Tara Brady

It’s a thrilling journey for both young viewers and those with more cause to ponder the afterlife. A fine bow from one of the great directors.

Working from a novel by the Georgian author Tamta Melashvili, Naveriani and her writer, Nikoloz Mdivani, have crafted a warm, witty and wise film.

No other film – not even by Georges Méliès at his most fantastic – trumpets early cinema's status as a magical science and scientific magic, quite so loudly or melodically.

The Lighthouse stands as a monument to two titanic performances. Pattinson’s easy naturalism curdles into something unnerving and evil here, while Dafoe goes full German Expressionist villain with the biggest screen performance since Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

It is a film of many enchantments.

Jude Law channels swaggering disquiet, resembling both the tormentor and tormented of a Harold Pinter play.

Despite the claustrophobic setting, Diop crafts an evocative modern retelling of Medea, with detailed notes on femininity, immigration and race.

The same droll humour and keen social awareness that have defined [Kaurismaki's] work since Leningrad Cowboys Go America, in 1989, are now put in service of a lovely, star-crossed romance.

The powerful current Palme d’Or favourite features terrific performances from youthful leads Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele, claustrophobic cinematography from Frank van den Eeden, weepie-worthy orchestrations from Valentin Hadjadj, and meaningful musings on how we hide behind small-talk, and internalise pain and gender norms.

There are similarities with the mumblecore science fiction of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Colour and The Endless, but Trenque Lauquen daringly stakes out its own spooky terrain.

There are similarities with the mumblecore science fiction of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Colour and The Endless, but Trenque Lauquen daringly stakes out its own spooky terrain.

Everyone on screen is having a ball — albeit behind the straightest of faces — in this uproarious gallimaufry of movie-related pretentiousness.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movie has a strange, magical aura for cineastes.

Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s pitch-black comedy makes merry with malignant narcissism and the worried well.

There are no easy answers here, only people and centuries of redrawn borders.

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.

At 76, more than 20 films into his storied career, Paul Schrader can still deliver a sucker punch.

It’s life, both not as we know it, and yet precisely as we experience it.

The film arguably shares DNA with the psycho-geographical works of Pat Collins and Alan Gilsenan.

The vigorous, masterful script, written by the director his wife and frequent collaborator Ebru Ceylan, counterpoints the extended runtime. The director says he could have made the film longer; remarkably, most viewers will agree.

It’s not the banality of evil that chills so much here as its matter-of-factness. This is really something.

Once you’ve hacked your way through the jungle of controversy, you will, in Abdellatif Kechiche’s already-notorious, rough-edged romance, encounter a small (though far from short) masterpiece.

This is a wildly impressive first narrative feature, powered along by a strong cast, great chemistry, virtuoso flourishes, and fierce energy.

This electrifying new film from director Romain Gavras starts as it means to go on: with a riot and fireworks.

Corsage shares some obvious DNA with Pablo Larraín’s Spencer and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, but where those films swoon for their put-upon heroines, Krieps brings an unapologetic flintiness.

Nothing is safe and nothing is sacred in Julia Ducournau’s delirious new world. Rev up and get ready to run over everything the hotrods in Fast & Furious hold dear.

Watching Andreas Fontana’s wildly impressive first feature, co-written by the director and writer Mariano Llinás, is a little like being Warren Beatty in The Parallax View.

The ensemble remains electrifying against the damp.

The stoical, quiet, affecting beast of burden in Li Ruijun’s much-admired drama is emblematic of the film’s larger appeal.

Sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr’s compositions are as dramatically impactful as Tilda Swinton’s performance is delicately minimalist. Her carefully calibrated movements sit beautifully within the director’s enigmatic images and hypnotic pacing.

The best Irish film in a long time.

This is a vital companion piece to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and it ends with a chilling coda.

Each sequence of the film springs a fresh horror and a new intrigue.

Horror aficionados will find much to admire, but everything about this wild project defies generic expectations. It’s a thriller; it’s a cat-and-mouse game; it’s a truly messed-up love story.

Living, which is composed entirely of delicate movements and earnest pleasantries, maintains a quietude and stiff upper lip in the face of tragedy.

It’s a cracking, effective thriller, powered by uneasiness, and made all the more potent by the recent death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old killed in police custody after being detained for violating the Islamic Republic’s dress code for women.

Inspired by a real-life Sandusky, Ohio legend, writer-director Todd Stephens crafts an impeccable odyssey that ponders love, loss, and attitudinal changes.

Elliott Crosset Hove and Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson make for compelling adversaries in a wonderful terrible contest.

As ever, Zhao Tao puts in the best performance you’ll see this year.

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

The cross-cutting between activism, brutish military figures and merciless degradation doesn’t always work. But the haunted faces of actors such as Jalal Altawil are hard to forget.

Caustic exchanges and lopsided family dynamics make for entertaining verbal donnybrooks.

Simultaneously folkish and earthy, Delpero’s follow-up to the much-admired convent drama Maternal shares DNA with Small Body, Laura Samani’s equally remarkable tale of spiritual redemption.

The hilarious histrionics similarly mask the paedophilia, gaslighting and self-justifications. Haynes cleverly stages a soap opera only to ask: you are enjoying this, but should you be?

The ever-reliable Dyrholm is both charismatic and curdling as the grubby matriarch. But most of the film is writ large and affectingly in Sonne’s agonised face.

Working from a libretto by the cult band Sparks, cult director Leos Carax’s English-language debut is unlikely to please mayonnaise mainstream tastes. But for those seeking surprises, spectacle, and shadows, Annette is a marvel like no other.

For a film with a challenging runtime, scratchy aesthetic and confrontational swagger, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World finds a pleasing rhythm and mines much absurd comedy. Welcome to the sixth stage of despair: hilarity.

It’s a haunting spectacle that will leave you reeling, even before a heartbreaking aftermath.

The second feature by Hungarian writer-director Horvat plays in the thin space between love, madness and consciousness. There are pleasing overlaps with Alain Resnais’s Je T’aime Je T’aime and An Affair to Remember, but Preparations is unique.

A far better prospect than even the most ardent Predator fan could have wished for.

Mostly, Joyland is a film of huge heart and empathy. Mirroring the hapless hero’s journey, it’s an unexpected romance.

The film built around the actor’s affecting turn works equally hard at upending expectations.

The epic results simultaneously function as endoscopic body horror, as a portrait of overworked and underfunded medical staff and as a business study of death.

In common with Jude’s scathing attack on the gig economy and toxic online culture in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 takes a scattershot approach to various targets: anti-Semitism, capitalism, nationalism and religious hypocrisy. The incomparable writer-director’s dark comedy doesn’t care to resolve its heroine’s quandary; it’s out to poke with ethical heft and barbed wit.

Away is as unique as it is lovely.

It’s a knotty, fascinating delve into the French legal system, the nature of truth and the institution of marriage.

Scorsese’s rhapsodical memories match the romance of Powell and Pressburger’s transportive storytelling and indelible images; his account of first seeing the rhododendrons in Black Narcissus on a nitrate print is as magical as the image.

Risk and bondage are seldom as playful as they are in Babygirl.

Director Coralie Fargeat follows up her gory 2017 rape-reprisal thriller, Revenge, with this outrageous comic body-horror, pitched somewhere between Sunset Boulevard and Brian Yuzna’s cult classic, Society.

As ever, Reichardt works in delicate movements as a storyteller. Magaro and Lee’s wonderful chemistry keeps perfectly in step with the filmmaker.

An inspired cast jolly along Baker’s back-alley Lubitsch towards an unexpectedly circumspect denouement. Tart observations about money, class, and power are encrypted in a lumpenprole romp.

Revisiting many of the master’s favourite themes – familial obligations, intergenerational frictions – Ozu’s 54th film delicately maintains its post-war critique.

The script, by Johannes Duncker and director Ilker Çatak, grabs the viewer from the get-go. Judith Kaufmann’s urgent, claustrophobic cinematography tightens the vice-like grip.

Youthful exuberance has seldom been so painful or compelling to watch.

Trust Kelly Fremon Craig, the writer-director of The Edge of Seventeen, the best teen movie of the past decade, to translate Blume’s seminal novel into a funny, exhilarating coming-of-age movie that will charm all genders.

The cast rises to match a huge emotional register culminating in literal and figurative explosions. Audiard’s book reimagines the musical halfway between heated drama and song. Choreography, cinematography, and design equally lean into his Sprechstimme innovations.

Unnervingly naturalistic performances from two cinematic legends – the great Italian giallo master Dario Argento, the great Italian giallo master and the star of La Maman et La Putain – add to the sense of loss.

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.

Bones and All deftly segues between teenage romance, hinterland tableaux and genuinely unsettling encounters.

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

The enduring quality of the 1953 original is rooted in its engagement with the twin atomic disasters of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This prequel, similarly, yokes American imperialism, postwar malaise, survivor guilt and weaponised atomic power to produce the best action film of the year.

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.

Grief is seldom this entertaining.

Following on from Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, Crossing gifts us the second essential Georgian screen heroine of 2024.

The film is ultimately a showcase for Sweeney, however. You can see the panic rising beneath the young actor’s calm, collected front. It’s a brilliantly measured turn that couldn’t be further from Sweeney’s iconic breakdown as the vulnerable Cassie on Euphoria.

Defiant, endlessly resourceful and gripping cinema.

We’re accustomed to Dumont leapfrogging from one genre to another, but he has seldom attempted so many swerves and shifts as he manages here.

A worthy contender in a British revival characterised by eerie cult classics as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Lee Haven Jones’s The Feast and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men.

There’s something of the Greek weird wave or Wes Anderson in Cavalli’s deadpan humour, which is offset by Porcaroli’s wildly energetic central turn.

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.

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.

Happily, Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi put in mountain-sized performances to offset the film’s silences and propensity for postcard shots, bringing heart and guts to the chilliest scenery. A worthwhile hike through many obstacles to friendship.

The damaged, rising community depicted in Sugarland are in no mood for apologies. They want accountability.

Lo-fi, disarmingly intense, and shot on textured 16mm by cinematographer Matheus Bastos, this impressive debut feature casts a twitchy, retro shadow over the less salubrious parts of New Jersey.

A film that feels as authentic as it is boisterous.

Akhtar, an actor who was so impressive in Four Lions and Utopia, and Claire Rushbrook, recently seen as Enola Holmes’s housekeeper, make for a quietly magnetic couple. For all the obstacles they face, this remains a strangely joyful film.

Ardent lovers may well wish for someone to look at them the way Attenborough looks at giant kelp; at another moment, he excitedly recalls forgetting to breathe during his first snorkel.

For much of its impressive duration, Dolan’s film blurs the line between family friction, bipolar disorder and the supernatural.

Dragon 2 feels like a proper film, not just a cartoon.

In Swan Song, feathers, synchronicity and sheer graft define the world’s most popular ballet.

A jigsaw puzzle, dream sequences and continuous snatches of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata build towards an uneasy denouement that will leave the viewer guessing and obsessing long after the final credits roll.

An anecdote concerning the “amusing, bright, and always very vinegary” Gore Vidal being caught by a woman police officer breaking into Williams’s New York apartment would, alone, make Truman & Tennessee required viewing.

A welcome innovation is the foregrounding of the dead; previous iterations have focused only on the survivors. The casting of mostly unknown Argentine and Uruaguarn actors adds to the novelty, as does the film’s compelling depiction of survivors’ guilt after the “Heroes of the Andes” return to their home country.

The action is character driven, not issue led. It’s a heartfelt miniature, prettily shot by the cinematographer Kristen Correll.

The Mitchells vs the Machines feels, even without the benefits of a theatrical run, just like summer.

Taking a leaf from Parasite, Barbarian both literally and figuratively plays with the idea that however unpleasant things seem there’s always a scarier, lower level.

Bounce along as Julie might and it’s a lively, sexy, eventful two-hour adventure.

Christian Petzold, the film’s writer as well as director, rightly took home Berlin’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize for this genre-defying comedy of manners. The German master deftly weaves ecological catastrophe, sexual capering and a portrait of beta masculinity into a plot that, at first glance, could be a holiday-from-hell sitcom episode.