Tara Brady

The chronological leaping around to pop tunes by Taylor Swift, Boygenius and Billie Eilish is the most interesting thing about Brett Haley’s sunny, saccharine film. The rest is flimsy.

It lacks the wild provocations of Schrader’s scalding recent trilogy, but Oh, Canada pokes and probes in quieter, sneakier ways.

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.

This is a fond requiem from a Bowie fan, made with reverence for his art and respect for his privacy.

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.

The film frantically tries to juggle farce, family comedy and the inherited trauma of the Holocaust. The results are not as egregious as Life Is Beautiful, but too much feels unearned and wildly inappropriate.

For all that structural uncertainty, Ella McCay is difficult to dislike. It’s old-fashioned and undeniably heartfelt. There’s a compelling sweetness in its rooting for good public service, and a refreshing optimism that feels almost radical in 2025.

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.

Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon features a luminous ensemble and arguably a career-high performance from Ethan Hawke, yet it’s hobbled by an aesthetic gamble so distracting, so patently absurd, that it nearly sinks the enterprise.

It’s tricky material, but what the script loses by making an actual monster it gains in small, poignant details.

Baumbach’s characteristically barbed wit too often makes way for self-indulgence and sentimentality. Ruminations on fame as a hollow, unfulfilling enterprise have all the depth of a disposable contact lens.

For all the Hollywood gloss, Vanderbilt sounds an alarming relevance in Göring’s sneering claim that Hitler “made us feel German again” and Triest’s warning that “it happened because people let it happen”.

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.

Die My Love is uncompromising, hypnotic, brave and often indelible looking, even when the theatricality and fractured structure erode any emotional weight. The result is an impressively punishing, intermittently brilliant bad trip that may be the worst date movie ever made.

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.

With looming grace and the fluffy heart of a Golden Labrador, Elordi, standing in for a departing Andrew Garfield, turns out to be the most swooning Goth heart-throb since Edward Scissorhands emerged from Vincent Price’s laboratory.

Despite the best efforts of Graham, menacing in monochrome flashbacks, the sanitised script never truly pins whatever unprocessed trauma is eating at the rising star.

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

Thankfully, Tron: Ares is less ponderous than Tron: Legacy, and the music is turned up to 11 in the hope you won’t notice all the shortcomings.

Blunt works hard to flesh out an underwritten role, but Safdie seems more interested in Kerr’s silences than his partner’s complaints. The relationship is too ill-defined to land an emotional punch.

Dickinson plays a small role as Mike’s antagonistic friend, but everything rests on Dillane’s powerhouse turn and the writer-director’s compassionate, daring script.

Hassan and Ingar deliver compelling, complementary performances: Hassan is as quiet and vulnerable as Ingar is fiery and charismatic. Clarissa Cappellani’s fluid cinematography and Fiona DeSouza’s stylish edits and inserts keep pace with the youthful exuberance. Judicious use of flashback sets up a gut-punch coda.

This messy romantic phantasmagoria is a hinterland for no one: a musical without musical numbers, a romcom without comedy. Sincerity saves it from collapse.