Mark Kermode

There’s something quite breathtaking about the deceptive ease with which Song’s first cinematic foray juggles the metaphysical and the matter-of-fact, conjuring a world in which every decision has transformative power, and concepts of love and friendship are at once mysteriously malleable yet oddly inevitable.

Most modern American film-makers rarely get the chance to conjure frank sex scenes that serve an explicit narrative purpose, so it’s significant that Sachs has cited the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman (along with fellow Europeans Maurice Pialat and Luchino Visconti) as inspirations for this French-German co-production.

Blue Beetle may be frontloaded with visual fireworks that neatly meld the practical and the virtual, but it is the likable interplay between its down-to-earth characters that gives the film oomph, making it more than just a Shazam-style romp.

Amid the screenplay platitudes (“The crash is not going to define who you are; how you respond to it will”) and shameless advertising riffs (unabashed spiels about PlayStation democratising motor sports), there’s an intriguing story of alien worlds colliding that somehow seems tailor-made for Blomkamp’s preoccupations.

For all the genre nods, this remains very much its own movie – a film that isn’t afraid to talk to its core audience, even while giving them the heebie-jeebies.

Pretty Red Dress is both playful and defiant, swept along on a tide of toe-tapping tunes that tug at the heartstrings, yet unafraid to face up to complex personal issues while still maintaining its solidly mainstream appeal.

It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject. Audiences will be delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.

For all its multitudinous reference points, this remains very much Da Silveira’s movie – as distinct and pointed as Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night or Julia Ducournau’s Raw­ – a genre film with something to say, and a unique voice with which to say it.

He may be 80, but Ford carries the weight of the film, which, for all its gargantuan expense, feels a bit like those throwaway serials that first inspired Lucas – fun while it lasts, but wholly forgettable on exit.

Fans will doubtless be dazzled by its meticulous imitation-of-life-in-miniature visual aesthetic, yet I swithered between whimsical amusement, mild curiosity and outright irritation.

Perhaps that is this frothy film’s strength: cherrypicking multiplex-friendly elements from a complex and still largely unknown life in a manner that leaves the audience wanting to know much more.

It’s functionally good-natured rehash fare, bogged down by some watery CG and a few uncomfortable dips into “uncanny valley”, yet buoyed up by Bailey’s winning titular performance.

I think Beau Is Afraid is best described as an amusingly patience-testing shaggy dog story that asks: “What if your mother could hear all those unspeakable things you tell your therapist?” Parts of it are hilarious. Other sections sag. Some will find it insufferable.

Disbelief is not so much suspended as detonated.

The real revelations, however, lie in the depiction of Fox’s family life, most notably his marriage to actor Tracy Pollan, who first won his heart by calling him “a complete fucking asshole”, and whose unswerving love leaves him all but speechless when he’s asked what she means to him, save for one word: “Clarity”.

Park’s portrayal of Freddie never misses a beat – an astonishing transformative feat for a first-time actor who seems to arrive on screen as a fully formed, multifaceted performer, inhabiting the film’s kaleidoscopic central character.

Hansen-Løve hits a career high note, delivering a quietly thoughtful and ultimately life-affirming portrait of the strange interaction between loss and rebirth. It’s a miraculous balancing act that pretty much took my breath away.

There’s a strong element of myth and magic at work here too, most notably in the recitation of an eerie dream about mating eels and mass infidelity, and in the sight of the body of a horse rotting over a period of years and returning to the earth. It all adds to the film’s haunting appeal.

The result will leave you with a smile on your face, a spring in your step and (hopefully) a renewed confidence in next-wave British film-making.

The Champions ensemble takes this to the next level, showcasing a host of rising talent, with particular plaudits to Tevlin and Iannucci, both of whom have scene-stealing charisma and note-perfect comic timing to spare.

Astonishingly natural and engaging performances from young newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele lend heartfelt authenticity to a film that builds upon the promise of 2018’s Girl, confirming Dhont as a deft and empathetic chronicler of the tumultuous anguish and ecstasy of adolescence.

What Enys Men “means” will differ for each viewer. For me, it is (like Bait) a richly authentic portrait of Cornwall, far removed from any tourist-friendly vision. . . I’ve seen the film three times so far, and I can’t wait to dive into it and be swept away again. Bravo!

Sporadically goofy fun, a scrappy carnival of ripped limbs, severed heads and spilled intestines, all softened by an only partly parodic family-centred Spielbergian sensibility.

While subjects as dark as separation and death may be faced head-on (a reading from Philip Larkin’s The Trees had me in tears), there’s a comedic quality that reminded me of Aardman’s sublime Creature Comforts animations – a joyous juxtaposition of quotidian, vérité-style dialogue and fancifully inventive visuals that hits a tragicomic sweet spot.

Yet there are also moments of heart-stopping tenderness and beauty.

An atmosphere of empathy, reason and wit pervades Polley’s film, underwritten by an emancipatory urgency (“that day we learned to vote”) that drives the narrative even in its darkest moments.

If you’re looking for a film that explains where the Spielbergian tropes you know and love came from, then The Fabelmans is for you.

For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare – hysterical rather than historical, derivative rather than inventive.

An awards-worthy performance from Danielle Deadwyler (who stole the show in 2021’s The Harder They Fall) lends a passionate heart to this solidly engrossing and still contemporary historical drama set in 1955 and dedicated “to the life and legacy of Mamie Till-Mobley”.

Filtering his immense contribution to cinema through a deceptively incidental lens, he once again reminds us that movie-making can be a profoundly humane endeavour; at once comedic, tragic and truthful.

A lumbering, humourless, tech-driven damp squib of a movie, this long-awaited (or dreaded?) sequel to one of the highest grossing films of all time builds upon the mighty flaws of its predecessor, delivering a patience-testing fantasy dirge that is longer, uglier and (amazingly) even more clumsily scripted than its predecessor, blending trite characterisation with sub-Roger Dean 70s album-cover designs and thunderously underwhelming action sequences. In water.

Ultimately, it’s the film’s sheer strangeness – that peculiarly magical, lapsed-Catholic sensibility that runs throughout all of Del Toro’s most personal works – that makes this sing and fly.

A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.

This deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.

Few will remain unmoved by this intriguingly adventurous and thought-provoking drama.

It’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.

O’Connor clearly isn’t afraid of rattling cages when approaching sacred texts. There’s something refreshingly untethered about the gusto with which she reimagines Emily, tossing aside the image of a shy, sickly recluse, replacing it with an antiheroine whose inability to fit in with the ordered world is a source of strength rather than weakness.

Flux Gourmet makes us laugh because, on some bizarre level, we do actually believe in and care about these utterly preposterous characters and situations.

At its heart this is a gothic melodrama, a fever dream of childhood trauma haunting adult life, replete with skin-crawlingly cruel visions of inquisitorial torture, brutal ordeals and hellish infernos – more Nightmare on Elm Street than My Week With Marilyn.

What Moonage Daydream does manage to do is to share some of the adventurous spirit of its subject – a chameleon who wasn’t afraid of falling flat on his face while reaching for the stars. If Bowie’s career teaches us anything, it’s that no one can laugh at you if you’ve already laughed at yourself. Certainly his capacity for balancing seriousness with self-deprecation (“No shit, Sherlock!”) remained one of Bowie’s most endearing traits.

Mortensen and Seydoux play it deliciously straight, jumping through the well-rehearsed philosophical and physical hoops with elegant ease, conjuring a sense of yearning humanity that saves the production from descending into silliness… just about.

Lorne Balfe’s sparsely used music leaves plenty of open spaces for the drama to breathe, as if inviting the audience to fill in the blanks with an internal accompaniment (tragic? Comedic? Ironic?) of their own choosing.

The film too often seems to be heading somewhere extraordinary, only to disappear into an ambitious conceptual hole that, while occasionally startling, is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

It’s that blend of heartbreak and joy, profundity and absurdity that is the key to this enchanting movie’s magical spell.

A thrillingly intense central performance by Alice Krige (who earned her genre spurs in the underrated 1981 screen adaptation of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story) is the lightning rod at the core of the film, grounding its hallucinogenic visuals in the terra firma of past tragedies and modern traumas, provoking “dark thoughts; really dark thoughts”.

An impressively slick and slimy performance from Javier Bardem is the standout selling point for this serviceable if (perhaps appropriately?) workaday satire on corporate corruption and alienated capitalism.

The result has homemade charm to spare, proving delightfully ridiculous but also poignant.

It’s a riotously audacious work.

None of which is to say that Good Luck to You, Leo Grande isn’t admirably subversive and enjoyably whimsical fare.

It doesn’t help that Dominion spends a good deal of time trying to figure out what story to tell and which genre (or country) to tell it in.

It’s a playfully twisted affair – not quite as profound as it seems to think, perhaps, but boasting enough squishy metaphorical slime to ensure that its musings upon textbook male characteristics are rarely dull, and sometimes deliciously disgusting.

Top Gun: Maverick offers exactly the kind of air-punching spectacle that reminds people why a trip to the cinema beats staying at home and watching Netflix.

Behind it all is an endlessly saddening search for that transformative sacrament evoked by the film’s title – alluring yet elusive.

The result may be a tad overlong and convolutedly overstuffed, but it made me laugh, cry and think – which is more than can be said for many a Marvel flick.

The atmosphere is stripped down and austere, allowing the songs to speak for themselves as they transport us from this world to the next.

While the Norns-of-fate narrative may contrive several reversals of fortune and sympathy, there’s little of the genuinely uncanny weirdness that made Eggers’s first two features such a treat. What madness lies herein is not of the north-northwest variety but more in keeping with the bonkers blockbuster spectacle of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.

Beautifully believable performances from Haarla and Borisov add emotional weight, rivalling the nuanced naturalistic charm of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy.

Ali & Ava is a vibrant work that uses the transcendent power of song to turn a streetwise tale into a diegetic musical, with genuinely surprising results.

Blending melancholy wistfulness with unruly energy and piercing humour, it’s a down-to-earth tale of love and death, boosted by a brilliantly believable central performance and elevated by fantastical moments of hallucinogenic horror and ecstatic joy.

With great physical poise and precision, Wilson (who optioned and developed the source book) engages the audience on a visceral level, her deceptively low-key performance taking us deep inside her character’s dreams, desires and insecurities.

This is a playfully sensuous affair that wonders what happens to slow-burn intimacy when mediated by the urgency of the online world.

As for Baker and regular co-writer Chris Bergoch, they refrain from judging their characters, observing the world from Mikey’s maniacally self-serving point of view even as comedy turns to queasiness and worse.

While The Duke is never quite as surprising as the case that inspired it, it nonetheless retains a much-needed astringent streak.

This is a triumph-of-the-human-spirit story as dramatic as the most finely wrought melodrama, with flashes of vintage newsreels reminding us that it is all “real”.

Years ago, I compared Del Toro to Orson Welles, a film-maker who instinctively understood the hypnotic power of cinema to dazzle, delight and deceive. On the basis of Nightmare Alley, which is blessed with more than a touch of evil, that’s a comparison by which I still stand.

The film takes a fantastical leap that viewers will find either breathtaking or ridiculous – probably a bit of both.

Some will be repelled, many will be bamboozled. But for those with an appetite for cinema that gets you in the gut, Ducournau delivers the goods.

The result is a spicy nerve-jangler served with a chargrilled side order of jet-black gallows humour – a divine comedy barrelling towards inevitable tragedy, played out in hell’s kitchen where someone is bound to get burned.

Like all the best evocations of times past, Licorice Pizza has no answers – only an enraptured sense of awe that makes Anderson’s joyous film feel like a very personal memory.

As always, Colman manages to express deep wellsprings of emotion with few words and fewer gestures – her face telegraphing great swathes of anguish beneath polite smiles and annoyed glances.

Where Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s version comes into its own is in the moments where it dares to find its own distinct voice – nowhere more so than in placing Somewhere in the hands of Rita Moreno.

For better or worse, House of Gucci is a little too well behaved to become a cult classic. But Gaga deserves a gong for steering a steely path through the madness – for richer, not poorer; in kitschness and in wealth.

Petite Maman is short and sweet, yet fearlessly profound. A mix of fairytale, ghost story and rites-of-passage journey, this is at heart a cinematic parable about healing intergenerational wounds, about breaching the barriers that inevitably grow between parents and children.

It’s the more deceptively restrained and poetic elements that strike home.

Playing out over three excruciating days at Sandringham – from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day – and carried shoulder high by a note-perfect Kristen Stewart, Spencer (the very title of which seems to present a challenge to the House of Windsor) dances between ethereal ghost story, arch social satire and no-holds-barred psychodrama, while remaining at heart a paean to motherhood.

For all its scattershot reference points, however, Last Night in Soho still emerges as Wright’s most personal film – you can feel how much he loves the material. Frankly, I felt the same way.

Right now, Villeneuve is riding the sinewy worm of Herbert’s sacred text with aplomb.

Despite a spirited performance from Comer and an impressive roster of supporting turns (including a scene-stealing Harriet Walter as Jean’s withering mother, Nicole), The Last Duel has a tendency to mirror its central battle’s attempts to address complex issues with the blunt tool of rabble-rousing spectacle.

If the result sends viewers scuttling back to Armitage’s uniquely accessible version of the source text, then that would be marvellous indeed. But there is enough here that is dazzling and enthralling for Lowery’s movie to stand proudly as a grand work of poetry in its own right.

While the result may not be quite as deep as the cavern at the centre of the story, it has an enticing sliver of ice at its heart.

Perfectly pitched and sensitively played, this is truthful, powerful and profoundly moving fare from a film-maker at the very top of her game.

There’s a strong element of Greek tragedy underpinning Rose Plays Julie.

Vividly rendered, and filled with tangible yearning, it strikes a balance between romantic passion and mundane domesticity, as the skin-prickling attraction of new love is tested by the day-to-day tribulations of real life.

Despite top-notch period production design and a couple of convincing studio workout sequences (I was reminded of the brilliant Love & Mercy as Aretha tells her bassist to ditch Alabama for Harlem), the drama rarely has the fiery spark its subject demands.

By comparison with 1999’s Pola X and 2012’s Holy Motors, Annette (which Carax tenderly dedicates to his daughter Nastya) is surprisingly accessible fare: adventurous, anarchic and unexpectedly heartfelt.

It all adds up to a very modern drama about age-old anxieties: the fear of ageing and death; the desire for intimacy and reassurance; the allure of artifice and deceit.

This thrilling, dizzying debut from Welsh writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond is a nostalgic treat for anyone old enough to remember the infamous “video nasties” scare of the early 80s. Yet beneath the retro surface lies a more universal tale about the power of horror to confront our deepest fears – a timeless celebration of the liberating nature of the dark side.

From bucket-of-water tomfoolery to visually inventive biography and witty musicology, this really does have something for the girl with everything.

This portrayal of imprisonment may be authentically down to earth (Blackbeard’s rival Lass wants inmates to be managed “more rationally”, not as enslaved people but “customers”), but Night of the Kings proves most captivating in evoking the transformative power of the imagination.

Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s feature debut intertwines music and politics in one of the best concert movies of all time.

Every bit as immersive as Victor Kossakovsky’s recent documentary Gunda, about a sow and her piglets, The Truffle Hunters serves as a timely reminder that the world does not turn to the industrialised rhythms of mankind alone, and that we lose track of its natural heartbeat at our peril.

While the result may occasionally get bogged down by dramatic contrivance, it’s generally buoyed up by a pair of likably bickering performances from the two leads.

Suffice to say that, as with all of Wheatley’s best works, In the Earth combines humour and horror in terrifically bamboozling fashion, not least during a gruellingly extended amputation sequence that will have you squirming, laughing and wincing all at once.

For all its apparent structural complexities, The Father is not quite as mysterious as its creators would have us believe.

After Love constantly foregrounds duality, narratively and stylistically.

It’s a collection of grimly satirical snapshots, fitting together like the misshapen pieces of a Chinese puzzle ball to create a dyspeptic, dystopian portrait of our past, present and future.

It’s the eerie mystery of sadness that rings most clearly through Nikou’s film, a meditation on the construction of personality that, like all the best ghost stories, combines wistful melancholia with a hint of wish-fulfilment, of lost souls who, in forgetting, are trying to remember.

There’s a hardscrabble sense of ordinary ageing folk making the best of a bad deal in often desolate and unforgiving circumstances. Yet whatever hardships they face, it’s the air of community and self-determination that rings throughout Zhao’s empathic film.