Cate Blanchett swallows Tár whole and spits out bullets in return.

The Outrun’s true tether, however, is Ronan, and here she works to all her greatest strengths. The film wraps entirely around her, yet she’s far too honest an actor to ever play up to the audience’s expectations of a woman in crisis.

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.

In short, it’s the life of Napoleon as only Scott can tell it, full of verve, spectacle, and machismo. Its battle scenes are thrilling, a throwback to the sort of spectacle no one in Hollywood – save, well, Ridley Scott – is interested in anymore. But it can be equally dispassionate, in a way that duly and accurately captures the man one contemporary described as “a chess master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity”.

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

It’s a feverish, agonised document of addiction and abortive passion, into which the director has weaved further elements of the author’s life.

It’s a devilishly smart and self-aware take on the current trend for Eighties horror homage, lovingly adapted from Grady Hendrix’s 2016 novel of the same name.

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.

It’s a closely focused character study, galvanised by the tremendous performances from Portman and Moore, which delves into areas more conventional dramas don’t go near.

I wonder how much Soderbergh connects to the material there. He’s a filmmaker who almost moves too fast to be known. But I’m certain there’s a piece of his soul in The Christophers, if you look hard enough.

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.

Jacobs delicately toys with the boundaries between truth and artifice, between dishonesty and vulnerability. Our intimacy with these characters is earned by their own efforts to shed their steel-built defences. And it’s all the more rewarding for it.

The Wedding Banquet old and new may take different paths, but they end with the same conclusion: there is indefatigable strength in the chosen family.

Like so many entries in this hybrid genre of late, it passes both ends of the generic test: unsettling enough to have audiences grimacing, funny enough to provide a few belly laughs.

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.

Pugh is very much at home in this kind of role, but it’s no less arresting in its familiarity.

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.

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.

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.

You will leave Dead Reckoning the same way you always do: wondering how Cruise could possibly outdo himself in the next one – until inevitably, he does.

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

That Luhrmann trades in razzle-dazzle certainly helps: he capitalises on his subject’s fondness for garish sunglasses, giant sideburns, and an arsenal of jumpsuits filigreed with gems and boasting outlandish collars. The two men’s shared appetite for gilded excess and perpetual motion makes this tribute, even more than the biopic, seem like a kinship of strutting peacocks.

As a class satire, it reaches no conclusions. But it’s filled to the brim with darkly funny, bile-slicked revulsion.

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.

Buckley, already a frontrunner for the Academy Award for Best Actress, lives up to all the chatter and more. Like Mescal, she’s well-placed to express Agnes’s particular grief.

Maria is a tragedy, but not because of one of life’s piteous events. Instead it’s the tragedy of a woman’s failure to heal her wounds with her art.

Torres, in her masterfully controlled performance, offers up all we could possibly require.

The brilliance of Adams’ performance lies in its subtlety and restraint, as well as its emotional rawness. Much of the dramatic tension here comes from her struggle to keep things together: to make appointments on time and to put her family’s interests ahead of her own for once.

Lovely, immaculate, and extremely faithful.

The fourth ‘Matrix’ film offers a volcanic cluster of ideas with ambition – and a reminder that long black coats and tiny sunglasses are, indeed, very cool.

Vengeance Most Fowl sees Aardman return to their tried-and-tested formula. Yet, it’s also the source of the studio’s continuing brilliance – somehow, the familiar always feels new, and the craftwork never tires.

Bitter and twisted and a visual marvel. [18 Jul 1996, p.6]

There’s no room for the sentimental here. No Grinch hearts suddenly grow three sizes. That’s not how it works in the real world, and Oppenheimer is interested instead in the smaller, more subtle shifts.

This is slippery, subversive storytelling that’s very hard to get any firm grasp on – but that is one of its main pleasures.

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.

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.

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

A thoughtful reframing of the Disney original’s metaphor for racism – with new character Gary De’Snake stealing the show.

Matt Reeves’s take on the Caped Crusader may not be a genre-defining miracle, but it delivers a tapered-down, intimate portrait, while Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman brings an almost-extinct sensuality to the role.

It’s surprising how much the film can flit between clangingly obvious bits of exposition – aha! The source of the floppy red hat! A reindeer that happens to be named Blitzen! – and more mature perspectives on the holidays.

It’s both wholly satisfying and ridiculously fun.

Robin Robin may be short, but it’s rich and satisfying – maybe one to serve alongside the pudding on Christmas Day.

H Is for Hawk concerns itself less with the healing of wounds, but rather with the prying open of them. Can we look so deep into the pulp that the fear of it eventually washes away?

Passages is smart and precise about other people’s messes. It’s a way to indulge in the most volatile parts of ourselves without ever feeling like we’re about to lose control.

David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult lead a movie that doesn’t just serve as a referendum for superhero films, but for the cinematic future of DC as a whole.

Park has a galvanising kind of curiosity behind the lens, pairing here with cinematographer Kim Woo Hyung. There’s always a new, unexpected angle to either watch Man Su or see his point of view.

Passing is as richly felt as it is carefully conceived.

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo and based on his cult cartoon, the film is a computer graphics showpiece: best at swooping round structures (skyscrapers) and rotating three- dimensional objects (lots of explosions). But it's the hallucinogenic sequences that tell you why it has become a cult. [03 Feb 1991, p.24]

As with Derrickson’s previous collaboration with Hawke, 2012’s Sinister, the director proves he can deliver an effective jumpscare – slick, and not too telegraphed. But there’s a thematic weight here that elevates The Black Phone above any of his previous work in the genre, a dark reminder of how often moral panics and bogeymen are conjured up in order to turn a society’s eyes away from the real and inescapable violence happening in people’s own homes.

The director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer.

I Swear is a crowdpleaser that doesn’t make a spectacle out of its subject, nor mines the darker chapters of their life for tearjerking sentimentality.

One of Them Days is funny as hell, but it also speaks to something sharply honest when Dreux sighs and mutters, “It shouldn’t have to be this hard.”

This film is nasty, funny, and cogent about the era it’s set in.

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

Its opening monologue speaks of music’s ability to “pierce the veil between life and death”. Sinners, in all its beauty and horror, proves the same can be true of film.

The Oompa Loompas are still problematic, but director Paul King’s follow-up to the Paddington movies can’t help but charm.

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.

One of Ken Loach's more harrowing evocations of working-class British life, anchored by Crissy Rock's performance as a hard-knocked Liverpudlian battling for the right to raise her children. [23 Oct 2014, p.54]

There’s something oddly satisfying about the way McKay's film lets us laugh at our own doom.

Edwards presents himself as an ideas-on-his-sleeve kind of guy, who’s invested in readdressing the meaning behind some of the most commonplace sci-fi imagery.

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.

Yasujiro Ozu's final film, re-released in a restored version, is a stately, slow-burning but very moving family drama.

The irony of being intimately connected while desperately lonely can be a hard one to digest. Yet director Mia Hansen-Løve prods at the concept with the same tenderness that she applies to all her films – each of them united by the pains and pleasures of interconnectivity.

Stone gives surely the boldest performance of her career so far, in a role that puts upon her heavy physical and psychological demands.

As its intricate hand-to-hand combat sequences play out, the crunch of bones seems to ricochet around the room you’re in – as does the satisfying thud of a throwing axe as it embeds itself into a tree trunk.

Madison takes a character trained by life to always pounce – on an opportunity or a threat – and subtly, but consistently, reveals to us her softness and her soul.

To the film’s credit, there’s also real style tucked into the periphery, as characters breeze past Richard Quinn florals and Lady Gaga, still in her Tim Burton demon era, performs on a runway of models in loose, patterned Seventies gowns and oversized hats. It’s a compromise. But, then, that’s what The Devil Wears Prada 2 has turned out to be all about – it’s artistry snuck in beneath the commerce.

Dashcam is pure chaos, headlined by a character with a maelstrom for a personality.

While Beck and Woods flirt with convention in the film’s later stages, as it grows wilder and more gruesome, Heretic is a wordy horror that holds up surprisingly well under scrutiny.

There’s a mainstream, global scope to the film, but Smith and Peter Bayham’s script isn’t without the small quirks and observations native to British comedy.

Oakley’s film ends on an ambiguous though hopeful note. Usually, this sort of conclusion risks coming across as a little mechanically inspirational. But Jean is a complicated sort of hero, full of indecision and regret. It’s something bracingly captured by McEwen, who plays her as someone in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight.

Every aesthetic decision here seems carefully made, even down to the brightly painted frontier towns (the historically accurate choice), which play in jokey contrast to a literal “white town”, in all meanings of the phrase. That’s what makes The Harder They Fall feel so thrilling – it’s a film that exists in the past, present, and future, all at the same time.

The Many Saints of Newark is both instantly recognisable and somehow unplaceable. It’s fierce and brilliant, too – a work that both expands on and complicates the cultural legacy of The Sopranos.

It’s conflicted, messy, ambiguous, and imperfect, but it’s treated with enough of a delicate, scrupulous hand to test the moral waters and not degrade itself in the process.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a love story written in blood, sweat and the slime of half-eaten brains.

Sentimental Value doesn’t argue that art heals all wounds, but that it’s sometimes the only recourse for honest expression.

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.

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.

When the inevitable comes for our protagonist, The Mastermind delivers it as one of the smartest, wryest punchlines of the year.

It’s rich thematic territory for the series, and slowly amps up the audience’s anticipation for the moment these two finally cross paths. When they do, it’s spectacular and audacious.

This is an audacious project and one which, for all its flaws, has much to commend it.

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

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]

This lavish historical epic has plenty of campy treasure in it. [07 Aug 2013]

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.

Hoskins is admirably twitchy as the crime-boss in the midst of having his henchmen culled, and being unable to work out who is behind it. [06 Mar 2000, p.21]

The special effects are gruesomely convincing, and Robinson views the world of advertising with a characteristically sharp comic eye. [25 Jul 1989, p.29]

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.

Blighted by development problems and a star whose downward spiral has been widely dissected by all, this superhero blockbuster emerges just as confused as predicted.

Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.

Wish, clearly, has been made with care, but as its credits offer a whistle-stop tour through Disney’s history, it’s hard not to think – god, wasn’t it great when they made stuff as weird and fun and daring as, say, The Emperor’s New Groove?

Most of the callbacks are played for light humour, not self-importance. Yes, it’s easy to tell you’re being manipulated. But it’s just as easy to respond with: so what?

It’s well-performed and efficiently emotive. Just like the music of Take That, I guess.

Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.

The Boogeyman is conventional horror, comfortably elevated – the same old monster in a shiny, new hat.

The tension of Thirteen Lives is implicit, and ramps up like a vice – how long until all these people’s luck finally runs out? But I do wonder whether all this soberness has prevented a good film from being an extraordinary one.

In Sing 2’s defence, the film is at least enthusiastic about its own overabundance, and the new celebrity voice additions – Halsey’s mollycoddled, rich-girl wolf or Letitia Wright’s street-dancing lynx – fit nicely into the mix.