[Kapadia’s] delicate touch remains very much the same, as she offers a gentle but clear critique of the challenges faced by women in India today.

The Zone of Interest is a gloriously original work and a boldly experimental addition to the canon of high-calibre Holocaust cinema.

Unlike any of the director’s previous works, there is no physical violence or even talk about it. Huezo seems to have grown tired of such harshness and she wants to explore a more nonviolent life. Fortunately, both in war and in peace, she has an excellent eye for portraying everyday life and the sensibility to get up close, without making regular people look like actors.

Expectations were rewarded with an intimate film and impeccable direction.

If The Boy and the Heron does wind up being his farewell to cinema, Miyazaki will be leaving behind a beacon of encouragement, a guidepost to remind the world that even when all seems lost, courage and compassion can forge a new path.

An overlong runtime, underwritten characters and some uneasy tonal wobbles dampen the film’s punchy humour and propulsive energy.

The Brutalist aims for symphonic grandeur and novelistic depth. It partially succeeds, though it too often mistakes pomposity for profundity, and bloated verbosity for literary nuance.

Minor quibbles aside, Pawlikowski has delivered a gorgeous poem of a film, a mournful meditation on national identity, private and public tragedy, the dangers of trying to remain apolitical in deeply political times, and the enduring cultural riches that can offer small but crucial solace in apocalyptic times.

Hindered by extremely predictable character development and a mosaic-like approach to narrative, making it hard to really get to know and empathise with any of the characters.

With all of its quick cuts and time-hopping, Oppenheimer behaves like a film that’s worried that it won’t have the space to fit everything it wants to say and do into three hours. Then it exhausts its welcome in the service of reiterating points. Then it delivers lectures in case you missed the earlier rounds. It knows how to blow up the world, but it doesn’t know when to quit.

Most strikingly, for a murder thriller, Killers of the Flower Moon is fatally lacking in dread or suspense.

As with Lanthimos’ previous films, Poor Things never allows viewers to get too comfortable or too acclimated to their surroundings; it’s a film that’s constantly throwing set pieces and absurdist humor and over-the-top outfits at the audience, but the effect is exhilarating rather than enervating.

Re-shuffling footage from films he has shot over the last 23 years, Jia Zhang-ke places his awe-inspiring cinematic mastery on full display in Caught by the Tides, though its ravishing poetic beauty tends to obscure the story.

Even if the concert sequences don’t completely do justice to the thrill of seeing this show in person, this documentary offers an in-depth souvenir of both the show itself and of this particular chapter in the ongoing saga of one of popular culture’s most intriguing, unpredictable, and powerful creators.

Across the Spider-Verse is a breathtaking whirligig of a superhero saga, spanning multiple realities without ever losing its emotional tether.

What one remembers most from All of a Sudden is the uniqueness of the women’s relationship and their shining embrace of human rights — not just emotionally, but with their minds.

An atypically told, but typically big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, Close Your Eyes is a passionate and engaging reflection on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past.

It’s a delicate piece of storytelling, one where the poignancy never feels forced and where the comedy springs from its characters rather than pop-culture references or lazy scatology.

This Colombian comedy contains enough dark humor to lighten the situation, irony to offer subtle social criticism, and a sense of self-confidence to challenge the stereotypes of a protagonist who goes from cursed poet to Pygmalion in the ´hood.

The pièce de résistance of unabashed culinary cinema, Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu serves up a French country idyll in romantic 19th century sauce for audiences whose tastes run to the fine wines and 12-course meals.

Black Bag is a not-quite-quotidian spy movie. The stakes are the fate of a relationship, not the fate of the world, and all the pieces come together to make human drama even more interesting than potential apocalypse.

An adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is as much about the director’s love of arch humor, fourth-wall shattering, and aggressive art direction as it a redemption saga about a rich man who finds purpose in his life.

Vermiglio is a film that proceeds carefully with few narrative missteps, until the ending sends Lucia on a highly improbable journey across Italy that upsets the tale’s strong sense of geographical unity. One wishes for a more emotional and convincing ending.

The film is a mirror and a warning.

The Eternal Memory is a salute to two courageous people, who were willing to share the joys of their daily lives, but also the anguish inflicted by a cruel disease.

Fleifel’s influences are many, from 1970’s Hollywood to Palestinian poetry to American novels, as he readily admits in his interviews, but To A Land Unknown is unique in its brutal realism; a heartbreaking tribute to exiled people.

Building slowly, the story morphs into a thriller, and finally a sort of horror film, though these parts feel more like decent imitations than real genre work.

Is God Is shrewdly combines its genre thrills — it’s a violent road trip of murder and revenge — with arthouse aesthetics and thought-provoking writing, which gives Aleshea Harris a career path that’s as hard to predict as Racine and Anaia’s literal one. But I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Blending autobiographical elements with heartfelt homages to Iranian cinema, writer-director Matthew Rankin's charmingly surreal comic fable reimagines Canada as a Farsi-speaking dreamland.

While the film is filled with shimmering images aplenty – including a literally sparkling trompe d’oeil – the director falls short of using the texture of his 16mm film stock to its full potential. The same could be said of his characters, who could do with more thoughtful fleshing out, while their slow-burning relationships generate more a sense of lethargy than melancholy.

Unfolding with faint whiffs of film noir, Meeting with Pol Pot boasts powerful performances from its cast, with Irène Jacob (Double Life of Veronique) and Cyril Gueï playing journalists whose professional demeanour unravels rapidly as they contend with the consequences of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.

The Story of Souleymane is more than its individual parts. Scenes fly by, prompted by the move-move-move! ethos of the hustling immigrant. This is a film told close in close quarters. On several occasions, the camera is so close to our hero that you can smell the desperation coming off his skin, which, as richly and darkly lensed by Tristan Galand, is mutedly lustrous.

The Eras Tour spotlights Swift’s musicianship as well as her showmanship: the acoustic section, where she accompanies herself on guitar and piano, could have been the entire concert, if one could build a stadium tour out of such intimate moments, but the bigger-than-life stagecraft on display never overpowers the music.

Gomes is a director poised between ironic narrative and experimentalism pure and simple, and his films (often described as strange, lyrical and hypnotizing) divide audiences into the visionaries and the unconvinced.

Graced by a strong cast, visual poetry and great formal control, this brooding meditation on evil still resonates a century later.

Leni Riefenstahl and her controversial legacy are examined in fascinating depth in the new German doc 'Riefenstahl' by Andres Veiel.

Adding an extra religious dimension to an already densely packed sociopolitical soap opera, Costa tells a rich story here about the fuzzy line between democracy and theocracy, clashing spiritual values and inflammatory culture-war rhetoric.

It’s a collective simmer of sight, sound, sweat, and sensation about fascinating, complex people pushed through their paces on and off the court.

As its attention-grabbing title suggests, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a supercharged, sense-swamping, overstuffed feast of a movie.

There is an intense vulnerability at the heart of Urska Djukic’s Little Trouble Girls.

The use of first-time and non-professional actors gives the film an authenticity and immediacy that more seasoned performers may not have delivered.

A throwback to an era when “summer movies” represented something distinct from what studios produced for the other nine months of the year, Dead Reckoning offers 163 minutes’ worth of adrenaline and excitement that never overstays its welcome.

Juggling big ideas and white-knuckle scares has always been the currency of the 28 Days Later saga, and Nia DaCosta does right by the franchise’s legacy.

Perfect Days turns out to be a surprisingly charming, haunting, moving work with deliberate echoes of Japanese cinema legend Yasujiro Ozu.

Steering away from exaggerated drama and concentrating most of the scenes on the little girl and her mother Ane (emerging Spanish actress Patricia Lopez Arnalz), 20,000 Species of Bees (20.000 especies de abejas) opens audiences up to a new understanding of trans kids, especially the idea that it is not the child who needs to transition, it’s the family and society who need to change their perceptions.

Gerwig and Baumbach come out on the side of the power of the imagination but never discount the criticisms of this iconic American object. What the film does best, perhaps, is to understand and explain why people make up worlds, be they real systems of oppression or imaginary playsets.

What we need is for the voice of the Yanomami and other groups fighting for their survival to be heard in the world. The filmmakers are achieving it with this documentary.

Preciado finds a way to deliver his message while entertaining his audience.

Babygirl is the rare adult drama that understands that complicated characters can be likable, even if their behavior is sometimes decidedly unlikable; it addresses power and gender dynamics in ways that avoid easy, post-#metoo buzzwords; and it’s going to lead to some really interesting post-screening date-night discussions.

The second chapter of Denis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation delivers on the visual grandeur and political intrigue, even if the characters tend to be reduced to their plot function.

A gripping drama -- almost a mystery -- about ordinary people from Japanese master Kore-eda Hirokazu connects to viewers, despite an ambiguous ending that feels overly complex and arty.

We’ve truly been down this road before, and none of Miller’s many talents can overcome the sense of familiarity that he’s already done all of this, and better.

This isn’t a story of rock music and stage theatrics; it’s about the woman who waited, in a home she was forbidden to leave, for the musician to come and deliver the love he promised. And it’s about the day she decided to stop waiting for it.

It is a smart and warm-hearted documentary that never tries to separate the superstar at its center from the political and cultural context, or to split John from the woman he loved and admired — and never deliberately cast shade on. It is also one of the finest portraits of these artists on film.

The lockdown across cities the world over was quite the inescapable slog; there’s no good reason for a film to replicate its worst feature.

Oceans Are the Real Continents is an ode to a wounded, wondrous country that still bleeds and loses its young to emigration.

Nosferatu offers all the atmospherics and the creeping dread that it should, but this version remains locked-in and static when it might have dared to explore new ground. Like its antagonist, it’s simultaneously living and dead.

The “be your true self” storyline has been a staple of animated features for decades, but it’s delivered with a real kick here.

Low-key but spanning a symphony of disturbing themes from personal relations and wildlife conservation to the threat of war, Koji Fukada’s ‘Nagi Notes’ offers a fascinating, multi-faceted perspective on insular Japan today.

The brilliant camera work and editing (both by Soderbergh, under his usual pseudonyms) and Koepp’s tersely insightful writing ratchet up the tension, as the audience and, eventually, the characters figure out just what’s going on in this seemingly ideal house.

There are dazzling, funny, heartbreaking sequences throughout this examination of the music legend and his complicated personal life, but they are undercut by aspects that might have benefited from more attention or deeper thought.

Ultimately, the film’s breezy attitude and calculated audience-pleasing wins out. Project Hail Mary offers plenty of laughs alongside of a dollop of sentiment, and it centers science in a tale where the apocalypse isn’t necessarily inevitable; it celebrates both humanity’s ability to save itself, and the idea that humanity might be worth saving.

The film comes alive when Mamacruz joins a sex therapy workshop. We are introduced to a delicious assortment of older women who bring joy and laughter into her life, along with a moving dose of heartbreak.

As these two modern masters of genre subversion have matured, they've also figured out a way to check off the boxes of thrills and gore and suspense while also finding something real to say about perseverance, hope, and love.

As it gathers to its grim conclusion with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, The Black Guelph becomes a quietly furious critique of power, corruption and lies among Ireland’s elites, from the police to the church to the upper echelons of government.

As a piece of investigative journalism it feels a little too fuzzy, but as an imaginative exercise in non-fiction cinema, it is consistently interesting and often hauntingly beautiful.

Mumenthaler’s screenplay works best when it lives and breathes in the ambiguities of Lina’s malaise and dissatisfaction, and how she balances it with her responsibilities as an entrepreneur, wife, and devoted mother. Splitting the difference between its more lyrical touches with more straightforward storytelling saps some of the power out of the film.

For Anderson fans, Asteroid City will be a pure guiltless pleasure, a full sensory immersion in his dazzling Day-Glo Pop Art toybox. For agnostics, this is still one of the director’s finer efforts, low on the childlike whimsy and forced eccentricity that mars his minor works.

The Naked Gun comes in at a lean 85 minutes, but stay seated for the whole thing, as even the closing credits become a vehicle for jokes on top of jokes.

As a procedural, it’s by-the-numbers. If it’s supposed to be a character study, the characters are TV-familiar.

Send Help becomes its own unique, mischievous, horrifying creation, thanks to director Sam Raimi and his singular gift for eliciting laughter that turns into screaming (and vice versa).

Civil War ultimately risks nothing and subsequently says nothing; it’s a thrilling war picture cosplaying as an examination of the zeitgeist.

Kidnapped (Rapito) is one of Marco Bellocchio’s most successful films, both as a taut thriller that will capture audiences with his terribly human drama, and as a masterful reflection on the themes that the Italian director has worried and revisited over a lifetime of filmmaking: the Catholic church as an anti-liberal indoctrinating machine that steals children’s souls, the frailty of personal identity, and the struggle for liberation on an individual and societal level.

Seligman and Sennott, reteaming after Shiva Baby, clearly know the beats and tropes of the teen comedy while taking every opportunity to subvert the formula. Bottoms always opts for the weirdest choices and least expected outcomes.

Glossy and gripping, Czech director Robert Hloz’s ambitious and impressively polished debut feature boasts high-calibre production design and a dense, twist-heavy, techno-dystopian plot that feels at times like an extended episode of the cult Netflix series Black Mirror.

In Bird Andrea Arnold once again shows she has the magic keys – in this case Franz Rogowski’s piercingly tender bird-man, and Barry Keoghan’s manically affectionate drug-dealer dad -- to extract drama, fantasy and authentic emotion from characters living on the lowest rungs of English society.

Bloodlines reminds us of why these hilarious horrors have been such crowd-pleasers, and why their creators might never call it quits.

By necessity, Inside Out 2 goes to even more complicated places than its predecessor, but it does so with real understanding, illustrating the ways that leaving childhood behind and forming the earliest stages of what will become an adult identity can be both liberating and terrifying, exhilarating and mortifying.

At 126 minutes, The Fall Guy overstays its welcome for a bit, but the stunts, the comedy, and the spark between the film’s dynamic leads make the movie a delectable kick-off to the popcorn pleasures of the summer-movie season.

This adaptation of the Broadway musical – the first half, anyway – offers a lot of craft but not enough magic.

Hoppers tells an effective story with wit and ingenuity, not to mention distinctive character design for every corner of the animal kingdom, from a kind-hearted shark (Vanessa Bayer) to a bratty caterpillar (Dave Franco).

For all the inherent familiarity of the hit-man genre, Fincher and Walker have nonetheless crafted an absorbing tale; what it has to offer that’s any different from countless similar tales lies in the minutiae rather than the mayhem.

Ferrari emerges as that rarest of films: the complex, complicated biopic. Like his subject, Mann appreciates beauty and power while never forgetting that beauty can wither and power can destroy; within that matrix of messy contradictions, he creates haunting drama.

Wherever it winds up going, the Judy-Nick friendship emerges as one of the more complex and satisfying bits of character interplay in contemporary Disney animation.

The latest sci-fi horror fable from Canadian writer-director Brandon Cronenberg is his most deliciously dark, richly allegorical nightmare vision to date. A bleakly satirical, sexually graphic, hallucinatory thriller about wealthy tourists resorting to debauched savagery in a fictional foreign country,

This new film resonates powerfully both as an emotional drama and as a welcome addition to the movie-musical canon.

Guadagnino has remixed an imperfect, incomplete book into an imperfect, incomplete film.

It’s no easy thing to mine humor out of historical tragedy, but El Conde finds a zone that allows for rueful chuckles over humanity’s cruelty without ever being glib about Chile’s dark past.

The Shrouds feels a little unruly and unfocussed, with too many loose threads and undernourished side plots. Even so, this is still an absorbingly weird autumnal statement from one of the most consistently original screen voices of his generation, still probing away at some familiar psychosexual obsessions, this time under a gathering cloud of looming mortality.

This sly and clever reverse reworking of romantic drama tropes warmly suggests that there can be as much hope and connection to be found in splitting up as there is in coming together.

This is gut-punch, feel-bad studio filmmaking, all the more notable for how rarely it happens.

Sometimes silly but always propulsive, this franchise entry dares to give us an empathy-generating Predator, even if Elle Fanning’s robot steals the show.

There’s a history of great directors going out on a lesser film, and unfortunately, Friedkin joins their ranks. He leaves behind an extraordinary filmography of groundbreaking work that will inspire generations to come, but The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will exist, at best, as a footnote to this legendary career.

As ever with Almodóvar, the healing balms of beauty, art, friendship, love and sex offer some consolation in the darkness, including a small but obligatory queer subplot.

Even if the only way to endow 1960s biker gangs with a sense of majesty and glory is to compare them to what would come later, Nichols captures those moments of fleeting greatness, allowing his lost men room to inhabit their own private inventions, to build their subculture and its mythologies, if only for a short time.

The cumulative effect of all this talent is a life-affirming blood-and-guts carnival of a movie that ranks highly among Audiard’s best, and boldest, work.

What Patel has crafted delivers both kinetic action and real-world relevance, an exceedingly rare combination.

The Phoenician Scheme sees Anderson indulging in all of his usual design fetishes (we don’t just get precisely-lettered labels on ornate boxes, we also get the yellowing cellophane tape affixed to those labels) without seeming to get around to a story or characters or themes.