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.

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.

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

There is too much going on in Manchester by the Sea and still it is among the best films of this or any year. It is too funny, too tragic, and too full of nods to all manner of movie genres.

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.

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

Gavron has used her clout to pull together an inclusive team that goes beyond representational box ticking. She has made a film powered by real empathy and joy. Bakray isn’t a black face in a white story – there is space for cultural nuance.

What’s surprising about the film is how hopeful it is, zeroing in on human creativity and resilience during the worst of times rather than wallowing in abject misery.

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.

The thorny nuances of multiethnic relationships are deeply understood by Celine Song’s directorial debut, Past Lives.

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.

Petite Maman becomes a profound meditation on inheritance.

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.

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.

No Other Land exemplifies the bravery and patience of activists and journalists. The occupation started over 70 years ago, and together, this unlikely pair capture its inhumanity with humanity.

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.

Tár, Todd Field’s portrait of the artist as an abuser, is the funniest horror film of 2022.

The same ground that once bore the sturdy foundation of a loving home now stands eternally scarred by the searing cuts of imaginary lines, an irreparable fissure that – in Panahi’s heartfelt visual diary – cruelly severs the frail umbilical cord to the motherland.

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.

At only 84 minutes and light on plot, at times this film feels so slight that it might just slip through your fingers. And yet its ethereality is what makes it enchanting.

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.

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

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.

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

With Saint Omer, Diop not only refreshes and expands upon the tired conventions of the courtroom drama, but she really drills down into the fundamental gaps in our understanding of human nature and the tantalising but illusive ‘why?’ of it all.

It’s hard not to feel like Sakamoto is in the room with you.

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

On a moment-by-moment basis, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is as exhilarating and illuminating a history lesson as you’ll ever have.

Balance is everything, though – this isn’t a saccharine rewriting of history, nor a fully-fledged “fuck you” to those who deserve it. Both Rasmussen and Amin remain aware of tone, opening up about how hard it can be to trust people when your life is spent being “adjusted, retained and suppressed” to fit an image others have created for you.

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

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

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.

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.

The film’s tender emotional core is its greatest asset, which is enhanced by inventive tonal shifts and complemented by incredibly fleshed-out characters, a uniformly brilliant cast and naturalistic dialogue that keeps it from lurching into the terrain of sterile realism.

It’s an amazing, hypermodern concept for a film, one which operates as a brutal critique of the class system, while also acting as a metaphor for geopolitical relationships and the moral and ethical lapses we sometimes overlook in the name of making rent.

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.

Rohrwacher instead makes connections through something more primal than logic, a flow of images that feels surprising but always intuitive, in the way a dream does.

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

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.

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

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.

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

A brilliant and tense allegory on the human paradoxes of violent conflict.

It’s not a faultless film, but it’s one that sits within the higher echelons of the oft-tawdry biopic form, and also reveals hidden depths to the Nolan project and, excitingly, suggests that we should brace ourselves for anything the next time around.

It’s the banality of enduring a sexual assault that Victor captures so well in her film; how the trauma lingers long in the body, even when you keep insisting to everyone (including yourself) that you’re fine.

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.

This is on first impression perhaps a very good, uneven film rather than an unequivocally great one.

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

Although the third act sags a little under the weight of Marty’s hubris, it’s impossible to deny Safdie is working at a remarkable technical level. Just as Good Time and Uncut Gems played to the strengths of their stars while also transforming them, Marty Supreme challenges Chalamet and he meets the play with fleet footwork.

While other men move through then out of the picture, Rogowski holds everything together with an exquisite deftness that is often emotionally overwhelming.

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.

A few behind-the-scenes moments during weekends and holidays depict a more personal side to the otherwise-enigmatic Bachmann, but the picture that Speth paints of him is as someone who is casually fixated with this occupation – that the process of teaching is seeped into his very being and consumes his thoughts.

It’s by addressing grief in its purest form that we empathise with the pain that can make us willing to open up again, pave over the cracks, and wound a broken heart.

Three Minutes culminates in a contemplation of its central paradox: “The absence in the presence”. It provides a vital memorial to the people whose lives have been lost to time, revealing the significance of preserving film as much as preserving history.

A fiery, confrontational missive from one of the finest dramatic writers in the business.

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.

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.

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.

The result is a melancholic, Terrence Malick-ian vision of a place that is brutal, beautiful and forever lost to time.

A painfully real portrait of racism in Australia.

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

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.

A riveting and awe-inspiring tribute to one of mankind’s great achievements.

Through disrupting linear time, Kapadia’s speculative, poetic rumination on memory, political reality and personal association transforms the viewing experience into something transcendent.

The film isn’t inconclusive but its time and continent-sweeping structure is anything but conventional: and that’s what makes the mercurial Return to Seoul, in the end, so remarkable.

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.

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.

Robot Dreams is Berger’s first fling with animation, and he takes to the new artform with evident and infectious enthusiasm.

The film is ambling, gentle and doesn’t strain too hard to force a point, but allows you to appreciate the multifarious nature of life in a city where the spectre of destruction lurks ominously in the clouds.

Farhadi never misses a beat, taking his tale into increasingly gripping territory.

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.

Anchored by Susan Chardy’s restrained performance, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl might touch on hot-button themes of sexual violence, misogyny and familial cycles of abuse, but Rungano Nyoni finds her own intriguing language to explore them.

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

Even if the dry wit and cherrypickable allusions may be absent, the technical virtuosity on display marks this as the work of a master. Visceral, haunted, and severe, Coen’s vision coaxes out not just the intensity in the play – every “gritty” take has done this, from Roman Polanski to Justin Kurzel – but in its older renderings.

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.

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.

Wandel displays her clear skill as a director of actors in this exercise, but there is the sense that this could have been a painfully visceral short film instead of elongated into a feature where it begins to feel overdone.

It’s confident, classical filmmaking, yet despite its many formal and thematic pleasures, doesn’t offer a whole lot that’s new.

It’s a wonderful film with not an ounce of fat on the bone, and Kaurismäki still manages to thread the needle between a style of ironic detachment and emotions that are big, bold and instantly affecting.

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.

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.

The director has described his film as a poem, but its rhythms feel more abstract, like recalling the best concert of your life in a dream. Brilliantly forgoing nostalgia to frame Elvis in the present, Luhrmann offers the closest experience of a live Elvis show that we may ever see. And like the Vegas residency, EPiC deserves a standing ovation when Luhrmann’s curtain falls.

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.

This is by far Haynes’ funniest film to date, with shades of Almodóvar in its dramatic zooms and heightened domestic tension.

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

Rich, mysterious, rigorous and generous.

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.

It may not all add up but this is an ambitious and taboo-tackling debut with an atmosphere that lingers thanks to gutsy performances from Colman and Buckley.

All the ingredients here are invaluable, and the film’s vision comes alive with a real sense of hope about the soul of Chile and its thirst for change that’s palpable, not imaginary.

Skarsgård is the best he’s been in years as a father fundamentally unable to articulate himself in any way other than his work, and oblivious as to why his daughters feel such frustration with him for a lifetime of distance, and there’s keen wisdom in Sentimental Value’s observation of the gulf between who our parents are and who we wish they were.

An absorbing set of vignettes, though the third section definitely ups the emotional ante.

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.

Seydoux is once again marvellous and a collaboration such as this seems long overdue.

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.