It’s a beguiling work from a master of her craft that holds the art of filmmaking in its piercing gaze, and speaks to an uncompromising vision of what cinema can be with a little faith and imagination.

The Secret Agent is, of course, a film of its own, and feasibly Mendonça Filho’s most refined, outright-auteurist work yet. Moura anchors this tale of history as an afterlife with a terrific encapsulation of the kind of hopelessness that masks itself as resilience, his gaze infused with the aching longing of a future condemned to remain possibility.

It is an experience as moving as it is unnerving, and as the piercing screeching of iron rods announces the Rose of Nevada is to leave port once more, it is we the audience there to wave a pained goodbye, quietly stunned by the ethereal aura of Jenkin’s striking creation.

The by-any-means-necessary bit barrage crams sight gags into the corners of frames, the credits, the infinitesimal space within edits. In a film that nobly aspires to everything being funny at all times, anything can be, the chief benefit of director Akiva Schaffer’s attention to and appreciation for the elements of cinematic form. You’ve got to be smart to be this stupid.

As with the titular Ravel piece, this is a work that is mellifluous, melodious and mysterious in equal measure. A Sphinx-like Beer, once again, seems to connect with her director on a level which transcends the purely professional, and through her economic yet forceful use of body language and expression, she makes certain that the film adheres perfectly to Petzold’s immaculate calculations.

Even as the death roll of capitalism continues to clutch Hollywood in its jaws, No Other Choice proves that, in the hands of a master, there’s still fertile ground to be found. His biting, incendiary dramedy calls into question how much we’re willing to accept – and how far we’re willing to go – in the name of preserving our own comfort.

The lure of intense mystery that beguiles you into trying to solve it again and again; the transference of an intoxication that makes you feel physically different afterwards. It sounds hyperbolic to describe art as having such power, but surely the reason we care about art is a belief that such power exists. High Life is too layered, too ambiguous, too potent to be about any one thing.

Faces Places is a subtly self-reflexive documentary that swims against this tide, inviting audiences to see that filmmaking is a process of having conversations with people, and enveloping each individual and their private creativity within the wider collaborative process. Art is a form of social work or, rather, it can be with the right people at the helm.

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

It is undeniably a magnum opus, but one that has been refined to the briskness of a novella.

As an artefact of the invaluable intersection between artistic effort and pragmatic resistance, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a testament to the dialectic of form and content, of artwork and social reality as a crucial, actively-engaged site of political struggle, an apt battleground in the fight against all-pervasive capitalist monoliths.

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 Woman King is unafraid to sprawl out and dig in as it explore histories untold, while delicious action sequences of near-exclusively hand-to-hand combat unfurl in front of us. It is a celebration of a filmmaker and a cast at the peak of their powers.

Eggers understands that fairy tales and superstitions don’t persist because they are true or because they are absolute fantasies, but because they are both at the same time.

In Kent’s beautifully balanced and exquisitely shot film, this is the best you can do for someone without negating their experience or agency. The Nightingale similarly does not ask its audience to identify with, root for, or relate to any of its characters. It only tells us to watch and to listen.

It’s stylish and sad and funny and bleak and a thousand other things. But most of all, it’s a pure hit of Sandler and Safdie.

The film’s advocate for kindness amidst the zeitgeist generations’ omnipresent nihilism is heartfelt and hard-earned – and not without diving deep first into the dark, sticky terrains of our morals and minds.

For my money it is the greatest film ever made.

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

The film is fun. It’s smart and sexy and engaging.

A painfully real portrait of racism in Australia.

Asteroid City is Anderson’s most complete, rich and surprising film to date, and perhaps his most autobiographical in some obscure, allegorical way, in that it stands as testament to how filmmaking is about bringing artists together and attuning them to a specific wavelength. On a more superficial level, it’s a film which pushes his patented funny/sad dichotomy to its wildest and most enjoyable extremes.

With Lingui, Haroun has created a quiet ode to the women who honour their sacred bonds to one another. By centering a mother and daughter united, instead of characters in opposition, he is able to underline the ways we can support each other in the face of patriarchal tyranny.

Sirât is a truly staggering and major film, one that has to be seen to be believed – a masterful gambit of affectionate character and community building that mutates into a work that deals with the primal instincts of human survival and the idea that we create our own gods through the things that we chose to worship.

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

I Saw The TV Glow creeps up on you, holding your focus so intently you hardly notice when it begins to fray at the margins.

Every shot, every narrative beat, every decision exudes not merely confidence, but the touch of a master.

Celiloglu’s carefully calibrated performance, combined with a screenplay which never descents to scurrilous signposting, makes Samet a person of endless literary intrigue – a monster and a martyr trapped inside the same body.

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

Poor Things showcases the director at his most playful and comedic, weaving his otherwise evident political critique into the complex character of Bella: a new kind of woman, a tabula rasa. How pleasurable it is to witness an evolution like Bella’s, with wonder and admiration.

Reeves and Moss are magnificent at resurrecting Neo and Trinity, and they blend exquisitely into Lana Wachowski’s matured style of filmmaking.

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

It’s a love story for our time and for all time.

This is another slam-dunk for Anderson, who has made a film that is a very rare beast indeed: one that is incredibly fun without ever once straining to be. And if you’re reading these words, it’s your god-given duty to go see this in a cinema on the biggest, loudest screen you’re able to access.

As a writer, Lowe is someone who can elicit a laugh from the deadpan line reading of a single word, yet the impression that the film leaves is quite different: a confessional, self-lacerating howl into the void; an expression of confusion and disappointment; a film which refuses to explain its heroine’s literal generational trauma with self-help platitudes.

Driver embodies calmness and stillness. This performance cements his status as an actor whose physical command matches his ability to telegraph inner life. It’s a cliché to say that the greatest actors make the smallest actions magnetic, but it’s true of Driver who makes the non-demonstrative act of listening feel like it means the world.

Petite Maman becomes a profound meditation on inheritance.

Wiseman shows us the “how” of art appreciation, from politics to philosophy, in a film vast in scope, and richly suggestive in insight.

The film offers no explicit commentary or context, but instead allows the images to speak for themselves.

It’s a film that heads to the shadowy spots that most filmmakers on this sceptred isle don’t even know exist; every frame exuding both a breathless confidence and a warped visual literacy which suggests a director on a mission to do anything to make an audience feel something – which is completely refreshing to behold.

In Hamnet, art is presented as a two-way whisper, as a codeword for connectivity and as a way to unlock doors to the future, and living.

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.

It’s a beautifully written and executed work, one of Panahi’s most formally straightforward yet powerful, gripping and generous.

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.

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.

It’s gripping in the moment, but with plenty to take away for afterwards. Genius really isn’t too strong a word.

What begins as an apparently modest, small-scale drama, ends in a moment of ethereal beauty, for both characters and viewers.

Licorice Pizza is a slow-release product, something that creeps up on you, inveigles its way into your conscience. It’s silky-smooth filmmaking perfection, bolstered by a full hand of remarkably charismatic star supporting turns.

Poitras questions him on the less glorious moments of his career, too, so that he emerges as a flawed human rather than a bastion of perfect judgement. This is not a perfect documentary either, with the breathless dash through his post My Lai journalism sometimes feeling overwhelming. Yet perfection is not the point when something impossible has been bottled: it’s something called the truth.

It’s compulsive and completely absorbing, and Laura’s dedication to this ad hoc investigation which may have no conclusion is echoed in a performance that empathetically redefines tired cinematic notions of obsessive behaviour.

With the verve of a master classical storyteller, Citarella stages the unfolding of this eccentric mystery while processing the dizzying flow of information with a grace and precision that will have you hanging on every frame.

The film doesn’t strain for meaning or metaphor, instead just showing us the events over a certain period and allowing us to sample and chew over them as we would heaving plate of delicious food. Just a wonderful film.

With such a moving ode to the symbiotic relationship between dreams and film, a nightmare would be if this is his final word on the matter.

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.

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.

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 is profoundly moving to see someone be so open with her audience, the meaning of her lyrics taking on new resonance since first writing them. And we were there, we remember it all.

The sequel has everything that made the first film so special, but most thrillingly, it puts away childish things. There’s moral ambiguity, meaningful stakes and commentary on race, capitalism and the state of cinema that have matured alongside its protagonist.

It’s a ghost story, but it’s a love story too. One that will break your heart.

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.

Anchored by two superb lead performances from a strong and silent Kaluuya and vivaciously hilarious Palmer, Peele flexes his aptitude for creating tension to both horrific and comedic effect.

The Zone of Interest seems to welcome division in its responses – such a bold, horrifyingly eerie work serves as a catalyst as much as an artistic statement.

The filmmaker’s renderings of desi girlhood are subtle but powerful, coming through in small details: the claw clips and medicine strips strewn about the apartment, tiny tattoos and even tinier, heart-shaped lingerie hardware, stolen moments under cover of darkness.

The constant blurring of the lines makes for a fascinating, often hilarious, watch.

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.

Like the best of the director’s work, Memoria lulls you into its rhythms, gives you the sparse outlines of an intellectual framework, then hits you with the full weight of accumulated lyricism that must be pure cinema.

It’s a film with fingerprints all over it; one that has been crafted rather than manufactured, and rewatches reveal a chance to revel in its sharpness; a scene in which Amleth seeks the counsel of a blind Seeress (the incomparable Björk) teems with intricate set and costume details, while a violent game of Knattleikr – a Viking cross between lacrosse and rugby – proves more adrenaline-inducing than any CGI special of recent years.

This is not a politically didactic film, nor a lapel-shaking polemic, but a film whose obligation towards fine dramatic authenticity succeeds in convincing that this is the correct way of thinking, and any alternatives are incorrect.

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.

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.

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.

Mangrove is a necessary and exhilarating illustration of the staying power of Black Britons.

Jarmusch’s film thrives in acknowledging the ultimate unknowability of our parents.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a character study for the ages, with Reinsve, Danielsen Lie and Nordrum delivering three magnetic turns.

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.

One thing that lifts this above the type of hospital-based docu-drama that are ten-a-penny on the small screen is that Paravel and Castaing-Taylor locate a uniquely cinematic quality to the footage.

Aftersun gives all its love to a past reimagined, as it punctures the present.

The Boy and the Heron is richly self-synthesising and achingly sentimental, collating artistic motifs from across the Miyazaki filmography and nakedly articulating the hopes it places in the next generation.

Its delicate blend of wryly observed humanity and thoughtful, understated visuals mean that the more dramatic beats hit harder. Even the occasional moments of gore feel shocking for the sparsity with which McDonagh chooses to deploy them.

With his rumi­na­tive lat­est, The Shrouds, Cro­nen­berg once more makes a play for the heart­strings in what must be one of the most naked­ly mov­ing and rev­e­la­to­ry films with­in his canon.

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.

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.

Ramsay articulates the inarticulate, here through her saturated blues, yellows, browns and greens, the colours of grief and sickness and rot…but also new life, summer skies, and hope.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

All the mad metaphysics come rooted in character.

The humour is merciless.

While Decision to Leave might lack the grandiose scale of Park’s most-lauded work, its intimacy is no less apparent.

Designed to replace the controversial final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, The End of Evangelion expands the series finale’s contemplation of emotional crutches and human connection to an apocalyptic scale.

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.

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.

Relic is an exercise in control and denial.