Essential, infuriating viewing.

The result is a gorgeous, layered portrait of a woman determined to put public image ahead of private feelings.

It’s another very special film from this exceptionally gifted and thoughtful (and extremely angry) director.

There are some great things in this film, yet its intentions are swept up in a mire of tonal indecision and cynicism masquerading as irony.

The mixed media technique cuts through the film’s naturalism to bring forth something felt and ineffable, akin to the rich, vivid worlds within children’s imaginations, as well as the haziness with which we recall childhood memories.

In this oneiric oddity, consumerism is everything, ultimately devouring even the consumer – while the real horror is the exploitative means of production, carefully kept underground beyond the sight of bourgeois shoppers above.

Too real for its whimsy and too whimsical to be realistic, Amanda will likely linger on those people who don’t leave their bedrooms much, more than on the reasons why they should – and that stunts its charm.

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.

There is an entirely straightforward way of making a docudrama about this subject, yet Beshir’s bold approach leaves much more of a lasting memory.

Glass Onion adopts the sturdy structural underpinnings of the Agatha Christie-like whodunit, and presents them with an ingenious mix of postmodern irony and bona fide awe.

What’s remarkable about Hlynur Pálmason’s drama is the way its elemental settings lend everything an oneiric quality. Yet the scenes play out with a very real, visceral intensity, especially once Ingimundur uncovers an uncomfortable secret about his marriage and seeks an outlet for his anger.

Nothing much happens in Summer 1993, and yet everything changes.

If it’s pure action you’re after, there’s plenty to set your heart racing here. Cruise and his long-time directing partner Christopher McQuarrie have once again engineered some truly staggering set-pieces

Owen wrote several other poems about the horrors of war before his untimely death in 1920, and there is one which Davies does not feature here whose title nonetheless captures the mournful spirit of his film. It’s called ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’.

It’s not a journey for the faint of heart.

This is Nighy’s film and his impact is felt even when he’s nowhere to be seen. But when he is, it’s all the more stunning, not least down to cinematographer Jamie D Ramsay’s striking visuals which pay homage to ’50s melodramas, with colours so vivid it feels like it’s too good to be true and will snap back to reality at any moment.

Although the film avoids depicting any act of violence (aside from that which Nitram inflicts on his father and a shooting we hear but don’t see) its sympathies seem strangely weighted in favour of a man who showed none to the people he murdered.

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.

It’s a satisfying film, even though it lacks closure. Nothing is unnecessary or over the top – so Moll doesn’t push the boat out.

Even setting aside its subject matter, it is an astounding feat of dramatising real events with an eye on the cinematic, yet it delivers such a punch to the heart that one hesitates to recommend it without qualification.

A Thousand And One is a powerful ode to resilience and community, as well as a passionate rebuke against the forces that produce devastating consequences for those they sweep aside.

The Bone Temple offers a heady mix of stomach-churning violence, absurdist humour and surprising glimmers of tenderness.

It’s a competently made and compellingly acted film which will hopefully lead to us seeing a lot more of both filmmaker and lead actor.

In an entertainment landscape saturated with whodunnits, it’s impressive to see Johnson maintain his topical observations and satirical jabs while confidently recalibrating to provide a mystery that shows the genre still has something meaningful to say.

After so many punishing stories, most recently 2022​’s Tori and Lokita, it’s hard to begrudge them the raw sentiment and mostly happy, hopeful endings of their newest one. But it comes too easy, in a film so artfully and opportunistically structured, which jumps from dramatic peak to dramatic peak as if skipping tracks on an album.

It’s Fastvold who somehow makes all these elements coalesce with such brio and eccentricity, expanding the possibilities of filmed biography while also making a film that manages to land direct hits to the head, the heart and the gut.

X has no interest in making sweeping statements about sexual liberation, about pornography or ageing. It brings the slasher back to its fleshy basics, leaning into what made the granddaddies of slasher films so memorable.

Sasha’s parents are inspiring in their determination to give their daughter the childhood every girl her age deserves.

Delicate, yet resonant.

It’s a film that understands there’s nothing to be gained from making oneself an island, but remains stoic and unsentimental in its vision of the past.

Perfect Days encourages a sort of radical presentness in our own lives – learning how to truly connect with our existence, even when it’s difficult or causes us to confront unpleasant truths.

By gambling with the flimsy dice of morality, the director crafts a film that successfully bypasses the traps of the gratuitous to find its way towards an uncomfortable but ultimately rewarding catharsis.

The film makes for a involving and often mordantly funny three-hander, and Exarchopoulos and Whishaw are both superb despite being given the slightly thankless task of clearing things up in Tomas’s wake.

While all the variations on A Star​’s formula are tailored to a specific moment in time, what’s most interesting about Kokuho is the way it trails through an extended period of Japanese history, embedding one in the culture without feeling the need to explain its appeal.

Andrea Arnold is an exciting director who knows how to create a thick patina of realism within which female protagonists stoically pursue improvement. It’s a little crushing, therefore, that American Honey feels unmoored from anything approaching real life.

It’s a small but perfectly formed comedy of manners, with Menzies particularly great as a therapist who finds himself unable to care about the lives of his patients.

A Hidden Life is, underneath it all, a love story. The Jägerstätters are a private microcosm imprinted by history. The Nazi regime is almost incidental, as these people could be anywhere opposing any evil regime. The substance of the film is buoyed by unselfish, enlightened love, shaped by a couple’s faith in each other’s morality.

The relentless pace of the dialogue is at times exhausting, and the tone never really varies, yet this is forgiven when, hours after viewing, you find yourself grinning into the ether, remembering standout hoots from the cornucopia of Meyerowitz tales.

My Favourite Cake is a slice-of-life film with considered dialogue and heartfelt performances that unravels a culturally specific repression, one that got the Iranian filmmakers banned from France and Germany to edit and promote this film, but also the more universal loneliness of the elderly who still have more life to live.

Rather than an attempt at directorial mimicry, Bergman Island is a unique vision from one of the greatest directors working today.

Gerwig’s filmmaking enriches our world, earnest and joyous and thoughtful. Even under the guise of a piece of massive IP, she maintains that spirit where others have failed.

There are as many potential ways to approach a parent-child relationship onscreen as there are parent-child relationships on the planet, but Hogg may have just discovered a new one.

This is the western as a dried, coruscating corpse, left out for the buzzards to feed on.

Although the first 40 minutes in the buttoned-up period setting do drag a little, once The Beast finds its groove, its imaginative and melodramatic spirit are hard to resist. It’s a big swing for the fences from a singular French filmmaker, and one that absolutely pays off.

Seidi Haarla gives a winning, intelligent performance as a naturally very clever person made to feel small and helpless in a strange land. But Yuriy Borisov pops from the first moments you see him: his hunched-shoulders posture; his abrupt, agitated movements and boxer’s duck-and-weave walk; the animalistic way he tears into food, impatiently and avidly.

Despite sleepiness being part of its premise, the pacing of Yu’s film is propulsive, and the deft detours into dark comedy – especially a reveal involving PowerPoint slides – are a highlight. But it’s Jung and Lee’s work that lingers the most, their thoroughly charming, lively performances enhancing the tragedy and dread of something awful happening to them.

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

As a follow-up to her exceptional – and sadly underseen – An Easy Girl from 2019, Other People’s Children could and should finally cement Zlotowski’s place in the top class of European auteurs.

It amounts to more than just ‘a heap of broken images’ – it’s a warming depiction of friendship as family.

The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as dark as a winter’s night. For it is a shadowy frío-noir, complete with femme fatale, even as its elusive, edgy narrative is passed down, like keepsake beads or diffracting crystals, from generation to generation.

Playful in its blocking and heavy on Altmanesque zooms, the movie’s textured visual language complements the script’s comedic and dramatic concerns, enhancing their impact rather than being an excessive distraction.

Its observational mode keeps it from being didactic or manipulative in any way, and it adopts an intimacy that evokes the deepest empathy. Luma’s pain is never spectacle.

By capturing the culture of fetish, party and riot, feminism, sex and politics, this unique blend of styles offers a fitting representation of a punk subculture that gave ’80s queer and feminist activism its vibrancy.

The rightful rage of its commentary is articulated with such clarity and specificity that it circumvents any accusations of ‘misery porn’.

Blending courtroom drama and claustrophobic tech-tinged nightmare, Red Rooms is a striking and austere examination of the true-crime industrial complex that benefits from its formality and disturbingly removed protagonist.

Orlando: My Political Biography is a dive into the collective trans consciousness, a discussion between Orlandos across time and place, an attempt to discover new ways to understand and express ourselves.

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.

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.

Hassan doesn’t need to provide a grand framing device. You sense their powerlessness, you are embedded within it. There is no omniscient camera to take the audience away because there is no freedom of movement for the Fazilis.

Guzmán wistfully laments his long absence from his homeland and the circumstances that led him to flee, imbuing his reflections with a tangible sense of mourning.

An Easy Girl reads not as the male sexual frustration of the Nouvelle Vague, but as a celebration of women’s sexual agency.

The superb casting of the two lead co-stars, who were only told the outcome of their characters storylines on the day of shooting, really buoys the film.

It’s a compelling and immersive drama which attains a contemporary relevance without ever really trying too hard.

A touching sports drama about the here-and-now, rather than victories or defeats.

There’s quite a lot to digest, and not all of it goes down easy, but it’s hard to fault Strickland’s ambition and imagination.

It’s a brilliant showcase of both McKellen and Coel’s talents. The contrast between them is rich and layered, down to the detail of costume designer Eleanor Baker’s choice of knitwear and corduroys in warm and cool tones.

By changing the cautionary tale to be against assimilation and categorisation, plus its invigorating update of traditional technique, the film carves out a space not just as the best Pinocchio film of this year, but among the finest films the director has made.

The first half of Dune: Part Two is among the best things that Villeneuve has ever done, though the sheer eventfulness of the plot and a bustling retinue of side-players (Austin Butler upgrading Sting’s cod-pieced ninny from the 1984 film into a hairless psychopath is worthy of mention) means that the final act does feel rushed.

Apollo 10 ½ is about the subjective intimacy of history, and how all events are just an equally-sized, vibrantly-coloured fragment in the kaleidoscope of our mind.

This is breathtaking filmmaking, but would be a little hard to take for two-and-a-half hours. Thankfully, Serebrennikov has more tricks up his sleeve.

Girls Will Be Girls is a sensitive and quiet addition to the coming-of-age genre that is relatable whether you’re a young teen going through love for the first time, or looking back on those exciting yet heartbreaking years of so many firsts.

The eventual reveal of the who and the why provides satisfying resolution, though the reward feels petty in comparison to the film’s freestanding pleasures: the tremulous discovery of love, the crystalline peace of unsupervised play, and above all else, the transportive score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, a masterwork within a minor work.

I found myself wishing I could watch a real game directed by Inoue, with such careful attention to detail and an acute sense of drama.

This is an assured leap to feature filmmaking for Manning Walker with a strong visual identity and sense of place – yet also one that sharply depicts the grey areas in gender and sexual politics that one is forced to confront as a teenager, particularly as a teenage girl.

While it’s absolutely a blast at the cinema, the dizzying heights that Miller drove us back in 2015 aren’t quite matched a second time around. But all is not lost: Furiosa is still miles better than the dreck Hollywood usually treats us to over the summer, and provided it doesn’t take another decade to get the Fury Road sequel that Miller has been promising, perhaps we’ll reach Valhalla yet.

There are a few moments of strain and not every gag is comedy gold, yet overall it certainly tickles the cross-generational funny bone and Shaun himself, irrepressibly naughty yet affectingly open-hearted, remains a fluffy icon for young and old alike.

It culminates in a bold exploration of transness, womanhood, Blackness and the sex industry, providing thoughtful and intimate insight into these material conditions and the breadth of experience that lies behind them.

Despite these subtle barbs, Return to Dust ends up as an elegiac love story as the unlikely couple form a bond built on a foundation of total understanding and empathy.

As a writer and director, Sweeney shows much promise, at times demonstrating the swaggering confidence of the Canadian upstart, Xavier Dolan – the pair even look quite similar. Yet the film works best as a showcase for exemplary range of O’Brien.

It’s all competently performed and executed, with loud booms of sound cued to each scene change as an attempt to ramp up the tension, and lots of behind-the-head tracking shots of cardinals anxiously pacing through corridors and stairways.

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.

Even though the film is packed with belly laughs, it is never spiteful or denigratory, and always appears thankful for the fact that pampered artists can produce miracles if they’re given the time and resources to do so.

The real beauty of Priscilla is its delicate portrayal of the all-consuming fire and flood of first love, and what happens when you grow up, and begin to realise the fairytale doesn’t always have a happy ending.

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.

Lurker is an excellent showcase for the talents of Théodore Pellerin (quietly marvellous in every role he takes) and an intriguing first step as a feature filmmaker for Alex Russell.

It’s a film that is firmly grounded in the geopolitical specificity of Cluj, exploring ethnic tensions, economic inequalities, legacies of totalitarianism, the brutality of capitalism and the destructiveness of real estate – yet it’s through this local context that Jude gets to dig deep into the contradictions of our globalised, neoliberal world as the all-pervasive cultural and moral rot continues to spread.

Although A Different Man slightly runs out of steam in its second half, it’s an effectively atmospheric and idiosyncratic thriller, deftly examining the patronising attitudes that prevail regarding difference and disability, and the knotty topics of authorship and entitlement to other peoples’ stories.

As well as boasting an all-female crew, Martelli’s film exquisitely evokes Carmen’s muted revolutionary spirit, making for an invaluable demonstration of feminine revolutionary cinema.

Top Gun: Maverick is an extremely enjoyable thrill ride, yet its focus on intense, immersive action doesn’t allow much room for lighter, steamier fun like its predecessor.

The contrast between Balsillie’s ruthless business mind and the awkward Lazaridis and Fregin is entertaining, and avoids the ‘difficult genius’ trope which haunts the subgenre by emphasising that BlackBerry was very much a team effort, and the individualism that followed later is part of the reason it failed.

Nobody does tension quite like the Dardenne brothers. As in so many of their films, there’s a moment in Tori and Lokita when a character makes a fateful decision and the narrative suddenly snaps into focus, creating stretches of the drama when you’re holding your breath and feeling a roiling sense of anxiety in the pit of your stomach.

Perhaps a little slacker than some of his previous outings, but Panahi’s commitment and courage shine through.

Clearly taking inspiration from Italian neorealism, Camilleri never embellishes or trivialises the landscape of fishing in Malta but rather presents it as it really is. Luzzu is a foreboding warning with no climax. A quiet call to action in the vein of Andrea Arnold’s Cow.

Despite a two and a half hour runtime, All That’s Left Of You feels incredibly compact. There is much owed to Amine Bouhafa (who also scored The Voice of Hind Rajab) and his kaleidoscopic score that prevents us from losing ourselves to a simple sadness.

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.

There’s a breezy panache to Wang’s direction, and he’s very good at capturing the comic skulduggery of, say, early instant messaging apps. It’s a shame, then, that it doesn’t have an original bone in its gangly, hunched frame.

It’s a magnificent piece of work, completely beguiling from end to end and one which wears its immense philosophical profundity with admirable lightness.

The story focuses on the mutual gratification the protagonists provide each other, and how two imperfect humans meeting can prove a shared antidote for worldly ills.