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.

Hugely impressive musical and dance performances from the two young men playing Michael Jackson cannot shake off the uncomfortable fact that there is an entire other side to the pop star’s story which is entirely conspicuous by its absence here.

The cinematic equivalent of being teabagged without your consent.

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.

It’s thinner than the paper it’s written on, and full of questionable choices — but in a switch-your-brain-off kind of way, this will adequately activate your heist glands. Light the fuze!

It’s nonsense — but at the very least, well-meaning nonsense.

Van Sant’s previous historical fictions have been more incisive, but this is a tense crime thriller, with a solid new addition to Bill Skarsgård’s rogues’ gallery of scumbags.

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!

With some genuinely shocking moments, this is a fascinating, frightening —  if frustrating — account of masculinity in crisis.  

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.

Parochial pub-based piffle — like a pint that’s gone a bit flat. But you can’t doubt its sincerity.

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.

Lovely visuals, but this is a rare miss from Sony Pictures Animation. Watch KPop Demon Hunters again, instead.

Gorgeous to look at — but this is simply not looney enough to stand alongside the Looney Tunes greats of old. Needs more anvils.

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.

An odd, messy, misjudged shambles. You can’t fault the earnest tone or the plucky performances, but you can fault almost everything else.

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

This is not the messiah. Nor is it a very naughty boy. There was an opportunity for a truly original spin on the so-called Greatest Story Ever Told here, but The Carpenter’s Son pulls its punches to make a rather rote horror that amounts to little.

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.

Wicked: For Good, sure — but not quite Wicked: For Great.

Gurinder Chadha’s Dickens do-over is a typically original perspective on a canonical classic, if let down by its stretched production values and unlikable songs. But it aims only to be a crowd-pleaser, and may yet become one. 

Now You Three Me, as it should be called, offers ample 2010s nostalgia, but not quite enough brainless fun lands successfully. Put this rabbit back in the hat.

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.

There’s trouble in this paradise: bleak without much of a point to make and bloody without any particular reason, this is an odd attempt at satire that takes a fascinating slice of real-life stranger-than-fiction history and somehow makes it less interesting.

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

It has about as much depth as a floppy disk, but some lovely, shiny CGI and a stunningly ear-shattering score from Nine Inch Nails makes for a fun if forgettable bit of futuristic fluff. Bio-digital jazz, man!

Not quite vintage Black, and Mark Wahlberg is no Robert Downey Jr, but this is fast and funny enough to be worth a couple of your hours. Squint hard enough and it almost feels like you’re back in the ’90s.

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.

All Of You might only work for some of you, but the easy, insatiable fire between Goldstein and Poots is undeniable. 

This collection of tired jokes is enough to prompt the question, “What day did the Lord create Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, and couldn’t he have rested on that day too?”

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 weak shadow of Eddie Murphy’s action-comedy yesteryear, The Pickup would be better off being left unpicked.

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”.

Adam Sandler goes back to his Happy place for this unashamedly stupid sequel. What it lacks in precision or panache, it makes up for in sheer goofy, golf-y geniality.

A big old pile of Smurf.

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.

Killer Of Killers looks the business and comes with all the gory kills and human heroes you’d hope for, but like most anthologies it is a little hit-and-miss.

Strictly-for-fans-only. Bono is a charismatic chronicler of his own life, but the self-conscious storytelling concept is a harder thing to stomach for non-enthusiasts.

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.

Cleaner has good people behind it but this British attempt at a Die Hard ends up just being a bit of a mess. Yippee-ki-nay.

It won’t win points for originality or sophistication, but this is another muscular, well-pitched heist thriller with strong character work from Butler and Jackson Jr. We wait with bated breath for The Further Adventures Of Big Nick.

It doesn’t always land, but it dares to be different, from the title to the team-up. Fresh and thoughtful in a way recent Marvel efforts haven’t always managed.

This is sadly unsuccessful as both an eat-the-rich satire and a schlocky B-movie. Not even Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega can rescue Death Of A Unicorn from expiring on arrival.

Like a parody of a Jason Statham film, without any of the joy that might imply. This Working Man just doesn’t work.

A largely painless viewing experience — but it could have been far more pleasurable.

At once awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, eye-rolling and head-scratching, this is animated cinema on a scale rarely seen. It doesn’t always hang together, but on its box-office achievements alone, Ne Zha 2 has earned a place with the immortals.

All is very much what it seems from another one of these all-is-not-what-it-seems thrillers — but there are fun, enjoyably unhinged performances from Edebiri and Malkovich.

The Electric State loses some of the quiet profundity of the original text, but as a breezily watchable retrofuturistic jolly, it has just enough juice.

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.

A mesmerising, wondrous example of animation’s potential; a thoughtful allegory about ecocide and death; and an adorable ode to four-legged (and two-legged) friends. No ebbs here: Flow is the real deal.

A solid bit of high-concept B-movie fun, establishing Josh Hartnett as a credible action hero, and James Madigan as a genre director to watch.

Quan is typically charismatic in a film that underserves his talents: an action-comedy with a solid amount of the former, but not much of the latter.

Funny and shocking, Get Away is not always a successful holiday-gone-wrong, but its bloody bonkers final act makes it worth the trip.

More unsubtly crowd-pleasing, Burnley-based ebullience, which gets by on its unimpeachably virtuous message — and a gloriously garrulous performance from the always-reliable Rory Kinnear.

La Diva Eterna lives in Jolie, with a performance as towering as it is understated: sad and soulful and heartbreaking. She has never been better. Brava!

Reassuringly formulaic, this is a straightforwardly inspirational-by-numbers sports movie, made watchable thanks to Jharrel Jerome and Jennifer Lopez.

Anyone looking for a revelatory portrait of an iconic artist might be a smidge disappointed. But as conventional as it is, this is still a strikingly well-made musical drama with pitch-perfect performances. Don’t criticise, as Dylan once sang, what you can’t understand. 

It never scrapes the heights of Jackson’s trilogy — few do — but amid a messy meeting of worlds, there are stirring moments.

Its wackier moments sometimes feel like they have more bark than bite, but as an uncommonly honest and authentic depiction of motherhood, Nightbitch will come as sharp relief to mums everywhere.

A typically formulaic seasonal sugar rush that’s only blandly mediocre, rather than so-bad-it’s-good. But Lindsay Lohan’s romcom-dominance cannot be denied.  

A solid if fairly derivative attempt to steal Disney’s thunder. There’s enough pep and vigour here to keep kids interested, if not quite enough for the grown-ups. 

A touch less fresh than the original, but this is still bursting with energy, emotion, warmth and imagination. It knows the way.  

A feverish, quietly sad exploration of longing and infatuation. Its lack of focus stifles the experience, but Daniel Craig has rarely been as compelling a watch.

Piece By Piece’s very existence is baffling, and the Lego of it all is never entirely justified, but as an unconventional documentary of a maverick musician, it works — just about.

Jacques Audiard’s outlandish musical thriller is a little jumbled, and a little misjudged in the treatment of its characters. But you can’t doubt its audaciousness.

If this is to be a swansong, it’s a fitting one: a thrillingly watchable legal thriller about truth, justice and (for better and for worse) the American way, as told by an all-American icon. 

It’s a very straightforward story, but there is no doubting the heartfelt nature of the telling — and the subject matter is unimpeachable. John Williams was the best to ever do it, and this film is a good reminder of how, and why.

An ingenious, wildly stylish new take on the body-swap movie, this deserves to be a Gen-Z cult classic. 

This is a film about nothing less than the future of America and the history of mankind. It is brash and bonkers and doesn’t always hang together, but 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola has rarely been as audacious.

An affectionate road-trip buddy-movie, featuring an unseen depth to Will Ferrell, this documentary is illuminating, timely, and gently funny.

Wolfs has all the practised professionalism of its two anti-heroes, if not quite their spark. But there are few movie stars as straightforwardly enjoyable to watch as Clooney and Pitt.

As sweet and beguiling a musical romance as it’s possible to have between two murderous psychopaths. Its kooky approach won’t suit all stripes of comic-book fan, but it finds a strange, tragic hopefulness all of its own.

The film is strongest when it remembers it’s a Tim Burton film and has licence to get weird. While it’s slicker and less homemade-feeling than the 1988 vintage, there are still flashes of B-movie brilliance.

Deeply forgettable and disposable, this is the kind of action-comedy you will feel like you have seen before. But Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg are good fun, at least.

Paul Feig is mostly back on form with a likeable, frantic, murderous, madcap money-grab of a high-concept comedy. It could be funnier, but it rarely stops for breath.

Alien: Romulus plays the hits, but crucially remembers the ingredients for what makes a good Alien film, and executes them with stunning craft and care. It is, officially, the third-best film in the series.

This is not a perfect film, but it handles the important stuff — abuse, trauma and recovery — unexpectedly well. If its reception is anything like the book’s, it will be a powerful vessel for people with similar stories of their own.

This is probably not the film you would expect it to be. But its unexpectedness is its biggest asset, a moving and very eccentric feathered fantasy about life, death and everything in-between.

Guy Ritchie’s defiantly ahistorical romp is part derring-do spycraft, part bullet-riddled action, part impish comedy, and all-parts silly.

An unorthodox romance that will leave you sweaty-palmed and tearful, in equal measure. It doesn’t quite reach the heights it could, but there’s a hell of a view at the top.

The 4.5 hour-plus runtime might put some off, but that massive canvas only allows for the deepest of deep dives into a monumental achievement in cinematic science-fiction. Another glorious day in the corps!

This is a bold, unusual and gorgeously realised take on the very familiar slasher template — even if it doesn’t quite live up to its innovative promise.

Kill lives up to its name, and then some: this is a breathless, ferociously gory action film, on a level rarely seen before in Indian cinema.

It purports to celebrate the pursuit of science, but this film may have single-handedly set the space programme back a decade.

An unremarkable and quickly forgettable B-movie. Jessica Alba makes a decent stab for John Wick’s particular brand of movie vengeance, but she needs better material than this.

A devastating, urgent reminder that art can be dangerous and important and political and powerful — especially in ten-inch heels.