Jonathan Romney

Colours of Time nudges its audience a little heavily, if cheerfully so, with its historical references, and self-confessedly (as per an end title) plays fast and loose in its accuracy, but is genially inventive in messing with the codes of period cinema.

One thing that can be said for revenge thriller Serpent’s Path, by Japanese genre maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is that its French remodelling stands coherently enough on its own terms, although the result is a murky, over-extended affair.

Happy New Year… is vigorous and engaging as dark character comedy, but as drama it never quite builds or coheres convincingly.

It feels like a gorgeous, decidedly dewy-eyed heritage hagiography.

A story which might seem the stuff of high melodrama is given a very different charge by Franco’s characteristic rigour – an uninflected cleanness and clarity in Yves Cape’s cinematography, and a minimum of narrative frills, driving the narrative towards a conclusion that is one of this director’s starkest yet.

The drama’s underlying theme of social and personal conscience clearly lifts Exit 8 beyond the more mechanical aspects of its gaming origins, although Kawamura doesn’t quite handle it without a certain mawkishness.

Holding Liat is an emotionally rich, politically thought-provoking account of one Israeli-American family’s ordeal in the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

Landmarks may not strictly be the film that admirers of Martel’s formal radicalism have been waiting for: notwithstanding some eccentricities, it is a relatively conventional work. But it’s very much from the heart, and from the political conscience – a critique of colonial history and the enduring abuse of power in Argentina.

What Does That Nature Say To You may be a touch disappointing for lovers of the director’s wry understatement, as certain themes feel uncharacteristically emphatic and even, in a last-act discussion scene, too explicitly stated. Otherwise, a group of regular Hong players mesh with seemingly effortless grace in a way that is bound to click with fans and with the director’s regular international outlets.

While the three sections don’t tie up narratively, nor strictly conclude as such, they leave plenty of ideas in their wake – and a multitude of entrancing images.

Precision-tooled, ambitious in scale yet bracingly concise, this is Bigelow’s boldest and most assured film yet.

A screenplay dense with incident and ideological discussion is carried efficiently by fast-moving, sleek direction and sumptuous mise en scene that catches the tone of a changing society and its sudden explosion of capitalist excess. Yet it never quite comes to life as a character sketch.

What gives the film its emotional continuity is a commandingly downbeat performance from Servillo.

The Blue Trail is entrancingly unpredictable in its picaresque unravelling, tinged with magical realist touches.

Although the narrative ultimately goes off the rails, Amamra’s magnetically pugnacious lead gives Animale a consistent pull, while director Benestan’s work with cinematographer Ruben Impens – who also shot Titane – is bustling and kinetic, and intimate when it needs to be.

There’s no denying the film’s urgency, and audiences will certainly leave with plenty to chew over, but Peck doesn’t aid the thinking process by overloading us, where a more focused reading of Orwell’s key ideas could have yielded a much more cogent argument.

The result is bound to offend on a wide scale, but also exhilarate with its sheer rage and ebullient aggression. Not for the faint-hearted, and certainly not for fans of Israel’s political status quo, Yes promises to stir very heated debate.

The film subsides into piled-up shocks and reversals, leaving the actors to bolster the drama with emoting – not always in the most subtle of ways.

Enzo makes a low-key but resonant coda to Cantet’s work, while thematically also being highly consistent with Campillo’s directorial output.

Two Prosecutors is crisply fable-like in construction.

Laxe maintains rising tension throughout, although to frustratingly inconclusve effect and somewhat at the cost of conventional dramatic satisfactions, but the boldness of the undertaking will appeal mightily to cinephiles hungry for movies that take real risks.

Ziba is a genuine intellectual heroine, and Hekmat conveys a sense of how her introversion and seriousness might set her apart in a hedonistic high-school culture.

With a terrific lead from screen and stage veteran Hélène Vincent, this is Ozon in his fine-wine register, but with acerbic notes.

This story of a guilt-ridden bailiff ostensibly resembles conventional social realism but then broadens its scope fascinatingly, foregrounding satirical intent and a mischievous degree of verbal overload.

The result is an undemonstrative but rich contemplation of memory, time and – as shown by the shifting nuances of expression on Rebecca Hall’s face – the pleasures of simply giving someone your undivided attention.

Modi’s ramshackle romanticism never remotely convinces, and – given that it’s about artists who suffered for their radical modernism – it feels terribly dated, stylistically and in content.

With contemplative slow pacing that is leisurely rather than laborious, and Cecilie Semec’s clean, luminous camerawork equally making the most of Oslo’s harbour area and the cast’s characterful, attentive faces, Love is a drama about choice, chance and the carpe diem imperative, especially in the face of illness and emotional distress.

A 21-film anthology on everyday life under bombing in Gaza, From Ground Zero offers a vivid range of insights into the daily challenges faced by civilians, particularly valuable given the restrictions on news reporting there.

Beautifully shot, impressively cast, and revolving round a charismatic lead from long-time US indie favourite Pitt, the film otherwise comes across as a derivative, solemn affair with a look that suggests a retro gloss finish on generic material.

Older children will appreciate the brisker pace and peril, so the overall strategy may be a smart commercial move – but this is the least striking of the series so far.

Daaaaaalí! is less about Dalí himself, more about the difficulty of capturing his mercurial essence.

Its immersive intensity makes it essential viewing for Serra followers, and for anyone interested in documentary’s ability to record, and make us think about, the extremes of the real world.

This depiction of young people facing up against school and state authoritarianism lacks a certain urgency, despite its manifest intelligence and craft.

Following his hugely ambitious period productions Mr Turner and Peterloo, the director returns to what might be considered the quintessential Leigh mode of tightly-framed domestic drama, and does so with exceptional bite.

Wang’s brutally revealing trilogy presents a challenging statement about working-class life, urban and rural, and urges us to think about economic exploitation and the nature of labour in the globalised world.

Her film definitely offers a chance to look more closely not just at the political condition of Brazil but, by extension, at the rise of far-right populism worldwide.

Hard Times, as the name title suggests, is not an easy film to watch, nor is it intended to be.

At once a documentary about the band and its recent live reunion, and a fictional embroidery around its status (and missed opportunities), Pavements is a joyous, slyly subversive celebration that, while unlikely to persuade newcomers to the music, nevertheless catches the band’s wayward spirit, as well as the downright ordinariness that came as an alternative to the bloated rock band ethos.

For a story which ponders on late-life exhaustion and loss of curiosity and pleasure, The Room Next Door strikes a defiant blow against ennui, staking out new territory for the director.

The Brutalist is defiantly its own kind of construction, but longueurs and narrative inertia make it not quite the resounding statement it aspires to be.

As for Law – sporting a bristling moustache and some girth that evoke the weariness that Husk must fight in himself – he gives a sometimes warm, sometimes commandingly irascible performance that shows this actor moving confidently into middle-career authority. He and Hoult’s icy-eyed adversary combine to somewhat mythical resonance; a wrestle-with-the-demon duo that actually fits the political context to pointed effect.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice may not be that fresh or substantial – it’s basically comfort food for long-term Burton fans – but it’ll be hard for viewers to repress a pleased smile, or graveyard rictus.

Mexico 86 offers Béjo a substantial, compelling lead; it shows the Argentinian-born star absolutely at ease in a Spanish-language role, and using her characteristically low-key performance style to potent effect.

While we understand Sam’s back story and present situation, we too rarely get a sense of who he is when not struggling against misunderstanding and harsh weather.

If Starve Acre seems to walk on well-trodden ground, Kokotajlo is nevertheless adept at inhabiting and revitalising the material. Familiar themes and moods haunt the film with their own uncanny insistence.

This might suggest that Misericordia is ultimately a film with a message, and a more solemn one than we’re used to with Guiraudie. But any apparent clarity should be taken with a pinch of salt, the film’s meanings shifting as constantly as the erotic drives between the various male (and occasionally female) characters.

In the film’s favour, it is not afraid of telling bitter truths about violence, hatred and death.

The film is uneven: gripping when it maps out psychological stresses in a claustrophobic domestic setting, less so in the final stretches when it incongruously morphs into a women-in-peril thriller.

By turns flippant and poetic, demystifying and just a touch reverent, the film thrives on whole-hearted collaboration from Deneuve and the other luminaries playing themselves.

A hypnotic and inventive Asian odyssey ... The viewer may not know exactly where Gomes and his characters are headed, but the journey is pursued with wit, imagination and intelligence, and delivers oblique insights about the way we see the world and history.

Rumours doesn’t quite maximise the potential of its incongruous encounter between the living dead and the great and good, or between urbane boardroom satire and psychotropic freakiness. What sustains it, though, are the performances, performed with relish by an ensemble cheerfully riffing on national stereotypes.

Certainly the film comes across in its revved-up, fragmented, ramshackle way as a modern Russian epic – with Limonov as a unique anomalous individual, yet at the same time somehow exemplifying the contradictions and neuroses of a tormented modern nation. He also comes across as a human, flawed figure, self-aggrandising, self-pitying, sometimes helplessly romantic.

The film starts by promising a bourgeois social drama about secrets and lies, suspicions and rivalries, and the troubled waters of juvenile and adult sexuality. What it ultimately becomes is much harder to define, but the result is resonant and haunting – and should spark plenty of post-screening discussions.

Amid the formal fluidity, the forceful acting keeps us hooked.

In Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back To Black, Winehouse’s brief, brilliant life is essentially pared down to a tale of poisoned romance.

Exuberant as it is, The Show treats its basic premise earnestly enough not to come across as merely spoofy. And there’s some considerable wit in the script.

At Averroès & Rosa Parks, which premiered in Berlinale Special, is a tougher watch than its predecessor, but an extremely accomplished and compelling work.

It is hard to decide whether Dumont is treating his genre borrowings with belittling contempt, or getting a kick out of the possibilities offered; it seems safe to assume both. And while the overall weirdness has charm and shock effect, once you’ve got over the surprise of Dumont being this flippantly outre the pleasure wears thin.

The newness is subtle and gently perplexing, but very satisfying indeed.

A documentary that is particularly urgent and eye-opening in the context of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The film’s eclectic ambitions and increasingly eccentric construction get the better of it, resulting in a very uneven brew.

Unfortunately, however confidently Macaigne works his genially shambling nerd persona, the comedy of manners never comes across as sharply as you would hope from a director whose comic mode can be relishably trenchant.

Murphy’s performance, Tim Mielants’s controlled direction and subtle emotional heft combine to make this low-key adaption of Claire Keegan’s Booker-nominated 2021 novella very much a proposition to be reckoned with.

Overall, though, the stylistic consistency and sustained chill of the black comedy make for a satiric focus far keener than, say, the farcical overkill of Triangle Of Sadness.

Emotionally intense and visually arresting, Evolution is rewarding viewing for those willing to enter its austere territory, but the technical virtuosity leaves it on the edge being perceived as of something of an academic exercise. It’s a film easier to admire rather than whole-heartedly engage with.

With a vibrantly charming lead from Griffin Dunne, and enough melancholic worldly wisdom to leaven the humour, Ex-Husbands is an accessible, ostensibly lightweight offering but one nevertheless carried off with expertise, intelligence and empathetic insight.

This magisterially simple version of a celebrated stage warhorse is a steely, no-nonsense final chapter to Friedkin’s career, as well as a stately farewell to cast member Lance Reddick, who died in March, and to whom the film is dedicated.

Sarsgaard is characteristically impressive, his gentle performance holding onto its mysteries and maintaining a dry delicacy that eschews Hollywood demonstrativeness.

This docudrama, recounting the background to Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed 2020 study ’Caste’, is an unwieldy, fragmented hybrid that comes across very much as an educational project, never quite gelling as narrative.

Coup de Chance is not a major reinvention, but it does have more spirit and joie de vivre than anything Allen has done in a while. A sharp, lively cast shows that he is actually rather good at directing in French, and the stars seem accordingly to be having a good time in this light comedy that takes an unexpectedly dark turn.

Each of the film’s three strands has its own dramatic flaws and virtues. But what is most intriguing is the way that the stories are braided, both in editor Anita Roth’s intercutting and in the establishing of visual parallels.

The Killer is a masterfully engineered piece. Throughout, Fincher pitches his own methodical control against The Killer’s, but also signals the glitches in his protagonist’s logic and flawed self-knowledge.

Even as the film sails insouciantly into a rarefied imaginative stratosphere of its own, it’s anchored to emotional reality by a dazzling performance by Emma Stone – if anything, outdoing her revelatory turn in The Favourite.

Whether Medusa Deluxe quite convinces us that it needed to be a one-shot exercise, it’s carried off niftily — the electric performances, from a super-alert, bristling cast, giving a feel of live event to the action, framed in Academy ratio.

Narratively spare ... Less substantial and approachable than Hong’s 2022 features The Novelist’s Film and Walk Up, the fragile, fragmentary In Our Day won’t earn Hong any new fans, but avid followers will enjoy its elusive felicities and love puzzling over its enigmatic gaps.

The Animal Kingdom sets itself up as a brooding chiller, jump scares, freaky coups de cinéma and all, but gradually shifts gear to become more poetic and tender.

An intimate but ambitiously mounted ensemble piece, The Old Oak ranks among Loach’s foremost state-of-the-nation dramas.

Anselm is a portrait of eminent German artist Anselm Kiefer, exploring the man’s spectacular – and often spectacularly sombre – work. Wenders also delves into Kiefer’s biography and his political, historical and literary interests, which chime with the director’s own long-term fascinations to make this arguably the director’s most personal – and certainly most German – film in some time.

The result is the depiction of a seemingly sealed-in, quasi-carceral world, revealing how much China’s current economy – after decades, and multiple phases, of Communism – is now built on old-school sweatshop capitalism, with youth a readily available, and very disposable, commodity.

For all its poetic charm, this is a slender work that comes across as something of a ’mindfulness movie’, in a faintly self-satisfied vein.

Fallen Leaves may not set the film world on fire, but is guaranteed to cast a warm glow.

The do’s, don’t’s and don’t-even-go-there’s of contemporary dating have long been standard fodder for US indie cinema, but they rarely get dissected quite so tartly, or with such weirdly impassive wit, as in The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed.

Taut, no-frills execution – notwithstanding some gorgeous but altogether untouristic landscape photography by Jeanne Lapoirie – helps to foreground the performances poignantly and compellingly.

Haynes makes intriguing work of subtly metafictional psychodrama in May December.

The Zone of Interest is a challenging rather than conventionally provocative film but, by any measure, essential viewing and a work that will be a vital focus of discussion both in the cinephile world and beyond.

Some cinema hits you in the gut – this film places you right inside the gut, and while it’s not always a pleasant place to be, it’s a visit you’re not likely to forget.

It’s McKirnan’s unflappable performance and energetic humour that hold it all together.

It’s clear that this one is waving a flag for the positive possibilities of an empathetic, culture-centred approach to mental care.

Tótem embraces chaos and bustle in an ensemble drama of a family living through crisis. This thematically rich piece offers a set of vivid character studies, while musing on life, death and time – largely from a child’s perspective.

As Maria, Burow shines in a phenomenally demanding role that challenges us to tune in empathetically to a character whose actions and motives are rarely less than problematic, but are always limned with a fine brush.

Undeniably well-meaning and impassioned about the country, its people and its struggle, documentary Superpower is a cluttered account of the war so far, the facts distractingly filtered through the dominant idea that the Hollywood actor is there on the ground, filming history as it happens.

While, on one level, it seems to belong to international cinema’s increasingly prevalent strain of climate catastrophe dramas, on another it’s a brittle character piece, a comedy of social embarrassment with a dark and ultimately tragic undertow. Until, that is, a coda ties it off in another register entirely.

Suzume is hardly a film for all tastes, but is certain to thrill anime buffs across all ages and continents.

While Disco Boy doesn’t entirely weave all its threads to satisfying effect, the film crackles with ideas.

The Adults is a gift to its actors, allowing them to explore the tensed-up taciturnity of emotional repression but also to go haywire with the voices and the crazily choreographed body language.

This is a film with some grace and exuberance, but a cavalier attitude to period verisimilitude only adds to the impression that, when it comes to facing ugly historical reality, Kiberlain’s approach is naïvely inadequate.

The film refrains from diagnosing or analysing – either Keiko’s psyche or her condition – but describes and evokes her world with subtle detached insight. It does so on a miniature scale that some might find frustrating or non-committal, but that allows director Miyake to give us Keiko in close-up, yet in a manner that’s scrupulously non-intrusive too.

The situation of Israel’s Arab population is treated with poised satirical acidity in Let It Be Morning, a film mixing social comedy with a touch of absurdism that, though rooted in real-world conflict, has distinct echoes of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.