Phil de Semlyen

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.

An early twist means that the bloodletting develops a repetitive feel, and there are unfortunate parallels with the recent Ready or Not 2, but the wincing and guilty laughs never quite dry up. Cult status may await.

The Magic Faraway Tree isn’t on Wonka’s level, let alone Paddington 2’s – two other Farnaby joint – and the aesthetic is occasionally a bit CBBC, despite the bucolic settings and intricate sets. But with the cracking cast, thoughtful message and the odd rollicking adventure, it’s a fun family movie that’ll finally give you permission to switch off the wifi.

Sorrentino explores these heavyweight themes with his usual wit and high style – as well as a standout soundtrack of haunting classic cues and Eurodance bangers. Surreal, comedic touches also prick the pomposity of La Grazia’s cloistered world.

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.

Director Bienvenu, who also voices helpful robot Mikki in the French version, has crafted a family film that’s offbeat and full of heart.

Weaponising the cinema’s Dolby Atmos into a delivery mechanism for frights is a clever ploy that Undertone never maximises.

Newton is a fun addition as the bubbly Faith, but the game Weaving is MVP again: a sharp finger in the eye of the one percent. This is a broader sequel, though, that only has more of the same for her to do. It’ll pass an evening but it won’t blow your mind.

The symbolism is lightly worn here in a gently observational film that’s underpinned with humanism and compassion.

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.

It’s often enthralling – especially with Murphy at its heart – though rarely explosive.

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

And that’s the major problem here. When the first Scream hit, it had a ball deconstructing ’80s and ’90s horror movie tropes. Six movies and three decades on, it’s become the very thing it was built to deconstruct, trapped in its own lore and fumbling about for its old smarts. The genre has moved on. Scream needs to get with the times.

If, like Alan Partridge, you believe that Wings were ‘the band The Beatles could have been’, Morgan Neville’s propulsively upbeat music doc is a total treat.

The class satire, the strongest suit of its Ealing ancestor, is blunter than a burglar’s cosh. The murders should be the juice in this devilish cocktail, especially with Zach Woods, Topher Grace and Ed Harris as the marks. But the deaths are throwaway affairs.

It’s refreshing to see a grown-up big-screen thriller this well crafted – and one that cares for its grounded characters and their predicaments. If it comes off the road once or twice, it’s still well worth the ride.

Rather than a bruising marital wipeout drama, Is This Thing On? is a film about how new purpose and a new tribe can help you re-evaluate what was there all along (the title, of course, refers to the marriage as well as the mic). It might make you think about relationships differently; it probably won’t make you want to take up stand-up.

Kangaroo has a love for the people, landscape and wildlife that leaves a warm glow. It’s not doing anything wildly different or unexpected, but it’ll put a smile on your face.

Happily, Send Help is both a return to the world of horror and a major return to form for the Evil Dead man, who’s been waylaid with bland franchise fare in recent years.

Finally, someone has returned to The Damned United’s cunning formula for a good football movie: don’t show any football.

Empathetic, funny and myth-busting – there are 300,000 children and adults living with TS in the UK alone whose condition will be better understood for this film – it gives you permission to laugh at the situation while feeling only compassion for the man.

This is simultaneously the nastiest and most soulful of the franchise to date – and the most probing.

For brain-free Friday night viewing, you could do much worse than spend 90 blood-soaked minutes with not-so-gentle Ben.

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.

When the foot comes off the gas, the cracks become apparent.

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.

There have been better animated sequels and more epic ones, but has there ever been a fluffier follow-up than this bouncy, buoyant caper starring at least half the nature world?

Ultimately, though, there’s not enough story to fuel a three-hour musical stretched across nearly five hours. What once was brisk and bright becomes a bit of a slog. Fans will be obsessified; everyone else, ossified.

It’s weird, in the year 2025, that it seems timely to point out that the Nazis were bad. But Nuremberg, an old-fashioned and satisfyingly complex morality tale in the guise of a courtroom drama and spy thriller, does that job in impressive style.

It’s a movie that got up on the wrong side of the bed and compensated with four quadruple espressos.

For a study of human connection at its most honest and affecting, with two remarkable lead performances, Dragonfly is a powerfully striking experience.

Measured rather than playing to the gallery, The Choral is Brassed Off in a minor key – an elegant, Yorkshire-set exploration of music as a spiritual morale-boost in the darkest times. With Ralph Fiennes gravely essaying the controversial choirmaster at its heart, it does a lovely job of swerving the obvious notes but misplaces its stirring crescendo.

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.

Needless to say, Souleymane’s Story is not an easy watch. It’s a tough, unsparing and often heartbreaking look at life for the migrants who make the online world tick, and a jolt for those of us who use it unthinkingly.

As with the previous Knives Outs, the satire is applied in broad but enjoyable brushstrokes.

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.

Cheesier than a wheel of Stilton and about as edgy, Downton Abbey bows out with a cosy but loveable final instalment that will leave few dry eyes among long-time fans of Julian Fellowes’ British TV thoroughbred.

Remake is emotionally shattering.

Martel’s forensic doc shatters any sense that, for her fellow Argentinians, the colonial burden has been lifted. It’s an intimate pinhole camera capturing an IMAX-sized story.

The performances are solid, with an excellent Jude Law all inscrutable psychopathy as a younger Vladimir Putin and Alicia Vikander the perfect embodiment of an amoral post-Soviet arrivista, and the chilly world-building works well enough, but there’s a missing ingredient – actual Russians.

Beyond the regular crunch of fist on bone, The Smashing Machine is an unexpectedly gentle, soulful character study that has Johnson undercutting his crowd-pleasing ‘The Rock’ persona with vulnerability and boyish uncertainty.

Those first 40-odd minutes are unbearably tense. Ferguson is a standout in a strong ensemble cast

Not top tier Jarmusch, but still a funny, soulful anthology worth seeking out.

As with The Shape of Water, del Toro makes no secret of where his sympathy lies and who the real monsters are, but there are surprises here. Not least of which is how moved you might feel in the end.

Grab your nan, put the kettle on and enjoy some exceedingly fine thesps hamming it up royally.

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.

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.

For a movie that looks this sleek, there’s a lot of scrappiness around the fringes. Paul Walter Hauser is fun as subterranean mastermind Mole Man, but gets barely a toehold on the plot. Half of whatever Natasha Lyonne’s character, a teacher with a thing for The Thing, was due to be doing is surely on the cutting room floor. The Four’s droid helper H.E.R.B.I.E. doesn’t leave a massive impression.

For Gunn, who has injected superhero movies with a winningly irreverence since his R-rated indie Super, ridding the DCEU of its bombast and self-seriousness is a step in right direction. Whether, like his alien hero, he can arrest the march of time and reinvigorate this tired genre is another matter.

Rebirth knows it needs to make its scaly stars frightening and surprising again and manages it in Spielbergian style.

M3GAN 2.0 continues to offer up a goofy brand of cautionary tale, too: against AI, tech dependence, and Silicon Valley types who want to stick a chip in their brains. You can take that seriously as you want to, just don’t be surprised to find yourself watching it again on your cellphone one day.

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

Splicing in montage footage of marching soldiers, shots from Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V, and even archers in action, and layering in discordant sound design, Boyle reinvents the zombie movie as a bloody pop-art installation.

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.

Unfolding at the American filmmaker’s measured tempo, it’s more droll than LOL-funny, though there are some big laughs along the way.

It takes a steady hand to pull off a horror film as outlandish as Dangerous Animals – a movie, lest we forget, that is literally about dangerous animals – but Byrne has pulled off something slick and confident here. It’ll keep horror fans out of the water for years.

In Saeed Roustayi’s Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family’s slow disintegration, it’s the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion.

South African director Oliver Hermanus finds plenty of deep feeling and sincerity here but his beautiful-looking, measured period piece gets stifled by its own languors – especially in a first half that needs a slug or two of moonshine to inject some life into it.

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

For devoted filmlovers, Nouvelle Vague is a must-see – a joyful homage to the art of cinema that’ll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll.

So, sure, the plot is overstuffed, the cross-cutting is frenzied, and Pegg’s goofy asides are the only light relief from the underlying somberness. If you’re looking for flaws, The Final Reckoning definitely has them. But with action sequences this adrenalised, no one is leaving short-changed.

By keeping the camera in the vehicle, hauntingly lit with the blur of passing houses and the glow of the mobile phone, Hallow Road invites you to fill the scene at the other end of the line with a shadowy menace that the final stretch really delivers on.

Writer-actors Tim Key and Tom Basden’s three-hander, set on a remote British isle, have delivered a rare blend of unkempt charm, emotional precision and soulful folk music with this feature-length expansion of their own 2007 short, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.

It’s a lurid psychological horror that’ll thrill midnight movie crowds.

As so often the case, this Marvel effort is best when its talented cast is flinging around snarky banter and self-aware asides.

The Friend is a poignantly affecting watch that mostly earns its emotional payoff, delivering gentle laughs along the way.

Malek’s twitchy brand of anti-charm makes him an unusual lead for a film like this, and his outsider energy works better as the tormented killer-to-be than the doting husband. Heller is not always easy to root for, which can make The Amateur a chilly experience.

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

With this quick-witted and sexually supercharged espionage caper, Steven Soderbergh and his screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) have just remade Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Industry generation.

‘Please don’t be boring,’ Nelson’s villain beseeches Wilson in a clutch moment. Who wants to tell him?

As ever, it’s Zellweger that provides the secret sauce.

Emotionally charged, Last Breath offers a forensic study of cold professionalism in the face of unfolding disaster. It’s deepened, too, by a rich cast of supporting characters, including Lemons’s fiancée in Scotland, the surface crew who recall the fateful night and his teary-eyed dive leader and mentor.

As it is, it’s an atmospheric, sporadically disquieting depiction of fatherhood in freefall.

The acting is a bubbling fondue of clashing styles.

This Nosferatu is a worthy modern addition to a classic horror lineage. Get lost in its shadows.

The songwriting verve of Lin-Manuel Miranda is missed, too. Composers Barlow and Bear chip in with some catchy ditties, but there’s nothing to match How Far I’ll Go and You’re Welcome.

Directed with real élan by Edward Berger – going two-for-two on literary adaptions after his take on All Quiet on the Western Front – Conclave is a film for the ’they don’t make ’em like they used to’ brigade.

You’d need an army of flying monkeys to find a Wicked fan with a grumble about this 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.

Most of all, it’s a colourful journey lit up with great tunes and a deep love of music – an ingenious, infectious new spin on the music doc.

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.

A film made with cold courage by the victim of a sexual assault, this gripping Japanese documentary plays like a ’70s conspiracy thriller.

McQueen isn’t questioning the courage or endurance of the city and its people through these brutal days. But he is probing our relationship with this over-lionised period of our history, though, and finding it hopelessly romanticised. Maybe it’s time, his flawed but hard-hitting film suggests, to lift the curfew on looking it afresh.

It’s a story of dehumanisation, children in cages, and the blurting, vote-craving policy-making of government by id – and it’s shattering to experience.

I’m Still Here takes you right into the machinery of a repressive regime, showing just enough of its dank jail cells and casual cruelties without overwhelming its deeper story of loss.

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

A deliciously barbed, but wise and ultimately hopeful investigation of female sexual desire, marriage and modern power dynamics that takes a hundred touchpoints, from ’80s erotic thrillers to the indie candour of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Secretary, and does something completely new with them.

A brooding, muscular FBI procedural that occasionally explodes into Point Break-y action, Aussie director Justin Kurzel’s (Snowtown) true-life thriller delves, pungently and topically, into the inner workings of white nationalism in America before deciding that squealing tyres and shootouts are a lot more fun.

Still, powered by its own helter-skelter momentum and the wild-eyed Keaton, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice just about holds all its macabre threads together. It’s not Burton at his very best, but like its fiendish antihero, it does the trick.

This analogue noir set in central China evokes satisfying memories of Bong Joon-ho’s great Korean crime thriller Memories of Murder.

Like its xenomorphs, Romulus is best when it’s single-minded, streamlined and ferocious. See it on IMAX and hold on tight.

The dog of the title – a sinewy, reputedly rabid greyhound mix – offers Lang a foil and a path to rediscovering his sense of self. Their snappy early encounters give way to a deepening bond; two solitary souls forming one of the most touching on-screen relationships of the year.

After the nuance of what comes before, it’s annoying that the knottiness vanishes in an ending that wraps everything up in a neat bow.

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.

With Slate, his co-creator, co-writer and ex-partner, director Dean Fleischer Camp charts a world in which a semi-orphaned talking shell not only makes perfect sense, but becomes a perfect vessel to share painful, relatable truths about life. Dementia, loneliness and heartbreak are all writ large in Marcel’s world.

You can see the sweat on stage, but it’s harder to detect in the filmmaking.

If you’re looking for a more granular account of the Oxy epidemic and its perpetrators, Emmy-nominated miniseries Dopesick and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestseller ‘Empire of Pain’ both have your back. But All the Beauty and the Bloodshed plots a slightly different kind of narrative: one that’s full of defiance and emotion.

Are its cultish mysteries for everyone? Undoubtedly not. But if there’s a place in your heart for dark, folky mind-benders that plug into the cosmic energy of remote, oceanic terrain (ie your favourite film would be a cross between The Wicker Man and The Lighthouse), you should take a trip across Jenkin’s freaky landscape asap.

It always keeps you in on the joke – and it’s a killer joke.

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.

Spielberg gets the chance to do something he’s never done before and make a miniature high-school film full of giddy subversions and emotional truths.

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 most dangerous thing about Pandora,’ someone muses sagely at one point, ‘is that you grow to love it too much.’ Jim Cameron disagrees. He can’t love this place enough – and it’s infectious. 

Kids will love its primary-coloured wonderland that teems with weird and wonderful beasts, and only the stoniest-hearted grown-up won’t be moved by its inclusive celebration of family across generations.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has more going for it than those MCU B-sides, but it still falls a long way short of recapturing the exhilarating glories of director Ryan Coogler’s 2018 smash hit. The visual and storytelling flaws here are only exacerbated by the seriously unsnappy runtime (they’re really not kidding with the whole ‘forever’ thing).

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

It has a scrappy, throat-grabbing energy and a sincerity that never feels hectoring.

Hunt is a film stuck entirely in fifth, racing from one sudden shootout to another at the expense of the labyrinthine plot.

For an evening in, it’s reliable entertainment. That’s thanks mainly to Stranger Things’ charismatic Millie Bobby Brown, whose charming, brilliant and surprisingly fighty sleuth steps out from the shadows of her more famous brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill), in a sparky story of young feminists socking it to corrupt 19th century gents and bent coppers.

Few of the laughs land, either.

It’s a quiet tragedy that’s rendered close to uplifting by its gentle grace and compassion.

It’s just got enough fresh ideas, laughs (mostly intentional) and queasy jump scares to make for a raucous Friday night at the movies.

Cramming Amsterdam’s myriad subplots and political angles into a coherent two hours ultimately proves beyond Russell. But tight narrative isn’t really what fuels the writer-director. He’s more about arming electric performers with offbeat, talky scenes and catching the lightning that sparks in a bottle. And the bottle here is full to the brim.

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

History nerds will note the strenuous efforts to capture the realities of the conflict, but the film’s use of smart Spielbergian grace notes to share its emotional truths is a real strength, too.

While the tartness and wit is missing to elevate this anywhere near the romantic-comedy canon, the overall vibe is so cosy and frothy, you’d need a heart of steel to hate it.

Playwright-turned-fillmaker Florian Zeller continues his one-man war on the world’s tear ducts with another hard-hitting portrait of domestic life in extremis.

For all its freedom to reimagine her life and rescue her from cultural victimhood, Blonde is just a bit too willing to chuck her overboard and watch her flounder.

Sluggishly paced, stodgily scripted and curiously edited, it’s not so much a bullet ballet as a creaky dance across an abandoned saloon.

Even by the writer-director’s standards of naturalistic, middle-class restraint, it’s a ruminative experience that borders on slow-going. But The Eternal Daughter is also an ode to mothers and daughters that will leave a few teary messes in the stalls, and it’s beautifully acted by Tilda Swinton in not one, but two roles.

Burdened with an underwritten part, the curiously flavourless Styles struggles to match Pugh for intensity as husband and wife fly at each other – one’s ambition at risk from the other’s intuition – and the couple’s chemistry fizzles out. It’s a crucial flaw in a film that needs to sell us at least one thing that feels real in its world of artifice.

What makes it work so well, aside from a rollickingly funny but never smirky McDonagh script that arms every member of its small ensemble with killer moments, is the reuniting of In Bruges’s two leads, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

What’s missing is a bit of heart to make you care, or at least, a sense of knowing how to wrap it up quickly enough, and smartly enough, for it not to matter if you don’t. An amped-up Friday night audience might have fun with Bullet Train once, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to ride it again.

Notre-Dame on Fire is really good at conveying an iconic building’s place in a nation’s soul, and the grief that its potential loss can provoke. Most of its symbolism is well-earned and resonant.

But what comes before [the ending] is so overflowing with ideas – about the erasure of Black culture, our relationship with past traumas, and the underseen side of the moviemaking business – and so brimming with visual flair, it puts most other blockbusters in the shade. Spend two hours watching it and a couple more unpacking it – with or without that know-it-all mate.

It’s a testament to the deftness and love with which Brian and Charles is made that its sweetness never becomes saccharine, and the eccentricity never feels forced. The result is a total delight – the surprise package of the year.

The odd duff fight scene aside, Waititi is so good at this stuff, and he directs it all like a circus master eager to keep the entertainment coming.

Short on plot, long on silliness, the return of the little yellow troublemakers is a fun but fleeting helium high.

It’s to the 1993 original what The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was to Raiders.

This enjoyably mean-spirited black comedy set in a grand country house will have you wondering who your real friends are – and what they really think of you.

If, though, you’re looking for a more probing look at the man behind the balls of fire, or a pan back to place him in a broader context, Coen’s rockumentary will fall just a little short of satisfying.

The hackneyed thieves-with-a-heart-of-gold trope is reinvigorated by the sharpness of the writing and Song’s Basset Hound charms. While Broker occasionally gets close to cloying, especially in its neat ending and jaunty score, Koreeda keeps it the right side of cutesy. It’s best enjoyed as a modern-day fairy tale – only, one where the abandoned baby sparks nothing but enchantment.

For those masters of small-scale vérité social dramas, it’s such a bracing sensation to see them tiptoeing into genre terrain, you’ll forgive the fact that the villains are two-dimensional and that the ending is jarringly abrupt.

Vaguely redolent of Salvador, only slowed right down to a walking pace, or The Passenger without its seductive sense of place (and Jack Nicholson), The Stars At Noon is a mercurial thing and, as an unsuccessful Denis film, a rare one too.

Every trick and technique here, from ingenious match cuts, to split screens and even comic-book cells, works to soup up the storytelling.

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.

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.

Abbasi offered a brilliantly leftfield perspective on immigration and otherness with his 2018 debut Border, and his follow-up takes no prisoners in his critique of Iranian society’s built-in misogyny and fake piety.

There’s more than enough here to hope that Cronenberg still has a masterpiece or two yet to be emerge from within.

A romantic fantasia set in Istanbul, George Miller’s mystical confection operates like the genie at its heart: it’s full of visual sleight-of-hand and boasts plenty of storytelling power, but soon disappears from your mind in a puff of smoke.

For the majority of the film, Östlund’s combination of sledgehammer and scalpel work a treat. They’re fast becoming the hallmarks of a satirist who’s unlikely to run short of subject matter any time soon.

You have to hope that Hardy is not this annoying in real life, because by the time Dashcam’s supernatural menace reveals itself, you’re firmly on Team Blood-Spewing-Zombie. Maybe that’s the point. It’s hard to tell.

This is obviously a deeply personal subject for Noé, who has spoken about experiencing the fallout of dementia first-hand. But while his film gradually pummels you, it can’t match 2021’s superb dementia chamber piece The Father for impact or insight. As it grinds towards its slightly contrived ending, it does start to feel like rubbernecking.

A benediction is a prayer for divine help. For any lover of beautifully crafted cinema with real emotional charge, Davies’s latest will feel a lot like an answer.

Minor grumbles aside, few Hollywood reboots can boast this blend of nostalgia, freshness and adrenaline. You will want to high five someone on the way out.

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

If you’re on the hunt for a diverting slice of prestige espionage hokum that comes with a side helping of real history, Operation Mincemeat is a satisfying night at the pictures.

The Bad Guys will work better for kids than adults: the comedy is broad, with farting not just a major source of laughs but an entire plot device, and the characters aren’t quite as lovable as the movie thinks they are, despite a winning voice cast that also boasts Marc Maron, Zazie Beetz and Awkwafina.

Haunting and narratively spare, Europa is a plea for humanity wrapped inside a gripping survival story.

You can tell Ryoo loves Hong Kong action cinema. His camerawork is nimble and elastic, and his starchy diplomats are unexpectedly great at martial arts. But the character scenes are well-handled too, and there’s a smart critique here on a divided country that can’t even be truly unified in a shared crisis.

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.

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.

And Pattinson? He’s solid enough, but the role seems to neutralise his greatest strengths, stifling his edgy, eccentric charisma under a morose, dutiful shell. He’s just another ever-searching crusader in a shadowy world. Hopefully next time he’ll be able to find the fun.

One token racism subplot aside, it juggles big ideas of social justice with more intimate moments of family life beautifully.

That’s a lot of years to wrangle into one biography – even before you take in the rags-to-riches, zero-to-hero-to-popular-villain arc of his life – but this snappy and searching doc makes a very solid fist of it.

It’s a compelling, edgy story of exploitation with no easy answers.

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.

Navalny is a barely believable brew of activism, resistance, poisonings, death squads, exiles and homecomings. Most of all, it’s a story of courage in the face of ruthless repression and one of those all-too-rare geopolitical stories where the bad guys actually get some comeuppance.

Plaza, who follows up Black Bear with another darker turn, is great in a role that lets her badass side out for a rampage.

Dreamweavers, visionaries, plus actors… filmmaking pair Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s latest DIY sci-fi bubbles with mad ideas and eerie pre-apocalyptic vibes.

While you know the stakes are high, Call Jane never seems particularly interested in proving it.

A mesmerising John Boyega lights a fuse under this poignant but by-the-numbers depiction of an Atlanta bank siege in 2017.

What Sing 2 does offer is more big musical numbers (‘Bad Guy’ by Billie Eilish backdrops a great visual gag involving a floor polisher), lots of eye-popping animation and a sugar-high ending that will delight kids and U2 fans alike

T​his​ smart and taboo-defying social ​​horror draws you in before abruptly bearing its teeth.