Stephen Dalton

Haunting and atmospheric, For Those in Peril proves that creeping grief and guilt can deliver just as much dread-filled dramatic tension as a straight horror movie.

Both surreal and sinister, it feels like we are watching a real-life version of The Truman Show.

A Hard Day offers a masterclass in throat-squeezing, stomach-knotting suspense.

Crucially, like its predecessor, Gloria Bell maintains a warm but rigorously unsentimental tone despite material which could easily lend itself to mawkish sentimentality.

As gripping onscreen as it was onstage, London Road remains a work of great finesse and originality.

A fable-like story about a young African girl banished from her village for alleged witchcraft, it blends deadpan humor with light surrealism, vivid visuals and left-field musical choices.

As its attention-grabbing title suggests, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a supercharged, sense-swamping, overstuffed feast of a movie.

As a piece of drama, Citizen Saint is opaque and cryptic, leaving many loose ends unresolved. Even so, it is never boring, holding our attention with outlandish plot twists and strong performances. But its key strength is as an exquisite visual artwork, largely thanks to Krum Rodriguez’s gorgeous high-resolution monochrome cinematography, which makes every shot an Old Master tableaux of fine-grained detail and chiaroscuro shadow.

The Zone of Interest is a gloriously original work and a boldly experimental addition to the canon of high-calibre Holocaust cinema.

It is a testament to the immersive immediacy of Victoria that the scale of its technical achievement only really dawns on you afterwards.

This may be one of Jude’s minor works, but it delivers a quietly devastating emotional punch.

The film repays patient viewing as it evolves into an engrossing, nuanced, philosophical drama.

Stylistically limited by its strict adherence to Lerner’s vintage footage, Newport & the Great Folk Dream does little fresh with the music documentary format. But behind its deceptively austere, artless, hand-held aesthetic this deep dive into musical history is actually slickly edited and elegantly structured, with a strikingly clear, cleaned-up audio soundtrack.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper is unusually somber and conventional by Broomfield's standards, relying more on slow accumulation of detail than caustic commentary or ambush interviews. But it has a quiet emotional force which pays off during the powerful final sequence.

Ghost Stories is a witty and well-crafted love letter to old-school horror tropes.

As a immersive primer on the first-hand experiences of British soldiers, this innovative documentary is a haunting, moving and consistently engaging lesson in how to bring the past vividly alive

A Field in England is a rich, strange, hauntingly intense work from a highly original writer-director team.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is full of understated, melancholy poetry.

A deluxe multi-character drama that blends real history with semi-fictionalized spy thriller and soap opera elements, Burning Bush feels in places like an extended Czech remake of the Cold War-themed German Oscar-winner The Lives of Others.

Jenkin's heavily stylized debut is a disorienting experience at first, but it ultimately creates a boldly Expressionistic mood of uncanny beauty and mesmerizing otherness.

Scorsese's choice to make this a standalone feature and not a limited series seems mildly perplexing. Anyone hoping for the propulsive dynamism of, say, Goodfellas or Casino may be disappointed. But The Irishman is also on many levels a beautifully crafted piece of deluxe cinema.

It is a superior genre piece at heart, but elevated by its high-caliber leads, Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, plus a script rich in political and cultural resonance.

Collins has crafted a mesmerizing modernist memorial to ancient Celtic traditions, even if its determinedly slow pace and diffuse narrative will likely leave some viewers unsatisfied.

An ingenious micro-budget science-fiction nerve-jangler which takes place entirely at a suburban dinner party, Coherence is a testament to the power of smart ideas and strong ensemble acting over expensive visual pyrotechnics.

Graced by a strong cast, visual poetry and great formal control, this brooding meditation on evil still resonates a century later.

Mother is a crisp, sardonic, darkly funny mystery thriller with a claustrophobic feel that occasionally betrays its roots as an Irish radio drama.

For all its narrow focus, this is a pleasingly personal breakdown of a fascinating episode in recent European history, tightly composed and crisply edited, with an appealing undertow of dry humor and some cautionary lessons for modern voters.

As a whole, Amy is an emotionally stirring and technically polished tribute, its sprawling mass of diverse source material elegantly cleaned up, color-corrected and shaped into a satisfying narrative.

Dolan's fifth feature feels like a strong step forward, striking his most considered balance yet between style and substance, drama-queen posturing and real heartfelt depth.

Even if this deceptively artful debut feels a little muted and unpolished in places, it is plainly the work of a skilled filmmaker with ample future potential.

Take a pinch of Top Gun, stir in a generous dollop of The Right Stuff, add a light sprinkling of Mad Men and you have the formula for this uplifting documentary portrait of former Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.

Beautifully shot with an acute eye for crisp composition, this intimate mood piece explores the subtle intricacies and low-level power struggles of long-term love in forensic detail.

This remarkable true story is a finely crafted exercise in slow-building suspense, though it works better as a gripping mood piece than as journalistic investigation, its raw confessional style slightly compromised by niggling narrative gaps and dramatic contrivances.

A key joy of Karl Marx City is its strong, arty aesthetic.

There is no big redemptive payoff here, just a few small victories and hopeful pointers to the future. The struggle continues. But this is still a very necessary story, delivered with rigor and conviction.

There are poetic and profound rewards here, even if Hamaguchi makes us wait too long for this quietly devastating emotional pay-off.

ever Here wears the outer clothes of a crime thriller to cloak a more haunting, disturbing, open-ended rumination on voyeurism and identity.

Red Army is a slick, witty, fast-moving blend of sports story and history lesson.

Baird can be forgiven for a handful of careless and ham-fisted touches. Filth is still a hugely entertaining breath of foul air fueled by McAvoy’s impressively ugly star performance.

The latest sci-fi horror fable from Canadian writer-director Brandon Cronenberg is his most deliciously dark, richly allegorical nightmare vision to date. A bleakly satirical, sexually graphic, hallucinatory thriller about wealthy tourists resorting to debauched savagery in a fictional foreign country,

Do not be fooled by the playful, irreverent tone. Behind its attractive surface sheen of lusty humor and ravishing visuals, this Trojan Horse drama makes some spiky topical points about the lingering scars of slavery, feudalism, misogyny and racism.

The Endless is not just about latent power struggles within cults but also within families, and about how both are eclipsed by more ancient, malevolent cosmic forces.

I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians is a mature, ambitious work from a spirited auteur who has mastered the cinematic rules well enough to break them with confidence.

The cumulative effect of all this talent is a life-affirming blood-and-guts carnival of a movie that ranks highly among Audiard’s best, and boldest, work.

The director is such an engaging presence onscreen — wry and humane, balancing sly social commentary with a playfully child-like attitude — that even a minor autumnal work like this is still a heart-warming mood-lifter.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a lightly gothic murder ballad made with great finesse and a fine cast.

Lady Macbeth mostly operates within established period conventions, but draws fresh blood from antique material thanks to a sparky cast, subtle nods to contemporary race and gender issues, and a hefty shot of gothic melodrama.

Examining the idea of paranoia as an engineered reaction, a tool of control that inhibits potential activism and self-expression, it's more than a lesson in living history. It's a powerful argument for how necessary it is to watch the watchers.

For Anderson fans, Asteroid City will be a pure guiltless pleasure, a full sensory immersion in his dazzling Day-Glo Pop Art toybox. For agnostics, this is still one of the director’s finer efforts, low on the childlike whimsy and forced eccentricity that mars his minor works.

The Story of Souleymane is more than its individual parts. Scenes fly by, prompted by the move-move-move! ethos of the hustling immigrant. This is a film told close in close quarters. On several occasions, the camera is so close to our hero that you can smell the desperation coming off his skin, which, as richly and darkly lensed by Tristan Galand, is mutedly lustrous.

A little more narrative rigour and psychological depth would have been welcome here. Messy lives do not always require messy films. That said, Tomasz Naumiuk’s whirling, kinetic camerawork has a freewheeling rock’n’roll energy that suits the material.

Blending autobiographical elements with heartfelt homages to Iranian cinema, writer-director Matthew Rankin's charmingly surreal comic fable reimagines Canada as a Farsi-speaking dreamland.

Kinds of Kindness is lighter on jokes and visual brio than many of the director’s previous films, with an overlong runtime that weakens the twist-heavy tension and punchy rhythm of having three back-to-back stories. Despite a solid-gold cast and some deliciously bizarre fairy-tale plots, it still plays more like a fun personal stop-gap project than a major career step.

There are so many witty touches and sharp little observations here that The Strange Little Cat can be forgiven for ultimately making no dramatic statement.

Even if it tells us nothing new, Pulp is still a handsome cinematic homage to a unique band, a proud city and the unifying power of pop music.

This haunting slow-burn psychodrama is superbly acted and quietly gripping, despite some minor plot wobbles and that cumbersome title.

Like much of Bong’s work, Parasite is cumbersomely plotted and heavy-handed in its social commentary. The largely naturalistic treatment here may also alienate some of his fantasy fanboy constituency. That said, this prickly contemporary drama still feels more coherent and tonally assured than Snowpiercer or Okja, and packs a timely punch that will resonate in our financially tough, politically polarized times.

Despite a few bumpy moments, actor-director Noémie Merlant's gory feminist horror comedy paints a rowdy, richly imagined portrait of three ladies on fire.

As a timely yarn about the mistreatment of minorities, both in Sweden and worldwide, Border is rich in allegorical layers. But as a thriller at least partially rooted in supernatural genre conventions, its relentlessly dour Nordic glumness drags a little. Social realism and magical realism make uneasy bedfellows.

Inevitably harrowing and sickening in places, but with tender and uplifting moments, Night Will Fall is a somber treatment of a serious topic which earns its place in the broad pantheon of Holocaust-themed cinema. It is just a shame that Singer's worthy memorial feels a little too small for its world-shaking theme and world-famous cast list.

This ebullient equestrian comedy thriller is effortlessly enjoyable as camp spectacle, with shades of Almodovar in the mix, even if its twist-heady screwball plot ultimately delivers more style than substance.

The Brutalist aims for symphonic grandeur and novelistic depth. It partially succeeds, though it too often mistakes pomposity for profundity, and bloated verbosity for literary nuance.

For all its limited ambitions, The Ones Below serves its purpose as a solid calling card for Farr's filmmaking future, a gripping exercise in domestic suspense that sets out its stall on the shoulders of giants.

An uneven mix of serious issue movie and sensational thrill ride, Honour is no masterpiece, but it is an accomplished debut.

The State Against Mandela and the Others adds little essential to the vast library of documentaries about Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle. All the same, this is a heartfelt, humane and visually inventive tribute to a fading generation of giants whose principled sacrifices ended up changing history.

Strickland and Fenton bring an extra layer of visual invention, smartly expanding on the show's pre-existing video elements and adding their own bespoke cinematic touches.

Köln 75 is an enjoyably off-beat blend of biopic, historical pageant and music-geek lecture from US writer-director Ido Fluk.

Do not expect blazing emotional fireworks, just finely calibrated performances and deep reserves of inner torment.

The splatter violence is fairly tame by modern gore standards, and the episodic narrative sags in places, but the ecological subtext and feminist folk-horror elements make this almost entirely female-driven road movie an agreeably fresh addition to the zombie canon.

Weekend of a Champion begins as a motorsports movie but ends up a portrait of two wily elder statesmen who have survived into their seventies by skill, stealth and sheer luck.

Goldberg has made a commendably adventurous and mostly enjoyable meta-comedy that recalls both the best and worst of 1970s Hollywood.

A twist-heavy crime thriller spiced with horror and noir elements, I See You is such a finely crafted exercise in slow-burn suspense that its loopy plot contortions only seem absurd in retrospect.

This is a solid and detailed record of an extraordinary protest movement.

Kill Your Friends remixes a brutally funny novel into an entertaining if somewhat familiar big-screen tale of amoral, chemically-fuelled decadence.

The tone veers into film-fan geekery in places, but Jodorowsky is such a natural showman and irrepressible egotist that his ancient anecdotes never become tedious.

Adding an extra religious dimension to an already densely packed sociopolitical soap opera, Costa tells a rich story here about the fuzzy line between democracy and theocracy, clashing spiritual values and inflammatory culture-war rhetoric.

A lean 91 minutes long, Cult of Chucky is part self-spoofing slasher, part lowbrow bloodbath and all guilty pleasure. There are plot holes here bigger than Trump Tower, and almost as ridiculous, but only the most joylessly wrong-headed film critic would waste mental energy unpicking them.

Over the long haul, the Wolfe brother never quite provide enough psychological and emotional ballast to flesh out their complex, conflicted characters. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise confident, gripping, highly charged debut.

An unflinching portrait of state-sponsored evil, Manuscripts Don’t Burn feels like the work of an angry artist who has been jailed, censored and harassed too long. This time it’s personal.

On many levels, Evolution is a dazzling high-wire act.

For casually curious viewers, Scream of My Blood is a fast-moving, well-crafted primer on the band, light on background detail but generally compelling.

Though heavy-handed in places, The Mafia Only Kills in Summer is a generally charming and engrossing debut feature.

As it gathers to its grim conclusion with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, The Black Guelph becomes a quietly furious critique of power, corruption and lies among Ireland’s elites, from the police to the church to the upper echelons of government.

Not every joke hits the target, and not every thematic tangent is fruitfully explored, but a stellar cast and lively pacing lend comic force to even the weaker lines.

The Amina Profile is an absorbing, artfully assembled and timely reconstruction of a fascinating digital-age hoax.

Clearly weighted towards Gitai's own liberal political stance, but incorporating a range of other views too, West of the Jordan River is a dry and sometimes depressing film, but informative and humane too.

The young Spanish director Eugenio Mira and his American screenwriter Damien Chazelle have fun paying homage to the pulpy potboilers of yesteryear.

With its secret gadgets, poison pills and furtive assignations in snowy graveyards, it is also an enjoyable throwback to the cloak-and-dagger heroics of classic Cold War cinema.

Though not the finest screen outing for Coogan’s best-known alter ego, this is a worthy addition to the ever-growing Partridge archive, with enough weapons-grade comic zing in the first half to excuse the less sure-footed second.

The sleepy-paced, elementally simple plot initially requires a degree of patience, but the story ends up gently absorbing.

Long Strange Trip is an affectionate and well-crafted documentary, but it would have benefited from a little more of this emotionally raw material and a little less fawning reverence.

The second English-language feature by Berlin-based Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz (Futuro Beach, Motel Destino, Firebrand) is shallow and lurid and not entirely coherent. Even so, it is loaded with enough visual brio, acrid wit and WTF plot twists to hit the target as a surreal, salacious guilty pleasure.

It looks and feels far more substantial than most indie debuts, confidently bending genre rules with its minimalist dialogue and hallucinatory plot, which owes more to David Lynch or Lars von Trier than to more orthodox horror maestros.

This schlocky horror picture show combines a zesty young cast with an infectious comic energy.

Leap of Faith is an easy, entertaining watch, but it feels like a smaller film than its two predecessors, chiefly because it features just a single long interview with Friedkin rather than a rich chorus of insider insights.

It will not teach you very much about either autism or Metallica, but you will leave the theater smiling.

Like the cumbersome hybrid animal at its heart, this beast is no beauty. But it is a technically impressive and boldly original statement.

The gory carnage is sparingly but vividly staged, the suspense-driven plot twisty enough to tax the brain.