Tim Grierson

The Holdovers is crushingly wistful in precisely the way moviegoers have come to expect from Payne.

What lingers is a collective misery and the invisibly masterful choreography of chaos, rage and death.

This meditative piece sidesteps ponderousness thanks to its modesty and inquisitiveness.

Of the many artists Hawke has honored on screen, he has never depicted one so touchingly diminished — someone so consumed with envy who nonetheless cannot lie to himself about the beauty of the art around him.

If It Was Just an Accident lacks the conceptual audacity of Panahi’s This Is Not a Film or 2022’s No Bears, the film’s straightforward narrative proves to be just another feint, disguising the writer-director’s anger and sorrow at his own mistreatment and that of so many Iranians

The performances are often revelatory, but the sense of history coming alive — of the past speaking to the present — is even more riveting.

The film consistently works as both a straightforward psychosexual thriller and something more troubling — almost unspoken — underneath.

So many films have tackled the underlying tensions between diametrically opposed family members, but here Eisenberg sidesteps cliches, consistently complicating our feelings about these nuanced cousins.

It may take a while to acclimate to the film’s off-kilter rhythms and strange happenings — not unlike the film’s protagonist, an outsider entering the forbidding Alaskan wilderness — but Saulnier has crafted his most mature effort to date, mixing his love for pulp fiction with a sombre examination of the inexplicable evil all around us.

What makes this adult animation so affecting is the writer-director’s commitment to fortifying his spectacle with a deep emotional undercurrent.

Marked by strong, reserved performances — and deeply compassionate to its soulsick characters — this quietly absorbing drama has secrets in store, each of them revealed with uncommon elegance.

This audacious action-thriller is the filmmaker’s most purely entertaining vehicle, but underneath its adrenalised set pieces are quieter concerns about how best to make lasting change in a corrupt world.

Not quite a thriller and not quite a horror movie, April is all the more haunting for never pinning down the roots of Nina’s retreat from life while dedicating herself to improving the lives of others.

A ravishing visual colossus, Blade Runner 2049 more than lives up to its predecessor’s legacy as a groundbreaking mixture of sound, images and mood.

The Witch’s greatest asset is its precisely controlled menace, and so even when nothing terrifying is happening, it feels like something ominous could be unleashed at any moment.

Like the filmmaker’s 2022 feature Barbarian, Weapons takes its time laying out an elaborate story, repeatedly shifting perspectives and main characters until the myriad strands come together in immensely satisfying fashion.

Ben Affleck produces one of his most irresistibly entertaining dramas — albeit one that never forgets the capitalist reality of this feel-good story.

To experience this film is to be overcome with melancholy. The love story’s fragility makes such a sentiment inescapable, but so is the sight of so many faces who are no longer with us.

This is a gripping, sometimes hypnotising film in which notions of good and evil are less clear-cut than the urgent desire to stay alive.

As often with Kore-eda’s pictures, Broker is about family, but it extends beyond that theme to talk about fundamental aspects of life — the need to belong, the hope of connecting with likeminded souls, and the desire to find a place called home.

Highly entertaining from start to finish, the film benefits from David Koepp’s inventive screenplay and Soderbergh’s storytelling swagger.

It’s such stately, evocative, confident filmmaking, the only reservation being that it’s also a bit chilly.

A Quiet Place Part II proves to be an even fiercer and more emotional experience than the first instalment. Expanding its world slightly without losing sight of the elements that made the original so effective, this superb piece of mainstream horror filmmaking is bolstered by some terrific performances, most notably Millicent Simmonds as a deaf daughter assuming the role of family protector in the wake of her father’s death.

As Hans Zimmer’s propulsive score juices the drama and thrill of Paul’s quest, Part Two achieves the sort of big-screen momentousness that is too rarely dared in contemporary cinema. Anyone swept away by the 2021 film will hunger to return for a second helping — and be richly rewarded.

There are many ways to portray authoritarianism, but Two Prosecutors is penetrating in its depiction of a society being slowly poisoned. The film might be too much to bear if it wasn’t so brilliantly conceived and executed.

The movie glides by so unassumingly, you may be stunned how moved you are by the end.

The action scenes are predictably magnificent, and an excellent supporting turn from fetching new cast member Rebecca Ferguson helps make this a sexy, propulsive, top-notch thriller.

The space battles and lightsaber duels are appropriately exciting, but Johnson keeps a close eye on the human element that girds this galactic odyssey. Rather than simply regurgitating Star Wars’ past, The Last Jedi emphatically builds on it.