Assayas's attention to even the most marginal character is a joy, as are his mesmerising changes of pace and register. A slow-burning delight. [11 Feb 2000, p.11]

The combination of Christie and Wilder ensures the story is impeccably told and the dialogue is unsurpassable from start to finish.

Penn and Kaufman’s film about him is sprawling and uneven but also heartfelt and inspiring. It’s informative but has an immediacy which you rarely find in conventional news reports. The documentary leaves you with admiration not only for its subject, the comedian turned wartime leader, but for the doughty Hollywood star who put himself in the eye of the storm too.

As light as McAvoy’s touch might be – this is a film, after all, that features a James Corden cameo – there’s more to do here than simply cheer the boys on and hope they get one over on the Oxbridge elite. There are bigger questions to ask, and California Schemin’ is willing to ask them.

The tone is distinctly feelgood, but the film, directed by Shekhar Kapur, thoughtfully explores the different ways that relationships can be built, and what cultures can teach one another.

The unexpected advantage here is that, when Williams wants to be truly upfront about his struggles, that veneer of fantasy shields us from the more harrowing details of his life, so that we can confront them yet still enjoy that “right f***ing entertaining”.

Manzoor’s film, with a roundhouse kick to the heart, both parodies the generational divide with its fantastical plot and finds sympathy for what makes parents domineering.

It’s a little metatextual analysis served up with a generous side of guts and gore, stabbing its cake and eating it with gleeful abandon.

The Big Sleep is as fresh and perverse as ever, and remains one of Hollywood's most entrancingly strange bedtime stories.

Hermanus is more than happy for his film to live in the shadows of Kurosawa’s. There’s still much to savour.

This is kinetic, muscular, easy-to-cheer filmmaking applied to a story ready-made for the silver screen.

The future presented in The Beast, Bertrand Bonello’s mesmeric blend of sci-fi, horror and romance, feels frighteningly plausible.

Benediction isn’t a cradle-to-grave biopic, nor does it dramatise a single, pivotal event. It’s one man’s breathless search, careening back and forth through the chapters of his life in search of something concrete and true. It’s beautiful, but only in the way it tends to its tragedies with such care.

Cooper shows us his subject’s mix of magnetism, volatility and childlike egotism but he remains a strangely elusive figure. It’s left to Mulligan’s Felicia to crack the film’s sometimes too-shiny facade and to give its story some bruising emotional depth.

The real way Safdie puts a chokehold on his audience is by examining Mark and Dawn’s physical and emotional weaknesses in such forensic detail. The Smashing Machine may not provide the pay-offs that audiences expect from more conventional sports movies, but this is the most raw and vulnerable that Johnson has ever been on screen. Once you’ve seen him this exposed, you won’t watch his typical action movie stunts in quite the same way ever again.

The Last Wish is visually gorgeous with an attention to detail you might not expect given it’s a sequel to a spin-off of a two-decade-old film.

Only 72 minutes, in black and white, this is a small classic, directed by Robert Wise. [02 Jul 2000, p.17]

It’s a phenomenal performance from McAdams, subtle and gentle in its heartbreak.

This black comedy about the travails of the teenage Rita (a marvellously taciturn Barbara Osika) captures beautifully the awkward ugliness of adolescence before a brutal final punch. [11 Aug 2001, p.8]

Phoenix’s performance remains powerful and stirring, too. The genius of it is that we can’t help but care for Arthur despite his neediness and derangement. Even during the film’s most apocalyptic and violent moments, we’re always aware that, underneath Joker’s gaudy warpaint, lurks little, feeble Arthur. Against the odds, this ingenious and deeply unsettling film even turns into a bit of a weepie by the final reel.

Many of [Hitchcock]'s signature motifs were established with this film, including a memorable climax with Novello almost killed by a bloodthirsty mob, and Hitchcock’s first trademark cameo appearance.

Beau Is Afraid is an Oedipal farce hysterically outsized in its execution.

The very best moments of Cyrano take place in near-silence, when all we can hear is the breathing of lovers enraptured by each other’s gazes.

There’s an argument to be made that Splitsville’s noncommittal on the subject of polyamory. I think that might, in fact, be the point: Covino and Marvin aren’t interested so much in whether polyamory is the solution to, or destruction of, a longterm relationship, but more the fact people’s stated beliefs and innate desires tend to be two entirely different and conflicted concepts.

Who’s really at the wheel of Richard’s ambition? His love for his children or his own ego? It’s a testament to both Green and Smith that the question is allowed to linger so potently.

Esmail goes big and bold with his Hitchcock allusions and showy camera work, not unlike M Night Shyamalan. At times, he’s a little on the nose, also not unlike M Night Shyamalan. It suits his vision.

Farnaby keeps it fresh and witty, combining the wordplay and low-stakes surrealism of his roots in The Mighty Boosh and Horrible Histories with a keen eye for literary adaptation.

All the characters’ feelings here are very deeply sublimated. The fascination of The Power of the Dog lies in its ambiguity and its depth of characterisation. Nothing is obvious here, not even the title.

Encanto bursts with colour and abstract flights of fantasy.

Nitram is a stark, difficult, but deeply reflective film that asks sincerely why we describe these crimes as incomprehensible at the very same time as we watch the same patterns unfold, again and again.

When it comes to Mad About the Boy, it’s less that Bridget Jones has finally matured, and more that she’s shown us how human she really is.

Miranda’s film finds a graceful balance between fact and fiction, framing art as a heightened form of self obsession and the most magical and important thing in the world.

It’s a real feat that Griffith always manages to steer the boat away at just the right moment, choosing emotional nuance over manipulation.

Sure, there’s a kind of “gotcha” twist here that tethers The Watched back to M Night’s work, but Ishana’s real focus is on where Mina’s sorrows take her, deep into the old, pagan world and its stories of slippery natures and shifting identities. Do we define ourselves or are we defined by others? It’s a pertinent question for the director, as she takes her first promising steps into the future.

That’s the wonderful thing about The Lost Daughter – it embraces thorniness. It treats it not as a personality flaw but as a badge of survival. Sadness is lanced through the heart of Gyllenhaal’s film, which she both adapted and directed, but it’s rich and luxurious in its texture.

Zach Cregger’s follow-up to the monstrous Airbnb hijinks of 2022’s Barbarian is easily as weird, wicked, and fun – what it’s not, however, is the chilly, nightmare headf**k we’ve been told it is.

Arnold’s Cow is grimy and unvarnished where it counts, laced with poeticism whenever the banal cruelty threatens to leave its audience numb.

No, there are no dinosaur cameos, but this 10th lap – now with added Brie Larson – is relentlessly fun.

Sure, there’s nothing in the film that matches the pure heartbreak of the first, when Riley’s imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) disappears into nothingness. But Inside Out 2 proves that it’s ludicrous, at this point, to accuse the studio of having run out of ideas.

It preserves DreamWorks’s broad, direct appeals to sentimentality while weaving in a little more of the thematic maturity and subtlety you might see over at Ghibli or Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon.

Bird is for every lost child who wishes someone would have stood up and defended them. It’s a fragile but beautiful vision, and marks the strongest blend yet of Andrea Arnold’s primary directives as a filmmaker.

McDormand carves out a little space for anger, though underplaying her performance so early on gives her further to leap when Lady Macbeth must succumb to her eventual madness. But, if anything, it only adds to the terrible weight of inevitability that hovers over Coen’s film.

It’s a body horror that’s really a family drama; that’s really a sly comedy about the discomfort of being trapped inside all this vulnerable, imperfect flesh.

The thrill of Eileen lies in how McKenzie plays off the film’s inciting spark, a blonde-bobbed enigma played by Anne Hathaway.

As a filmmaker, Cregger seems conscious of embracing and then twisting an audience’s expectations, leaning into certain tropes of the genre before forcefully pushing towards something far more realistic.

History might not have allowed Elisabeth the kind of power she wanted, her death in 1898 also bringing her life to a violent close. But Corsage reimagines it all, granting her unexpected agency and, in eventual death, one moment of pure, well-earned freedom. There’s something magnificently empowering about that.

Rose of Nevada is Jenkin’s most conventional narrative film so far, which is to say it’s still filled to the brim with dreams, visions, and ambiguities. It’s a Cornish The Great Gatsby, in its own mesmeric way, though its boat bearing us back ceaselessly into the past is a literal one.

Lyne can laugh at these people because he holds little respect for them, and there’s a general sense of revulsion directed here towards the rich and reckless. His camera navigates queasily through the film like he’s capturing a natural disaster in action.

This is a story, ultimately, that drives home the idea that solidarity can exist even when there’s no sense of community – and particularly when that community has been systematically dismantled by the powers that be.

Presence’s greatest feat, and presumably Soderbergh’s main interest in the project, is in how alive and defined a character our ghost is.

The film is always on the move, and yet somehow oppressively claustrophobic, as the tension gradually builds to the point of no return suggested by its title.

The callbacks, thankfully, are fairly minimal – but it’s still a comfortingly old school affair, in which its CGI feels at home next to a host of traditional practical effects, including that old gem of a slowly collapsing water tower. No bulging-to-the-point-of-bursting muscles needed.

Spielberg’s motivation for The Fabelmans has little to do with cementing his own myth – it’s a more tender, more bittersweet journey towards the realisation that, though the camera never lies, what it shows us can be hard to swallow.

With Alice, Darling, director Mary Nighy (daughter of actor Bill) delicately exposes how internalised and invisible the experience of narcissistic abuse can be.

With barely a twist to speak of (at least in the traditional sense), his latest film Knock at the Cabin feels like a repudiation of the past.

If there are no other pleasures to Wicked Little Letters beyond the tome’s worth of expletives launched by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, then so be it. That’s plenty enough to sustain this witty, joyously written piece of forgotten history, scripted by comedian Jonny Sweet.

The pair operate at a low simmer of hysteria that feels farcical without ever losing believability, while treating sincere emotion like the bursting of a dam that threatens to drown them together. They love as they hate in The Roses, decadently and without restraint.

Pamela, A Love Story may not feel particularly revelatory, but its sheer pathos is undeniable.

Robinson, really, is a genius at all this – the way he extends his “f***”s like he’s watching the fabric of the universe collapse around him, or how his smile can both burn with frightening intensity or the fragility of a lost little child.

Nothing is off the table, really, ethically or psychoanalytically. Yet Babygirl isn’t guiding us confidently to some fixed destination. It’s simply feeling its way forward, orgasm by orgasm.

Eisenberg fills that anxious blank space with genuine questions seeking genuine answers, delivered by the comforting typewriter patter of his own voice, and a poignant, wrecking ball performance by Culkin.

As After Yang gently suggests, there’s no longer a way to conceive of ourselves that’s entirely detached from technology. Nerves and circuits, inevitably, all work towards the same goals.

It’s lovely, if a little practised. Yet, the real gutting here comes courtesy of the film’s miniature thesis on grief, and how privilege determines the channels of its pain.

While Marvel’s been busy flooding us with endless, exhaustive content, DaCosta’s movie offers us the one thing that made this franchise work in the first place – heroes we actually want to root for.

Cocaine Bear is a film worthy of its title, and perfectly constructed to feel like the kind of cult horror movie you’d find on a dusty VHS tape somewhere in a stoner’s basement. It’s bloody and grotesque, at times quite dark, but also surprisingly endearing.

The Final Reckoning, final or not, presents us with a fascinating contradiction: Ethan Hunt is both a pure singular and a state of mind. He’s cinema as the madman dreamer’s paradise.

Though it was out of step with contemporary sensibilities, Powell and Pressburger's Technicolor epic increasingly seems the Citizen Kane of English war movies. [19 Mar 2011, p.26]

By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war.

Crime 101 is sleek like a Michael Mann venture, but with a healthy dose of 2020s nihilism.

This is, dare I say it, how fan service should be done. It’s far easier to overlook the usual nostalgic pandering when it’s taken a backseat to genuine creativity.

Timestalker certainly puts on a show.

It’s hard not to be drawn in. That’s the trick of Anatomy of a Fall. Sandra is a fascinating, one-woman puzzle box, thanks largely to the strength of Hüller’s performance.

What isn’t said in How to Have Sex, and what isn’t openly felt, is the stuff that really hurts.

Nicolas Cage stars as a Satanic serial killer in a movie that is nasty, precise and as subtle as a magic trick.

The Fire Inside is a sports biopic with the nerve to ask, “What happens after the win?” It’s a simple shift in emphasis, but an unexpectedly transformative one, which forces us to reckon with how shortsighted we can be in our assumptions that victory creates a certain kind of immortality.

Despite the performative feminism, and beyond the black eyes and broken noses, the girls still work naturally towards clique-defying female solidarity. It’s the small, sincere thought behind the joke: you don’t have to master the theory to know that women are stronger together.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is damn funny, often deliriously so.

The emotions in Janet Planet creep up on you.

Scrapper is a solar system of a film, with Campbell’s playful and defiant Georgie shining bright at its centre. You’ll not find many characters this year quite as likeable.

In Christopher Andrews’s stark, haunted debut – anchored by two soulfully frayed performances by Abbott and Keoghan – violence becomes the only language left to speak when shame, resentment, and desperation have stripped the words right out of these people’s mouths.

To reduce the film simply to its outlook on race ignores both its content and its message, as some of its most rewarding elements follow Monk back to his family, for a funny, touching portrait of a man attempting to fine-tune his relationship with the world.

A Different Man layers idea onto idea, then inflates them to the point of satirical absurdity.

In a crowded field of dour horror, it’s a relief to find something so knowingly silly.

Against the odds, Jeanne du Barry has turned out to be a subtle and well-crafted costume drama with plenty of satirical bite.

Theater Camp has no shortage of actors lining up to poke fun at the self-indulgence of their own vocation.

Picture the ‘Mean Girls’ queen bee Regina George if someone had given her a knife and a death wish. And she was an android.

It spins out like a fairytale penned by someone midway through a stimulant-induced panic attack.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair doesn’t quite go where it’s expected, or hit the most obvious talking points. It offers something all the more intriguing – a last-minute twist that forces us to reexamine what we’d already accepted as either truth or fiction.

A Quiet Place: Day One can’t boast the freshness of concept of the first film, but, in pure emotional payoff, it’s the most satisfying of the series.

The Guardians films have always been about the fact that many of us are like putty – shaped not by where we’ve come from but where we are and could end up. Vol 3 should make audiences thrilled about what comes next for Gunn in his new position as co-head of DC Studios. As for Marvel – well, it’ll be their loss.

Kappel’s astounding performance constantly draws the film’s energy back to her in a way that ensures the audience is never in doubt of Linnea’s own agency, even in her most vulnerable moments.

Empowerment is only one piece of the puzzle, which together forms a refreshingly nuanced portrait of sex work, desire and self-perception.

We’re constantly reminded that there are hundreds more stories weaving in and out of these streets, existing beyond Yas and Dom’s. This romance is special. But it also sort of isn’t. It’s exactly the kind of hope the most lovelorn in Rye Lane’s audience might be looking for.

There’s more than enough wit, beauty, and imagination to Wakanda Forever to outweigh its weaknesses.

Sickeningly effective.

Cinema is in a precarious position right now. And, just maybe, Project Hail Mary will remind people why they ever fell in love with it in the first place. Sometimes, to move forward, it helps to look back.

This, then, is everything you expect from a Wes Anderson film. If you like his work, you’ll love it. If you don’t, you’ll probably break out in hives again.

It’s not a manifesto, really, but a matter-of-fact portrayal of the palpable anger emanating from a betrayed generation.