Phil de Semlyen

The message of finding balance between analogue and digital, old-school toys and tech, may seem woolly to some. But balance feels like the solution to this 21st century parental quandary – and maybe to Hollywood’s legacy sequel problem: play to your old strengths, but have timely purpose in doing so. Toy Story 5 strikes that balance nicely.

An icebound travelogue and haunting photo essay, given voice by a lovely electronic score from Dan Deacon, Time and Water is an often dispiriting but at times transcendent look at the death of an Icelandic glacier, and the ways we process loss.

Not a flat-out fizzer but definitely nowhere near the ludicrously high standards he’s set for himself, Steven Spielberg’s return to sci-fi goes down as a mid-tier entry in his personal canon – albeit one elevated by Emily Blunt and a couple of the type of nuts action sequences that few others could pull off.

This is a real return to form from Wilde, who finds her Booksmart groove again after the misstep of Don’t Worry Darling. Cue it up and get the neighbours round. Or not.

Enzo is a haunting reminder of what it is to be young – a fitting epitaph to a filmmaker who understood young people better than most.

Wigon executes the bloody splurges with flair but fails to build up to them with stakes or tension.

Pressure is less of a traditional war flick than a satisfying chamber piece about how people use and communicate information when the stakes are sky high and groupthink is kicking in.

Its urge to find beauty in the wreckage of war has a forced quality, a romanticism at odds with this grim world. Still, with LGBTQ+ stories so rare in the filmography of World War I, it’s a rare and welcome perspective – as well as another showcase for a gifted young filmmaker.

Full Phil is a 70-minute short story of a film with a few good jokes, some touching moments, and two Hollywood stars really going there (Stewart’s food consumption is heroic). It’s fun but, like Mr Creosote’s mint, only wafer thin.

Director László Nemes (Son of Saul) returns to World War II to force two real-life foes – French Resistance chief Jean Moulin and Nazi interrogator Klaus Barbie – into a grim dance macabre in this elegant and viscerally intense wartime thriller.

Zvyagintsev has made another remarkable film full of moral clarity that will get up the nose of all the right people. He may just be the greatest Russian filmmaker since Tarkovsky, and he’s definitely the ballsiest.

The Romanian filmmaker has tackled similar themes before, most recently in 2022’s Transylvanian xenophobia drama R.M.N., but it’s extra punchy to see him casting a steely glance at a society other than his own. His latest is another chilly but gripping effort, that surges from cosy to traumatic in a heartbeat.

The storytelling doesn’t quite live up to the craft and performances.

Overall, though, this is a timely drama from a director with a growing canon of eloquent humanist work – a melancholy torch song to the stories that play out beneath our changing skylines.

Bitter Christmas finds the Spaniard at his most raw and introspective – looking inwards and not entirely enjoying what he finds.

A strange beast, then: great when it’s being Predator or Tremors; rotten when it turns into Prometheus.

The Beloved is a fabulous film about filmmaking, and an astute and hard-hitting one about family dynamics. It’s also a great argument that the two should be kept apart at all times.

It’s a great adventure story, and Dower’s ebullient doc captures the exhilaration of following it on the news at the time. Perhaps it’s time Piccard embarked on another one of his quixotic expeditions.

Fatherland is an elegant, engrossing film; chilly at times, but also poignant as repressed feelings finally bubble to the surface. This is another expansive, enriching work from a modern master.

In the mood for two hours of relentless fights, gory kills, clichéd McGuffins and unmemorable characters, all served up in a weightless CG environment? Mortal Kombat II punches a hole in all those boxes.

Apart from the confetti-cannon finale, this isn’t the hackneyed stereoscopic where things burst through the screen, but an immersive front row and on-stage spot at Billie Eilish’s 2025 world tour.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is one of those nice surprises, a so-called legacy sequel made with love and executed with flair. Think Top Gun: Maverick with better hats.

The photography is spectacular. Petit and his crew have abseiled, crawled and waded through the darkness to chart the earth’s shadowy recesses.

A woolly family caper with a nostalgic flavour, The Sheep Detectives conjures flattering comparisons with Babe.

Finding positive manifestations for mass groups of men marching through cities in identical clothing is no mean feat, but you’ll walk away from Ultras with a new understanding of a misunderstood phenomenon.

Generic, sure, but gripping enough, Apex has located a corner of God’s own country where the devil reigns.

No one expected this long-delayed piece of Michael Jackson pop-aganda to lay bare the man behind the myths and myriad controversies in forensic style. And yet… this soft-ball character study of the King of Pop only doubles down on the former, while completely ignoring the latter, hitting all the usual dreary biopic beats along the way.

Newcomer Abraham Wapler as video artist Seb and Zinedine Soualem’s high-school teacher Abdel are standouts in the likeable ensemble, but the Adèle timeline, a sepia-tinged coming-of-age tale with a backdrop of characters to put Madame Tussauds to shame, is the film’s heartbeat. It’s a great excuse to revisit this gilded age in French history.