The Banshees of Inisherin is a beautifully-shot and deftly-played comedy. It is at once masterful, surprisingly poignant, and profound. Its portrait of a friendship faltering ultimately proves how vital friendship actually is: how vulnerable and naked we are without it.

Suffice to say, There Is No Evil is a deeply felt study of the effects of state violence on the individual. While the cost of resistance is high, the price of compliance may well be greater.

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.

Saint Omer is a deeply intellectual film – Medea is referenced several times as a frame of understanding – but it’s also heartfelt. There is a compassion to the dispassion: an empathy.

Oppenheimer's first film maintained a passive detachment, allowing the killers to re-enact their own atrocities and metaphorically hang themselves with their own words. The Look of Silence takes a far harder line, probing the killers more deeply and confronting them in an attempt to shake some sense of remorse out of them.

In one sense, Il buco is a testament to human hubris, contrasting the self-satisfaction of our own temporary structures with the unknowable depth of nature’s works.

Zvyagintsev is masterfully compiling a cinematic record of suffering, and the indifference surrounding and facilitating it, which will live on.

Birds of Passage is an enthralling, powerful statement and lamentation on the drugs trade’s inevitable encroachment upon on indigenous peoples and how gangsters casually destroyed them.

A lovingly observed, pitch perfect coming-of-age comedy, Gerwig's warm, astute account of the end of adolescence is a stunning solo debut.

Hit the Road is damned near to being a masterpiece – if it isn’t simply one already. There are scenes of broad comedy, musical sequences and a wholly tragic episode that plays out in a long wide-shot. The wonderful cast inhabit their roles so fully it’s hard to believe this is not a bona fide family.

Caniba offers no trite explanations or condemnations of Sagawa. Instead, we are offered a small window into his reality.

Dolan is a director who thinks hard about the possibilities of cinema and explores them with verve and ingenuity, but it is in his latest film that everything has come together.

It was the film that introduced the world at large to master director Akira Kurosawa and his frequent, infinitely watchable star Toshiro Mifune.

Ferrara's Welcome to New York is a savage work that's easily one of the best films of the year. [Unrated Version]

The Argentinian director’s follow-up to 2019’s Lux Æterna is a typically difficult watch, subjecting us to the grinding indignities of old age, but it also a deeply moving study of lifelong love and loyalty to the bitter end.

The Childhood of a Leader is a dark, enigmatic piece of work that hovers between visionary greatness and petty domestic triviality. Corbet's inaugural stint behind the camera marks a stunning debut.

The magical realms of Justino’s stories are echoed in the real world, where spaces are enclosed but liminal, defined by uneasy boundaries that are easily breached.

Gnecco has both breadth and subtlety. His Neruda is a complex and fascinating character study, a man fastidiously vain of his status but unconvinced by his own performance even as he enraptures a nation.

Revolving around the omnipresent theme of grief (and adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s short story), the film composes a ghostly melancholic reflection on this profound human emotion.

As a fictionalised account of what was once described as the worst European genocide in the post-war period, Quo Vadis, Aida? is wrenching and vital in its bitter grief. As a study of political and diplomatic inertia in the face of contemporary global human tragedies, it could not be more urgent.

Both Vanderbeque and Duret give star turns here: utterly believable as brother and sister, each performance informs the other as they try to survive each day.

Not only is the film a compellingly told tale of suspense and terror, but it's crafted with such precision and sense of timing that one can cry "Masterpiece!" without being shamefaced or wondering if a hyperbole-induced crime against all good sense has just been committed.

Scorsese’s direction always keeps us uncomfortably close to Travis’ subjectivity, whether we’re prowling night time Manhattan or gazing into a glass of Alka-Seltzer until the whole world disappears into the healing hiss.

Once we start to understand Ayka’s life and reasons for behaving how she does, the film gains tragic dimensions and its humanist voice grows into a desperate cry.

Yes, it is pretentious. But pretension is also about ambition and this is cinema that is willing to kick out the lights.

Weighed down by existential questions, Lucky carries the burden of life’s unanswered questions on his sun-lined face; it’s a fearless portrayal of someone facing the finality of their life.

Zvyagintsev's pessimism is leavened both by his comedy and his sense of beauty. Mikhail Krichman's cinematography captures the sublime grandeur of the landscape against which the nasty, brutish and short lives are played out.

Arguably Andrei Tarkovsky’s finest masterpiece, the Russian director’s 1979 film Stalker is the culmination of a career-long preoccupation with memory, trauma and the relationship between subjective perception and physical reality.