Gerwig nails how mothers and daughters argue – always at each other’s throat. Because of the tonal breadth of the film, different shades of feeling are found in each grudge match. Love as a combative war of words is an energising force.

Selma Blair is sympathetically naturalistic as a woman who gave up her career to be a mother and now wonders what her options are. This is offset at every turn by Cage, whose line reading is unpredictable and whose movement is flamboyantly deranged.

This is a Serious Movie that engages the intellect with compelling depictions of place, time and people. The ensemble cast is full of small characters with personalities that reveal themselves through political quirks and related creativity.

Big budget superhero flicks are a dime a dozen. Woman at War takes a sidelong glance at what it means to look, sound and act like a fighter – one hellbent on serving the world’s greater good.

A painfully real portrait of racism in Australia.

A memoir writ in moving image, the film returns to her favourite motifs, such as family, feminism and feeling (in the corporeal sense), to unite Varda’s bountiful output across myriad artforms.

Relic is an exercise in control and denial.

Some Kind of Heaven gently prods at the incompatibility of two cherished American narcotics: freedom and comfort. Though the latter can be purchased, it comes at the cost of one’s individuality.

It gets under your skin, with the audacious and cunning mystique of a magician who always has one more trick prepared. Bonello leaves us hypnotised and hungrily begging for more.

Every woman’s uphill battle will look different, and here is one fleshed out admirably.

While scant on plot and somewhat unfocused tonally, Zhao nevertheless manages to construct a vivid portrait of a community on the fringes without frills or fuss.

There’s some familiar moral teachings, but Vinterberg at his most meditative and earnest is a joy to watch. Man isn’t cured of all ills – but he is acutely aware of just how many more rounds are worth having.

A luxe, rather ridiculous look at the uber-rich.

An uplifting tale aided by an incredible soundtrack and captivating subject.

There is pain worth immortalising in the stories of the past, and endless sadness found in a lonely woman’s quiet existence. Yet Mothering Sunday fails to look beyond what the outside world can see, in order to really excavate a truth to be remembered once the holiday has passed.

It might sell tickets, but only because people recognise the name. Any interest in artistry is all but dead and gone in the age of the IP blockbuster.

Garbus never tries to conceal Cousteau’s flaws. For her, in order to understand where we are now, we first need to understand where we came from, and Cousteau represents that touchpoint.

At times it’s a little too ponderous, and sometimes struggles to bring variation and surprise to its runtime. Yet this laconic, meditative drama muses on the nature of time and the revelation that, even though Muzamil’s predicament seems highly unlikely to the rational onlooker, the knowledge he accrues is pertinent to all mortals.

It’s a throwback to the exhilarating, ferocious Hong Kong action filmmaking of yore, capping off a muscular actioner that marries old-school bravado with contemporary technique.

While this is ultimately a film about taking the time to appreciate what you have and enjoying every step of your way, the overall impression remains one of haste and only occasionally contagious overexcitement.

This low-on-dialogue, low-on-action, high-on-atmosphere feat is deeply cinematic, yet begs the questions: is there anything new to be said about World War Two, and is Nagy’s effort enough to stand out in this terribly overcrowded genre? The answer, alas, is no.

In this, her first film centring male psychology after a career of female character studies, she makes observations about masculinity and power that defy classification. She has blown these subjects wide open and we can but stand still and try to catch the fragments as they rain down.

Petite Maman becomes a profound meditation on inheritance.

Director Green may get the best out of Smith, and his directorial style is, in general, very robust, yet his hyper-competence occasionally works to the detriment of the film, feeling cautious and out of step with the bold ambition of hi subjects.

Here, faced with many barriers, a director is experimenting with the film form itself, taking apart all the tools at his disposal and smashing together their raw components to forge something new.

Drive My Car is endlessly fascinating and rich, the type of film which you could spend hours analysing and come no closer to feeling as if you’ve landed on its true intent.

Williams and Maskell have delivered an effective, savage revenge thriller – as long as one’s expectations are moderate.

Frost takes a fairly conventional documentary approach, but it serves as a comprehensive introduction to a master of her craft.

It’s perhaps one or two increments too obscure, too puzzling and too unwilling to give anything away that it seems to end mid-sentence, without any traditional closure. Yet it’s still a bold work that puts great faith in its cast to play along with this game of chilling insouciance.

The Nowhere Inn is fan service in the most St Vincent of ways: solidifying her mysterious image as a queer women’s deity, baring everything and revealing nothing at all.

Sometimes the filmmaking doesn’t quite do enough to elicit the requisite intensity from some key conversations, but it certainly lands its most important punch, which arrives at the devastating climax.

On paper Stewart seemed like an eccentric casting choice, yet she slinks into the material with grace and ease, and her trademark arsenal of half-met glares and anxiety-dashed grimaces perfectly express her desperate yearning to be free of prettified toff prison.

It’s a supremely compelling tale leavened by its wry humour and a subtle commentary on the essential emptiness of American life.

What’s interesting about Eternals is how genuinely down to earth most of it is, rejecting the time-honoured duality of the flashy superhero who also has to contend with the banality of domestic life. This is more like reality, in that it is about coming to terms with smallness and impotence in the face of so much cosmic sprawl.

The film is at its best when holding back details and sculpting fine character details, but the intensity is ramped up far too early and it becomes increasingly tough to take the plot seriously, or build an emotional connection with its climactic revelations.

The Harder They Fall is a thrilling feature debut from Jeymes Samuels, redefining the movie western for a modern age. These. People. Existed. And we want more.

Misguided, wandering, and searching for a purpose, Sophie spends the remainder of the film looking for answers. The dénouement, however, is not fulfilling for her or the audience, sacrificing a potential emotional breakthrough for the story’s weak undercurrent of a quest for love.

The depths of failure here are difficult to overstate, beginning with bringing Platt back to the role he originated on stage despite his age.

Antlers is a slippery, troubling film whose ambiguities, despite one heavy-handed piece of exposition, remain intact even as the film’s identity keeps metamorphosing and body-swapping. Here, the beast within has always been there, lurking and latent as part of America’s constitution, and just waiting to bite back.

It’s a film that simply enhances the feeling that America has been prematurely deprived of one of its finest musical ambassadors. Irrespective of location, however, we’re all poorer without him.

The important scenes are allowed to play out in a way that allows for a slower, more satisfying reveal of character motivation, as well as adding necessary ballast to the emotional foundations for later in the saga.

The French Dispatch is Anderson’s most impressionistic and unusual film, not to mention his most ambitious.

As with both Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There, Haynes finds an enthralling middle ground between hero worship and ambivalence. There’s no thrill, no intrigue in hagiography. It’s the music, and where it takes you, what it opens up for you, that’s the thing.

For all its reliance on gore and good old-fashioned jump scares, the film rarely raises the pulse.

The film feeds into the very power structure it sets out to debunk, a frustrating miss that threatens to cloud Comer’s poignant performance.

This wonderfully promising debut from Raiff transposes personal experience brilliantly and showcases the filmmaker’s talent both in front of and behind the camera.

Sweetheart doesn’t rely on traumatic storylines and narratives of victimhood to make its audience care about AJ. Her journey isn’t straightforward in any way, but it’s instead relevant and reflective of the queer Gen Z experience. Sometimes there is no resolution. Things stay messy, and that’s okay.

It’s the enigma of Marc-André that makes this such a compelling documentary.

With a forgettable, borderline generic, plot and direction lacking flair and artistry, it’s not a disaster, it’s just a disappointment.

Tseden directs with a low-slung commitment to a dramatically heightened form of social realism, and this deceptively simple story ends up speaking volumes about how love, sex, marriage and parenting sit at a paradoxical remove from the dictates of the state, and the parochial attitudes of the older generation.

One might question the need for yet another Oasis doc, but in this case the end the effort is justified, especially if you came of age to these very tunes.

Wild at heart, this quiet epic casts a lingering mystical spell, perfect to usher in the forthcoming autumn nights.

Campbell’s fearlessness, in both her abrasion and the fragile humanity behind her chaos, helps strike this delicate balance.

For all its technical prowess, this is a contemporary action-thriller with a distinctly old-fashioned flavour; one eye on the future and both feet planted in the past.

The boldness, nuance and humour with which Lighton navigates BDSM dynamics as well as Colin and Ray’s personal and joint complexities results in a film that’s frequently touching and surprising, less of an adaptation and more of a reimagining that compliments the source material rather than replicates it.

Violence breeds violence, and Oldman’s film shows us this horrific reproduction without compromise, hesitation or shame.

Farewell to the Flesh exhibits a savvy awareness of its own political limitations.

If we look past the obvious limitations of a shoestring budget, we find a gift: a lovely, tactile film with such a nuanced depiction of the ever-shifting tides of mother/daughter dynamics, overflowing with love and care as much as it is with a vibrant colour palette and gorgeous textures.

The film remains one of the most realistic depictions of nuclear war and the chaos that would ensue, wrapped up in a Los Angeles love story.

It’s astonishing how early on in her career Denis had a handle on her distinct brand of visual composition. Hers is a genius for showing not telling, for laying out surfaces that are rich with implication and for conducting details until there is a heady picture that is minutely observant with a sweep that reaches from heaven to hell.

Stalker is a movie to be watched as many times as physically possible, to be picked apart, discussed, argued over, written about, to inspire music, books, poetry, other movies, teachers, philosophers, historians, governments, even the way an individual might chose to live their life. It really is that astounding.

Hoskins performance shows a man who clearly believes that he’s on the right side of history, and once this big, good deal is done, he will have atoned for past sins. The film is brutal in the way it conclusively proves him wrong, right down to its iconic final shot in which Shand sits in the back of a car struggling to settle on the emotion that would amply capture his frazzled state.

Based on Stephen King’s first published novel, from 1974, and in fact the first cinematic adaptation of that well-read author, Carrie dramatises all manner of first times, as Carrie gets her period, falls in love, and is ultimately penetrated, killing – and maybe dy(e)ing – in deep, deep red.

Co-writers/co-directors Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz confound life and art, reality and dreams, sanity and madness in their surreal vision of conservative America succumbing to – or biting back against – the encroaching counterculture.

Notorious in its time for its copious profanity, Robert Towne’s screenplay now seems far less shocking. But its naturalism, embodied by a very fine cast, still rings true.

For my money it is the greatest film ever made.

What elevates Sisters above a standard Hitchcock rip-off, and makes it authentically De Palma, is its typically unsubtle and scathing social critique.

The particular brand of slapstick comedy and barbed romance in What’s Up, Doc? is an homage to a bygone era of Hollywood cinema that in 1972 was considered outdated. But Bogdanovich embraced it without irony.

This is a film stripped back to its bare essentials, and Spielberg thrives in having to get creative to make each moment feel as fresh and energised as the last.

Its emotional power and zany charm linger in the mind much longer than its obvious failings.

Modern viewers, raised on decades of gialli and slashers, will have little trouble identifying the shadowy figure whodunnit. But there is still real pleasure to be had in wandering these halls of repressed madness, where everyone seems affected in one way or another by the tragedy of Kathleen.

The film is not only an enjoyably unique exploration of coming to terms with illness and mortality but a snapshot of the French capital circa 1962, and even its cinematic culture.

Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece stands the test of time, still managing to feel incredibly fresh and exciting.

Rounded out by an incredible cast, Lumet’s realisation of Reginald Rose’s script didn’t require anything too bold or exaggerated. It simply took 12 men in a single room with something important to talk about.

From its guileless exposition and comically life-drawn Americana, to its Scripture quotations and sensitivity to a child’s perspective, the film proceeds with a simplicity of inexhaustible depth.

Tense, funny and genuinely chilling in places. A strong tonal balancing act.