Phil de Semlyen

Can a movie leave you with a comedown? If it’s as raucous and unruly as Kneecap, a nonstop blizzard of beats, bumps of white powder and punky defiance of the British and Belfast’s sectarian past, the answer’s a firm ‘yes’.

Still, cumbersome plotting aside, there’s enough gory mayhem and genuine zingers to make Deadpool & Wolverine a fun ride in a packed and up-for-it cinema.

With its peppy cast, streamlined story and about a bazillion pixels’ worth of VFX cyclones to sweep you back in your seat, it’s a fun and refreshingly old-school night at the pictures.

Thelma is neither as funny nor as Marmite-y as Little Miss Sunshine, a kindred spirit in the quirky indie realm, but its light shines in myriad little character beats.

It’s artfully shot, the aspect ratio tightening claustrophobically as it flashes back to the 1970s. But Perkins’s script also sprinkles in sudden shocks, deeply macabre moments and slashes of dark humour to generate a deep unease all of its own.

Genre fans will admire the ceaseless mayhem of this rare Indian entry to the carnage canon. It’s not The Raid, or even this year’s Monkey Man, but it’s got some slick moves of its own.

With no Ghibli film in the offing (although My Neighbor Totoro is getting a UK cinema re-release in August), The Imaginary is an often delightful way to fill the anime gap.

It charts an unexpected success story that leaves you hopeful others will embrace its lessons.

The result is an empathetic, emotionally candid treat – Pixar’s own brains trust back at full capacity.

It’s rare for something this necrotic to feel this fresh.

Watching this sturdy, sensitively acted Old West drama, it’s easy to wonder how many westerns Viggo Mortensen would have made if he’d been kicking about in the ’50s and ’60s.

With his energised 2021 breakthrough Sweat, von Horn followed a young influencer grappling with the dark side of online life. This period piece offers a very different kind of female odyssey through a lonely and forbidding world. The result is harrowing but seriously impressive.

It clocks in at three hours but not a scene feels superfluous as its central quartet – dad, mum, two teenage daughters – squabble, fall out and finally implode in a subversive final act.

Santosh positions its protagonist as a fundamentally decent woman in an impossible situation, rather than a crusading cop on mission. If ‘Training Day with more grey areas’ sounds dull, it’s anything but.

Motel Destino never deviates radically enough from that tried-and-tested Postman template to throw up too many surprises. The result is frisky but fleeting.

Imagine Pedro Almodóvar directing Sicario and you’re close to the tenor of this exuberant cartel-thriller-stroke-musical – which, as if those elements weren’t heady enough, comes with a tender trans twist.

A cinematic Rorschach test, it’s more likely to reaffirm your views on the man than challenge them.

As a supernatural chiller, In Flames finds itself undermined by its own everyday horrors.

Still, if his doc is as toothless as Cookie Monster 2.0, it’s still a nostalgic treat to spend time with the man who gave us Kermit, Big Bird and the Goblin King.

The tone is incredibly specific – darkly funny, exuberant, sad and enraged – and the small cast nails it.

If co-directors Svetlana Zill and Alexis Bloom paint a sometimes confronting picture of the price of ‘free love’, that never tarnishes their subject. You’re left with the sense that she was a butterfly neither the Stones nor any of the other men in her life could ever trap – a fitting epitaph to a mercurial life.

With The Fall Guy, stuntman-turned-filmmaker David Leitch and his bang-on-form stars, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, have nestled a frisky, winsome romantic comedy inside the framework of an old-school, full-throttle action movie and conjured up a pretty perfect Friday night at the movies in the process.

It’s not quite Roman Holiday, but it’s got a charm of its own.

If the story construction is intricate, the tennis is ferocious.

It’s a pungent articulation of American chaos. The problem is that it’s not telling us much that we don’t already know.

Not all of these vignettes are duds – Amy’s meet-cute with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell, excellent) over pints and pool in a Camden boozer is genuinely terrific – but they don’t make a script that already feels soft-soaped to get the Winehouse’s estate’s approval, feel any less pedestrian.

Stark social drama meets boy’s own adventure in this strikingly photographed African-set, Oscar-nominated adventure.

The new Dev Patel is taking no prisoners in this slice of Mumbai mayhem, announcing himself as a filmmaker with possibly the most ferocious mainstream action movie since The Raid, and as an action star by sticking a knife into a goon’s neck. With his teeth.

Entertainly, director Michael Mohan, who worked with Sweeney on the 2021 thriller The Voyeurs, twigs that the Catholic Church isn’t just a source of spiritual tension, but a terrific arsenal too. Immaculate makes imaginative use of crucifixes, rosaries, and at least one crucifixion nail in all kinds of ways the Papacy didn’t intend.

From sombre Islamic prayers to café-touba-fuelled socialising, Banel & Adama is stitched beautifully together from the fabric of rural Senegalese traditions.

It’s wonderfully creepy and unnervingly familiar, like Alan Partridge by way of The Exorcist. If that doesn’t automatically enter it into the pantheon of classic midnight movies, I don’t know what does.

The combination of Gyllenhaal’s easy charm, some Florida sunshine and at least one fight scene for the ages make this Road House worth stopping by. Just try to grab a seat in a quiet corner.

Do you work to live or live to work? If you’ve got a half-decent job, it might just be the latter. For young millennial Angela, a hard-pressed PA at a Bucharest film production company in Radu Jude’s self-described tale of ‘Cinema and Economics in Two Parts’, it’s barely even the former.

Stopmotion feels born out of the sheer mental challenge of being trapped in a room with macabre creations that come to life over weeks of painstaking labour.

It’s anthropology, not violence, that provides the sting in the tail – a thought-provoking coda to an often pulse-pounding survival horror.

As a sequel, it works for the same reasons that make The Empire Strikes Back so many people’s favourite Star Wars film: there’s a darkness, a bleakness, that makes the fist-pumping moments feel all-the-more earned.

With top performances and real heart, American Fiction is a film that diagnoses the problem and presents a cure.

Culkin, just as motor-mouthed and f-bombing as Succession’s Roman Roy, but here with an extra slug of despair, is the manic yin to Eisenberg’s neurotic but compassionate yang. It’s an inspired on-screen pairing that plays to both actor’s strengths and finds space for melancholy amid some deeply awkward laughs.

It’s far from a ham-fisted, tasteless Bialystocky nightmare. But neither does it avoid some jarring dissonance, as Celie, a young Black woman in 1900s Georgia, goes from a deep personal hell to some hard-won peace via slickly choreographed saloon-bar stompers, banjo-picking blues numbers, and an awkwardly-staged soul ballad framed within an RKO-style dream sequence.

[Arcel's] crafted a kind of Danish The Last of the Mohicans that’s full of passion and political conviction. It should stand the test of time almost as well as its rugged hero.

With a Bully XL jawline, the scale and intricate design of a Gaudi cathedral and the rage of a grumpy old codger, the subsea icon emerges from the cracks of modern blockbuster-making to remind the world that there is a much better way to make a monster flick.

As a piece of London social history, Scala!!! is winningly leftfield and its spirit is wildly infectious. But you could watch it without having been within a thousand miles of this once-seedy corner of King’s Cross and still get a kick out of it.

When even Alan Tudyk can’t rinse laughs from a sidekick role, your script probably needs another sprinkle of magic.

Ridley Scott delivers a spectacular but flavourless French history lesson.

It could have a lot of sentimental mush, but with Jackson and Caine on this form, it’s a total heartbreaker.

The Holdovers is a triumphant comeback story for Alexander Payne, too. The director bounces back from 2017’s misfiring Downsizing to find his tone – a rare kind of jaded hopefulness – with all his old assurance.

Fennell has captured something real about these unreal people and the world they live in. Her film slices with a scalpel, peels back the layers and finds only hollowness beneath. Maybe that’s the real twist.

The death of le Carré feels like the end of an era. The Pigeon Tunnel is its enthralling epitaph.

The level of brainwashing, privation and systemic abuse makes for an enraging, confronting watch, but it’s refreshingly focused on the people, rather than geopolitics. Just like for its two fleeing families, Beyond Utopia is an emotional journey.

Berger doesn’t make concessions for the easily teary: Robot Dreams is a film as much about separation as togetherness. But while the final reel is a low-key heartbreaker, the bubble never pops on the loveliness of what came before.

20 Days in Mariupol can’t match For Sama for a Hollywood ending. That film sought to cut its bleakness with a whisper of hope – a new baby born in a shelled maternity ward – and a sense that something might, just might, survive the horror. Chernov has nothing as optimistic as that for us, just a fly-on-the-wall account of an unfolding atrocity. And it’s devastating.

Society of the Snow is careful to memorialise the dead in a moving, meaningful way.

As an exploration of what motivates people at work – and what doesn’t – it’s smartly and subtly observed.

A gripping, visceral human drama that occasionally turns shakycam thriller to excellent effect, it’s a small victory for empathy over coarseness. Like Michael Winterbottom’s prescient 2003 docudrama In This World, it demands that you witness the treatment of refugees with your own eyes.

Like the musical style it’s named after, it plays slowly. But hang in there and you’ll find an enthralling requiem mass to a dying breed of hardscrabble gangsters and dirty cops that boasts a clutch of juicy performances.

Comfortably Linklater’s best movie since Boyhood, Hit Man stands alongside School of Rock for big laughs and good vibes – albeit with a darker streak that slowly kicks in.

Empathetic rather than judgy, Coppola’s relationship drama hands agency back to its young heroine.

It’s a film for cinephiles as well as musos and romantics, with its discrete ‘movements’ mirroring the movie making style of its time frame.

Like a hollow-point shell, David Fincher’s slickly enjoyable assassin thriller is explosive but empty.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s feminist Frankenstein comedy is scabrous, smart and obscenely funny.

Unfortunately, its 39 minutes unfold in such motor-mouthed haste, it feels like a dad belting through a bedtime story while the football’s on downstairs.

The First Slam Dunk’s nimble storytelling and canny editing makes it work as both a sports movie, where you’re invested in the result, and a coming-of-age drama, where you care about the characters.

A mockumentary as sparky, big-hearted and entertaining as its cast of bright-eyed kids and the wannabe thesps who coach them in the ways of ‘turning cardboard into gold’. The affection for musical theatre is so sincere, it’ll win over even the most Sondheim-averse.

Gran Turismo may ultimately be a glossy marketing exercise, but there are moments that’ll leave you with the right kind of whiplash.

Like Aftersun on a gallon of SunnyD, this warm and freewheeling comedy-drama about a girl connecting with the dad she’s never met proves that working-class stories don’t have to be all misery and angst. Sometimes, that kitchen sink can be filled with bubbles.

More than just another franchise reset, Mutant Mayhem wrestles with its own cultural relevance (or otherwise) in interesting ways.

Life in The Damned Don’t Cry is brutally unfair, and Boulifa offers no easy answers. But thanks to the compassionate filmmaker and his two impressive leads, it’s a compelling watch.

The cumulative effect is so stunning and antithetical to anything Hollywood is doing at the moment – the equally audacious Barbie aside – that it feels like a completely different art form. And, frankly, hallelujah for that.

Tom Cruise’s latest IMF outing is so relentlessly exhilarating, you’ll need a lie down afterwards.

The sheer ambition is still there, but the storytelling rigour – Lasseter’s great forte – is again missing in Elemental, the studio’s latest big-screen offering.

It’s a sensitive, careful film with real emotional intelligence, but no less gripping for swerving dramatic fireworks in favour of quieter, more observational moments.

In its quieter moments, No Hard Feelings gestures towards real emotion. More often than not, though, it gets sidetracked by chaotic set pieces, with naked fistfights (the actress, surprisingly, goes full frontal here), mace sprayings and even an ingenious homage to The Shining, working Lawrence’s knack for slapstick to the funny bone. It’s fleeting fun, when a bit more honesty and candor might have made it her answer to Young Adult.

Occasionally, the dizzying filmmaking style, a mix of practical stunt work and invisible VFX, feels like a video-game cutscene. More often, it just sucks the air from your lungs. The ending gestures pretty firmly at another sequel to come. It’ll have a tough job upping the ante on this.

It’s such a torrent of universes, ideas and styles that it should collapse under the weight of its own creative payload. But it all works – brilliantly.

Beautiful acted by Japanese veteran Yakusho, it’s a character study with real depth. Maybe not top tier Wenders, but still one to linger over.

If this is the end of the road for a British filmmaking great, it’s a thoughtful, heart-filled finale. British cinema’s old oak still stands tall.

Food is a gift of love here – and romance courses through this delightful film.

If Kidnapped aims to dive into the subconscious of its characters, it gets stuck on the surface.

Kubi is often wildly funny in Kitano’s straight-faced style, and it’s never less than a lot of fun. Fans of visceral, cynical action movies will lose their heads over it.

Like a kind of cinematic Lego set, Ben Hania takes the building blocks of filmmaking and constructs from them something cathartic, affecting and original.

The overall effect is one of wonderment, eccentricity and heartache that will connect deeply with anyone who recently spent an extended period stuck in close proximity with other human beings.

It’s hampered by a pedestrian script and an improbable ending, but always catches fire when the supercharged Law is on screen.

Serrated with political edge, Scorsese’s true-crime epic is impeccably constructed and utterly gripping.

A thriller of real psychological and emotional depth, Triet’s film is a treat. Watch it with a partner and argue about it afterwards.

Even with its cramp-preventing intermission, Occupied City’s epic runtime doesn’t deliver the same accretion of emotional power that makes, say, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Holocaust doc, Shoah, so great. Instead, it begins to open itself up to monotony and worse, glibness.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is full of delights, poignant, peppery and plain life-enhancing. For anyone navigating the rocky journey into young adulthood, or any parent trying to help, it’ll feel like a hand stretched out in solidarity. Just like Judy Blume intended.

While watching a bunch of Nazis get offed in a variety of grisly ways offers some midnight movie thrills, the stakes only get lower and lower.

Serenity, wonderment and worry mix in this awe-inspiring, musical tour of the Earth’s waterways.

Candy-coloured fun for greying gamers and fresh-faced wee’uns that does the basics well but not much more.

A mostly CG-free, witty, grown-up drama that revels in strong, propulsive storytelling? Sometimes they do make ’em like they used to.

Thanks to its pointed message about violence against women and injustice, this is a thriller with even sharper edges. Somewhere beneath its enthralling depiction of obsessive police work is a cry from the heart against a broken system.

Some of that tension dissipates in a more low-key third act that foregrounds the excellent Foïs and Colomb as a mother and daughter at loggerheads, but The Beasts is still a compelling, tragic study of human conflict in a scarily believable context.

This take on Alan Bennett’s pre-pandemic play, a love letter to the NHS set on a geriatric ward in Wakefield’s beloved-but-threatened Bethlehem Hospital (‘The Beth’), ticks along amiably enough for an hour or so. Then, like a hand grenade in a tombola, a harrowing third-act twist detonates beneath it and narrative and tonal destruction ensues.

Beyond the music, Meet Me in the Bathroom makes a compelling study of the whole idea of a ‘scene’: how does it happen, why does it end and what’s it all about?

It’s not going to win too many trophies, but Champions is still a cheering watch.

Even in those well-executed gnarlier moments and winky character beats, Scream VI feels a lot more dated than the genre it’s deconstructing.

After the self-satisfied The Gentlemen and the slick but sparkless Wrath of Man, it’s a nice reminder that at his best, Ritchie remains an accomplished teller of tall tales.

The Fallen Sun is a satisfying enough way to kick off a Luther Cinematic Universe.