Robbie Collin

The sheer unsparing intimacy of Gyllenhaall’s film gives its thrills an excitingly illicit quality. Watching it feels like reading someone else’s diary – and then finding yourself mentioned in its pages.

The film bears its real-world resonance as lightly as a button, thanks both to the steady supply of well-turned one-liners and the rippling chemistry between Nanjiani and a never-better Kazan, who’s so disarmingly funny here that I kept catching myself pulling puppy-dog faces whenever she was on screen.

Ceylan expertly draws your eye and ear to the drama behind the drama, and gives the most gently naturalistic scenes the weight and grain of visions. The word visionary has been flogged by the film business to the point of redundancy, but with The Wild Pear Tree, Ceylan reminds us he has earned every letter of it.

This tremendous follow-up to Trier’s 2021 international breakthrough hit The Worst Person in the World flows with a ravishing freeness through the many complex strictures it builds for itself: layered family psychologies; behaviours and secrets that recur and reform across generations; the therapeutic value of art to its makers.

First Reformed doesn’t come off as pastiche, or a raking-up of old ideas – largely because Schrader and his cast commit to the project with sharpened and unblinking seriousness, even when the going gets mesmerically weird.

The mechanisms at work in Baby Driver, while calibrated with hair’s-breadth precision, are nothing new. Here’s what is: the sheer glee with which the film prods around in its own clockwork to show you what spins what.

It’s tense, absurd, desperate and daft, all at once: seldom have so many contradictory tones been so gainfully employed.

Each vignette has the subcutaneous prickle of folklore – unapologetically weird as they are, you can feel their hooks snagging on your psyche’s most deeply buried regions.

There’s no need for Spielberg and Kushner to tease out topicality here. Aspects of West Side Story feel as pertinent today as they must have done on its 1957 Broadway debut. But relevance is easy: timelessness is the real artistic feat. And Spielberg has magnificently pulled it off.

Kapadia’s film is many things: a Sherlockian reconstruction of Winehouse’s arcing path across the skies of superstardom, a commemoration of her colossal talent, and a moving tribute to a brilliant, witty, vivacious young woman gone far too soon. But above all, it’s a perceptive examination of the singer’s need for love – from her friends, family, colleagues, husband and public – and the ways in which that need went unmet, or was exploited, at the times it ached in her the most.

Varda by Agnès is unquestionably one for the fans ... But this film also serves as a tantalising crash-course for newcomers.

They don't come sourer or sexier than Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), a pretty much perfect film noir. [26 Jul 2014, p.4]

Girlhood carries you along with its characters, neither lionising nor demonising them, but allowing you to watch them live their lives and make their own decisions, be they rash or inspired or a terrifying mixture of the two.

For Lynch himself, “the big news was that I’d finally completely killed Twin Peaks with this picture”. But in fact, this exceptional, widely misunderstood film restores it to writhing, screaming life...Far from cheating viewers, this fresh perspective offered them a new way to decode the entire Twin Peaks mythos, with Sheryl Lee’s extraordinary, soul-tearing performance shaking the franchise out of its cherry-pie-munching reverie...Time has passed, and its brilliance is gradually coming into focus, just as Lynch hoped it would.

It’s hard to recall a time when the state-of-the-art felt this much like art.

Tran, a practised sensualist, is superb at depicting food as a vehicle for pleasure.

This isn’t just good writing, it’s humane and honourable.

The film has a cumulative power that sneaks up on you even as you think you’re keeping track of it, and a twilit afterglow that hasn’t faded yet.

The characters often come across as immature dolts, but the film’s humane enough to recognise that’s all part of being 18.

It positions spycraft as a hybrid of occult ritual and parlour game – and perhaps also a grand-scale working-through of deep-seated national jitters. Happily, it’s also enormous fun with it, and has your mind whirring to keep up with David Koepp’s devious screenplay, which gives itself a head start and waits until the very end before willingly surrendering the lead.

This being a Wes Anderson film, it almost goes without saying the details are delectable.

The thing about Spielberg these days is he makes this stuff look easy.

Some films based on dramatic true events offer us a snapshot of a life: I’m Still Here shows us a life of snapshots.

Bizarre, beautiful, moving and playful, this is an oddity to cherish, with depths that only reveal themselves – entirely aptly – on the hoof.

In some passages, the film abides by the biopic rulebook more carefully than it needs to; its best moments are the ones where King and his cast create some tension then simply let it cook.

There’s a gleeful toxicity here that will launch a thousand think-pieces – Pitt’s character is capital-P problematic, absolutely by design – but the transgressive thrill is undeniable, and the artistry mesmerisingly assured.

No director working today observes family life with such delicacy and care, or is so unstintingly generous with what they find.

In lieu of monologues and soul-baring, Coogler crams the film with proper movie-star performances at every level: by turns glowingly charismatic, sparklingly funny and silkily seductive.

Its title refers to the mythical Islamic bridge across hell, on which one false step leads to certain damnation. The path trodden by the film itself is no less risky, but it styles out the crossing astonishingly.

The film itself is a mesmerisingly gripping and controlled parable-thriller in which the paranoia, misogyny and rage of the Iranian state are mapped seamlessly onto an ordinary family unit.

Toy Story 4 reaffirms that Pixar, at their best, are like no other animation studio around.

It feels like summer on film – the thing radiates Factor 50 good vibes, and boasts a cast so preposterously attractive, and with such sweltering chemistry, that a couple of hours in their company may make you feel as if you’ve had a holiday fling by osmosis.

What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration.

It exists in an eerie cinematic in-between, and is completely unlike anything else you’ll see this year.

Chazelle has always specialised in virtuoso endings, and his sure hand and sharp eye brings this ambitious character study smoothly into land.

Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery; every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip.

There are visual flights of fancy here as glorious as anything Miyazaki’s studio has created, but the story is rooted in a country trudging towards its own destruction.

Great animation can communicate wildly complex ideas with head-spinning clarity and wit, as Docter capably proved with Inside Out – a film which staged the interplay of emotions in an 11-year-old’s head like a vintage sitcom. If anything, Soul pushes this capacity for revelation even further: there are moments of true Blakean mystery and wonder here, expressed with a crispness that feels like a lightbulb snapping on above your head.

It’s a funny, insightful, sensationally acted account of art’s capacity to dissolve walls, and heighten, broaden and deepen the reach of our lives.

It works as beautifully as it does because the film’s comedy has been machined with Swiss precision, and all of its characters written with obvious love.

Everything about The Lighthouse lands with a crash. It’s cinema to make your head and soul ring.

Mandy exists in its own supremely unnerving horror dimension.

For a shot of pure forward-leaping, backward-dreaming animated pleasure, pick brick.

So hauntingly perfect is Barnard’s film, and so skin-pricklingly alive does it make you feel to watch it, that at first you can hardly believe the sum of what you have seen.

King’s fluid direction of her four actors means the snug setting never feels dramatically constricting, while their jostling performance styles make each combination of voices feels like its own distinct treat.

Belle is a beautifully observed, dazzlingly animated sci-fi fairy tale about our online-offline double lives – it’s Hosoda’s finest film since 2012’s Wolf Children, and perhaps his best to date.

A heady hybrid of comedy, polemic and period crime drama, it could have been scattergun stuff, and there are patches of preachy overkill. Much more often, though, there’s a rollicking drive and focus to it.

Glazer’s astonishing film takes you to a place where the everyday becomes suddenly strange, and fear and seduction become one and the same.

Shot and edited by Spielberg and his team in less than six months, The Post is very evidently a strike-while-the-story’s-hot kind of project, and it finds the master filmmaker at his most thrillingly supple and intuitive.

Glass could hardly have asked for two more game accomplices than Clark and Ehle, who play the…well, the you-know-where out of their respective roles, and are both naturally attuned to the film’s murkily sensual, dread-laden wavelength.

Via breezy metaphysical farce, Palm Springs identifies this very recognisable strain of millennial malaise, before skewering it with merciless accuracy.

Flawed but compelling ... [A] hallucinatory gimmick feels a few rewrites away from working smoothly, and the thematic linking of Philippa’s plight with that of her subject’s never quite convinces. But Hawkins is quietly impressive.

If you are asking an audience to listen to one man talking for an hour and a half, you had better make sure he is worth listening to, and minute-by-minute, Hardy has you spellbound.

Hit Man trips along on great writing, Linklater’s witty, light-touch direction and a rich sense of place, but what makes it especially pleasurable is Powell and Arjona’s naturally steamy rapport.

Reeves marshals more than his fair share of battle scenes and sweeping set-pieces, but never forgets the flicker of a face can provide all the spectacle that cinema requires.

The debut feature from 33-year-old Raine Allen-Miller adjusts and updates the classic Curtis formula to a small urban chunk of contemporary south London – and captures the place’s clatter and bustle with such undisguised love, it makes the blossoming of romance there feel like the most natural thing in the world.

Every frame has been composed with cerebral coolness, and the hotel and its surrounding forests are shot with a dream-like lucidity. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before, and I’m still not sure that I have even now. This is the kind of film you have to go back to and check it really happened.

It’s a black-and-white period piece invested with a supremely eerie folkloric edge – a bleak historical chapter made timeless, and all the more troubling for it.

Çatak’s film turns out to be less intrigued by where the missing money actually goes than how the school reacts to its disappearance: as a sort of loose organism purging itself of impurities as its collective survival instinct kicks in. It’s a sound lesson in politics – or is it biology? – but more importantly, it’s a chalk-snappingly tense watch.

Flies buzz, sweat trickles, negotiations continue, and you feel your breath dry up.

Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far.

Giamatti isn’t playing a type, so much as a man who has taken refuge inside one in order to armour himself against the more exposing aspects of human existence. It’s a riotous but also slyly moving performance of a performance – and, along with Randolph’s, is rightly being talked about for awards.

With a story that straddles two generations and stretches from Trump’s United States to the Vietnam jungle, Da 5 Bloods is one of Spike Lee’s most expansive films to date. But it’s built with the precise, snap-shut mechanisms of an ancient moral fable – a Pardoner’s Tale made about and for unpardonable times.

Throughout, Quillévéré keeps asking her cast for the impossible, and gets it.

[Sachs'] subtle, often quite special film shows us a shared life as a series of impositions: sometimes we’re imposed upon, and sometimes we do the imposing, and love is the net result.

Silk curtains flutter and fall, candles glow, fires crackle softly in the grate. Every scene, every shot, has been composed with total, Kubrickian precision, and calibrated for maximum, breath-quickening impact.

The action always feels rooted in the greater story of the city of Shiraz itself: even a scene as simple as Rahim walking through a shopping centre becomes naturally soundtracked by a musical instrument salesman tuning a dulcimer in his booth.

Neither clever nor stupid enough to work.

This Iberian spin on the Snow White legend is a curio and a wonder; a silent fairy tale woven from softest velvet.

Guiraudie’s film is acutely brilliant on the funny, scary machinery of desire, and how easily humans can get caught up in its cogwheels.

That Blade Runner 2049 is a more than worthy sequel to Scott’s first film means it crosses the highest bar anyone could have reasonably set for it, and it distinguishes Villeneuve – who’s masterminded all of this, somehow, since making Arrival – as the most exciting filmmaker working at his level today.

Modest as it may look, this is boundary-pushing cinema in all the best ways, and what a thrill it is to hear those boundaries creak.

Watching del Toro’s film felt like playing with toys as big as skyscrapers, but everything about this successor feels trinket-sized.

This is riveting, dizzying stuff from Villeneuve.

Nikou’s film is wonderfully astute on love’s unruliness: it wants you to both delight in and despair of it, and have fun doing both.

Close is a great film about friendship, but perhaps an even greater one about being alone.

The monster mayhem scenes are obviously the main draw, and they’re terrifically staged, with clean visual effects that look anchored to the real world. And a careful balance is struck between spectacle and horror.

This is a handsome and mature entertainment, rich with novelistic intrigue, that asks for very little in exchange for its rewards.

The wonder of stop-motion is the mountain of effort required to achieve even the smallest movement. The charm of Shaun the Sheep is that you don’t notice it for a moment.

Miller finds grand, America-describing themes in the interactions between these three men: the extraordinary influence of inherited wealth, the hunkered-down ambition of working-class athletes, the equation of material success with honour and moral rectitude.

Part of the genius of Warfare’s ending is that it admits that war rarely – if ever – contains endings at all.

Jackie, the English-language debut from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows you the past in a hall of shattered mirrors – fractured and unsettling, with every surface sharp enough to draw blood.

You just have to watch it, then grab a net and try to coax your soul back down from the ceiling.

The film is stupendous: as antic as Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love, but with The Master and There Will Be Blood’s uncanny feel for the swell and ebb of history.

The quietly ingenious ending is the opposite of having your cake and eating it, and leaves your stomach rumbling for a resolution this film is too smart to provide.

As In Fabric transitions from one plot to the next, it is as if the film itself is nodding off, in order to reach a conclusion a conscious mind could never have found. The effect is wholly and deliberately bewildering, both in the moment and for days and nights afterwards.

At first, watching Pacific Rim feels like rediscovering a favourite childhood cartoon – but del Toro has flooded the project with such affection and artistry that, rather than smiling nostalgically, you find yourself enchanted all over again.

The switch from male to female leads has been done with so little apparent regard for how it might actually affect the plot that entire tracts of the film, including its finale, now land like poorly tossed pancakes.

It is unquestionably Nyong’o’s film, and the 12 Years a Slave actress gives a nerve-flaying double performance. As Adelaide, every facial expression seems to embody an emotion in its purest, uncut form, while her evil double has a twisting, buckling physicality that comes close to avant-garde butoh dance.

Historical epics are rarely light on their feet, but The King sets new standards in the field of galumphing: the film moves like a rhinoceros through porridge.

The film may handle differently to its predecessor, but it’s clearly been tuned by the same engineers. After the pared-down drag racer, here comes the juggernaut.

It’s a film of strange and moonlit beauty, and touches you like an icy whisper on the back of your neck.

Mendes...lets the quieter moments breathe.... But Mendes is rather good at being loud, too, and his nine times Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins makes the wildly ambitious action sequences the most beautiful in Bond’s 50-year career.

The only way to understand it is to swim in it for yourself, feel your own heart braid around these two interwoven lives, and gaze up in awe at the silvery arc those falling stars trace across the sky.

Like its precursor, Glass Onion doubles as a dazzlingly engineered gizmo and a raucous cautionary satire, with implications that billow out into the world even as its mechanisms snap satisfyingly shut.

Mirai bathes ordinary family life in a beautiful new light.

Disguises, time bombs, runaway trains: Cruise, his director Christopher McQuarrie and their collaborators are very consciously working in a century-old tradition here, perhaps to show the business and art of stunning audiences can – if we choose – be much the same now as it ever was.

It’s a film that could have so easily smacked of an exercise, but its beauty feels thrillingly natural, and its considerable emotional power is honestly earned.