Phil de Semlyen

Director Nora Twomey’s film is about the ways we try to cradle each other from the harsher realities of life. This is a day-to-day survival story that stirs the heart and fires the imagination.

Like Orwell on helium, this reimagining of Stalin’s demise and the subsequent ideological gymnastics of his scheming acolytes is daring, quick-fire and appallingly funny.

This San Fernando Valley palimpsest is so buoyant and bubbly, it practically floats off the screen. It’s the giddiness that grabs you in the Californian’s latest gem, and the dizzying sense of possibility and innocence. It left me with a contact high.

Whatever your favourite side to the limitlessly faceted David Bowie, this magnificently mind-bending film serves it up in a 140-minute career-spanning opus that races by in a snap of the fingers. It’s almost as extraordinary as the man himself.

There’s a touch of diet Brando about Elgort’s reformed bad boy-turned-lovebird, but Zegler brings a lovely brand of innocence and conviction to Maria. And don’t be surprised to see Moreno winning another Oscar. Or, for that matter, Spielberg.

It’s at once intimate and expansive – a film with a big heart and not a bad word to say about anyone.

Like Nomadland, another film that maps out rocky terrain with impressionistic grace, Hamnet is a deep-felt ode to loss and resilience. Zhao doesn’t just tell you about the healing power of art, she shows you. Prepare your tear ducts accordingly.

For all the clammy grip it exerts, this thrillingly original film is more interested in trapping you in its psychosexual maze and immersing you in the relatable pains of self-discovery.

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.

There’ll be moans from horrorheads that it’s not scary throughout, but in deepening his exploration of family life in the ‘burbs, Cregger sharpens his twisted scares to a dagger point. And the frights, when they come, really land.

Make it your destiny to see this blood-soaked odyssey along the edge of the world as soon as possible.

This could all easily come over as hippie-dippie or hectoring, but it’s neither. As with her last film The Rider, a western masterpiece in its own right, Zhao is so expert at stitching together realism, moments of sheer transcendence and a lightly-worn radicalism in a way that feels nothing but unpatronising and empathetic.

Frustrating, funny at points, heartbreaking and quite magnificently shot throughout, Leviathan is one of the films of the year.

Nighy has never been better than in this richly rewarding ’50s-set drama about a repressed and terminally ill man who discovers life just as it comes to an end.

It's a film that bores straight into your soul and leaves you shattered, but somehow richer for having seen it.

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.

Masterfully told and beautifully acted, Manchester By The Sea is a shattering yet graceful elegy of loss and grief.

A survival epic full of mysteries and magic, it’s an animated epic worthy of Ghibli.

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

The Lost Daughter expertly juggles tone, hopscotching between timelines and slipping from tender to tense and back again, always challenging the viewer’s judgments and preconceptions in unexpected ways.

Remake is emotionally shattering.

Chilly, severe, distancing, utterly captivating and made with formidable filmmaking IQ, Tár is a movie very much in the mold of its ever-present central character: world-renowned conductor and fully functioning sociopath Lydia Tár.

The effect is eerie, profound and emotional. As a mirror back onto humanity’s foibles and criminal excesses, EO is the perfect heir to Bresson’s long-suffering Balthazar.

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.

Marty Supreme is a stunning achievement, a breathless yet precisely controlled joyride full of vivid characters, hairpin turns and did-that-just-happen moments – and a modernist fairy tale about big ambitions colliding with grubby street-level realities and capitalism’s seedy imperatives. This is a film that’s built to last.

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.

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

This unusual film sits in a genre of one.

By whatever metrics you measure a Bond movie – tight plotting, gnarly villains, emotional sincerity – Craig’s final outing is a rip-roaring success.

The Brutalist is a major work of art that asks something from its audience but gives back in spades.

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

Joaquin Phoenix is devastating as the villain-in-the-making in this incendiary tale of psychological escape and psychopathy.

The director is clearly having a whale of a time taking the piss out of the corruption, cruelty and bribery rife in his country.

Mamoru Hosoda’s cyber fairy-tale is basically wall-to-wall bangers, all backdropped by virtual worlds that wash over you in waves of world-building so detailed and epic, they’d make William Gibson’s eyes pop.

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.

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.

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

1917 is a work of sweeping scale yet pinpoint intimacy.

A groundbreaking view of the horror and pity of war, I can’t remember a cinematic experience quite like it. It’s devastating and extraordinary.

The arguments over whether Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made will rage on forever. But the greatest film about Citizen Kane – and just about any other movie – has definitely arrived. David Fincher’s eleventh film is a lavish love letter to old Hollywood in all its glory, cynicism and wild extravagance.

The Polish filmmaker has conjured a dazzling, painful, universal odyssey through the human heart and all its strange compulsions. It could be the most achingly romantic film you’ll see this year, or just a really painful reminder of the one that got away.

This riotous, arcade-game-inspired sequel powers up with fresh ideas and some brilliantly-executed pastiching.

This moving, surprising documentary offers a tale of Hollywood pigeonholing that feels particularly timely.

Veering from blaxploitation spoof to undercover thriller and ending with a no-punches-pulled real-life coda, it’s riotous fun one minute, savagely biting the next.

Passionate and expertly crafted, this black-and-white opus is well worth seeking out.

Smart storytelling and snappy editing elevate the jokes and enrich the emotions.

The story isn’t wildly original – think ‘Leon’ with throwing stars – and it’s overlong, but the action is unrelenting, thrillingly staged and occasionally even flat-out hilarious.

It takes a lot for a movie to out-bonkers Cage on this kind of form. Color out of Space manages it in style.

It’s not judgy or lecturing, and there’s nothing too didactic here – and maybe not a lot to linger over either. But if you’re looking for a couple of hours of sexy Parisians hooking up, falling out and finding their feet again, all set to pulsing electro and with a baked-in romanticism that makes a built-up corner of Paris feel like Casablanca, Audiard and his co-writers have made the perfect film.

But for all its flaws, it’s a colossally entertaining ride that never stints on its efforts to wow you with its scale and spectacle.

Instead of a study of alienation and solitude, News of the World is about connection – about two traumatised people finding silent comfort in each other. About the promise of healing. It’s a long road, cautions this elegiac film, but it’s always easiest when travelled together.

With Gosling and Hüller to the fore, Lord and Miller have delivered a cosmic adventure with hope in its heart and a twinkle in its eye.

Occasionally soapy on the homefront but cataclysmic in combat, this is a worthy addition to the WWII canon. Garfield underpins it all with skill, showing that sometimes, war can be humanising too.

At a seriously economical 72 minutes, director Daniel Vernon crams in a lot, leapfrogging between the tawdry racist subculture that spat out men like Copeland and London’s bubbly, multicultural communities that they hated so much. The courage and tenacity of anti-fascist campaigners like Searchlight gets its due, too.

Being dead has never looked as fun as it does in Pixar’s latest adventure, bursting with skeletons, magical spells and Mexico’s annual Day of the Dead.

It’s hard to draw too much old-school romance from this world of sponsorship, celebrity and sports washing, but F1 manages it on the back of Pitt’s earthy charm. Watch it rev into the canon of great sports movies. Motion sickness tablets recommended.

For the many people impacted by dementia, it won’t be an easy watch – and for those who have experienced it in the past, it may feel like a gentle pressure on an old wound. But it’s a real window into an affliction that is both commonplace and unfathomable. And in that sense, it’s a gift.

Wei is magnetic as the would-be killer who uses her patchy Korean as an additional smokescreen to manoeuvre behind. She ties the detective in knots, a shapeshifter whose true nature is beguilingly unclear.

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.

Cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s handheld camera work, some really slick editing and canny use of real news footage, combined with impressive CGI, give it all a pulse-raisingly immersive quality, like a plunge into the underworld.

Sure, it gets a bit silly towards the end, and the promised post-credits scene is for the truly dedicated. But in a year when the cinemagoing experience could be categorised as ‘much too little’, you can’t really blame it for giving us a bit too much.

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.

It's the exuberant yin to the stately yang of Jackie Kennedy biopic Jackie, Larrain’s last film, and it’s full of the pheromones of sexual discovery and the piss and vinegar of toxic relationships.

It’s the two characters with no dialogue at all, Gromit and Feathers, who steal the show – a pair of silent cinema-style adversaries sparring in another joyfully Aardman nostalgic caper.

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.

Maybe the film loses its head a bit at this point too, with its deeper message lost in the epic bloodshed, but the chances are you’ll be having too much fun to mind.

It’s a winning combo of satire and sleuthing – Succession with police tape – and a perfect slice of high-calorie escapism.

There’s so much in Grenfell: Uncovered about the state of modern Britain that Sadiq does brilliantly not to get sidetracked.

It’s a bleakly familiar message for our times.

It’s a hugely impressive debut and visually arresting from first to last.

In a world of portentous blockbusters getting ever darker, it’s a joy to see one throwing on the disco lights.

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.

The result is another great showcase for the animation house’s powers of non-verbal storytelling that’s a giddy delight for kids, and just witty and knowing enough for grown-ups.

Redmayne is up there with Richard Attenborough in 10 Rillington Place as a terrifyingly mundane embodiment of evil.

Possibly the most uplifting film ever made about a time of unending violence, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast comes with a bruised heart and an unquenchable spirit of optimism.

The Whistlers has a tonne of pulpy circuit-breakers – look out for a hilarious ‘Psycho’ tribute – to remind you not to take it all too seriously. Hitchcock would have approved.

A vibrant, haunting documentary, and a poignant tribute to a free spirit.

Apples is less sharp-edged satire, more humanist exploration of the importance of memory.

Sure, it’s a somewhat honeyed portrait that lacks voices to put the other side across. But as the flimsiness of the case against Assange is laid bare, so too is a system that tried to suffocate, torture and crush him to protect its interests.

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

Diego Maradona has the football and the drugs – think Scarface with screamers – but it’s a surprisingly emotional ride too. In the spirit of all good docs, it’ll make you reappraise your feelings about the man and the myths around him.

The truths that spill forth from this unlikely platonic love story are touching and deeply relatable.

If the ending is signposted, Youri’s earthbound journey to the stars offers a stirring escape from an unjust reality. Like his Russian sorta-namesake, he’s a hero we can all get behind.

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.

Costa and O’Connor are terrific.

It’s Woodard’s film from start to finish. She’s been great for three decades, but this is her best work yet.

Helter-skelter, a bit mad and full of heart, it bounces along with the out-of-control energy of the early adolescence its depicts. When it pauses, it also offers a seriously touching snapshot of mums and their daughters, as well as a smart critique of why the burden of family expectations and the inevitability of teenage boundary-pushing usually results in carnage.

A slow cinema treat, Two Prosecutors rewards patience, with endless waiting rooms and antechambers both a limbo state and a last-chance saloon for Kornyev. It’s a haunting, mesmerising, pessimistic piece of work.

A gripping, chastening study in what it’s like to spend your entire life behind enemy lines, A Fantastic Woman offers uplift, too – as well as the odd surreal touch.

If awards season gets up your nose, with its self-congratulatory speeches and luvvie back-patting, this playful and wildly entertaining Spanish satire on the filmmaking process is the perfect antidote.

It’s often thrilling, occasionally improbable, sometimes confounding, but like its director, Ad Astra is never bound by the gravitational pull of the ordinary. Strap in.

A bold, honest film about family life that showcases a terrifically unpeppy turn from Bejo.

See it, then go home and wipe your hard drive.

The interviews are as entertaining as the slick interplay on the ice.

A few flaws keep Black Widow a rung or two below top-tier Marvel, including a sluggish final act, some generic villainy and yet another overlong runtime – seriously people, two hours is fine – but if you’re after a big, expertly-crafted, self-aware chunk of blockbuster entertainment to watch on the big screen, Marvel, as usual, has your back.

Hive is never quite a feelgood film – the deep trauma that underpins it militates against any jaunty Calendar Girls vibes – but there is a tangible sense of joy as Fahrije begins to lead her fellow, long-suffering widows to a place of healing and the promise of better times ahead. And the comeuppance one or two of the menfolk get is definitely mood-enhancing.

A motorsports movie you don’t need to be a petrolhead to enjoy. Rev up those whiteknuckle thrillride clichés, you're going to need them.