Kevin Harley

Taut and sprawling, riveting and haunting: firing on all cylinders, Nolan tackles world-changing history with fearsome force and focus.

Del Toro’s Valentine to boundary-crossing love pours from the screen in ravishing torrents of feeling and style. And Hawkins is sublime.

Adam Sandler is off-the-scale good in the Safdies’ latest: a scuzzy shot of adrenaline into the crime pic’s heart.

Alluring and unnerving, Lynch’s horror-show reminds us how much cinema misses him. Watts is electric, too.

Part Two is an inarguable marvel technically, almost leaving its Oscar-grade predecessor for dust.

Prepare to be spirited away. A brain-scrambler to make hearts swell, Shinkai’s giddy romance brims with emotion and invention.

Between the vast exteriors and candlelit interiors, the expressive authority of Kubrick’s direction is breathtaking.

Moving ever-onward from the sequels years, Pixar gets right back in the zone with Soul. Deep, witty, and fast on its jazz-loving feet, it doesn’t miss a beat.

Anderson crafts another classic of obsession and strange love, played by dynamite leads: Day-Lewis retires in style, Krieps is revelatory.

Under Haynes’ sure hand, Blanchett and Mara deliver a love story to melt to. Every glance means something, no strain shows: it’s filmmaking as natural as breathing.

Defiant, determined, Vega delivers a star-making performance in a drama of embattled grief, directed with heart.

Even the devout, surely, will warm to Dormael's alt-gospel: one of compassion, oddball fish gags and cheerier skylines.

Between its orgiastic carnage, orgasmic colours and very good dogs, Wick’s return gives hyper-stimulated action cinema a good name.

Gibson returns to film’s frontline with a ferociously felt anti-war movie, while Garfield invests his Doss with tremendous conviction.

An earthy, affecting and droll celebration of the unique alignment of influences that forged a great band – and the thrusting live footage rams Pulp’s greatness home.

A genre-blender imbued with style and substance. Magnetic and elusive, Stewart matches her director.

Vogt’s droll, daring meta-drama flows in subtle, surprising fashion. Petersen provides a magnetic focus for a mischievous, moving debut.

Ragnarok is both the MCU’s funniest outing yet and its clearest beneficiary of a playful, character-ful director’s voice since Guardians.

The drama gets overwrought but Shults stages the fallout artfully, stressing choppy montages and a nerve-rattling sound mix as tensions erupt.

Kapadia lays bare the tragedy of Winehouse’s story. It’s a tough, unfiltered watch but a thoughtful, thorough, feeling one.

A meditation on repressed desire with deep secrets, Thelma throbs with hypnotic intensity: it burns slow, but its magnetism holds right up to the teasing climax.

Over-ambitious perhaps, but Freyne’s intensely executed ‘infected’ fable packs tension, resonance, and clout.

It might not venture into the unknown, but Raya takes spirited wing.

Dudok de Wit and Ghibli have birthed a pan-continental marvel: a fable-cum-fantasy of a life adrift, aching with tender beauty and awed by nature’s extremes.

Mackenzie goes western in satisfying style, while Bridges, Pine and Foster bring true grit to Sheridan’s tight script.

In Soderbergh’s self-aware hands, it’s a character-centric, director-driven, genre-savvy invitation to take pleasure in a job well orchestrated, right up to a judicious closing shot that leaves you wanting to linger awhile with its motley crew.

Subtexts about grief and revenge help anchor the plot, though the more decisive clincher is Lowe’s guiding imprint – a mix of scathing vernacular wit and genre savvy.