Glazer’s uncompromising and chilling vision of evil is unlike any other film about Nazism.

Tár is a film of rare and wild excellence.

One Battle After Another is a film about legacy, about fathers and daughters, about the fight against an all-too-real American government hellbent on white supremacy, militarism, and oppression. Yet it also manages to be one of the most touching and absorbing thrillers of the year. Make no mistake: Paul Thomas Anderson is a genius.

Mad About the Boy is just enormously good fun.

A work of staggering mystery and power, with an epic scope and a visual style to match, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is old school in the best possible sense.

It joyfully expands on the source material with extended musical numbers and astute childhood flashbacks in a combination that will delight committed Ozians and newcomers alike.

It is a story of family and relationships, of life’s inevitabilities, and the surprises we can nonetheless carve from those. Its gut-wrenching despair is matched by a strange optimism, a powerful embrace of the possibilities of life and love that stays with you long after the end credits roll.

It’s a film about ordinary Londoners living ordinary lives and facing normal challenges, from mental health to domesticity. Baptiste is toweringly real: formidable and heartbreaking in her performance.

Mikey Madison gives a sparky, vulnerable, devastatingly real breakout performance as a strip-club dancer and sometime-sex-worker. Filmed with neon-lit nocturnal verve, Anora is as gorgeous to behold as it is deranged.

A beautifully simple story of moral courage in the face of complicity, Small Things Like These is one of the best films of the year.

Melodramatic to the end, it’s difficult to imagine a more perfect home-watch film for cosy winter nights. Knives Out die-hards: we are back.

The film’s very last moments are perhaps a little saccharine, but honestly, by this point, you’ll forgive it anything. Supremely confident and stylish film-making that markets itself as big yet feels somehow small, in the sense that extraordinary care is paid to each scene, each modest conversation. Marty’s self-belief may sometimes be unearned, but this film’s absolutely isn’t.

What the film does so well, though, is bring enormous compassion to a story that initially seems to despair for the world.

Exhilarating, satisfying, classical with a touch of tongue-in-cheek: Gladiator II ticks all the boxes, and does it with panache.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues may not have the brown M&M joke or cultish appeal of its original, but it gets great and lovable mileage out of just how good those first jokes were – mini-Stonehenge replica included. You’d have to be a curmudgeon not to think it was fantastic fun.

It’s great fun to watch two actors of such calibre play these wicked games of mistrust and deception – it’s even more fun to see Soderbergh handle his story so deftly.

Sinners is one of the most satisfying and fun blockbusters I’ve seen so far this year.

Ronan’s performance holds our attention. She is astonishing in this role, able to harness both fragility and determination in equal measure. She dances alone as if exorcising demons from her body, pretends to conduct waves on the beach with unparalleled joy.

This is a gnarly and fascinating thriller whose characters feel genuinely dangerous and unpredictable.

It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Part One, but this is still a highly entertaining display of what musical theatre can do on screen with top level performances and a true affection for the world-building.

Whether you’re a racing fan, have watched Netflix’s F1: Drive to Survive, or are a newcomer to the sport altogether, F1 uses old-fashioned, engine-revving storytelling.

Ballerina is actually great fun, a propulsive, pulpy gun-fu joy that revels in the things the early John Wick did so well: stunts and absurd world-building.

The Friend is a film that tells us that the only way out of heartache like this really is through. It may jump all over your bed and make you sleep on the floor, but weathering the hard part has its own kind of rewards.

Obsessed by rooting his supernatural folk tales in the realities of historical life, Eggers turns Nosferatu into a gothic horror fairy-tale. It’s retro in the best sense of the word.

You don’t have to profess any special interest in the subject to have a fantastic time at the cinema with Conclave, which is part political thriller, part catfight, and utterly compelling.

Die My Love is simply too odd to appeal to everyone – but anyone familiar with the despair induced by listening on repeat to “I like to eat apples and bananas”, while wondering where their life, identity and bodily autonomy have gone, will find truth, if not solace, in its singularity.

There’s nothing new here and also a palpable reliance on enduring goodwill from the franchise’s existing fanbase, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. This is all such undemanding, carefree fun, delivering exactly what it promised, and simple without ever becoming simplistic.

Oscar Isaac is ideal as Dr Victor Frankenstein, a fevered, charismatic, and darkly obsessive oddball. He’s passionate and intense, driving the plot forward with powerful force.