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.