Mark Kermode

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.

BlacKkKlansman slips seamlessly from borderline-absurdist humour to all-too-real horror, conjuring an urgent blend of sociopolitical period satire and contemporary wake-up call.

Charting a razor-sharp course between the borders of horror, satire, psychodrama and lonely character study (Taxi Driver has been cited as an influence), Saint Maud is a taut, sinewy treat, blessed with an impressively fluid visual sensibility and boosted by two quite brilliant central performances.

Whatever its inconsistencies, The Lost King is an underdog story that proves a perfect vehicle for Hawkins’s reliably winning screen presence.

One for the buffs. [17 Feb 2008, p.3]

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.

Throughout, Konchalovsky juxtaposes wide-ranging events with seemingly insignificant details to dramatic effect.

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.

Built upon a wittily verbose script that delivers more laugh-out-loud lines than most of the year’s alleged comedies, Knives Out retains a beating human heart into which daggers are regularly plunged.

Time and again, scenes of back-breaking struggle end with the screen fading to black, as if the film itself is simply too tired to go on or hanging its head in empathetic shame.

While the changing moods of BlacKkKlansman seemed bold and audacious, the warring elements of Da 5 Bloods appear bolted together rather than alchemically mixed.

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.

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

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.

After Love constantly foregrounds duality, narratively and stylistically.

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.

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.

Strickland’s work seems to exist in that strange space between the social-realist tragicomedy of Mike Leigh and the exotic kaleidoscopic imaginings of Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell. It’s a mesmerising place to be, at once familiar yet otherworldly. Try it on for size.

Hats off, too, to choreographer and movement consultant Madeline Hollander for bringing a shiversome physicality to the shadow roles that recalls the creepiest moments from Hideo Nakata’s Ringu.

The primary tone is gentle and melancholic – an almost existential evocation of memory, and the longing to be made whole.

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

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

Geirharðsdóttir commands the screen throughout, but she receives significant support from Jóhann Sigurðarson as Sveinbjörn, the gruffly avuncular sheep farmer who lives alone with his dog, Woman.

“Narrative art is dead – we are in a period of mourning”; “To scandalise is a right, to be scandalised a pleasure”; “Refusal must be great, absolute, absurd…” Abel Ferrara’s infatuated tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini is littered with such gnomic bon mots, which could apply equally to either director.

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

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.

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.

The result is an A-list B-movie that juggles moments of breath-taking visual splendour with much on-the-nose speechifying about sins of the fathers and eternal isolation, spiced up with some action-packed silliness that entirely undercuts its more po-faced pretensions.