.

Apollo 10 ½ is about the subjective intimacy of history, and how all events are just an equally-sized, vibrantly-coloured fragment in the kaleidoscope of our mind.

Despite these subtle barbs, Return to Dust ends up as an elegiac love story as the unlikely couple form a bond built on a foundation of total understanding and empathy.

As a writer and director, Sweeney shows much promise, at times demonstrating the swaggering confidence of the Canadian upstart, Xavier Dolan – the pair even look quite similar. Yet the film works best as a showcase for exemplary range of O’Brien.

It’s all competently performed and executed, with loud booms of sound cued to each scene change as an attempt to ramp up the tension, and lots of behind-the-head tracking shots of cardinals anxiously pacing through corridors and stairways.

Even though the film is packed with belly laughs, it is never spiteful or denigratory, and always appears thankful for the fact that pampered artists can produce miracles if they’re given the time and resources to do so.

There’s a breezy panache to Wang’s direction, and he’s very good at capturing the comic skulduggery of, say, early instant messaging apps. It’s a shame, then, that it doesn’t have an original bone in its gangly, hunched frame.

It’s a magnificent piece of work, completely beguiling from end to end and one which wears its immense philosophical profundity with admirable lightness.

In ambition, achievement and Jenkin’s future as an image-maker of esoteric esteem, this is a big step up from Bait.

It’s a supremely compelling tale leavened by its wry humour and a subtle commentary on the essential emptiness of American life.

Harari’s film is a practical, simple and saddening document of everyday madness.

As with the titular Ravel piece, this is a work that is mellifluous, melodious and mysterious in equal measure. A Sphinx-like Beer, once again, seems to connect with her director on a level which transcends the purely professional, and through her economic yet forceful use of body language and expression, she makes certain that the film adheres perfectly to Petzold’s immaculate calculations.

Beyond the archness and cynicism, there are some profound, self-reflective insights about what it means to make moving images in the 21st century.

There are points here where it feels as if Linklater was trying to make a gender-switched version of Fassbinder’s tragic The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, but without really leaning into the forceful bitterness and agency of the protagonist, and opting to have the text make a more profound point about the precarious nature of power and influence.

It’s a tender and warm film about missed connections and ships that, for whatever reason, end up passing in the night.

At times it’s a little too ponderous, and sometimes struggles to bring variation and surprise to its runtime. Yet this laconic, meditative drama muses on the nature of time and the revelation that, even though Muzamil’s predicament seems highly unlikely to the rational onlooker, the knowledge he accrues is pertinent to all mortals.

It’s a film that heads to the shadowy spots that most filmmakers on this sceptred isle don’t even know exist; every frame exuding both a breathless confidence and a warped visual literacy which suggests a director on a mission to do anything to make an audience feel something – which is completely refreshing to behold.

What’s most important here is how Philibert captures the patience of the nurses and attendants, who never ever interrupt or talk down to the people whose conditions and wellbeing are L’Adamant’s raison d’être.

As a whole, the film doesn’t really work, as Mendes is far more successful in dealing with psychological issues than he is with political ones.

It’s a film which man­ages to have its daft thrills and con­vinc­ing­ly piv­ot to wist­ful philo­soph­i­cal intro­spec­tion, and while there are cer­tain­ly some rough edges and unex­plored plot avenues, it prob­a­bly counts as one of Boyle’s strongest works this cen­tu­ry.

It’s a film about making art that feels good in the moment, as the act itself can be as rewarding – and possibly even more so – than the delivery of that art to an audience.

It’s not a film that does anything particularly new, in the dutifully linear way it tells the story to the ultra-functional shooting style. Yet its satisfaction comes from its careful release of information, it’s ambience of encroaching dread and the subtle psychological twists that push Julie ever closer to that euphoric breaking point.

This is a grimly refreshing and confident toe-dip into the world of horror, and we hope Duane choses to revisit this atmospherically murky pool.

It’s a fun little diversion that’s more interested in the salacious gossip and anecdotes than it is offering a more broad inquiry into how these artworks more generally enhance the music they’re being used to sell.

On paper Stewart seemed like an eccentric casting choice, yet she slinks into the material with grace and ease, and her trademark arsenal of half-met glares and anxiety-dashed grimaces perfectly express her desperate yearning to be free of prettified toff prison.

Asteroid City is Anderson’s most complete, rich and surprising film to date, and perhaps his most autobiographical in some obscure, allegorical way, in that it stands as testament to how filmmaking is about bringing artists together and attuning them to a specific wavelength. On a more superficial level, it’s a film which pushes his patented funny/sad dichotomy to its wildest and most enjoyable extremes.

It’s a strange and beguiling film, and I’m just going to lay down my cards and say that, on the back of her all-in collaborations with Lars von Trier and Claire Denis, Goth’s presence makes any movie a must-see.

Malek’s icy performance does little to endear the viewer to Charlie, while his ultra-tactile relationship with his wife – presented in gauzy flashbacks – never feels entirely authentic.

Shields is a worthwhile subject and her accomplishments are incredible, but this film is perhaps one for underdog sports enthusiasts only.

It studiously documents the various ways that Hamid makes his case, even though there’s never that much depth to the character beyond his cloak-and-dagger maschinations and a pressing desire for justice.

Pacifiction is by far Serra’s most serious and sombre film to date, an epic of neutered power and human expendability – a death-knell for humanity rendered as a tropical daydream.

This archive clip-driven documentary comprises Cousins’ own informed and poetic postulations on the inner-workings of the Hitchcock corpus, as he heads on a jolly, thematically-inclined ramble through one of the great artistic legacies of the 20th century.

It’s a slow, detailed procedural, one which carefully draws you into its dismal intrigue – and it’s engrossing for much of its runtime.

Raimi uses Send Help as an opportunity to flex his patented formal dynamism, and while the camera is a little more sedate than the elasticised excesses of films like Evil Dead II or the underrated Darkman, he’s still a master of of using movement and framing to create emphasis and draw us closer to the characters and their heightened emotions.

This is an exhaustive and lively document of a cult scene that you’re very happy it existed, but maybe don’t want to be a part of yourself.