John Nugent

Just a solidly made cat-and-mouse thriller, with muscularly committed performances from its two leads. It’ll make you want to explore the Great Outdoors and simultaneously never leave your house again.

A defiantly avant-garde take on commercial chart-toppers. It’s not for everyone, but it deserves to be: a gorgeous fusion of film, fashion, faith, and certified bangers.

A cautionary tale against the dangers of excessive podcasting, this is a supremely spooky sonic ordeal. As an allegory for Catholic guilt, it’s haunting; as an auditory experience, it’ll fuck you up.

A special sort of film, one which can be enjoyed as a dark climate-change allegory and a bright, colourful, emotional yarn on friendship and family. Fantastique!

A very watchable old-school blockbuster crowd-pleaser. Ryan Gosling and an alien made of rocks are the best space-based double-act since R2-D2 and C3-PO.

Don’t call it a comeback — but this is really strong stuff from Pixar: funny, thoughtful, sweet, making for a heartfelt paean to nature, and beavers in particular. Dam good.

An energetic, urgent and damning assessment of our prison crisis, Wasteman marks Cal McMau as an exciting new homegrown director.

A hugely impressive debut. Personal and political, this is a tender and spellbinding depiction of family in fraught times.

Essentially “Men will literally do stand-up rather than go to therapy”, in cinematic form. An appealing tragicomedy-drama, told with veracity and heart by Cooper, Arnett and Dern.

About as powerful as cinema gets. Its hybrid blend of documentary audio and devastating dramatisation is heart-wrenchingly, shatteringly effective.

A gripping, zig-zaggy potboiler, this is a crime thriller in the old-school tradition, with some enjoyable turns from Boston’s finest, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

Just lovely. Tourette syndrome has not been afforded its cinematic dues, but what an affable, funny character to explore it with in John Davidson — and what a performance from Robert Aramayo.

A true original: an impressionistic portrait of a lost life, recreated in multiple forms with a gorgeous soundtrack. Odd, but unique.

With strong performances in service to a clear, confident vision from Chloé Zhao, this is a wrenching contemplation of the “undiscovered country” of death and grief.

Haunting, serenely composed and beautiful, this is an elegy for a life and a country that America used to be. 

Gothic, iconoclastic, engrossing, slyly excoriating of modern-day America and very funny to boot, it’s another solidly satisfying whodunnit from Benny B. Keep them coming, please.

Edgar Wright’s biggest film yet feels like something out of both the future and the 1980s: a scathing satire that’s also a lot of fizzy blockbuster fun.

Riveting, unhinged, and sardonic to its honey-soaked core, this is another Lanthimos-Stone winner. (With a great opening-title typeface, to boot.)

As a newly solo director, Safdie summons a thoughtful and moving mood for this unconventional sports film; as a newly serious dramatic actor, Johnson is about to win some awards.

A heck of a debut from first-timer Shawn Simmons, and another powerful argument for A-list status for Samara Weaving. Bring on the sequel, which is obliged to be titled Miny Moe. 

An audacious, farcically funny digest of where we are now, and how we got here: the cinematic equivalent of pandemic primal therapy, a mad scream into the void.

A hugely accomplished horror achievement, and a significant step up from Barbarian: tense, sad, hilarious, unsettling, ridiculously entertaining, and ultimately oddly uplifting.

The result is a film that has a better chance of producing a belly laugh than any in recent memory: one that deserves, as Drebin would say, “20 years for man’s laughter”.

M3GAN 2.0 is more absurd, self-aware silliness: a riot of timely tech paranoia, with almost no horror but a ton of successful comedy. Slay, queen!

A different beast to Past Lives, this is a razor-sharp look at the competitive marketplace of dating: both rigorously honest and idealistically romantic.

A tense, knotty opening act yields to some of Tom Cruise’s most impressive stunts yet, ending the film — and perhaps the series — on a high.

With a committed, crazed, brilliantly calibrated performance from late-Renaissance Cage, this is a feverishly good thriller: surreal and strange and sticky.

Its pleasures lie in the dialogue, the twists, the reveals. It all leads to a delightful Agatha Christie-style drawing room denouement, in which the rat is exposed, their best-laid plans laid to waste. Like the film as a whole, it’s deliciously, lip-smackingly satisfying.