It’s a modern story that pays homage to the vintage stylings of this pair of characters, a blast from the past that should last for a new generation of cartoon aficionados.

Led by a beautiful performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, writer-director Ava DuVernay’s fact-based Origin is a profoundly moving and humanistic movie that explores a range of complex issues about race and culture through the lens of a woman coping with loss and grief.

Though the subject of immigrants from persecuted minorities fleeing their homelands is topical, what elevates I Carry You With Me above most social dramas is its finespun, artisanal quality.

This is an artistic film best enjoyed in a theatre on a big screen, when the different shades of darkness juxtaposing against the shifting colours take you on a magical ride.

It’s a respectful film that pays due homage to the original tale.

Most importantly, what the film really accomplishes, is bringing back to life Tenório Cerqueira Junior, a terrifically talented musician whose career was ended abruptly. They’ve restored his work and his legacy. It's no small thing.

Knives Out is a charming and wonderfully crafted whodunnit that, despite the inevitable presence of a dead body, plays like a warm and cozy antidote to the winter chills.

A chamber-sized display of cinematic razzle-dazzle, and convoluted political allegory filled with gallows humour and broad polemics, Pablo Larraín’s El Conde re-imagines the Chilean dictator as the 250-year-old vampire star of a 1930s horror movie.

It is slap-in-the-face powerful, taking place 35 years ago (I always wonder in period pieces where the characters are today; Jean would be in her mid-60s) but full of the kind of educational turmoil and “woke” fears that stoke today’s Western culture wars. The more things change...

Fans of action films as Top Gun, American Sniper or Hobo with a Shotgun may be disappointed by the absence of splatter, though The Monk and the Gun achieves is own kind of sardonic catharsis.

The Testament of Ann Lee can be seen as a feminist companion piece to the much-awarded 2024 film The Brutalist, which Corbet directed and Fastvold co-wrote, starring Adrian Brody as a fictional Holocaust survivor and brilliant architect.

Led by Reisman’s deadpan, uningratiating performance, Retrograde is a funny, uncomfortable portrait of young millennial, struggling with her loss of status and clinging to the wreckage of her past aspirations.

Despite some impressive kills and a respectable body count, Heart Eyes is more romcom than slasher. However, it's a genre mishmash that creates a wholly unexpected delight. Imagine Jason Voorhees stumbling onto the set of Sleepless in Seattle or an entry in the Scream franchise directed by Garry Marshall.

It’s a well-made, witty movie that manages to send up some of the tropes of organized religion while simultaneously signaling that it is firmly on the side of the believers, and also managing not to annoy any atheists in the house. Jesus, it’s good.

Aranoa has pulled together an excellent cast. But holding it all together is the formidable and always watchable Bardem. His performance makes this satire also a character study.

Green Book is not the deepest depiction of racism, but it is a funny and heartwarming depiction of a friendship, forged in a car.

At its least, Level 16 ranks as a very good episode of Black Mirror but at its best, it succeeds as a hybrid of the kind of dystopic paranoia we get from Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale with touches of sanitized malevolence from Stanley Kubrick.

Sometimes, in equations of the heart, you can solve for X. And sometimes it remains stubbornly, soul-stabbingly unknown.

From the first act straight through to the third, the film engages on a level far higher than it needs to. Which is what happens when you put real craft behind a premise that could have coasted on novelty.

With the right combination of nostalgia and novelty, it’s spot-on for families looking for fun on movie night.

Bolstered by superb performances by two Oscar-winning actors, director Tobias Lindholm’s The Good Nurse is a subdued, elegantly made true crime film about how a heinous crime spree was brought to an end.

The film is Roth’s, and so expect a silly premise, comic-book violence, and gory set pieces. What you might not expect is the humour. Thanksgiving is funny.

Hamnet is a sensitively told, beautifully realized pastoral tale, driven by Buckley’s magnetism, and a well-placed cast.

Uncut Gems is a heart-pounding sprint of a movie, a two-hour anxiety attack, anchored by a tour de force performance by Adam Sandler.

Ultimately, Train Dreams is a unique concoction, and a journey worth taking for its own keening moments of grief and simple wisps of joy.

If John Wick is a ballet of ultra-violent choreography, then Sisu: Road to Revenge is its bad-ass country cousin: a full-body-contact square dance where you don’t just swing your partner to the left, but off the top of a speeding train, headfirst into a tree.

Terrence Malick’s latest, A Hidden Life, is one of the year’s most ambitious films and an arguable masterpiece, though, admittedly, your receptivity to it depends on your capacity to experience three solemn hours of waving fields of wheat, theology and Nazi cruelty. c

The Irish have struggled to find peace on a road historically paved with war. The little village in The Banshees of Inisherin seems a microcosm of the complexity of maintaining that peace, even among ostensible friends.