Last Breath makes for a very decent entry into the survival genre of films like Touching the Void with the added appeal of the submarine movie and all the claustrophobia and intensity that comes with that.

Aïnouz has eschewed the post-modern fun of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite for a much grimmer, darker vibe. This is the kind of film where torches most definitely gutter and men call out directives “on the orders of the king!” But for all the weighty gravitas of Simon Russell Beale as a conniving bishop and Eddie Marsan as a conniving noble bring to bear, the story never takes the history seriously enough either.

An assured and captivating debut feature, von Horn weaves a moral tale of guilt, redemption and revenge with a disquieting restraint that catapults his film towards the territory of Malick or Haneke.

Challengers is, in the end, a fantastically well constructed film with a star-making performance at its centre. Not quite a masterpiece, Guadagnino holds back from fully embracing the potential of his film’s eroticism and style, but Challengers is nevertheless a worthy contender.

It’s not that Abigail is terrible: all its pieces slip together where they should, but its for all its excessive violence and gore it is a dull, lifeless experience.

Civil War, though imperfect, is a biting, satirical blockbuster that is as much about the alienation of modern media as it is about imagining a second American Civil War.

This biopic is a well-mounted and handsomely shot study of men obsessed by their work, but never fully hits top gear.

Godzilla Minus One is a monster movie of singular power, using horror-infused kaiju spectacle to deliver an emotionally compelling story of grief, wartime trauma, and hope. Most importantly, its genre-leading visual effects scenes are complemented by richly soulful performances and humane themes of reconciliation and redemption.

Argentinian director Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen is an enigmatic, semi-absurdist puzzle that defies the allure of narrative solution in favour of the liberation of loose ends.

Like the best film noir, with which this in undoubtedly in dialogue, Trenque Lauquen is a film about affect and textural cohesion moreso than logic and catharsis.

Irony has a wearying effect after a while, ultimately leading to a flattening of the ethical landscape so that by the end of it we can’t help but feel they’re all as bad as each other.

What’s most repugnant about Project X is its utter lack of moral consciousness, with the overriding message being that such disregard for property and community deserves little more than a slap on the wrists – a message that couldn’t be more ill-advised in a time of such amplified social despondency.

This isn’t a film about sexual assault as a rare aberration, but about a culture which collectively diminishes any notion of consent and encourages a rush to experience.

With this near-perfect midnight movie, [Glazer] has given us a work of unsettling and riveting brilliance.

In its depiction of a part of Europe struggling to keep up with neoliberalism, R.M.N. exposes the dark mirror of liberal, globalised western European metropolitanism.

Lucy feels like the work of a filmmaker who has recovered his mojo.

More than a casual swipe at modern social trends, Rotting in the Sun exposes a kind of cruelty, alienation, and social stratification that is only as modern as the technology through which it expresses itself.

There are moments when Garrone’s vision strays too close to the fable in its narrative even as its images portray a brutal reality. However, Io Capitano doesn’t lose its humanity.

Past Lives, a film about love, friendship and fate, is an astonishing debut from South Korean-Canadian director Celine Song, and a devastatingly romantic one at that.

Green Border is a powerful and necessary film.

Kröger manages well with moments of pure cinema in between, and a particularly out-there moment of noise and mayhem which threatens to crush the film and the audience in an audiovisual avalanche. There’s an immersive strangeness that only David Lynch has snuck into mainstream cinema.

Linklater’s Hit Man is an Aperol Spritz with enough fizz and prosecco to cover the taste of the strychnine. This could be one of the brightest dark comedies of recent times.

The final few minutes will baffle some, infuriate others, but it will also be the wildness of the imagination which will have you pondering Evil Does Not Exist long after it has ended.

This is Barbie on absinthe.

Cooper’s performance is sublime, delicately balancing the problem of playing a ham while not becoming a ham.

Few American directors capture the contemporary urban nightscape as well as Fincher: a supreme genre filmmaker, which makes this perfectly fine film so disappointing.

There is quite literally a darkness at the heart of the American dream as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl.

A pointed, revealing study of selfishness and an all-too familiar portrait of emotional indulgence, bolstered by three excellent lead performances.

As fascism in South America, North America and Europe is rising from the grave, it needs a properly-aimed and delivered stake, rather than complacent sniggering

Garrel’s The Innocent deftly mixes comic family melodrama with genre thrills in this pacy, emotive thriller with a killer cast.

German director Christian Petzold’s latest is a tense, emotionally fraught drama, layered with smouldering internal conflict that by its incendiary close invariably catches alight.

In examining the reflexive, redemptive power of fiction, Lie with Me is a moving story of love lost to time.

American writer-director Erika Arlee’s debut feature showcases strong performances and nice visual flourishes, but A Song for Imogene struggles to find an emotional hook.

There is a vitality and a quiet defiance to this kind of filmmaking that is difficult to resist.

Ever the craftsperson, rarely the artist, Nolan has constructed a grand and terrible machine, a fascinating object of cinema and a deeply frustrating work of imagination.

Gerwig has crafted a warm, funny and cinematically rich film – if one whose narrative and political ambitions are far less radical than it would like us to suppose.

Sharing its name with a 1950 Joan Crawford film, The Damned Don’t Cry has thematic resonance with its namesake as a study of women’s vulnerability in a patriarchal society and the criminalising of marginalised lives.

On its own terms, M:I-7 is a superbly-crafted action thriller.

8 A.M. Metro is a sweet but ultimately shallow film whose final act ultimately finds depth and dimension too late to redeem its prior narrative shortcomings.

The Dial of Destiny starts with a prologue that easily stands up against the classic trilogy, is often disarmingly poignant and never less than entertaining. Much of this is down to Ford, who has always excelled at bringing depth and charm to a character who on paper is fundamentally little more than a silhouette.

Everything looks beautiful: sand the colour of peach fluff and skies, a cyan blue.

With a tightly-woven plot, dazzling cinematography and a razor-sharp cast of characters, Medusa Deluxe is Brit neo-noir at its knotty best.

A basically entertaining, but flimsy and shallow object, The Flash may not be the final entry in this long-beleaguered franchise, but it might as well be.

Across the Spider-Verse’s hymn to emotional storytelling is a much-needed salve to the dreary primacy of cycles and lore: more importantly, full of colour, life and drama, it is a near-unassailable good time.

Move Me No Mountain is an emotionally and thematically inert experience.

Homecoming gives an empathetic portrait of a family in a phase of change. Girls are becoming women; a mother is beginning to return to life. It has the promise of a prelude.

It’s a pity that on this occasion Scorsese makes an admirable and fine film, but alas not a great one.

About Dry Grasses is part-Chekovian comedy of yearning and male ego, and part-tragedy of a country which stymies the growth of its own citizens.

Glazer’s film is richly daring. It is both meticulous and brutal; aloof and involved; ferocious and cool. It is poetry and cinema, but it is also guilty and it knows that it is.

It is as glitzy and gaudy as the festival itself, with its vacuous politics drowned out by the thunderous sound of it slapping its own back.

Despite the multiple viewpoints, Monster is actually the anti-Rashomon, a jigsaw puzzle rather than a riddle wrapped in an enigma. The care and empathy with which the director and writer, as well as the performers, extend to all corners of the piece is extraordinary.

For most of his career, Paik was dismissed by critics and struggled financially, but as director Kim amply demonstrates, his work has had tremendous influence on both fine art and popular culture. Moon Is the Oldest TV is at once a celebration of that work and testament to its incalculable value.

This is strong work for a debut feature, and while not presenting assisted suicide itself with the greatest of nuance, Plan 75 is an accomplished portrait of capitalist alienation.

Its social reality – that of the emptying and decline of rural regions in Italy – is contemporary and vital, but there is something deeper and simpler at play here. In that simplicity, with its notes played purely, there is no need of distortion or abstraction to justify itself.

Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul is a visceral, astonishingly assured work, compelling, rarely predictable, and vital.

An uncategorisable odyssey of sub-Freudian nightmares that goes hard on suffering but soft on narrative intrigue.

Julia’s journey is one of nihilism having transformed into a quest for meaning: Rodeo’s final image speaks to both of these impulses.

It can be sly as a fox one minute and as obvious as dynamite the next, but it’s never less than thrilling.

Albert Serra’s latest is a hazy fever dream of post colonialist politics and ambition that in its final minutes lurches into apocalyptic mania.

With One Fine Morning, celebrated French director Mia Hansen-Løve presents complementary accounts of infatuation, love, and loss in a nuanced, moving study of the ways that love can sustain and consume us.

Austere, emotionally taciturn and with shades of Bergman, Dreyer and Jan Troell’s The New Land about it, Godland is the Icelandic director’s most accomplished work to date.

In politics and the media, opportunistic hate-mongers whip up bigotry against gender non-conformity, while everyone in contemporary cinema is beautiful but no one is horny. In this context, Please Baby Please is a vision inspired by the past, but is undoubtedly a document of the present.

As historical noir, Martelli’s film is thrilling, but as a document of the comforts of complicity and the terror of resistance, 1976 is visceral.

A film that wields its simple premise with devastating impact.

While The Five Devils doesn’t quite have the clarity of vision of her previous picture, its emotion, erotically-charged themes and puzzle-box structure leave much to recommend.

If the overall plot is a little two-dimensional, a little ‘tell me something I don’t know’ in its mining of upper-middle-class callousness, it’s hard to fault the magnetic craft of this exquisitely unpleasant picture, like a broiling jacuzzi of hallucinatory sex and violence that you might briefly dip a toe into, if you dare.

Pearl is notable as a pandemic film, situating itself in the middle of the Spanish flu outbreak, though much like its engagement with sex, violence and entertainment, and its treatment of women, the film sets the table for a discussion but doesn’t quite make a full meal of it.

Six films in, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett deserve credit for crafting two set pieces that manage to emphasise their characters’ vulnerability and paralysing fear in surprising and unique ways.

The screenplay balances the big narrative beats that this kind of broad crowd pleaser demands, along with posing more difficult social questions to which there are no easy answers.

The components are all here for a compelling psychological drama, led by two excellent performances, but a conflation between narrative obfuscation with thematic depth undermines Esme, My Love’s final emotional impact.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a true delight.

As a mechanism the film functions very well indeed – but as a film, as “a machine that generates empathy” as Roger Ebert had it, Quantumania falls vastly short. Still, one might argue that we do not board roller coasters expecting art, and so as an entertainment at that level it is hard to deny that this latest entry fulfils its purpose handsomely, providing all the thrills and spills of the fair.

Religious allegories, monochrome photography and folk horror trappings will draw in viewers as much as its meandering contemplations and languorous pacing may test their patience.

Bebjak’s film is far from bad and its three-tiered narrative is often compelling, buoyed by fine performances. But its treatment of women and shallow exploration of its themes sadly bring down its initial promise.

[An] astonishing feature debut.

Polley is not especially subtle in her allegory, and nor does she need to be: the exceptionally well-made Women Talking gets to the point in its sheer, righteous invective.

Though it may not stray too far off a well-beaten track, Marley Morrison’s feature debut Sweetheart is a sure-fire crowd pleaser that showcases a young filmmaker and cast with real promise.

EO is at once a cinematic curiosity, a compelling drama and a harrowing portrait of cruel whimsy.

As this semi-autobiographical film plods on, there is an unshakeable sense that in reaching for the stars, The Fabelmans instead lands somewhere more mediocre and disappointing.

As a neo-noir Holy Spider offers a tightly-woven procedural crime thriller, bolstered by a superb central performance from Amir-Ebrahimi and gorgeous, lurid aesthetics. A steadier hand marshalling its themes and a more disciplined third act might have tipped Abbasi’s third feature into being something truly special: as it stands we are left a very solid, smart and satisfying thriller.

Whereas Bait was a lament for a way of life swallowed up by mindless urbanite tourism, Enys Men is a hymn to sublime, endless time and the hauntedness of existence.

This film will draw you in and demand a second viewing.

Director Carla Simón’s Alcarràs is at once a paean to family, community and a dwindling way of life, and a complex and heartbreaking study of the victims of progress.

Beyond its gender-swapped lead role, Peter von Kant never truly ventures into new territory and so never quite justifies its own existence.

It’s all tasteful and non-sensationalist in approach. However, some will mistake an important topic for great filmmaking. Schrader’s film relies more on the former than displaying the latter.

An understated but spectacularly mounted drama.

At 150 minutes, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? could easily have been shorter and still achieved its intended emotional and aesthetic effects. But a river isn’t less pleasant for meandering before it reaches the ocean: if this is how it has to happen before we lose the thread of Lisa and Giorgi’s lives in the flow of others, then so be it.

What Philippe does yet again, as with his his previous documentaries, is a bang-up job of examining what makes great films great, and here it is twofold: showing that The Wizard of Oz is not just an all-timer in its own right, but showcasing how Lynch drew on its emotional and cosmic resonance, in overt and oblique ways, for his own iconic forays.

At almost four hours in length, Mr. Bachmann and His Class is long, but its enormous characters and emotions more than fill the space, headed by an astonishingly charismatic and inspiring teacher in Dieter Bachmann.

As the credits roll on one of the most spectacular and unengaging films of the year, The Way of Water’s vision is as clear as mud. As Cameron has become more fascinated with the technology of storytelling, it seems he’s become less so by the actual storytelling.

Herrera’s exploration of the African diaspora in Bantú Mama does ask questions about identity, family, and the meaning of home which truly resonate.

As just another entry in the MCU, Wakanda Forever is a very solid film. Entertaining and intelligent, it builds on the themes of its predecessor. Yet, navigating more than defying the Marvel machine, Coogler’s sequel becomes more than the sum of its parts. And so Wakanda Forever’s most important legacy is as a fine and fitting tribute to its erstwhile hero.

As a fable Amerikatsi hits the big emotional notes: it’s an American tale in reverse, told sincerely and personally. Sentimental, yes, simplistic too, but also honest and even affirming.

Panahi’s courageousness as an agitator is matched only by his inventiveness as a filmmaker.

Okuno’s Watcher is smart, engaging and intelligent, and it’s especially refreshing to see this sort of mid-budget, grown-up genre film getting a proper theatrical release.

With surprises, compelling performances and strong visuals across the board, Barbarian warrants recommendation but with serious caveats.

Vesper is throughout a gripping post-apocalypse fable. Despite its mythological derivations, Buozyte and Samper’s world, grounded in blood, mud and viscera, is often uncomfortably close to our own.

It’s an important moment for representation on-screen and surprisingly political in nature.