Tara Brady

The set list could use a few more upbeat numbers, but the project finds a heartfelt focus in the fans, who sob, snivel and bawl their way through loud, dramatic singalongs. Trembling manicured hands hold thousands of iPhones aloft.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond cares not a jot for the confines of conventional narrative and identification. This is cinema as bombardment, as fetish, as swooning fan collage. Who needs a new Bond film?

This is not horror gussied up as allegory or prestige: it is, pleasingly, a straight ghost story, executed with rigour, a swipe at misogyny and a sly sense of fun.

Taking cues from the gameplay, this compelling psyche-out is deceptively simple.

The script, written by the director and Tibério Azul, occasionally fumbles its dystopian framework. But the journey has enough vigour, underpinned by ideas on autonomy and ageing, to sustain its adventure.

The coda veers into the conceptual chaos of weaker, later Paranormal Activity instalments, but it’s a promising start for the director’s proposed trilogy. Keep ’em coming.

Taking its cues from those ancient remains, Rosi’s deserving Special Prize winner at Venice gifts us a pristine, durable snapshot of Naples.

Sorrentino supplies the occasional surreal house-style flourish – a drifting tear observed in zero gravity – but mostly the director leans into the quiet complexities of Servillo’s turn.

Working from a blackly comic script by Austin Kolodney, Van Sant fashions a shouty standoff in the tradition of Network and Dog Day Afternoon.

The director comes seriously close to re-creating the elegiac spell of In the Mood for Love, but, unlike Wong Kar-Wai’s film, the emotional core remains frustratingly out of reach.

There are technical blips. Occasionally, the 3D character animation and frame-rate stutter in the margins. But the film’s approximation of temporal confines never leaves the viewer feeling stuck in a moment.

A bruising character study that challenges the audience to sift genuine catastrophe from psychic projection.

In Mendonça Filho’s slippery moral universe, revelation offers neither catharsis nor closure, only the squeamish knowledge that some nightmares end, and others are obscured by history.

Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s debut feature is a formally playful, gorgeously rendered, emotionally impactful adaptation of Amélie Nothomb’s autobiographical novella from 2000. Bring tissues.

The zingers could be zippier. But what makes the film feel radical is its welcome and unwavering confidence in 2D animation as a comedic anvil. Sight gags pile up, frames stretch and snap, and the fourth wall is wobbly. In a genre increasingly marred by CG realism, Looney Tunes revels in its cartoonish artifice.

Grief is seldom this entertaining.

My Father’s Shadow, which was coproduced by Element Pictures, is not a conventional political drama. Instead it quietly marries personal and national histories, offering a deceptively sprawling portrait of Lagos, a family and the fragile, frantic ways people try to hold on against tyranny.

It makes no grand claims for itself, gesturing briefly at ethical complexity before pegging it towards efficient, blood-soaked mayhem.

As ever, Mustaine is unmistakably himself. The tunes are good, too. Godspeed, Megadeth.

[Hania] carefully sidesteps ethical questions about the use of performance alongside archival evidence with a clear-headed chronicle of a tragedy and of wider Palestinian suffering.

At a moment when truth is increasingly relative, Cover-Up acknowledges the grim continuation of the state apparatus that Hersh first exposed in the aftermath of My Lai. Without journalists of his calibre, we’d be none the wiser.

Wiseman has made films about bureaucracies, city halls and cabarets, but here the institution is pleasure itself. It’s a feast that will leave many viewers ravenous.

Whishaw’s performance is a theatrical masterclass in controlled ramble; Hall’s is the art of listening, with responses that range from concern to a slightly cocked head. Their chemistry enlivens the most throwaway anecdote.

Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man may be the most chilling film of 2025, not simply because of the notoriety of Julian Assange, its subject, but also as a clinical exposé of the elaborate machinery of state power, media hostility and private opportunism.

The visual gags are fresh, the jokes are funny, the world-building is disarmingly buoyant, and the musical cues, from Holiday in Cambodia to Carmina Burana, are playful.

Djukic’s feature debut echoes the sensitivities of Céline Sciamma’s early coming-of-age stories but with a bold, cinematic bent.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady cemented their reputation for tender portraits of young people blossoming away from home with their earlier films The Boys of Baraka, Detropia and the Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp. With Folktales, the veteran documentary duo return to familiar thematic terrain with renewed compassion.

The director’s formal control, from the eerie electronic sounds of an ondes Martenot to the startling image of blood flowering across ice, collides the cinematic and the liminal.