It’s refreshing that Rivers and Williams have an understanding that, just because the camera is pointing at you, it doesn’t mean you need to narrate your actions and speak to the audience down the lens.

With its insistence on truth even as it strays from the historical accounts it hinges on, The Ritual fails to scare, entertain or convert. Even though the seasoned professionals attached manage to hold their own, Pacino and Stevens can’t save The Ritual from itself.

It may be a tad uneven and repetitive in places but it’s also enjoyably sweet and silly.

Along Came Love essays a type of bond where shared secrets eventually erupt, causing both tragedy and release.

Beyond the archness and cynicism, there are some profound, self-reflective insights about what it means to make moving images in the 21st century.

It goes without saying, but the film dazzles with its trompe-l’oeil-like worldbuilding, which inhabits the fairy tale reality of Anderson’s mind without ever giving over to the wayward indulgence of dream logic.

Magic Farm may not be a blanket crowd pleaser, but Ulman’s smart writing lands in a deeply optimistic place about the pure magic of human connection.

Playing out as part psychological chiller and part supernatural horror, it navigates parental fears and family secrets in a sinister liminal space.

There’s no hope of Final Destination: Bloodlines converting any franchise agnostics – this is a supersize portion of what fans have come to know and love. Yet somehow, where fan service is usually considered a negative, here it feels affectionate and satisfying.

There’s a sense that the makers of Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning are biting a thumb at the naysayers and playing the hits one more time, albeit with a little bit more focus on the previous feature installments.

The director is an expert in this precise kind of world-building, one intricately related to yearning – for another, for belonging, for redemption.

Where The Wedding Banquet really shines is in its characters, not only in its two romantic pairings that feel profoundly real, but also in subverting our expectations of its intergenerational relationships.

Seeking Mavis Beacon is the debut film of two young Black women, carving out their own place for themselves within the historical record. It’s not flawless, or free of blemishes and glitches, but neither should it be.

This is the best Marvel film in a while, but it doesn’t quite compete in the bigger leagues of the indie cinema it aspires to.

An insulting parade of tedium.

It’s not a film that does anything particularly new, in the dutifully linear way it tells the story to the ultra-functional shooting style. Yet its satisfaction comes from its careful release of information, it’s ambience of encroaching dread and the subtle psychological twists that push Julie ever closer to that euphoric breaking point.

Ultimately the mash-up of genres doesn’t quite come together in a satisfactory manner, clashing to the point of whiplash.

It is a disorienting, all-consuming sensorial experience and made all the much better to those willing to surrender to its mysteries.

The film’s creative gore alone cannot paper over the ultimate flimsiness of Blichfeldt’s concept, which amounts to an adolescent scrawl of fairytale satire, somehow less interesting and transgressive than Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ which predates it by 46 years.

The film is a triumph of special effects, certainly, but its narrative ambitions are more modest and predictable.

If you’ve ever wished ill towards a scalper, Kurosawa has the film for you. But this darkly comic thriller also skewers those who flirt with fantasies of vengeance from behind supposed anonymity.

While there’s certainly fun to be had watching a cute penguin (named Juan-Salvador) waddling around the school, chugging sprats and mimicking his master, the film never amounts to more than a piece of superficial fluff.

Last Swim is a compelling, textured and authentic London coming-of-age story anchored by an exciting new generation of acting talent.

While she shares title billing, Ono is still framed in relation to her husband. And yet, even in passing, she emerges as an engaged, inscrutable and passionate artist: creatively confident where John seems adrift.

This coming-of-age tale from debut writer/director Louise Courvoisier features its fair share of darkness, but it’s shot through with compassion and humour. The film is a testament to resilience in the face of hardship, and a hymn to the Jura region where Courvoisier herself grew up.

More than a retrospective of his own work, Caught by the Tides is a loving tribute by Jia to his most meaningful collaborator.

It’s a bittersweet story, foreshadowed by his descent into alcoholism, yet the film manages to retain a purity of heart that will likely move any Burton fan.

Death of a Unicorn relies heavily on a mythical gimmick and the comedic prowess of its cast, and yet gives neither actor or equine enough material to gallop with.

Sebastian gradually transforms into something more substantial when reaching towards a point about the cross-generational relaying of queer histories, but ultimately is too preoccupied with constructing a shallow character study to delve into more nuanced terrain.

Exaggerated misdirections do nothing to prevent Drop‘s eventual reveal from feeling obvious and contrived, to the extent that even a svelte 90 minute runtime starts to feel like a stretch.

Malek’s icy performance does little to endear the viewer to Charlie, while his ultra-tactile relationship with his wife – presented in gauzy flashbacks – never feels entirely authentic.

The filmmaking is raw and tense, with the young cast suitably disappearing into their roles as anonymous SEALs and the filmmakers seeking to get as close to reality as one can get without projecting literal bodycam footage of a war zone onto a cinema screen.

From its slow build-up comes a rousing finale, with Penelope setting an impossible feat of strength and agility as the benchmark for her new marriage material (as it should be!).

Sinners elegantly walks a line between enjoyable mayhem as well as a sense of tragedy around this safe haven being ripped apart – but also leverages the classical allure of the vampire for motivations inspired by its reflective first half.

When Autumn Falls strays into some interesting, ethically thorny terrain, but Ozon always opts for the easy, often crowd-pleasing solution rather than to have things become too dark or alienating.

Where the film really sings, however, is in its depiction of buried guilt and false hope. The beating heart of it develops through MacKay’s performance of pure naivety and his burgeoning relationship with Ingram’s Girl.

It’s not all choreographed chaos, either – La Cocina soars in its quiet moments.

It’s a truly forgettable slab of action filmmaking with little respect for its audience’s intelligence or even their time, and one has to hope Ayer and co don’t make good on their threat of producing more.

Beyond the creative stunt choreography, Novocaine doesn’t leave much of an impression full stop, and its saccharine ending relegates it to a category of films with intriguing premises that end up ultimately forgettable.

Guiraudie successfully fashions his own singular cinematic world.

There’s not enough here to sustain even a slim sub-90 minute runtime, and Collet-Serra seems lost when tasked with a project that provides little opportunity for dynamic action sequences or wild plot twists.

It’s not a bad movie, and it lives up to the standards that it sets itself, but it is as throwaway as a killer Tamagotchi.

This 20th anniversary refit/remaster of 2004’s cult rock- shock-doc Dig! proves that no amount of inadvisable retroactive tinkering can diminish the quality of a core product that’s this good.

It’s a slow, detailed procedural, one which carefully draws you into its dismal intrigue – and it’s engrossing for much of its runtime.

Once you get used to some of its perplexing choices, there’s fun to be had here. De Niro has delicious chemistry with himself, which becomes more amusing when imagining how he would have been performing these duologues to an empty void.

While a fair majority of the scenes and set-ups lack for deeper resonance, there’s a surface-level sheen that does deliver some superficial thrills.

The Rule of Jenny Pen offers a horrifying hypothetical: what if your final years were spent trapped with a racist bully?

The throbbing interpersonal strains intensify with a gentle logic, even if, tonally, the film does sometimes stray into a mid-tier streaming dramady serial at times.

Despite being an obvious meditation on the potential for impending climate catastrophe, the film is never cloying or condescending – instead Flow feels warm and delicate, like the fur of a cat who’s been lying in a sun spot all morning.

Playing like a Jarmusch – or Amirpour – joint, Sister Midnight is a droll, strange, cool freak of a film, never quite finishing its own sentences or following through on narrative expectation.

Marching Powder is neither interesting nor relevant enough to warrant being discussed within a wider cultural or socioeconomic context.

Ultimately, the lasting message of Lost and Found is discovered in the heart of its subject’s work, and the undeniable power of his uncompromising camera lens – frames transformed into cinema, an abrasive reckoning with the edifice of the past.

Like Imitation of Life, The Last Showgirl treats high-gloss femininity as a form of false consciousness, an ideal imposed upon women that ends up alienating them from each other, particularly mothers from their daughters.

Director Bong returns to familiar territory, but with no less ambition or heart than he has shown throughout his career.

I’m Still Here triumphs in pairing Salles’s intrinsic understanding of the emotional potential of realism with two brilliant performers in Mello and Torres.

Evoking the strange combination of brutal British realism and light fantasy of Jacqueline Wilson’s iconic young adult novels (particularly Double Act), it’s a promising debut for Labed, who moves between the uncanny and the tender with ease.

It’s a good time, but not a great time – though within the canon of Stephen King adaptations, it’s definitely among the more fruitful offerings to make it to screen.

The bite that made the first Bridget Jones’ Diary such a delight isn’t really here. Perhaps that’s a sign of the maturing protagonist, but it doesn’t leave much for us to get excited about.

Unfortunately Heart Eyes is so vacuous and confused that it can’t even decide if it’s cynical or sentimental about love itself.

Its recourse to human suffering as a way to jerk a viewer to react feels tiresome after a while, and it’s not helped by an ending which serves as a quick-fix band aid suggesting that sublime happiness is just an unlikely plot twist away.

Timely, anguished, and ultimately cathartic, the movie meets its moment.

At least there is dedication to the spectacle of practical stunt work, owed to director Jonathan Eusebio’s background as a seasoned stunt performer.

Shields is a worthwhile subject and her accomplishments are incredible, but this film is perhaps one for underdog sports enthusiasts only.

Dav Pilkey’s beloved children’s graphic novel series was adapted about as faithfully as possible, fully capturing the puerile (literal toilet humour) and subversive (critiques against the education system’s expressionless rigidity education system) spirit of Pilkey’s work in a consistently hysterical and dynamically-animated treat of a film.

The film is not without intrigue as the situation is so bizarre and terrifying that it often appears more like a work of fiction.

The most shocking element of Bring Them Down is the emotional truth at its core; Andrews’ observation of how difficult the cycles of abuse are to break is astute, and even the most sensational elements of the plot have a grim plausibility to them. But this is balanced by the empathy that Andrews and his cast show.

At a time when the tech industry is continually attempting to force AI down our throats, there’s something cloying about a film so nakedly insistent that a robot can replace a human being it portrays almost all the humans in the story as self-serving and villainous.

Soul-stirring. One of the most exceedingly lovely coming-of-age films in a long while.

It’s a film about making art that feels good in the moment, as the act itself can be as rewarding – and possibly even more so – than the delivery of that art to an audience.

The film is fan fiction about real-life celebrities.

The challenge, such as it is, of watching a Mike Leigh movie is simply the challenge of being a person in the world – the challenge of paying sustained attention to others – and Pansy is among his most demanding and rewarding tests.

Soderbergh’s enjoyably swift chiller demonstrates genuine curiosity towards its occupiers and the choices they make through difficult circumstances.

It is, like those beautiful concrete monstrosities which are revered and reviled in equal measure, a film that towers across the Venice line-up this year, tragic and wry and gorgeous and disturbing – any number of hyperbolic terms might apply to the beast that Corbet has created in The Brutalist.

The film’s thesis is often a little obvious, yearning for a return to a brand of architecture whose half-life isn’t so slim, but ignoring the arduous and exploitative construction methods that were used to produce those grandiose structures of yore.

Where Gump managed to steal a nation’s heart with its hokey aphorisms and up with people outlook, Here actively repels with its generic insights into the evolution of family, society, civilisation, the whole bit.

It’s a hushed yet effectively emotive drama that’s bolstered with the addition of Mikhail Krichman’s stunning cinematography. Yet sadly, it’s hard to overcome the film’s biggest weakness – the ripple effect that comes from its overcomplicated characterisations.

The film is not wanting for alluring, dramatic situations, but the filmmakers seem at best haplessly blind and at worst blithely dismissive of their potential.

With the emotional stakes having been spelled out in giant, razor-sharp claw marks, all that’s left to do is squirm at Blake’s slow, agonising change and wait for the inevitable to happen.

It’s Sonne’s remarkable, multifarious performance that really lifts this one above the pack. She uses her face with the expressiveness of a silent film actress, so when the big emotions eventually come they hit especially hard.

There’s an ethereal quality to Jolie’s performance that matches Callas’ legendary persona, and despite the deep sense of melancholy that pervades the film like a ghostly veil, this is still a love story – and one where the heroine lives forever.

Babygirl joins a limited canon of films that takes the much-maligned subsect of female sexual desire seriously, while also serving as a compelling psychodrama about the intricacies of trust and understanding, even in a long-standing relationship.

Despite its refusal to lean into the visceral imagery it sets out with, The Damned still succeeds in creating a haunting atmosphere, which is aided by the deserted Icelandic landscape that seems to stretch on forever.

This is simply a generic and brutally efficient tearjerker – like its title, it aspires to archetypal grandeur and lands somewhere blander.

A Real Pain may set out its stall as an empathetic tour of pain, effortlessly exposing the quiet and chaos of the human condition through its multiple characters and the places they visit, but it is also distinctly a film about the boundaries and limits of love.

It’s a cosy, classic Aardman treat, perfect for Wallace and Gromit fans of any age – and Feathers McGraw remains as menacing as ever.

Alongside beautifully-judged performances and management of a tricky tone, Boonnitipat and Thodsapon Thiptinnakorn’s sentimental but never saccharine screenplay nails something true and relatable about all the complicated responses we can have to the likely death of family.

The horror comes from seeing seismic consequences closer to newspaper headlines than history books. Figureheads die, but words live on, with grifters always waiting in the wings, spouting the same hate.

Its entwined torrents of pain and pleasure chart the boundaries of sensation in a buttoned-up age, and allow us back in the present to be scandalized by its raw, visceral (in the definitional, from-the-guts sense) hungers as if for the very first time.

Better Man works because it is that rare biopic which acknowledges its inherent ridiculousness, poking fun not only at the star machine but Williams himself (who, regardless of your opinion of his music, has always been quite open about his shortcomings).

Nickel Boys is a masterpiece – moreover, it is a miracle.

It was an exciting prospect to see what someone like Jenkins would do while up against the Hollywood machine, but it unfortunately feels like the machine won this bout, if not by knockout, then definitely on points.

It’s as minimal as a drama can get, softening the highs and lows of narrative into a meditation on memory, purpose and recreation. Don’t be put off by its ambling form, for its function effectively probes political topics behind a gauze of cinematic serenity.

Where Favoriten differentiates itself from the aforementioned films is in its combination of formal and emotional complexity.

Burroughs believed in magic, and watching Queer, one has an inkling that Guadagnino does too.

Gilford’s tale of chosen family awash with bright blues and reds maintains a bold sense of hopefulness at a time when America’s LGBTQ+ population is bracing for the worst.

It’s all desperately silly.

The duo’s Indian collaborators are largely absent though, and it all comes together in a rather shallow, often frustrating attempt to bottle up a significant piece of late 20th century film history, devoid of that touch of Merchant Ivory movie magic.

It’s predictably rousing, and Tolkien heads will probably enjoy many of the callbacks to the original trilogy, but as a film in its own right, it’s all a little overblown and unnecessary.