Donald Clarke

This picture is, in part, an attempt to assuage guilt at enjoying the teen-camp slasher at its most misogynistic and transphobic. It is also, as the director would admit, an amusing send-up of where they now find themselves.

Shot in perennial murk, relentless in its cruel focus, Obsession is, at its heart, a deathly serious film with a troubling message to convey. Well worth enduring (if that’s the word).

This is ultimately an inspirational yarn focused on the value of standing by convictions.

Philippe brings few stylistic flourishes to the film, but the fascinating conversation, punctuated by delving into her personal archives, should be more than enough to satisfy the serious cinephile. She is kinder about Hitchcock than some of his other female leads. She is realistic about the rigours of the studio system.

For all the eccentricity of its premise, Rose of Nevada has things to say about how easily we can become disconnected from the relatively recent past.

The film is about the cost of success. It is about the emptiness of fame. It is about the companionship of women (in small groups and in vast stadiums). Those themes are expounded with an invention and wit that add bounce to a film draped in rich, oil-painterly gloom. Approach with the most open of minds.

The picture, shot in Ireland and Spain, will prove a blast for those who like their horror propulsive, transgressive and (in a good way) nauseating. Cronin and his team haven’t quite solved the age-old problem of what to do with the Mummy, but they have confirmed that it remains a dilemma worth tackling. The film deserves the pharaoh’s ransom it will undoubtedly make.

Camus’s prose is heard as we sink into intellectual concerns that obsessed French intellectuals through the 1950s. But it remains a gripping piece that treats its source with great respect.

Revelling in bright fabrics and seductive horizons, the director, despite all the conflicts, is here to argue for both the warmth of traditional families and the excitement of contemporary youth culture. No film other than Sirat has, this year, made such compelling use of music.

It would be a mistake to seek too many lessons from the film. Its great achievement is in the creation of a timeless nowhere that is both drawn from history and independent of it. That is the absurdist ideal.

A humane work devised by serious minds.

Resurrection, shot with extravagant beauty by Dong Jingsong, makes more sense on first viewing than the director perhaps allows. Each story is whole in itself. But it has the quality of a gorgeous knot that will never fully be untied.

It is such a shame that momentum is allowed to sag as the film shuffles through six endings when either of the first two would do nicely. To that point, Project Hail Mary is a model of high-class popular entertainment. An explicit tribute to a Steven Spielberg classic in the opening third feels like no great overreach.

Sound of Falling asks a fair bit of audiences. It provides great rewards for those who oblige.

This is, for good or ill, the sort of enterprise both fans and detractors will be talking about for years to come.

Night Shift does not go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria’s eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us compellingly through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday.

Trash this classy doesn’t come along often enough.

Linklater repays the debt in a beautiful film that eschews granular analysis of the art for a broad celebration of Frenchness at its most proudly awkward. It captures the point at which artists were just discovering energies that would turn culture on its head in the decade to come.

Lilleaas and Reinsve go up against each other with nuanced vigour. Fanning, though not suggesting any real film star I can think of, has fun spreading trivial glamour about the place. Skarsgard deserves the Oscar he may well receive.

Here is an intelligent entertainment as generously stuffed as the greatest 19th-century novel. They rarely make them like this any more.

Breakdown: 1975, like the best films of that period, never lets up on entertainment as it pursues a serious end. We don’t get just Network and Harlan County, USA; we also get The Towering Inferno and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All contribute to sharp analysis of a body politic apparently unaware of its own psychological instability.

There is much else to admire in this beautifully shot, cruelly raw film, but, with some justification, most of the talk will be about the female lead. One can think of few other actors who can so unashamedly access such torrents of simulated emotion.

All the best science fiction on artificial intelligence is really about the challenges of being human. Her is full of strong, sly jokes and intriguing speculation on future technologies. But, ultimately, it is a sad story about the difficulty of making meaningful connection with any psyche, whether organically evolved or digitally tailored to the user's needs.

The closing sequence, sure to endure future homage from impressed film-makers, has already become famous for its chilling ambiguity. One of the year’s very best films.

The three leads demonstrate absolute belief in romantic absolutes as we drift towards a class of sob-heavy denouement Hollywood now rarely attempts. The Irish director’s best film yet.

Mind you, everyone here is suffering. That overbearing mass of existential angst almost certainly contributes to the many negative responses, but few will endure its attack without admitting they’ve sat through something out of the ordinary.

This remains a careering exercise in mid-ranking Yorgosia that just about justifies its many indulgences. We should remain grateful that a talent so odd remains somewhere adjacent to the mainstream.

The Palestinian submission for international picture at the incoming Academy Awards is a handsome, old-fashioned production that, even when it is telling us things we didn’t know, confirms all our worst suspicions about the British colonial experience in the Holy Land.

This is a cinema of introversion, concealment and evasion. Nothing is given up easily.

This excellent debut feature from Ben Leonberg may be unique among horror films in fairly attracting the compound adjectives “deeply unsettling” and “utterly adorable”.

Many will have issues with the depiction of a largely benevolent military and political hierarchy. Some will worry about the necessarily terse summaries of North Korean and Russian polities. Almost everybody will shiver at the realisation that when a response to nuclear attack is required it is too late for any to be effective.

Anderson and his fine cast layer all these pyrotechnics with a palpable sadness for their characters and for the country. There are few explicit arguments here about the state of the US, but one can imagine endless such arguments being projected upon it.

McConaughey and Ferrera prove the most delightful endangered bus companions since Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Speed, exhibiting just the right balance between tension and comradeship.

None of which is to suggest the film backs away from great gags that, as it was in 1984, continue deep into hilarious improvisation over the end credits.

Allegories are unavoidable. The walk is American capitalism. The walk is life itself. It requires, however, no such connections to enjoy the best King adaptations in many years.

The extravagance of Fastvold’s techniques can sometimes get in the way of the characters. Strong supporting actors such as Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie and Christopher Abbott don’t quite succeed in making personalities heard over Blumberg’s bewitching arrangements. But, as cinema of melodic effect, The Testament of Ann Lee could hardly be bettered.

One good reason we all have to remain upright is this clever, original, warm cinematic balm.

Horrible, silly, reprehensible, enormously good fun.

Materialists has received the odd puzzled review in its home territory, but it has the welcome oddness of a future classic.

When the macabre does fully show itself, no concessions are made to taste or restraint. Though Weapons is lavishly shot and expensively acted – Amy Madigan is deliciously gamey in a role we won’t spoil – it ultimately settles into the rhythms of premium-brand pulp.

It must be admitted that, against the odds, the team do a largely satisfactory job of reanimating the corpse. I’m not sure audiences will have quite as much fun watching the thing as the writers plainly had getting it on to the page. But they have certainly stuck to the brief with admirable diligence.

At any rate, though loose in structure, Friendship offers a few minor masterpieces in the art of cringe.

Before Amongst the Wolves resolves itself into a familiar genre (I was much reminded of a particular British film from the noughties), we get a grim survey of stubborn urban discontents.

Considered as an exercise in hushed mortal contemplation, The Shrouds, sombrely scored by Howard Shore, earns a spot beside Cronenberg’s best work. This is just the sort of unclassifiable oddity that the greatest directors, now less concerned with expectations, manage late into fecund careers.

Jurassic World: Rebirth plays, nonetheless, as a refreshing blast of matinee exuberance after the pomposity of the previous three films. Yes, third best in the series. For whatever little that is worth.

The film has sad stories to tell about Minnelli’s marriages, but there is often grim humour in the footage.

What most sticks in the brain is the film’s incidental meditation on the mythology of England from distant past to speculated future.

The film does occasionally struggle with getting England right. We are always aware that this is a French film-maker looking through the window at the crumpets on their doilies. But there is a mischievous intelligence at work that complements the embrace of sometimes broad misunderstandings.

This fine documentary on the Palestine solidarity encampments at Columbia University, in Manhattan, makes much of comparisons with student protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

Along Came Love (which has a deceptive title) does not torture the emotion or tax the brain, but, well acted and easy on the eye, it just about delivers on its early promise of knotty personal drama. It also has important things to say – implicitly for the most part – about the unjust expectations placed on women in French society.

Few so economical features – 80 minutes, with only three significant characters – have had such unsettling fun in the dark, dark woods. Don’t let it slip you by.

Veiel structures his film with grace and guile.

The Surfer, for all its unpleasantness, offers encouraging evidence that there is still room for existential awkwardness in contemporary cinema. No better, odder man than Nicolas Cage to act that out as the catechism of surfism gains another worthy chapter.

We have a new cinematic poet in Kulumbegashvili, and she doesn’t care if the stanzas rhyme. Difficult. Abrasive. Worth persevering with.

Murray and Watts make something genuinely touching of Iris’s quest to discover what prompted the writer to end it all.

Even the greatest general will lose some control when marching an entire division over hostile highlands. But, far from feeling indulgent, the picture is positively economical in the way it addresses so many ideas – sociological, cultural, historical – while forwarding its rattling, viscera-soaked yarn.

Many will retain understandable uneasiness about the project, but few could deny the technical brilliance and dedication to an austere brief. An essential watch. Though maybe just the once.

There is always room for a post-Beatles doc if it’s this good and this original.

If any recent release has the potential to become a cult classic it is this melodic warning from beneath the earth.

Flow needs to make no specific points about human misuse of the planet. Its generalised sense of environmental dread reminds of something we all know and constantly pretend to forget.

The film does not quite pull off its enigmatic ending, but this remains a startlingly eerie debut that finds new angles to a familiar genre.

So joyous and inventive is each scene that it proves easy to disregard the ambling lack of plot.

No doubt the unrelenting archness will annoy many. But, honed to an economic 93 minutes, Black Bag beats all the current worthless streaming thrillers for wit, pace, style and commitment to the bit.

An astonishing, unsettling fable of hidden miseries.

The dialogue in one pathetically desperate audition sequence is withering in its authenticity. But credit must go to Anderson for turning this staple of drama – like Olivier in The Entertainer, a hopeless victim of changing fashion – into a living, breathing human being.

Good old-fashioned disgusting fun. I had a blast.

Energy does not buzz around this film, but it swells with decency, humanity and quiet bravery.

This is an uncomfortable film, but one that sweeps you along in its momentum.

Mad About the Boy may take place in the safest of all worlds, but it is more connected to the greater sadnesses of life than we had any right to expect. Oh, and it’s still properly funny. Which matters a bit.

More than a few critics have suggested the film ends up losing the run of itself, but few would deny that it remains indecently entertaining up to the last frame. Odd, special, important.

Blue Road is most memorable for its crisply edited evocation of unlikely triumph.

A knotty, rough-hewn marvel.

If The Brutalist were not so wedded to audiovisual effect, it might play like a lost Great American Novel.

The risky focus that Leigh Whannell, the film’s director, puts on the psychological over the physical may alienate some gorehounds, but it makes for an original shocker with subtexts that linger.

A small film about great matters.

The monkey conceit is a success on several levels. It presses home that sense of Williams being an agent of chaos in any environment.

The film is at its best when incorporating text from the play with oddly appropriate gameplay.

Beautifully shot by Ranabir Das, a cinematographer who apparently revels in the variety of artificial light sources, those scenes welcome us into the last act with a warm, satisfying hug. It is, however, Kapadia’s generous polyphonic engagement with Mumbai that sits most memorably in the brain.

Does it all add up? The cleaved-brow Fiennes, who does inner torture better than anyone, makes something believable of Lawrence’s battle for truth and integrity. Isabella Rossellini works magic with a minute supporting role. But few will survive the final scenes without pondering the Italian for “magnificent hokum”.

This is a bold, brassy entertainment that breaks new ground as it hugs venerable genres to its chest.

No purer entertainment has come our way this year.

The cool, often static shots and unhurried editing are characteristic of a school of documentary film-making that allows the viewer complete freedom to shuffle significances. There is a beauty in the empty precision.

A superb family entertainment. Maybe even a future classic.

A welcome oddity.

You couldn’t sincerely argue that The Outrun brims over with plot, but its rough, maritime texture is never less than diverting. It needles. It provokes.

A film that is no less thrilling for its sober rigour.

All kinds of comparisons present themselves during Coralie Fargeat’s monstrous growl at the inhumanity of society’s response to the ageing process.

James Watkins’s version easily justifies its independent existence, however. Four first-rate performances find new energies in the story. The shift in nationalities adds other interesting angles.

Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned.

Sing Sing itself does us all good while delivering a compendium of engaging personal dramas. Domingo rules over all like the most benign of creative deities.

Janet Planet plays a little like a memory piece from an unknown future – the assembled past life of an adult who, as a child, grasped only a bare majority of the tensions unfolding about her. A lovely, flawed idyll.

If nothing else, this fine debut feature from Korean director Jason Yu – hitherto assistant director to Bong Joon-ho – counts as a small masterpiece of tone.

Yes, the pulpy mythologies sometimes overshadow that carefully maintained mood. But it remains quite a mood. Hokum as high art.

A grim thrill rounded off with a chilling last shot.

The set pieces are well handled, but this prequel stands out most for its commitment to fleshy humanity.

Most contemporary westerns end up mourning a vanished era of compromised freedom. The Bikeriders doesn’t quite believe in that myth, but it still finds time to dampen a handkerchief as its shadow recedes. A flawed, fascinating film.

There is, as there was in the first film, a profound sadness at the heart of Inside Out 2.

Not everyone will approve of the big swing here. But few will resist the richness and fullness of [Arnold's] characterisation.