Ian Freer

Belfast is exactly the kind of film that wins an audience award at a festival — highly entertaining and beautifully done without ever being innovative or challenging, finding the universal in the specific, the upbeat in dire circumstances. Slight but winning.

By The Grace Of God lives in the present, a fast-paced, exciting, beautifully played film that matches Spotlight as a searing portrait of modern heroes who stood up.

Song Without A Name is a true original, at once rooted in a raw emotional reality but told with the striking beauty of a dream. Writer-director Melina León is definitely one to watch.

Like Talk To Her, it doesn’t completely satisfy when it comes time to resolve its intrigue. But, as with their debut, the Philippou brothers show a real skill for creating believable teen characters, Barratt and Wong create a tender, affecting chemistry that make the chills all the more affecting.

An intimate, if unanalytical, portrait of one of movies greatest talents, told in her own words and through an adroitly assembled use of fantastic home movie footage. It’s also probably your only chance to see a Hollywood icon win a sack race.

Uneven in places, Pin Cushion nonetheless offers a moving meditation on what it feels like to be different, elevated by great work from Joanna Scanlan and newcomer Lily Newmark.

The filmmaking is exemplary but most impressive of all is the tone that mixes comedy, melodrama and darkness.

It comes on like an Unsolved Disappearance Movie but American Woman morphs into something more interesting, a portrait of a woman gradually finding her place in the world. And Sienna Miller is stellar.

Subject acknowledges sensitivities are shifting but also pointedly makes clear, for the damaged souls here, they didn’t change quick enough.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut is an affectionate, if flawed, Valentine to both musical theatre and the art of creativity — some bum notes, some strong moments. Tick, tick… the jury’s out.

Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn is a scattershot satire, wrapping its hit-and-miss point-making in a raunchy comic romp. Despite its faults, Radu Jude’s flick is one of the more audacious films of 2021.

It's one of the most highly-wrought (indeed, overwrought) films ever made, with art direction, editing, sound effects, weird camera angles and lighting orchestrated to fill every frame with hints of the unsettling.

Jeremy Hersh’s debut is naturalistic and well played. If it initially lacks momentum and oomph, the film becomes a multi-faceted look at issues surrounding surrogacy, anchored by Jasmine Batchelor’s central performance as a woman forced to make a life-changing decision.

Filmworker is an absorbing, important portrait of both a genius at work and the man behind the scenes who made the magic possible, whatever the cost to himself.

She Will is meditative horror, parlaying modern concerns through a thick, ancient atmosphere. It perhaps has too much on its mind, but Charlotte Colbert’s debut works as an imaginative and unsettling calling card.

Deyn is a revelation in a difficult but rewarding take on Scottish rural life. The most English of directors has done a Scottish classic proud.

Supernova is a tender two-hander that gradually crushes your heart. What it lacks in cinematic width it gains in well-earned emotional depth, courtesy of delicate writing and two subtle but towering performances from Firth and Tucci.

Part mystery, part black comedy, part metaphor for loss, Patrick is a nakedly true original. It also has the best caravan fight since Kill Bill Vol. 2.

It sounds like Big Brother on a boat, but The Raft is an absorbing portrait of a bold (or foolhardy) historical experiment that hits many of today’s hot-button topics, dominated by a compelling and complex central figure.

News Of The World is narratively slight, but it is a terrific showcase for two actors at completely different ends of their careers and a quietly emotional dispatch about two broken souls learning to heal.

A bizarrely strait-laced project for Todd Haynes, Dark Waters lacks dramatic oomph but compensates via a well-mounted telling of a terrifying story, driven by still contemporary concerns and a convincing central turn by Mark Ruffalo.

The Dig is well played, especially by the leads, and visually gorgeous, but it lacks fire and ironically doesn’t get under the surface of its story.

Two parts raw and real, one part manipulative, Coda finds engaging characters and real emotions in a hackneyed narrative arc. See it, though, for a terrific turn from Emilia Jones, if for no other reason than to say you were there at the beginning.

It is perhaps not top-notch Haneke but Happy End is an intermittently gripping film about loveless people in a joyless world. They could all do a lot worse than go on holiday with the characters from Paddington 2.

A smart riposte to the ’hood drama stereotype. Dope is funny, stylish and mostly exuberant fun.

JT LeRoy is a decent telling of a fascinating, resonant true story. If it never really fulfils its promise, it’s worth it to see two major talents — Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern — in full flow.

Paul Andrew Williams and Neil Maskell breathe new life into a familiar one-man-army scenario. Unrelenting, no-nonsense and hard-as-nails — just like its eponymous anti-hero.

A pressure cooker of a period picture, Brooklyn 45 is a smart take on the spooky séance staple, a film where the scariest spectres are the ghosts of the past rather than any pixel-packed phantoms.