Part Two is as grand as it is intimate, and while Hans Zimmer’s score once again blasts your eardrums into submission, and the theatre seats rumble with every cresting sand worm, it’s the choice moments of silence that really leave their mark.

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

On a first viewing of the film, I was instantly impressed by Nair's narrative skill: the speed and certitude with which she draws you into her world, and the dexterity with which she interleaves half-a-dozen different stories. The second time, her sentimental streak was more apparent and more annoying, but Salaam Bombay still convinces as a modest, uplifting movie. [26 Jan 1989, p.15]

Director George Miller combines speed, grace and explosive violence, emulating Sam Peckinpah westerns and even, at times, the work of Charles Dickens – Furiosa is a bit like a young Artful Dodger, using her wits and courage to stay alive.

Soderbergh may not have intended Kimi to be a film primarily about the pandemic, but it understands intimately what it’s felt like to live through it.

Conclave turns ritual into the hysteria of a murder mystery, the tension of a political conspiracy, the pressurised force of a criminal heist.

Official Competition may be yet another satire on filmmaking, but it’s the rare iteration that’s nuanced enough to understand that self-awareness does not equal absolution.

In her own coolly analytical way, Coppola makes some trenchant points about the way Priscilla is controlled by the men in her life. She is living in a gilded cage. The wealth and luxury she experiences don’t compensate for her complete loss of freedom.

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

Top Gun: Maverick really isn’t packed with the kind of craven nostalgia that we’re used to these days. It’s smarter, subtler, and wholly more humanistic.

Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.

In the end, Dìdi favours sentimentality, but it doesn’t strictly feel as if it were shot through the distanced, nostalgic lens of a filmmaker in reflection.

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.

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

Even at its nearly three-hour runtime, John Wick: Chapter 4 commits so nobly to its self-seriousness that it almost borders into camp. And yet, the franchise possesses both the self-confidence and the ingenuity to earn its boldness.

Enys Men is so rich with symbolism that there’s a real satisfaction to be gained from rifling through the clues.

The Card Counter is claustrophobic, certainly – but not always in the right ways.

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

The Texan auteur’s new film – his 22nd, and the first of two due for release in this year alone – boasts a fine, quirky and courageous performance from Ethan Hawke, but it’s a stagey affair which at times becomes very stilted.

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.

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.

What keeps the film’s heart tender is the fact that, even if Linda’s been reduced to a husk, she’s still a mother who loves her daughter; who knows she’s in pain and can’t help her outbursts. She still sits at her daughter’s bedside and sings, gently, like a bird. She still wants to try, even when she fails. And that’s something to count on.

For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.

The Substance doesn’t quite gel as it should, but it’s potent.

Depp does magnificent work in embodying the sense of existing out of place, not only in the violent contortions and grimaces of supernatural possession, but in the way Ellen’s gaze seems to look out beyond her conversation partner and into some undefinable abyss.

Obsession is delicately handled work, unafraid to find pockets of humour. Customer service is hilariously inept, even when it’s a matter of life or death. But Barker, both as its writer and its director, is also interested in how the dynamic between Bear and Nikki starts to reflect real-life toxicity, and never plays too recklessly where it really matters.

Peele, really, is the magician disguised as a filmmaker. Nope is the sleight of hand so slick you’ll never question how the trick was pulled off.

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

Even if Sarah Polley’s superlative work doesn’t get the plaudits or the audience it deserves, it should stand to have a far greater legacy. This is the kind of cinema that endures – not just as a great work of art (although it is that), but as something that moves us all forward.

Dickinson doesn’t end Urchin on a note of sentiment or tragedy, but somewhere in the very human middle of it all – and in doing so announces himself as a director with real guts.

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”.

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

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.

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.

Love Lies Bleeding bottles that hot, feverish, salvatory desire, only to shake it like soda pop and then ping off the cap.

Even if 28 Years Later feels like being repeatedly bonked on the head by the metaphor hammer, Boyle’s still a largely compelling filmmaker, and the film separates itself from the first instalment by offering something distinctly more sentimental and mythic than before.

It’s a film that not only signals a major musical arrival, but ends up feeling a lot bigger than the conventional (and often confining) boundaries of the “music biopic”.

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.

Rex actively underplays Mikey’s self-interest and cruelty, so that – in a way – the audience becomes an equal target of his manipulation.

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]

This is a low-budget horror helmed by a young pair of mavericks. It’s anchored around a phenomenal central turn by Wilde, who’s all twitchy eyelids and haunted relatability. Its practical effects are effective, rendering it dead in bloated, blotchy, dripping flesh. And when the spirits reveal more demonic, subversive desires, the tricks they play on the living are delivered with a taunt and a giggle.

The film is bawdy and wistful, with a rich vein of melancholy running through it.

Cal McMau’s debut takes the well-worn path of prison dramas, focusing on a violent feud waged between cell block bunkbeds. But there’s enough of a noxious stink in the air – the sense that all the system does is create a microcosm of the state, with even less power to scrap over – that Jonsson has the material he needs to fully mesmerise.

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

Stewart’s febrile, sensitive performance and Larraín’s trademark lyricism give it an emotional kick that such predecessors lacked.

No Sudden Move may be a fairly minor entry in his filmography, but it’s well-crafted and thrilling in a way that feels oddly reassuring.

The idea that it serves a film like September 5 to tell its story through an apolitical lens isn’t just wrong: it’s laughable.

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.

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

In its own offbeat way, Asteroid City is an Anderson patchwork of Cold War paranoia and American family values in all their often hypocritical glory. It is every bit as arch as his best work, while still managing to tug hard on the heartstrings.

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

It is a harsh and muddling movie, but often an astounding one. [24 Mar 1996, p.11]

Pearl’s torment – empathetic, frightening, and ludicrous all at the same time – is believable largely because Goth single-handedly wills it to be.

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.

Encanto bursts with colour and abstract flights of fantasy.

It’s such relentless comedy that it starts to imitate the beats of a horror film: when there’s no joke on screen, the body starts to tense up in anticipation of what’s inevitably around the corner. You leave the cinema half expecting somebody to have snuck a fart machine into your pocket.

With this cast, you might have thought that Hytner didn't need to emphasise anything, but he does a lot of damage to the film's final half-hour by sending the camera off on wild, skyward missions, or slapping George Fenton's score on to the soundtrack with a trowel. In the last minute he repents for his sins, permitting us to leave the cinema with only the creak of rope and wood in our ears.

Like the very best of Anderson’s films, The French Dispatch is both utterly exquisite and deceptively complex – a film that, like the finest of dishes, is even richer in its aftertaste.

In Benedetta, master provocateur Paul Verhoeven demolishes the line between the sacred and the profane. The breast becomes holy, a source of nourishment from which religious fervour can stem. The Virgin Mary, in turn, inspires not only boundless grace but sexual desire.

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.

It’s been told with enough wit and viscera to outpace many of its competitors.

Branagh doesn’t seem as eager as Cuaron to interrogate his own memories, or to reckon with how the protective veil of one’s parents can shield a child from reality.

We’re never told what this conflict is about, who might be oppressed, or what freedoms have been stolen away. All we’re given is violence.

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

The animation is not overcooked. It manages to swerve clichés, despite being full of heartwarming messages that, in the wrong hands, could meander into mawkishness.

Stanley Donen's 1957 musical represents a triumph of form over content.

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.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie proves that more of the same is sometimes the very best thing.

Though it takes a liberal approach to biography, it’s so attuned to Emily’s creative spirit that it’s not implausible that this is how the author might have chosen to envision her own life if given the chance. Emily captures the soul of the artist, if not her reality.

Rebuilding, instead, is a lovely rendering of what feels like half a story. It’s not the action its title promises, but the preceding moment of retreat to lick one’s wounds.

A House of Dynamite (which premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival) stands as a grim and timely warning about the renewed dangers of nuclear proliferation. Another way of looking at it, though, is as the most entertaining Hollywood movie on the subject of potential mass destruction since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.

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.

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.

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.

This is one of the best evocations of the end of days ever committed to film: not too shabby, given a meagre budget. [29 Jul 2018, p.66]

Birdy, in many ways, is basically a pint-sized Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s onscreen alter-ego and the de facto lead of Girls. Both wrestle with the insecurities that stem from never quite aligning with traditional expectations of femininity. Both refuse to ever consider that the blessings and burdens they carry may not be universally shared among their acquaintances.

With Bones and All, Guadagnino has pulled sweet tragedy out of marred and bloodied flesh.

It is a film of such literal and emotional largeness that it overwhelms the senses.

As imperfect as Armageddon Time is, its director’s honesty is something to be appreciated.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem blends a hyper-aware but affectionate love of the franchise’s past with the look and lingo of the present. It’s learnt all the right lessons from the current Spider-Verse craze.

The takeaway from Woman of the Hour is that this is not the story of an individual evil, but mass complicity from a society that allowed Alcala to continue his reign of terror far longer than it should’ve.

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.

Hsu and Cola balance the mania well against Park’s straight woman sincerity, but it’s Wu, a rising star on the standup scene, who serves as Joy Ride’s surprise MVP.

The Duke reminds us once more, [Michell] knew how to get the very best out of his actors without forcing unnecessary dramatics.

Not many friendships are tested because somebody decides to dress up as a literary detective in public. But it’s refreshing, in a way, that Will & Harper doesn’t try so hard to trumpet relatability. It doesn’t need to. Its heart remains true.

If everything seems familiar from countless other crime dramas, at least the film is very slickly and creatively directed by Lee.

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.

As Jodi, Kazan gives the film’s standout performance, delicate and affecting, and when we’re in her company, the stakes of the investigation feel gravest.

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.

A moving, sentimental work that also chills to the bone, powered by the inevitability of tragedy when familial loyalty becomes tethered to self-destruction.

Fair Play is not the erotic thriller Netflix’s algorithm so desperately wants it to be. There is sex, yes, and a psychological duel, but very little perverse desire. It’s ultimately a very ugly film. That’s not its failure, but its intention.

It feels like She Will spends its entire runtime on the very cusp of a completed sentence. I was desperate for an explanation, but the film is frustratingly secretive – those answers, it seems, are still buried deep.

In trying to limit the scope – and offer Ridgeley his moment in the sun – Wham! inadvertently becomes a music documentary without much interest in music. Like the band themselves, this is a breezy watch, but if there’s profundity beneath the perms and the cut-offs, the film struggles to find it.

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.

If the film results in stunt performers gaining a little more respect from the public, that’s the ideal. If it merely reminds them how likeable Gosling is, that’s good, too.

Man of the moment Jonathan Majors somehow manages to out-charisma both Michael B Jordan and Tessa Thompson here.

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande showcase phenomenal vocal ability in this adaptation of the blockbuster musical, but they’re let down by a film that is aggressively overlit and shot like a TV advert.

A berserk, angry, funny and exhausting analysis of sado-masochistic power games masquerading as loving relationships.