Wendy Ide

Ultimately what makes this an unusually rewarding picture about motherhood is the fact that it shatters the binary distinction between the good mother and the bad one.

It asks pertinent questions about loneliness and a world in which algorithms can know us better than our human partners ever will.

What’s perhaps unexpected, in a film that has the look of a brooding fable by Carl Theodore Dreyer, is how funny it is at times.

This French and English-language drama is a film about taking ownership over the end of life; about dying personally and, if necessary, selfishly.

The rather on-the-nose storytelling grows increasingly complex and interesting the further that the protagonist ventures into morally ambiguous territory.

This female-led triptych of stories, with its deft, empathetic camerawork and intimate, intricately crafted character sketches, is a minor masterpiece in its own right.

It’s a heightened caricature, certainly, but there are uncomfortable truths underpinning the surreal excesses.

The latest anime from Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) is a beguilingly sweet-natured little gem. The film balances spiralling flights of fancy with glinting observations on parenting and family dynamics.

Savage’s success at getting under the skin of the kind of cancerous depression which gnaws away at the soul means that this is not always the easiest watch. There are no audience-appeasing neat happy endings, just raw emotional wounds and aching compromises. But, despite a low key approach, this is a compelling, sometimes wrenching drama.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams is a furiously visceral force behind the camera. His knuckleduster direction goes beyond mere muscularity and takes on the daunting persuasive power of a mob enforcer; his storytelling is both thrilling and utterly terrifying.

The slow creep of the camera mirrors the incremental build in pressure; this is the kind of tension that feels like a tightening chokehold on the audience.

Both the film and its cast of charismatic, dreadlocked old-timers are loaded with an easy charm that is as heady as anything that gets smoked during the course of the recording sessions.

This arresting first feature blends sci-fi and fantasy to create a worldview which is at once savagely grotesque and alarmingly familiar.

Goth is riotously entertaining throughout, but two specific scenes, in both of which the camera rests solely on her face for an extended shot, capture the full force of her unnerving talent.

It is a film which celebrates empowerment and the exhilarating release of finding a voice and being heard.

Ron’s Gone Wrong transcends the familiarity of the story (there’s a thematic an overlap with Big Hero 6 and How To Train Your Dragon, to name just two) with deft writing, appealing animation and a big heart crammed into a small malfunctioning robot.

One of the main strengths of Chadha’s approach is the way she weaves the historical detail into the richly textured story with such a light touch.

It’s an accomplished, ambitious work which has a Herzogian fascination with vast, unforgiving landscapes, hubris and madness.

This is a picture with first-rate fight choreography to match the quality of the martial arts talent involved.

The film is a bracingly confrontational commentary on the direction the country is taking in the Bolsonaro era. Propulsive storytelling doesn’t come at the expense of the vividly sketched personality of the community.

The latest film from the acclaimed writer-director Pema Tseden casts a typically wry eye over the collision between modernity and tradition in 1980s Tibet.

The audience brings to this film a set of expectations born from a lifetime of watching romantic fiction. That Monday skewers them so pointedly and thoroughly is what makes it such an entertainingly subversive spin on the genre.

Like a big old glass of pub wine, it might not be particularly complex or sophisticated but, my goodness, it hits the spot.

What makes this particular adaptation, co-written by Bravo and Jeremy O Harris, sing is the fact that, while it winks at Twitter with a smattering of emojis, it’s the legitimacy of Zola’s voice, rather than the means of its dissemination, which is prioritised.

Koberidze invites us to reshape and reappraise our perspective on what constitutes beauty. It’s a bold decision and, coupled with the endurance-testing pacing and running time, one which will make the film something of a marketing challenge beyond the die-hard Koberidze fan base. And yet there is something alluring here – it’s a meditative and elusive picture that conveys a spiritual beauty as much as an aesthetic one.

An investment on the part of the audience is required, to focus in on the characters and to follow the dialogue. It’s not quite as dry as it sounds. There is a subtle humour in this singular approach, but like the dialogue and the drama (such that it is), it is sidelined.

There are thematic parallels with everything from The Lego Movie to The Matrix, but key to its appeal is an unabashed sweetness and goofy enthusiasm that proves irresistible.

There’s something about the macabre sensuality and mossy, crepuscular gloom of this retelling of the vampire legend that leaves a mark on the audience. It’s not so much a viewing experience as a kind of haunting.

There are episodes of muscular, tautly directed action but the overall tone is brooding melancholy, all of it accompanied by a fretful, moaning wind and an eerie score.

Not surprisingly given Kuras’s background as a cinematographer, Lee is largely visually driven.

[An] impressive and wrenchingly sad documentary.

Perhaps more radical than the censor-bating, though, is the fact that My Favourite Cake trains its lens on lonely, ordinary older people – a demographic all too frequently invisible to film-makers the world over. A rare delight.

It’s tender, thoughtful film-making from Finnish director Mikko Mäkelä, exploring the bond between two men separated by generations but joined by literature and love.

This slow-burning drama, which won one of the top prizes at Sundance earlier this year, elegantly balances a spark of hope against a slowly rising tide of dread.

It’s a fascinating story that starts as an affable, strange-but-true tall tale but ends in a decidedly minor key.

Firecracker chemistry between the two leads makes this doomed Romeo and Juliet romance all the more tragically persuasive. Mavela’s kittenish little girl voice is utterly beguiling; Marwan’s adolescent swagger doesn’t quite conceal the sweet boy beneath.

Matt and Mara is one of those films in which very little concrete happens, but the tingling possibility that something might makes it compelling.

A haunting allegorical tale, Aniara warns of humanity hurtling in the wrong direction and realising too late that there is no turning back.

There’s an element of playfulness here – Hong challenges us to identify the subtle shifts in emphasis and interplay between the two versions of the story. The narrative expands into an intricate game of spot the difference.

Control director Anton Corbijn’s first documentary, Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), is a fascinating and suitably maverick snapshot of a richly creative moment in music history, told through a couple of disreputable hippies who designed some of the most iconic album covers of all time.

Peng’s performance is physically rather than verbally expressive – he has barely more lines of dialogue than the dog – but Lang’s arc of redemption is explored with heart and humour.

Essential viewing.

This feature debut from the Sydney-based writer and director Samuel Van Grinsven may tackle familiar material – gay coming-of-age stories are hardly uncommon – but it does so with a lustre and style that marks Van Grinsven out as a name to watch. Perhaps even more notable is Leach, a silky, feline presence who owns every moment that he’s on screen.

Demoustier so supercharges her performance with charisma, she almost seems to sparkle.

Despite some pacing issues and a slightly repetitive second act, this is a polished production which establishes writer/director Aleksei Mizgirev as a talent to watch

There’s a languid kind of magic to Koberidze’s approach, which, with its enchanting score, digressive montages and sparse dialogue, has roots in silent cinema but also feels refreshingly and genuinely original.

The storytelling is so deft and slick, it almost feels scripted at times. But there are certain elements that you can’t dictate in advance, like the almost spiritual connection that grows between Nikola and the gangly, damaged bird that he rescues from the dump, and which, in turn, reaffirms Nikola’s bond with the land.

When the film is this much fun, who cares if Grant recycles some of the greatest hits from his gag repertoire?

Although perhaps on the enigmatic end of the Hong spectrum, The Woman Who Ran touches rewardingly on themes such as relationship dynamics and gender roles. The delicacy of the predominantly female-driven storytelling is unassuming but beguiling. And Hong goes so far as to skewer his own tendency to indulge monologuing windbag male characters in previous films.

While Mickey 17 isn’t in the same elevated league as Parasite, it’s a lot of fun.

Moore’s subtle, empathetic work elevates what could be dismissed as a small-scale, even banal story.

This is immensely enjoyable stuff.

The performances, so thickly layered with charm and artifice that it’s hard to know what and who is real and what isn’t, are first-rate. It’s a pacy and enjoyable movie.

It is a fairly familiar crime thriller setup, yet this playful, effortlessly engrossing picture from Rodrigo Moreno takes a series of deliciously confounding turns.

By encouraging a merry chaos of overlapping personalities and performances – restructuring the timeline into a multilayered playground where the child and adult stories interact – and subtly foregrounding existing themes of female fulfilment and the economics of creativity, Gerwig creates something that is true to its roots and bracingly current.

Nyoni’s Zambia-set film, using the Bemba language and English, deftly juggles humour with pathos, domestic drama with surreal fantasy flourishes. It’s dizzyingly creative and rather special.

It’s a testament to Macdonald’s performance (and later, to Khan’s charm) that we share her passion for puzzling.

This is a stylish and satisfying prequel that elegantly integrates Sam’s poet’s sensibility into the storytelling.

Muylaert handles an atmosphere charged with intensely conflicting expectations with a light touch, and sparks of humour.

Powered by a surging, impatient energy and a bracing undercurrent of spite, Ramin Bahrani’s version of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker prize-winning novel is one of the more successful literary adaptations of recent years.

The child’s perspective on the story means that the film is unquestioning when it comes to the sources of the psychic powers, neatly sidestepping the need for exposition. In a child’s mind, magic is real, black magic painfully so.

Schrader’s sensitive, unshowy approach to the directing choices is a smart decision; this is a film that is respectful of and in service to the stories of the women.

It’s dazzling, baffling and staggeringly ambitious.

Fans will eat it up (with relish and fries); older kids will adore the oddball humour. And even cinemagoers who have never seen an episode of the TV series (me, for example) are likely to find much to amuse them, provided they have a tolerance for extreme silliness.

It is, it has to be said, something of a stretch to believe that this regal woman would be drawn to a dullard such as Ernest, but Gladstone and DiCaprio manage to convince us that this is more than a partnership of expediency – it’s a marriage of real love.

A beguiling, if slightly convoluted, fantasy.

A fair bit of historical scene-setting at the beginning means that the picture takes a while to hit its stride. But once it does, there is much to enjoy in this big, brawling ruck of an action movie.

The magnetic Scicluna is a Maltese fisherman in real life, and part of a cast predominantly made up of non-professional actors. His performance is impressively complex.

The words are so piercing and acute that we hardly need the stirring score that swirls in the background.

While the film defies neat genre classification, it has elements of physical horror – like a mating between the mind of David Cronenberg and something that crawled out of a compost heap.

The Eternal Memory is a restrained, respectful piece of film-making that takes its lead from its two subjects. It’s wrenchingly sad, but also a testament to the love that endures, even as Augusto increasingly struggles to recognise his wife.

Rock’s wildest years – both the man and the music – swirl together into a psychedelic maelstrom of pills, pictures and brilliantly creative swearing.

Not only is it an affectionate and personal film – the subject, Elsa Dorfman, is a long-standing friend and Morris’s emotional investment in her story is evident in every frame. It’s also far more informal in approach than his normal forthright technique.

For all his shame, and the shuttered windows and disconnected webcams that block out the world outside, there’s a magnetism to Charlie and his big, overburdened heart which draws others – and us, as an audience – to him.

Coppola evokes the aching loneliness and isolation experienced by women who simultaneously have everything and nothing.

I can think of few other films that get into the skin of new motherhood, with its formless terrors and fierce, furious primal love, as inventively and effectively as this one.

Shot on film, using vintage equipment, the picture has a scrappy, tactile quality, its ghostly black-and-white images scratched and scorched. Meanwhile, Neil Hannon’s smartly used score envisages a chilling authoritarian future for pop music.

It’s this – the wry humour provided by the long-suffering Bonnie; the lovely lived-in quality of the friendship – rather than the lengthy swimming sequences and a few slightly unwieldy flashbacks that gives the film its crowd-pleasing appeal.

It’s an absolute joy.

Ultimately, one of the key pleasures of the picture is its uncertainty – the niggling doubts that remain, and the sense that a crucial piece of the puzzle is tantalisingly out of reach.

The restrained, austere filmmaking of the latest picture from Wayne Wang belies the emotional depth of this sober picture.

Küppenheim is terrific, her precision and restraint in the role drawing us into the story.

Surface similarities to Groundhog Day are relegated to background noise, thanks to the crisp writing and the nihilistic bite of the humour.

Classic rock needle drops and showy, snaking, single-shot action sequences – both GOTG trademarks – abound in a picture that balances a slightly overstuffed storyline with mischief, humour and the biggest of hearts.

It’s a terrific little film that combines the earthy humour and honesty of a Shane Meadows movie with an unexpected expressionistic section – flooded with colour – that channels the boys’ joyful dancefloor abandon.

At a time when the press is routinely denigrated, an account of investigative journalism as a force for good makes for inspiring viewing.

An impressively nuanced portrait of the three-way relationship between a man, a woman and his disease.

While the symbolism can land a little heavily at times, Bessa’s fiercely committed performance and the palpable anger in the storytelling are the picture’s driving force.

It’s a bold, arresting debut from writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, who balances muscular, crime-thriller tropes against moments of striking, unsettling beauty, tension and urgency against knottily complex character development. Highly recommended.

It’s a savagely funny showcase for Cage at his very best. But the picture sours somewhat in a third act that departs from crisp character study to target cancel culture, losing some of its biting humour in the process.

Writer-director Evan Morgan’s deft screenplay balances a taut crime story against a textured character study.

Although the sparse dialogue and gradual build requires an investment on the part of the audience, this is an accomplished work.

This is not cinema that leaves you feeling good about things. Nor does it tread a familiar path. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most daringly unexpected films of the year, a sinewy, unsettling psychological horror, saturated with a squirming dream logic that tips over into the domain of nightmares.

A collision is inevitable, but even so, the film’s climax is unexpectedly devastating.

Foy is terrific in a film which balances bruising candour about mental health issues against arresting wildlife photography and a fervent appreciation of the natural world.

Fascinating, confounding and continually surprising.

It’s a gentle piece of Arabic-language storytelling, one that softly, slowly enfolds the audience rather than propels them on a journey.

The Substance not only offers a female perspective on women’s bodies, but also argues that things only start to get properly messy once fertility is a dim memory.