Robbie Collin

Emotionally, the film operates in a classic Gray area, with barely perceptible eddies that build to a mighty existential wrench. All of which, it should be said, rests on Pitt’s shoulders – which feel like very different shoulders, somehow, to the ones that slouched so appealingly through Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. His performance here is as grippingly inward and tamped down as his work for Tarantino was witty and expansive – it’s true movie stardom, and it fills a star-system-sized canvas.

The film doesn’t stint on emotional complexity, but it might be Baumbach’s most accessible to date.

From the off, JJ Abrams’s film sets out to shake Star Wars from its slumber, and reconnect the series with its much-pined-for past. That it achieves this both immediately and joyously is perhaps the single greatest relief of the movie-going year.

[Haigh] hasn’t sacrificed a shred of the understated, observational style, lace-like emotional intricacy and lung-filling feel for landscape that all made his previous film, the Norfolk-set marital drama 45 Years, such a force to be reckoned with.

A late narrative gambit made me worry that Hansen-Løve was pushing her conceit a little too far into the realm of the meta, but it pays off with thrilling clarity and elegance.

Greta Gerwig takes on feminism and the patriarchy in this hilarious, deeply bizarre film.

The Eternal Daughter is a minor film at least partly by design, but it leaves an ethereal trail of sadness and creepiness.

On a first viewing, I wasn’t quite convinced by some of the glitchy japes Bonello deploys here and there . . . But perhaps he wants us to think of the film itself like its torn heroine: a strange machine whose ghost refuses to give up.

It is one of the year’s very best films, a great, rumbling thunderclap of genius.

This is a complex, bewitching and melancholy drama, another fearlessly intelligent film from Assayas.

Its relentless, almost hallucinogenic craziness makes it a hard film to engage with, and the viewer drop-off rate when it launches on Netflix later this year will undoubtedly be steep. But as a mad satire of movie-world tumult, and a furious love letter to the business that made and unmade its maker, it could scarcely be improved.

For all the placidity of its cud-chewing subject, Cow has a thrillingly alien charge.

Merlant’s film isn’t being unladylike: rather, it’s asserting that ladylike is what all of these things really are, and it’s high time cinema admitted it.

Blue might be the warmest colour elsewhere, but here it’s just a bit tepid.

Mank feels like both a film for the ages and one hauled up from them: a forbidden tale grave-robbed from the Hollywood catacombs.

Electrifying.

It’s a nocturnal fantasy, seductive and ablaze with threat.

Garrone knows exactly where he’s leaving both his heroes and his audience: on the agonising cusp of a happily-ever-after his film makes you want to will into existence.

For all its simmering malice and buried secrets, it’s worth remembering that this is David Fincher in fun mode: unnerving, shocking and provoking for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, but mostly sickness.

Its generation-spanning story has serious power, and, in its masterful opening chapter and final sequence, brushes against greatness.

Kahn never allows his filmmaking to pull focus: at times, the camerawork could almost be documentary footage. But his craft is crisp, and the supporting cast so well picked that the arrival of each witness on screen comes with the satisfying thunk-y feel of an arrow hitting its target.

Loving is short on grandstanding and hindsight, long on tenderness and honour, and sticks carefully to the historical record. It also features two central performances of serious delicacy and depth.

It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.

The script, co-written by Del Toro and Patrick McHale, is perhaps a little slick when it comes to hustling the plot towards the next moral lesson. But the storytelling itself is unashamedly old-fashioned, and forays into the political and the macabre are all carefully tailored to younger viewers.

Denis Villeneuve's sequel to his 2021 sci-fi epic is a bold and visually astonishing piece of filmmaking.

The film can get so emotionally and spiritually punishing that it needs Elba’s industrial magnetism to keep you on side. And vile as the Commandant may be, he’s a strong showcase for the actor’s talents.

With a fresh joke in almost every line of the script, even if only one in five worked, you’d still be laughing more or less continuously through to the credits – and for me, at least, the hit rate was often considerably higher than that.

Half-fish, half-fowl and altogether inspired, it is a dazzling mosey through the creeks and canyons of the Coenesque, whose scattershot format and by turns bizarre and macabre sense of humour belies a formal ingenuity and surgical control of tone that keeps the viewer perpetually off-guard.