This picture is, in part, an attempt to assuage guilt at enjoying the teen-camp slasher at its most misogynistic and transphobic. It is also, as the director would admit, an amusing send-up of where they now find themselves.

At the heart of the film is 11-year-old Lidia, raised within this fiercely loving queer household. Through her eyes, Céspedes captures the tenderness and volatility of a family under siege.

Shot in perennial murk, relentless in its cruel focus, Obsession is, at its heart, a deathly serious film with a troubling message to convey. Well worth enduring (if that’s the word).

The Sheep Detectives, a family-friendly whodunit that marries pastoral whimsy with unexpectedly weighty themes, is a rare, woolly beast.

The set list could use a few more upbeat numbers, but the project finds a heartfelt focus in the fans, who sob, snivel and bawl their way through loud, dramatic singalongs. Trembling manicured hands hold thousands of iPhones aloft.

This is ultimately an inspirational yarn focused on the value of standing by convictions.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond cares not a jot for the confines of conventional narrative and identification. This is cinema as bombardment, as fetish, as swooning fan collage. Who needs a new Bond film?

This is not horror gussied up as allegory or prestige: it is, pleasingly, a straight ghost story, executed with rigour, a swipe at misogyny and a sly sense of fun.

Philippe brings few stylistic flourishes to the film, but the fascinating conversation, punctuated by delving into her personal archives, should be more than enough to satisfy the serious cinephile. She is kinder about Hitchcock than some of his other female leads. She is realistic about the rigours of the studio system.

Taking cues from the gameplay, this compelling psyche-out is deceptively simple.

For all the eccentricity of its premise, Rose of Nevada has things to say about how easily we can become disconnected from the relatively recent past.

The film is about the cost of success. It is about the emptiness of fame. It is about the companionship of women (in small groups and in vast stadiums). Those themes are expounded with an invention and wit that add bounce to a film draped in rich, oil-painterly gloom. Approach with the most open of minds.

The script, written by the director and Tibério Azul, occasionally fumbles its dystopian framework. But the journey has enough vigour, underpinned by ideas on autonomy and ageing, to sustain its adventure.

The picture, shot in Ireland and Spain, will prove a blast for those who like their horror propulsive, transgressive and (in a good way) nauseating. Cronin and his team haven’t quite solved the age-old problem of what to do with the Mummy, but they have confirmed that it remains a dilemma worth tackling. The film deserves the pharaoh’s ransom it will undoubtedly make.

Camus’s prose is heard as we sink into intellectual concerns that obsessed French intellectuals through the 1950s. But it remains a gripping piece that treats its source with great respect.

The coda veers into the conceptual chaos of weaker, later Paranormal Activity instalments, but it’s a promising start for the director’s proposed trilogy. Keep ’em coming.

Taking its cues from those ancient remains, Rosi’s deserving Special Prize winner at Venice gifts us a pristine, durable snapshot of Naples.

Revelling in bright fabrics and seductive horizons, the director, despite all the conflicts, is here to argue for both the warmth of traditional families and the excitement of contemporary youth culture. No film other than Sirat has, this year, made such compelling use of music.

It would be a mistake to seek too many lessons from the film. Its great achievement is in the creation of a timeless nowhere that is both drawn from history and independent of it. That is the absurdist ideal.

Sorrentino supplies the occasional surreal house-style flourish – a drifting tear observed in zero gravity – but mostly the director leans into the quiet complexities of Servillo’s turn.

A humane work devised by serious minds.

Working from a blackly comic script by Austin Kolodney, Van Sant fashions a shouty standoff in the tradition of Network and Dog Day Afternoon.

Resurrection, shot with extravagant beauty by Dong Jingsong, makes more sense on first viewing than the director perhaps allows. Each story is whole in itself. But it has the quality of a gorgeous knot that will never fully be untied.

The director comes seriously close to re-creating the elegiac spell of In the Mood for Love, but, unlike Wong Kar-Wai’s film, the emotional core remains frustratingly out of reach.

It is such a shame that momentum is allowed to sag as the film shuffles through six endings when either of the first two would do nicely. To that point, Project Hail Mary is a model of high-class popular entertainment. An explicit tribute to a Steven Spielberg classic in the opening third feels like no great overreach.

Sound of Falling asks a fair bit of audiences. It provides great rewards for those who oblige.

This is, for good or ill, the sort of enterprise both fans and detractors will be talking about for years to come.

There are technical blips. Occasionally, the 3D character animation and frame-rate stutter in the margins. But the film’s approximation of temporal confines never leaves the viewer feeling stuck in a moment.

Night Shift does not go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria’s eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us compellingly through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday.

A bruising character study that challenges the audience to sift genuine catastrophe from psychic projection.

In Mendonça Filho’s slippery moral universe, revelation offers neither catharsis nor closure, only the squeamish knowledge that some nightmares end, and others are obscured by history.

Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s debut feature is a formally playful, gorgeously rendered, emotionally impactful adaptation of Amélie Nothomb’s autobiographical novella from 2000. Bring tissues.

The zingers could be zippier. But what makes the film feel radical is its welcome and unwavering confidence in 2D animation as a comedic anvil. Sight gags pile up, frames stretch and snap, and the fourth wall is wobbly. In a genre increasingly marred by CG realism, Looney Tunes revels in its cartoonish artifice.

Grief is seldom this entertaining.

Trash this classy doesn’t come along often enough.

My Father’s Shadow, which was coproduced by Element Pictures, is not a conventional political drama. Instead it quietly marries personal and national histories, offering a deceptively sprawling portrait of Lagos, a family and the fragile, frantic ways people try to hold on against tyranny.

Linklater repays the debt in a beautiful film that eschews granular analysis of the art for a broad celebration of Frenchness at its most proudly awkward. It captures the point at which artists were just discovering energies that would turn culture on its head in the decade to come.

It makes no grand claims for itself, gesturing briefly at ethical complexity before pegging it towards efficient, blood-soaked mayhem.

As ever, Mustaine is unmistakably himself. The tunes are good, too. Godspeed, Megadeth.

[Hania] carefully sidesteps ethical questions about the use of performance alongside archival evidence with a clear-headed chronicle of a tragedy and of wider Palestinian suffering.

Lilleaas and Reinsve go up against each other with nuanced vigour. Fanning, though not suggesting any real film star I can think of, has fun spreading trivial glamour about the place. Skarsgard deserves the Oscar he may well receive.

At a moment when truth is increasingly relative, Cover-Up acknowledges the grim continuation of the state apparatus that Hersh first exposed in the aftermath of My Lai. Without journalists of his calibre, we’d be none the wiser.

Wiseman has made films about bureaucracies, city halls and cabarets, but here the institution is pleasure itself. It’s a feast that will leave many viewers ravenous.

Whishaw’s performance is a theatrical masterclass in controlled ramble; Hall’s is the art of listening, with responses that range from concern to a slightly cocked head. Their chemistry enlivens the most throwaway anecdote.

Here is an intelligent entertainment as generously stuffed as the greatest 19th-century novel. They rarely make them like this any more.

Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man may be the most chilling film of 2025, not simply because of the notoriety of Julian Assange, its subject, but also as a clinical exposé of the elaborate machinery of state power, media hostility and private opportunism.

The visual gags are fresh, the jokes are funny, the world-building is disarmingly buoyant, and the musical cues, from Holiday in Cambodia to Carmina Burana, are playful.

Breakdown: 1975, like the best films of that period, never lets up on entertainment as it pursues a serious end. We don’t get just Network and Harlan County, USA; we also get The Towering Inferno and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All contribute to sharp analysis of a body politic apparently unaware of its own psychological instability.

There is much else to admire in this beautifully shot, cruelly raw film, but, with some justification, most of the talk will be about the female lead. One can think of few other actors who can so unashamedly access such torrents of simulated emotion.

All the best science fiction on artificial intelligence is really about the challenges of being human. Her is full of strong, sly jokes and intriguing speculation on future technologies. But, ultimately, it is a sad story about the difficulty of making meaningful connection with any psyche, whether organically evolved or digitally tailored to the user's needs.

Djukic’s feature debut echoes the sensitivities of Céline Sciamma’s early coming-of-age stories but with a bold, cinematic bent.

The closing sequence, sure to endure future homage from impressed film-makers, has already become famous for its chilling ambiguity. One of the year’s very best films.

The three leads demonstrate absolute belief in romantic absolutes as we drift towards a class of sob-heavy denouement Hollywood now rarely attempts. The Irish director’s best film yet.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady cemented their reputation for tender portraits of young people blossoming away from home with their earlier films The Boys of Baraka, Detropia and the Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp. With Folktales, the veteran documentary duo return to familiar thematic terrain with renewed compassion.

The director’s formal control, from the eerie electronic sounds of an ondes Martenot to the startling image of blood flowering across ice, collides the cinematic and the liminal.

Mind you, everyone here is suffering. That overbearing mass of existential angst almost certainly contributes to the many negative responses, but few will endure its attack without admitting they’ve sat through something out of the ordinary.

For all the Hollywood gloss, Vanderbilt sounds an alarming relevance in Göring’s sneering claim that Hitler “made us feel German again” and Triest’s warning that “it happened because people let it happen”.

Bentley sometimes leans too heavily on lyricism and voiceover, but the film’s earnestness and restraint cast a strange spell. Train Dreams may mourn a disappearing US, but, more movingly, its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with.

This remains a careering exercise in mid-ranking Yorgosia that just about justifies its many indulgences. We should remain grateful that a talent so odd remains somewhere adjacent to the mainstream.

The Palestinian submission for international picture at the incoming Academy Awards is a handsome, old-fashioned production that, even when it is telling us things we didn’t know, confirms all our worst suspicions about the British colonial experience in the Holy Land.

In common with Jude’s scathing attack on the gig economy and toxic online culture in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 takes a scattershot approach to various targets: anti-Semitism, capitalism, nationalism and religious hypocrisy. The incomparable writer-director’s dark comedy doesn’t care to resolve its heroine’s quandary; it’s out to poke with ethical heft and barbed wit.

This is a cinema of introversion, concealment and evasion. Nothing is given up easily.

This is a nervy study of how poverty wears people down, eroded by uncertainty and the grinding effort to stay afloat.

This excellent debut feature from Ben Leonberg may be unique among horror films in fairly attracting the compound adjectives “deeply unsettling” and “utterly adorable”.

Blunt works hard to flesh out an underwritten role, but Safdie seems more interested in Kerr’s silences than his partner’s complaints. The relationship is too ill-defined to land an emotional punch.

Dickinson plays a small role as Mike’s antagonistic friend, but everything rests on Dillane’s powerhouse turn and the writer-director’s compassionate, daring script.

With its fast-paced walking, talking and shouting into telephones, A House of Dynamite is a nervy, timely thriller that goes down like Coca-Cola while another US brand – its military – takes centre stage.

Hassan and Ingar deliver compelling, complementary performances: Hassan is as quiet and vulnerable as Ingar is fiery and charismatic. Clarissa Cappellani’s fluid cinematography and Fiona DeSouza’s stylish edits and inserts keep pace with the youthful exuberance. Judicious use of flashback sets up a gut-punch coda.

Anderson and his fine cast layer all these pyrotechnics with a palpable sadness for their characters and for the country. There are few explicit arguments here about the state of the US, but one can imagine endless such arguments being projected upon it.

McConaughey and Ferrera prove the most delightful endangered bus companions since Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Speed, exhibiting just the right balance between tension and comradeship.

Forming a Greek chorus, the films are only as disjointed as their context: the obliteration of normal life and the stubborn, miraculous act of carrying on.

None of which is to suggest the film backs away from great gags that, as it was in 1984, continue deep into hilarious improvisation over the end credits.

Allegories are unavoidable. The walk is American capitalism. The walk is life itself. It requires, however, no such connections to enjoy the best King adaptations in many years.

In his impressive feature-length debut, the Irish documentarian Gar O’Rourke offers an immersive and mesmerising portrait of life in a still recognisably Soviet institution.

The extravagance of Fastvold’s techniques can sometimes get in the way of the characters. Strong supporting actors such as Lewis Pullman, Thomasin McKenzie and Christopher Abbott don’t quite succeed in making personalities heard over Blumberg’s bewitching arrangements. But, as cinema of melodic effect, The Testament of Ann Lee could hardly be bettered.

Sudan, Remember Us gives voice to the ordinary revolutionaries it portrays.

The strain of absent fathers, generational addiction and the cycle of poverty are carefully countered by resilience, love and the flicker of youthful possibility.

One good reason we all have to remain upright is this clever, original, warm cinematic balm.

Horrible, silly, reprehensible, enormously good fun.

Materialists has received the odd puzzled review in its home territory, but it has the welcome oddness of a future classic.

The tragic cycle is composed of the same beats that defined such superior films as The Godfather and Animal Kingdom. But the tight focus on Lesia, and her realisation that the men she loves are also capable of monstrous things, reinvigorates the familiar form.

When the macabre does fully show itself, no concessions are made to taste or restraint. Though Weapons is lavishly shot and expensively acted – Amy Madigan is deliciously gamey in a role we won’t spoil – it ultimately settles into the rhythms of premium-brand pulp.

What begins as a twisted riff on Hansel and Gretel spirals into a grisly meditation on trauma, punctuated by unsettling dark-web videos, gaslighting and a supernatural ritual that is never satisfactorily explained.

At its best, Dreams is intimate and contemplative, anchored by Overbye’s dreamy voiceover and performance. The second half loses some of that purpose.

It must be admitted that, against the odds, the team do a largely satisfactory job of reanimating the corpse. I’m not sure audiences will have quite as much fun watching the thing as the writers plainly had getting it on to the page. But they have certainly stuck to the brief with admirable diligence.

Lo-fi, disarmingly intense, and shot on textured 16mm by cinematographer Matheus Bastos, this impressive debut feature casts a twitchy, retro shadow over the less salubrious parts of New Jersey.

The script’s wandering and overlapping arcs can feel uneven and tricksy, yet there’s something utterly compelling in how Glasner stages decay not just as a biological inevitability, but a doomy familial legacy.

At any rate, though loose in structure, Friendship offers a few minor masterpieces in the art of cringe.

Romantic comedies typically demand an easy reconciliation. The Other Way Around, although ponderous in places, is skilful enough to leave the viewer rooting for precisely the opposite. It’s a neat trick: like pulling a tablecloth from under dishes in reverse.

The film, set within the bland, institutional corridors of a Norwegian primary school, chronicles a single afternoon that stretches into a surreal purgatory of suspicion, guilt and (finally) something like the compellingly demented choreography of Climax, Gaspar Noé’s dance horror.

Perry and his editor, Robert Greene (using split screens and collage techniques), build a dizzying kaleidoscope of timelines, earnestness and glee. What emerges is a film that’s as formally adventurous and oddly affecting as the soundtrack.

Before Amongst the Wolves resolves itself into a familiar genre (I was much reminded of a particular British film from the noughties), we get a grim survey of stubborn urban discontents.

Considered as an exercise in hushed mortal contemplation, The Shrouds, sombrely scored by Howard Shore, earns a spot beside Cronenberg’s best work. This is just the sort of unclassifiable oddity that the greatest directors, now less concerned with expectations, manage late into fecund careers.

Jurassic World: Rebirth plays, nonetheless, as a refreshing blast of matinee exuberance after the pomposity of the previous three films. Yes, third best in the series. For whatever little that is worth.

The Gold Rush is a typical Chaplin film; but it is better than any of those that have been produced before. From the very first moment of the picture Chaplin strikes that curious note of sublime aloofness that sets the key of all his best work. [19 Jan 1926, p.6]

The film has sad stories to tell about Minnelli’s marriages, but there is often grim humour in the footage.

What most sticks in the brain is the film’s incidental meditation on the mythology of England from distant past to speculated future.

The film does occasionally struggle with getting England right. We are always aware that this is a French film-maker looking through the window at the crumpets on their doilies. But there is a mischievous intelligence at work that complements the embrace of sometimes broad misunderstandings.