As the jokes start to sour and the night shifts to something more serious, Wilde and her dramatically experienced ensemble are able to handle a difficult tonal descent without slipping.

Here is a really impressive directorial debut from Mumbai film-maker Rohan Kanawade: tender, subtle, candid, scrupulously observed.

This unsettling parable has a scriptural concision and mystery.

The way Friedland subtly works in these little touches is truly impressive. But her finest achievement here may be casting Chalfant, who gives an astonishingly nuanced, considered and graceful performance.

Ladykins, Stop! That! Train! is a winner. Perhaps that’s unsurprising seeing as many recent Drag Race challenges have felt like mini movie sets themselves, with elaborate scripts and costumes. And while recent gay movies like Pillion and Blue Film have focused on uncomfortable home truths about queer life, Stop! That! Train! offers refreshingly rosy escapism. See it with as rowdy – and gay – an audience as possible.

Disclosure Day does give us once again a very Spielbergian primal scene of suburban childhood, though not with the devastating reality of his autobiographical The Fabelmans; rather, it is that aliens give Spielberg his way of defying the old maxim about not being able to go home.

This nifty little movie keeps you guessing and when it eventually shows its hand, there’s still plenty of mileage left in the characters.

Its scope might be small but I found its emotional impact to be surprisingly big.

Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.

Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure.

Leo Woodall’s breakout TV roles in The White Lotus and One Day offered a megawatt charisma, but for his biggest film role to date he dims it to a soft glow with gentle performance opposite Dustin Hoffman as one of a pair of New York piano tuners. And what a pair they are; they are a real pleasure to watch in an easy, unforced drama that mixes romcom moments with a relaxed crime thriller.

Far from reiterating tired binaries – tradition versus modernity, elders versus youngsters – the film embraces the beauty of contradictions with open arms. Even when the possibility of reconciliation appears out of reach, it is the effort to communicate – whether through words or art – that brings peace.

An absorbingly intimate, novelistically detailed procedural about the day-to-day, moment-by-moment lives of the Vichy administrators after the fall of France, mostly shot conventionally, sometimes jolting into an anachronistic dreamlike scenario on video.

Teaching scenes in films always have a fascination for me, and these are tremendous; Mercier patiently, sometimes angrily, tries to get the students to appreciate the complexity, nuance, eroticism and social commentary in the frescoes and artwork.

With warmth and heartfelt passion, and a quintet of outstanding performances from young actors shot in looming closeup for so much of the time, Clio Barnard has created an absorbing and moving social-realist picture.

The Esiris have created a seductive, mesmeric picture.

The Black Ball is handsomely produced, lovingly detailed and confidently constructed, bringing the puzzle pieces together in the edit and contriving an elegant, poignant cameo for Lorca himself, a kind of incidental choric figure who seems to intuit all the future triumphs and disasters of love and war. It is a rich and rewarding movie.

The film is an amazing feat of animal training and deft editing, and it’s all so weirdly cheering.

Fares’s gaunt, handsome face so eloquently conveys vanity, but also a poignant emotional woundedness, anxiety and self-pity.

The performances from Mazurov and Lebedeva are outstanding, and Zvyagintsev’s direction is superb with his cold daylit compositions and scenes in grim streets and housing estates. Everything here looks like a crime scene.

Her Private Hell resists interpretation, like so many of Refn’s recent films, but executes a slow dervish swirl of hypnotic strangeness.

There is some top-quality entertainment value on offer here from a movie which can only intensify the world’s K-obsession.

It’s a meaty drama with big scenes and big but carefully considered performances: a really substantial piece of work from Gray.

It is a fierce rejection of anything starry-eyed about movie-making and a quietly gripping psychological study of a painful confrontation between father and daughter.

This is a bleak, pessimistic film with two excellent lead performances.

Ritchie is more deeply invested in the thought-through craft of making a B-movie than many of his peers and there’s a smooth sensuousness to how he moves, each of them looking, feeling and sounding like films he genuinely cares about.

Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.

On the face of it, the film contains a soap-opera’s worth of secret feelings and tumultuous events, including the teenage lovers’ sensational escape from the town during a heavy storm. And yet Fukada maintains a cool distance.

The Christophers is a talky, at times incredibly funny, comedy drama with plot reversals that make it feel like it’s on the verge of a thriller. It doesn’t end up there, at least not strictly, but it’s unpredictable enough to never make us entirely sure just where it’s heading.

Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink.

Is God Is may borrow from an old narrative formula, but it reframes it into something sharper and more searching. It shows that stories rooted in Black trauma don’t have to be pulled down by it. Vibrancy and texture are what give a killing spree its stakes, after all, and this one ends with an understated affirmation of the human spirit. How’s that for a twist.

This is a powerful, memorable film.

What is fascinating about northern soul is the way it survived under the media-cultural radar and appears to resist larger interpretive analysis.

Ramblers are justified in keeping the pressure up and the take-home message is: opening up the glories of the countryside and nature itself to everyone is a universal good.

What gives the film its distinct flavour is a slightly feverish tone and dream-like logic. In places, it’s hard to see what the magic realism adds, and the script’s ideas about gender and gaze feel underexplored. Perhaps in the end, this sense of unreality opens the door to its characters finding love in this harsh and hopeless place. A touching and moving film.

Although no amount of revisionist gallantry can conceal how terrible Yoko Ono’s vocals are, this has a historical fascination as they were Lennon’s only full-length concert performances after the Beatles’ split.

The emphasis is more largely upon discipline and commitment in the service of art, a vocational self-immolation in which the transformation of pain into beauty is the whole point.

Here is a visually epic and surprisingly positive documentary about a maligned subculture: football ultras.

It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

This is an elegant, chilly dream of despair.

With an unerring but sardonic sense of how death presses in on us all, this is a promisingly pungent debut from Mitchell.

This is a memorable education in the laws of the tween jungle.

It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.

There are serious points raised with wry obliqueness here: about police racism, land theft and, more positively, ancestral continuity. (Perhaps to keep the indigenous focus, Endless Cookie skirts the issue of Seth as a white chronicler.) But it’s also equal parts hallucinations in coffee froth of rutting caribous – and a palpably radiating love for community – in this often hilarious spawn of the likes of Fritz the Cat

François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.

It offers us a provocation, a jeu d’ésprit of outrage, a psychological meltdown that is more astutely articulated than in many other more solemnly intended films. And it gives us what it promises in the title.

The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.

The movie’s ironies and cruelties clatter across the screen, but Komasa also allows the audience to consider who it is Chris really wants to train.

Without Buckley, this would have been lacking; with her, it’s a very bizarre and enjoyable spectacle of married bliss.

It is quite a vision: mordant, satirical, brutal.

The film perhaps suffers from a loss of nerve about how villainous to make the villain, but it zaps along very entertainingly.

Hüller’s quiet, sinewy performance provides the film’s form and musculature.

Bronstein is brilliant at conveying mounting panic and a terrible, all-consuming sadness.

You may find yourself wondering why we are going over this ground again, but it’s an engaging film, and there is always something mesmeric in McCartney’s face: cherubic, and yet sharp and watchful.

The performances of Jonsson and Blyth are fierce and overwhelmingly convincing.

[Berg] uses Jeff’s answering machine messages and archive 90s material, including the unmistakable, moody black-and-white MTV footage, to tell a very sad story with sympathy and urgency.

There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi.

This tender and sweet animation from film-makers Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is an involving, poignant study of early childhood; how fragile it is, and how strong you feel yourself to be to have outlived or surpassed it.

Overall, it is a highly watchable spectacle, leaving a sizzling streak of rubber on the tarmac.

There’s a rigorous chill to this Hamlet.

There’s nothing radical or groundbreaking about either that message or the film-making on show here, but Ricciardi and Janice’s honesty and indeed that of all those around him, prove to be very moving in the long run, underscoring that there’s as many ways to face death as there are to live life.

There is an unadorned honesty to the film that makes it admirable and not uplifting.

It’s both a sublime hang-out of a film and a celebration of individual achievements, a fascinating map of a long-ago scene and a referendum on legacy.

This is, against great odds and surely some western expectations, a beguiling hangout film – an invitation to the dinner party, a fascinating window into a group of underground artists who carry on despite the risks, a representation of creativity under surveillance. A snapshot of everyday resistance, the fight for a freedom from the bottom up. And most effectively, a moving portrait of one nutritive, symbiotic friendship in transition.

In many increasingly overcrowded fields – trauma horror, curse horror, gay horror, Sundance horror – Leviticus stands tall.

The road through year 10 may be rocky, but Manners is a confident guide – her film-making is splashy and stylish throughout, shrewdly conveying just how much one can learn, and break, in a year.

Tatum manages to ground the viewer in his abject bewilderment and pain. It’s a instantly memorable performance in a haunting movie, one that I have carried with me in the hours since I’ve seen it. Perhaps that is the best thing I can say about this remarkable feature – for its viewers, as it is for its meticulously rendered subject, the disquiet lingers.

As a standalone film, The History of Concrete is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, compelling and surprising, if 20 minutes too long. And, of course, about much more than just concrete.

This intriguing documentary from Croatian film-maker Igor Bezinović is partly a comic opera and partly a chilling message from the past.

Echoing the cycle of crop cultivation, Shyne’s film inhabits the seasons of life, bookended by images of a funeral and the open sky. This vanishing way of life is imbued with a dose of melancholy, yet hope still remains for a better harvest in the future.

This is an absorbing, compassionate film.

This is an exciting, forthright, energised – though very gruesome – film in which there is real human jeopardy and conflict. Non-zombies are more cinematic.

Writer-director Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor’s script leans perhaps a little too hard on the show-don’t-tell theory of construction, but she and her team make evocative use of simple but effective flourishes.

Flower herself remains elusive – which is the point, perhaps, since the perspective here is mostly lovers’ projections written on a delirious high, reconstructed from the letters.

Roberts, who also directed hit shark thriller 47 Metres Down and its superior follow-up, is mostly at his savviest and most ruthlessly efficient here, a confident leveling up for a genre film-maker finding his sweet spot. After a lacklustre year for horror, Primate makes for a wildly entertaining start to 2026.

Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this.

Holding Liat is a valuable work, not least for showing us that Israel and Netanyahu are not synonymous.

This is a never-say-die story and its cheerful optimism makes it a calorific Christmas treat.

We get some tastily over-the-top acting and some huge rewind POV shifts to explain what has really been going on – and, of course, the heady whiff of gaslight as Millie can’t quite be sure she really understands anything that’s happening. Silly it may be, but Feig and his cast deliver it with terrific gusto; this is an innocent holiday treat.

The film’s poetry resides in its thoughtful inactivity, its vernacular spirituality and its gentleness.

Kotevska depicts the growing bond between man and bird with warmth and humour, and while the musical score is a bit on the sappy side, there are enough drolly astringent touches to make this cockle-warming family viewing, if you have a family that likes stories of unhappy agrarian workers.

This is an utterly absorbing and outstandingly acted film.

Brisk, lucid and sweeping, Cover-Up assures that some, at least, will not.

The sad thing is that there doesn’t appear to be much space for someone like Ardern in modern politics; less space than ever in fact.

The pure craziness is a marvel.

It’s as twisty and stuffed with second and third guessing as one would want but its charmingly convoluted nature feels as elegantly composed as it felt in the original, building to a finale that leaves us with a satisfied smile.

While we might want to hear more about the specific cultural geography of the Azeri Turk community to which Shahverdi belongs, this remains a thought-provoking portrait of an extraordinary spirit.

The good news is that it remains terrific: punchy, old-school stunt work, crisply uncluttered cutting, and varied, inventive baddie-splattering from the moment Aatami deploys one of those beams to take down a jet fighter.

It always feels as if the people making this movie are having fun, and while that’s never a guarantee that the audience will too, it’s certainly the case here.

What a performance from Erivo; it is genuinely moving when the Prince has to convince Elphaba what we, the audience, have always known: that she is beautiful.

White smartly weaves Gibson’s evolution as a poet and performer, commanding stages like a rockstar –“we called them the gay James Dean,” Falley jokes – with their hopes to stage one final show, a celebration of life before their death.

Tsou and Baker’s script sharply examines what it really means to lose face: which shames are noble, which are indulgent, and what should be passed from one generation to the next?

Part of what makes Perkins’ film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy.

It’s too soon to know for sure, but this may end up being ranked as one of the best nonfiction films of the year.

It’s a stark, fierce, wonderfully acted film.

Greg Kwedar has adapted the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson; the director is Clint Bentley, and they have created a lovely looking, deeply felt film, clearly absorbing the influences of Terrence Malick in some of the low camera positions, sunset-hour compositions, narrative voiceovers, and epiphanically revealed glories of the American landscape.

The humour is delivered with the same conviction and discreetly weighted force as the sadness, and the same goes for this film’s determinedly unbowdlerised view of sex.

Fully committed to a radical irresolution, this simultaneously alienating and beautiful film bears repeat viewing.