Tara Brady

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.

A film that feels as authentic as it is boisterous.

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.

The most magical moments are the most ordinary, as Claire Mathon’s camera sneaks up on the two little girls in peals of laughter as they make a mess with pancakes or divvying up the parts in the script for (a fantastic-sounding) murder-mystery.

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.

Defiant, endlessly resourceful and gripping cinema.

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 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 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.

The entire ensemble is remarkable. The drama is so engrossing, it knocks the jaunty Beatles song right out of the viewer’s head.

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

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

It’s a ravishing spectacle. The trouble is that the unremitting gorgeousness robs the material of all its grit, of its satire, of the sense of precariousness that one experiences on the characters’ behalf, of the fear of hunger, and of the dread that any chill or fever might be a death sentence.

The film never lets up. Pieced together from carefully colour-graded archive footage and the contemporaneous testimonies of Khrushchev, Andrée Blouin, In Koli Jean Bofane and Conor Cruise O’Brien (narrated by Patrick Cruise O’Brien), Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat finds an unlikely villain in its propulsive score: jazz.

There are obvious parallels between Rasmussen’s film and such similarly constructed animations as Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and Keith Maitland’s Tower, although Flee’s rugged lines are never as polished as anything found in either of those films. The sense of catharsis and the heartfelt voiceover, however, offset the roughhewn aesthetics.

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

A series of indelible images coalesce into a powerful chronicle of institutional abuse and racial inequality.

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.

Poitras’s biopic of Goldin is powered along by righteous fury: an engaging portrait of both the artist and her activism.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The filmmaker’s technique generally counterpoints any caveats and script imperfections. The ensemble cast is starry and strong. The segue from the end of the second World War into the cold war is marked by a spectacular explosion sequence. “Brilliance makes up for a lot,” Murphy’s Oppenheimer tells us. It sure does.

It adds up to a rare film about assimilation that can be equally cherished by both poles of the American political landscape. And everybody in between.

The grand casting gambit of pitching De Niro against De Niro proves an unnecessary distraction. Curiously bloodless in every respect.

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

Forget the big brand space opera: here’s the season’s pre-eminent work of event cinema.

Between Kurtz and Stigter – a Dutch journalist who authored Atlas Of An Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 – no stone is left unturned.

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 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.

Bentley sometimes leans too heavily on lyricism and voiceover, but the film’s earnestness and restraint cast a strange spell. Train Dreams may mourn a disappearing US, but, more movingly, its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with.

It’s impossible to recreate the electricity of a live performance but with a musical as beloved as Hamilton, one can hear the audience swoon as Christopher Jackson’s George Washington appears, or when Daveed Diggs’s Thomas Jefferson struts onto the stage.

Much of the project’s power is derived from Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning central performance.

Parallel Mothers wears its heart on its beautifully styled sleeve. Even the dark excavation at the heart of the enterprise is delivered with wit, warmth and eye-popping colours. It is difficult to think of another filmmaker who could so effortlessly juggle tones and seemingly disparate elements.

It’s Lee Chatametikool’s temporal-jumping edits that define this compelling drama.

An ambivalent, accusatory depiction of intercountry adoption, Return to Seoul mines South Korea’s controversial adoption history to craft a smart if maddening character study.

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

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

With the cinematographer David Gallego, the sound designer Olivier Dandré and a superb ensemble cast, Nyoni has crafted indelible tableaux, powered by dark survivors’ humour, blistering originality and retaliatory fury.

An elegantly structured film composed of clever, delicate movements, every aspect of Georgia Oakley’s debut feature – from Izabella Curry’s editing to Kirsty Halliday’s period costuming – is as restrained as Rosy McEwen’s excellent performance.

The Spielberg film casts a long shadow over the stage musical, which too often feels like a retread of that film interrupted by songs. The musical number as narrative speed bump is a flaw that carries over to the big screen.

India Donaldson’s Good One is a sneaky revelation, a low-key coming-of-age drama that deftly sidesteps familiar tropes in favour of keen cringe comedy and emotional precision.

At 72 minutes, Playground falls shy of feature length, yet it atones with a sickening sense of dread and pinpoint emotional accuracy. The performances that Wandel coaxes out of her young cast are remarkable and often painful to behold.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

Based on the novel by Elena Ferrante, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s opening gambit as a writer-director is a brave charge at source material defined by flashbacks and far too many subplots.

Extravagant horrors and psychological torments ensue. James Vandewater’s edits and Karim Hussain’s phantasmagoric visuals add to the anxiety and chaos.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is not quite the equal of the same film-maker’s Oscar contender, Drive My Car. Both films, however, share a deceptively languid pacing and find an aching humanity in middle-class people in crisis.

Seydoux and Poupand bring plenty of emotional clout to their roles, even if the script straddles uncomfortably between verité and melodrama.

The film never attains the Shakespearean-sized tragedy of the Korean director’s Decision to Leave or the bludgeoning impact of OldBoy.

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’s certainly something to see – especially Malgosia Turzanska’s costumes and Jade Healy’s production design – and plenty to mull over but both the viewer and the film-maker should have guessed from the offset that there can only be one Barry Lyndon.

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

The quietly convincing leads Elías and Bigliardi occupy very different points on the deadpan spectrum. The denouement isn’t entirely satisfactory, but with a journey this epic, who cares about the destination?

The script, by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, tarries for singsongs, dinners and poignant conversations about cinema and the self.

An entirely non-professional cast makes it seem as if the director-editor Ana Pfaff and cinematographer Daniela Cajias simply happened upon every beautifully composed sequence. The effects can be slow-burning and occasionally a little shapeless, but they cast their dappled spell as the summer wears on.

A perennially sun-dappled kitchen. Cast-iron pans. Belle-époque bustles. Gastroporn doesn’t come more XXX-rated than this insanely pretty, airily vacant livre de recettes.

Another director might have fashioned Basic Instinct from such voyeuristic clay. Park dances with the material. Eschewing sex in favour of simmering sensuality, Decision to Leave coalesces into an intricate ballet between the main characters, Park’s careful choreography and Kim Ji-yong’s acrobatic camerawork.

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.

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

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 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.

There’s plenty of razzle dazzle here but little that passes for oomph.

The Kraffts, who first bonded over their love of Mount Etna, remain as committed to the cause of understanding volcanic hazards and triggers as they are to one another. Their story makes for this year’s best documentary to date, and a film that demands to be seen on the largest possible screen.

A triumvirate of superb performances and the warmth of Maryam Touzani and Nabil Ayouch’s screenplay offset the clumsier tropes. Virginie Surdej’s cinematography bathes daylit scenes in golden light to match the thread Halim uses on his petroleum-blue creation.

Yves Cape’s unfussy, still camerawork never distracts. Chastain and Sarsgaard subtly work every acting muscle. (The latter deservedly took home the Volpi Cup from Venice last September.) Franco is kinder to these characters than he has been to many of his creations, leaving the viewer to parse the moral murk.

The most anxious Jewish comedy since the Coen brothers visited Jobian trauma on Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man stars Carol Kane as an adult bat-mitzvah student. This alone would justify the admission price, but there’s more.

The visuals are as wildly original as the script, which was co-written by Docter, Kemp Powers, and Mike Jones.

Watching anonymous child after anonymous child arrive for treatment makes for grim and frustrating viewing. We want to know who these kids are, but the film does not. It’s the very antithesis of how hospital drama – narrational or otherwise – are supposed to function.

Pritz collaborates commendably and sensitively with his subjects.

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.

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

Though not quite as extravagantly imaginative as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time or Wolf Children, the eighth feature from Mamoru Hosada marries dazzling spectacle, high-octane action and social commentary.

Heartfelt performances from such terrific actors as Keri Russell and Scott Haze fail to turn this hotchpotch of competing themes into cohesive drama.

The director of Stranger by the Lake returns to the deadpan, sexually unstable working-class environs that have shaped many of his previous films with this pleasingly confounding tale of displaced characters and desires.

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.

The tragic cycle is composed of the same beats that defined such superior films as The Godfather and Animal Kingdom. But the tight focus on Lesia, and her realisation that the men she loves are also capable of monstrous things, reinvigorates the familiar form.

This is a nervy study of how poverty wears people down, eroded by uncertainty and the grinding effort to stay afloat.

Powered along by youthful exuberance, earthy sex scenes and keen naturalism, Holy Cow is a box-office sensation in France, where it outperformed Anora and The Brutalist. The cinematographer Elio Balezeaux finds winning tableaux in dung, well-used farm equipment and sun-dappled pastures. An auspicious debut for everyone involved.

Appealing documentary of the Nobel Prize-winning author has fascinating details.

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.

Arjona brings heat to an undeveloped character. Powell, who manages to wring a moment of magnetism from iPhone notes, inevitably steals the show.

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.

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.

It is a film of many enchantments.

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

It’s all very superficial, but carried off with impeccable style.

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.

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.