As a whole, the film doesn’t really work, as Mendes is far more successful in dealing with psychological issues than he is with political ones.

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

It’s a lot more interesting and exciting to think about than it is to watch.

A child’s anxieties about what might be under the bed or in the shadows are also precisely those primal fears that fuel horror, ensuring that, with all its obfuscations, evasions and abstractions, Skinamarink strips the genre down to its most basic elements: a vulnerable individual alone in the dark.

The power of Alcarràs lies in the filmmaker’s care for and understanding of her subject which, as with Summer 1993, is a story taken from her own life and examined on screen with a deceiving charm that gives way to a deeply emotional narrative.

Chukwu directs a compelling tribute to what Mamie endured and achieved, yet for anyone familiar with the history, new insight is perhaps lacking.

Writer-director Carlota Pereda has embarked on a risky debut with this horror film that addresses bullying, fatphobia and the social stigma associated with obesity while delivering on gore and shocks.

Kreutzer crafts an elegant portrait that grants this historical figure a new lease of agency and autonomy.

The Pale Blue Eye is all at once a melancholic romance, a revenger’s tragedy, and an intriguing mystery. Its one problem, though, is that it comes with a glacial pace to match its wintry setting.

Chazelle swings for the fences, but Babylon feels like the worst kind of jazz: a loose freestyle comprised of beautiful moments punctuated by bum notes and off-key scatting.

The film not only rejects any criticisms – and there are many! – of the first film, but doubles down on them, delivering an even more hokily disjointed narrative, ramping up the sentimental cut-aways of human/animal camaraderie, and ramming unearned, broad-brush emotion down the viewer’s throat like so much salty popcorn.

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.

One issue with here is there’s so much plot, alongside a persistent desire to frame and underscore every one of this journey’s universal resonances, that it’s hard not to feel bogged down in ideas and details.

In Nanny, first time feature filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu takes the spotlight and shines it on this unexplored sect of society, creating a beautiful yet chilling tale surrounding identity, love, and motherhood peppered along with terror, tension, and African mythology.

It’s a highly uncomfortable watch – it documents the countdown to death in a determined yet uneasy way.

By transposing the video essay format to a feature-length affair, Philippe attempts a union of theory (criticism) and practice (documentary filmmaking), and so the very ontology of Lynch/Oz becomes a subject of fascination in its own right.

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.

The overarching theme of White Noise – an anxiety around the looming spectre of death – is familiar territory for for the writer/director, as is the psyche of the film’s middle-aged, middle-class white protagonist. This is his most ambitious project in both scale and provenance.

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.

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.

Told in a literal and linear fashion, the style of animation and narrative pacing unfortunately means that the film – with exception of the final scenes – sometimes loses poignancy in its attempts to express the unfathomable tragedy of Charlotte’s life.

Despite its noble intentions, The Silent Twins is a broad-brush depiction of the Gibbons sisters’ lives, one that fails to represent the institutional racism and discrimination which had a profoundly damaging effect on them and quite possibly led to Jennifer’s death.

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.

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.

Peter’s unflappable, occasionally unbelievable heroism is placed front and centre, and it’s nearly always at the expense of making Emancipation a richer and more varied experience as a piece of cinema.

What distinguishes Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s newest interpretation from its predecessors is its deft, mature understanding of what makes both Lady Chatterley and her lover tick.

It builds towards a moving conclusion without ever feeling manipulative.

Bones & All gets at the fragility and futility of human existence, and the fleeting moments of joy we find between birth and death. It’s an imperfect but effortlessly charming film, one that feels lived-in and loved (shout out to the eclectic, youthful soundtrack and Elettra Simos’ expressive costume design) and speaks to the human desire to love and be loved, in spite of our flaws. Bones and all.