While there’s a cynicism that clearly comes from someone who has done his time in both Los Angeles and the industry, it’s ultimately about something more human, and more unsettling, than just Hollywood. There are, after all, lurkers everywhere.

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.

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

Sharply written, smartly structured and well-acted, with a star-making turn from Victor herself, the 93-minute black comedy is not only nimble and consistently funny, but one of the best, most honest renderings of life after sexual assault that I’ve seen.

Sweeney’s smart and highly unusual film earns its boundary-pushing because he never loses sight of the inescapable, human sadness at its core. For all of its themes of identical mental and physical connection, Twinless is a true original.

As the years go by and the trauma festers, the film grows into something thornier, surprising, beautifully textured and deeply moving.

Mr Nobody Against Putin ultimately stands as both an act of service and a tribute – to a school that once was, to students whose lives were and will be irrevocably changed for the worse by the regime, to a once fruitful job. Talankin has produced a must-watch, indelible document of ideological warfare that echoes far beyond Russia. How’s that for a nobody?

This is an engaging and thoroughly worthwhile movie.

[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.

A very sombre picture of American crime and punishment.

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.

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

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.

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.

A Woman of Paris is a remarkable film, an historic film, a film to see and consider. But, it is wintry, and not everyone will find it to his liking.

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.

Incredibly principled and brave, the librarians talk about their vocation and standing up for the young people for whom libraries are a safe space where they can discover their identity in the pages of books. They really are superwomen.

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.

Caught Stealing is a very enjoyable spectacle.

Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end.

Kitty is a child of her age, and this melodrama aspires to state-of-the-nation commentary about the limits of the American dream for working-class women, while she cherishes a keepsake snowglobe like a distaff Citizen Kane.

It’s a terrific performance from Hawke.

The whole thing is underscored by barnstorming performances from Wong and Hawkins.

Forget the adulterated, Communist party-sponsored attempts at blockbusters of the past, self-taught animator Jiaozi’s film is an utterly self-assured pageant of Chinese mythology that, with head-spinning visuals, is a fine technical advertisement for what the country is capable of, in this case on a comparatively small $80m budget.

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

Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas – a scattershot fusillade of scorn. It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair.

A classic, not to be missed.

There’s lots of good stuff here, some witty reboots and reworkings of gags from the first film and sprightly update appearances from minor, half-forgotten characters currently residing in the “where-are-they-now?” file.

This is a really exhilarating, disturbing picture which foregrounds excellent writing and performances.

This is an all too rare romcom that delivers on every level. If you’re looking for well-drawn characters caught up in an outlandish situation that generates plenty of laughter and sentiment, look no further. Oh, and it’s sexy too. What more could you want?

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.

The movie sweeps ambitiously across Europe and the Middle East and shows us a complex world of pain.

There is no reason for this new Naked Gun to exist other than the reason for the old ones: it’s a laugh, disposable, forgettable, enjoyable.

One for the fans, perhaps, and a vivid Gradiva-esque glimpse of the past.

Fun, fiery and totally frivolous, Heads of State is a perfect summer movie with great potential for future sequels.

More than any comedy or even film I’ve seen recently, this is movie driven by the line-by-line need for fierce, nasty, funny punched-up stuff in the dialogue, and narrative arcs and character development aren’t the point. But as with Succession, this does a really good job of persuading you that, yes, this is what our overlords are really like.

Buxton gains confidence as the film heads into the murky final stretch, neatly gliding around the, ahem, sharp corners that would have seen others crashing into the darkness. He leads his story to a knockout ending that’s both hauntingly downbeat yet crushingly inevitable without going to new, unnecessary extremes.

The dreary details of post-heist calamity are as pertinent as the main event. It is this that attracts Reichardt’s observing eye and makes The Mastermind so quietly gripping.

It hardly needs to be said that subtlety is not really among this film’s attributes - but it is fierce, angry, engaged, and intensely, sensually alert to every detail of its own pleasure and pain.

It is another powerful, absorbing picture from Campillo and a fitting swan song for Laurent Cantet.

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

This is a big, muscular picture which aspires to the crowd-pleasing athleticism of Spike Lee’s sports icons; it’s very enjoyable and there’s a great turn from Washington.

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

The Ring is a showcase for the young Hitchcock's editing panache: the experimental, Soviet-influenced montage that would surface so violently in Psycho. [04 Jul 2012]

This is a family film with an IQ higher than the average – though before you book your half-term tickets, ask yourself if your little one is ready to watch a kid take a DIY flamethrower to the face of a scary monster.

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.

With a blend of archive footage and re-enactments the film-makers skilfully recreate the urgency, passion and energy of their protest.

I still can’t be convinced that Megalopolis is anything other than an (honourable) failure. But Figgis’s documentary is an absorbing success.

Its riddling quality, combined with its spectacular visual effects, may leave some audiences agnostic – and I myself wasn’t sure about the silent-movie type effects. Yet it’s a work of real artistry.

It is dense with fear and sadness.

It is engaging and sympathetically acted and layered with genuinely funny moments, mysterious and hallucinatory setpiece sequences, and is challengingly incorrect thoughts about the haves who fear the contagious risk of coming into contact with the have-nots.

It is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side.

It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema.

Simón has an instinctive and almost miraculous way of just immersing herself within extended freewheeling family scenes – her camera moving unobtrusively in the group, like another teenager at the party, quietly noticing everything.

With icy provocation, Israel’s ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of 7 October.

It’s a transparently personal project and a coming-of-age film in its (traumatised) way, a moving account of how, just for one day, two young boys glimpse the real life and real history of their father who has been mostly absent for much of their lives – and how they come to love and understand him just at the moment when they come to see his flaws and his weaknesses.

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.

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

As with the previous Knives Out films, the characters are not, in fact, equally important and equally capable of murder. An inner core of suspects emerges and their guilt discloses itself incrementally at the end, as opposed to being withheld for a final reveal. What a treat though, with cracking turns from one and all and O’Connor the first among equals.

It’s impossible not to be carried along by the delirious rush of silliness in this knockabout screwball comedy.

This forthright and watchable picture, with its terrific cast of veteran players such as Jack Warner, Thora Hird and the totemic Sam Kydd, is entirely happy in its own B-movie skin, with the “X” in “Xperiment” gleefully signalling its identity as a pulp shocker.

It’s an eerie, disquieting experience.

Conti manages the feat of being funny, emotionally astute and kinda sexy throughout.

Maybe this film, concluding as it does on a distinctive note of euphoric sentimentality, does not add up to quite as much as the director thinks; but it intrigues, it exhilarates and it shows that Sorrentino is Italian cinema’s heir to Antonioni.

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.

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

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions.

A drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour.

Basically, there is a contentment and calm here, an acceptance and a Zen simplicity that is a cleansing of the moviegoing palate, or perhaps the fiction-consuming palate in general. It is a film to savour.

Like a great routine, beneath the jokes lurks something tender, grounded and real.

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.

It’s the audacious austerity of Farsi’s film-making that really makes the material sing.

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’s another really bold and distinct statement from Jenkin.

It’s a lovely slice of life, a heartfelt New York story – and judging from the brief burst of writing that we are permitted to hear, the postman can rest easy whether he is on stage or at work.

The personae and performances of Pacino, Domingo and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic nastiness of the affair, and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious: a display of, not heartlessness, exactly, but a shrewd professional sense that pity and fear were emotions that could only benefit the kidnapper.

There is a reckless, ruthless kind of provocative brilliance in what Ben Hania is doing.

Hersh emerges as a tough, combative, peppery personality from this movie.

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.

At a game-length 91 minutes, Saipan smartly comes and goes with speed (for all of its anger, it’s also a breezy, funny time) but it’s the rare football movie that’s worth a replay.

Poetic License is far from mere pastiche. It has a distinct, youthful sensibility and sources its comedy more from recognisably human behaviour than from profane, one-liner riffing.

There’s a rigorous chill to this Hamlet.

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.