Phil de Semlyen

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.

The result is a gritty but giddying human drama that plays like a glorious mix of ‘Precious’, ‘Girlhood’ and ‘The 400 Blows’ – a huge-hearted coming-of-age story that serves as an inadvertent throwback to the easygoing buzz of hanging out with your friends in the city you call home.

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.

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.

It’s an exercise in mindfulness that asks you to give yourself over to it lock, stock and barrel. If you’re willing to do that, you can cancel that meditation course.

Remake is emotionally shattering.

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

What a clever, haunting way to show art’s power to articulate the hurt we find hard to express.

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

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

Never extraneous, Flee’s smaller details make this true-life story buzz with life.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Artfully lit and soundtracked by chirruping bugs and buzzing bees, the experience is so soothing that it’s easy to be caught out when the world’s distressing realities elbow in. But it speaks volumes for the power of its woozy spell that it’s so tough to see it broken.

It’s not that you can’t see what Von Trier is getting at, it’s just you wish he’d get there quicker and without all the desecrated bodies. For most of its hefty runtime, The House That Jack Built is just a slog.

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.

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.

Granik builds her engaging, sympathetic characters in subtle increments.

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

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.

Ridley Scott delivers a spectacular but flavourless French history lesson.