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.

A terrific, gripping drama that will cross cultural borders with ease. Every nation has such stories.

It’s a knotty, fascinating delve into the French legal system, the nature of truth and the institution of marriage.

Scorsese’s rhapsodical memories match the romance of Powell and Pressburger’s transportive storytelling and indelible images; his account of first seeing the rhododendrons in Black Narcissus on a nitrate print is as magical as the image.

It has the precision of retooled memory. It speaks to experienced time and place.

Risk and bondage are seldom as playful as they are in Babygirl.

Beau Is Afraid is all clatter and stress and movement, but the director is in control throughout, engineering both comic set pieces and existential show trials with equal invention.

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.

As ever, Reichardt works in delicate movements as a storyteller. Magaro and Lee’s wonderful chemistry keeps perfectly in step with the filmmaker.

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.

Shot in chiselled light by Lukasz Zal, who was behind the camera for the first two films in the trilogy, Fatherland also becomes, as the car moves eastwards, increasingly taken up with the ravages of grief and the responsibility of the artist. Those themes come together in a beautiful, sad epiphany that closes out a terse film with divine economy.

Revisiting many of the master’s favourite themes – familial obligations, intergenerational frictions – Ozu’s 54th film delicately maintains its post-war critique.

The script, by Johannes Duncker and director Ilker Çatak, grabs the viewer from the get-go. Judith Kaufmann’s urgent, claustrophobic cinematography tightens the vice-like grip.

Youthful exuberance has seldom been so painful or compelling to watch.

Trust Kelly Fremon Craig, the writer-director of The Edge of Seventeen, the best teen movie of the past decade, to translate Blume’s seminal novel into a funny, exhilarating coming-of-age movie that will charm all genders.

Think Mean Girls mashed into Lindsay Anderson’s If ... But with more sublimated high-feminist discourse. Just perfect.

The cast rises to match a huge emotional register culminating in literal and figurative explosions. Audiard’s book reimagines the musical halfway between heated drama and song. Choreography, cinematography, and design equally lean into his Sprechstimme innovations.

Hogg has created her own universe and explored it with relentless vigour. Few final shots have so satisfactorily summed up such a magnum opus. Sod the detractors.

Mirror is much copied, but as the recent run of Terrence Malick films demonstrates, eschewing time and plot for flotsam and psyche is much harder than Tarkovsky makes it look.

A remarkable piece of work.

Unnervingly naturalistic performances from two cinematic legends – the great Italian giallo master Dario Argento, the great Italian giallo master and the star of La Maman et La Putain – add to the sense of loss.

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.

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

Bones and All deftly segues between teenage romance, hinterland tableaux and genuinely unsettling encounters.

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

The enduring quality of the 1953 original is rooted in its engagement with the twin atomic disasters of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This prequel, similarly, yokes American imperialism, postwar malaise, survivor guilt and weaponised atomic power to produce the best action film of the year.

This is a profoundly serious film, one concerned about our disregard for animals and our disintegrating ecosystems, but it is also restlessly alive.

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.

Grief is seldom this entertaining.

Following on from Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, Crossing gifts us the second essential Georgian screen heroine of 2024.

The film is ultimately a showcase for Sweeney, however. You can see the panic rising beneath the young actor’s calm, collected front. It’s a brilliantly measured turn that couldn’t be further from Sweeney’s iconic breakdown as the vulnerable Cassie on Euphoria.

Maybe, Morgan’s Creek does not have the ironic grit of Sullivan’s Travels or the suave perfection of The Lady Eve, but, as a showcase for Sturges the comic impresario, it can hardly be bettered.

Defiant, endlessly resourceful and gripping cinema.

We’re accustomed to Dumont leapfrogging from one genre to another, but he has seldom attempted so many swerves and shifts as he manages here.

A worthy contender in a British revival characterised by eerie cult classics as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Lee Haven Jones’s The Feast and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men.

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

There’s something of the Greek weird wave or Wes Anderson in Cavalli’s deadpan humour, which is offset by Porcaroli’s wildly energetic central turn.

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.

There is always room for a post-Beatles doc if it’s this good and this original.

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.

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.

Happily, Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi put in mountain-sized performances to offset the film’s silences and propensity for postcard shots, bringing heart and guts to the chilliest scenery. A worthwhile hike through many obstacles to friendship.

The damaged, rising community depicted in Sugarland are in no mood for apologies. They want accountability.

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.

A film that feels as authentic as it is boisterous.

The Unknown reworks the body swap, a trope favoured by goofy romcoms, as elevated horror.

For all the undeniable power of Occupied City, some will wonder if, given its formal repetitions, the piece should not be presented as an installation. Maybe. But the concentration and lack of distraction allow that greater degree of immersion. That sense of being dragged through a narrative – even a non-linear one – is a vital part of its unsettling appeal.

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.

Time will tell if the social media thread is set to become the epic poem of the new millennium. For now, Zola feels like a triumphant lunge into fresh territory.

Akhtar, an actor who was so impressive in Four Lions and Utopia, and Claire Rushbrook, recently seen as Enola Holmes’s housekeeper, make for a quietly magnetic couple. For all the obstacles they face, this remains a strangely joyful film.

Ardent lovers may well wish for someone to look at them the way Attenborough looks at giant kelp; at another moment, he excitedly recalls forgetting to breathe during his first snorkel.

For much of its impressive duration, Dolan’s film blurs the line between family friction, bipolar disorder and the supernatural.

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 Surfer, for all its unpleasantness, offers encouraging evidence that there is still room for existential awkwardness in contemporary cinema. No better, odder man than Nicolas Cage to act that out as the catechism of surfism gains another worthy chapter.

Perhaps Gray’s best film so far.

Dragon 2 feels like a proper film, not just a cartoon.

In Swan Song, feathers, synchronicity and sheer graft define the world’s most popular ballet.

It doesn’t exactly subvert expectations, but the sharp writing and subtle acting make for a more satisfying experience than a bald synopsis promises.

A real stonker of an entertainment.

A jigsaw puzzle, dream sequences and continuous snatches of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata build towards an uneasy denouement that will leave the viewer guessing and obsessing long after the final credits roll.

Older than Ireland is at its most moving when addressing the universal experiences that shape all lives.

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.

The film is a genre entertainment and, like all such beasts, it honours certain conventions and allows certain compromises.

An anecdote concerning the “amusing, bright, and always very vinegary” Gore Vidal being caught by a woman police officer breaking into Williams’s New York apartment would, alone, make Truman & Tennessee required viewing.

For all the plum-on-the-nose satire, Östlund does not, however, fall into the trap of making every target a monster.

Honour Among Thieves could have tidied away its plot more economically, but the leisurely pacing does allow us to connect with the surprisingly fleshy characters. It is no mean feat to make something so funny from such unpromising material. It is more impressive still to end on a genuinely moving note. A welcome surprise.

A welcome innovation is the foregrounding of the dead; previous iterations have focused only on the survivors. The casting of mostly unknown Argentine and Uruaguarn actors adds to the novelty, as does the film’s compelling depiction of survivors’ guilt after the “Heroes of the Andes” return to their home country.

What makes the thing really fly – and it does still fly – is the witty energy of Jon Watts’s direction and the fizzy chemistry between the core actors.

In short, Kosinski and his team have accomplished their odd, hybrid mission more impressively than should have been possible. Most importantly, they have, in an age of cartoon computer graphics, delivered action sequences that appear to be taking place in the real world.

The action is character driven, not issue led. It’s a heartfelt miniature, prettily shot by the cinematographer Kristen Correll.

The Mitchells vs the Machines feels, even without the benefits of a theatrical run, just like summer.

Taking a leaf from Parasite, Barbarian both literally and figuratively plays with the idea that however unpleasant things seem there’s always a scarier, lower level.

For all that self-aware fuss, Glass Onion works darn well as a mystery romp. It is a little smooth to the touch, but there are beautiful chicanes along the route to a satisfactorily clamorous conclusion.

Bounce along as Julie might and it’s a lively, sexy, eventful two-hour adventure.

This tribute feels plausible. It feels touching. But it also feels a bit otherworldly. All those adjectives are appropriate for another tremendous film from one of our era’s great young directors.

Christian Petzold, the film’s writer as well as director, rightly took home Berlin’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize for this genre-defying comedy of manners. The German master deftly weaves ecological catastrophe, sexual capering and a portrait of beta masculinity into a plot that, at first glance, could be a holiday-from-hell sitcom episode.

At the risk of damning with the faintest praise, this is easily Bay’s best film in more than 25 years.

Strickland has expressed a passion for This is Spinal Tap and Flux Gourmet has much to do with how close confinement causes creative types to claw out one another’s eyes. The characters here are every bit as cleanly drawn as the members of that fictional rock group and, even if they generate less open affection, they also encourage one to take sides.

Nia DaCosta, young director of the fine Little Woods, is behind the camera and she shows a real gift for gruesome showboating.

A late narrative development swerves the meet-cute into less sure-footed terrain. But this remains an encounter to treasure, jollied along by quiet political protest and poignant notes on widowhood.

As a love letter from grown-up Riot grrrls to their growing-up daughters, it’s a lovely cross-generational gesture.

Many will retain understandable uneasiness about the project, but few could deny the technical brilliance and dedication to an austere brief. An essential watch. Though maybe just the once.

One Life breaks no new cinematic ground. But it tells a story worth hearing. And it allows an indisputable great one more chance to show us what he can do.

This is softer, more emotional and in some ways, more obvious, than Angelopoulos's other work, yet it has a memorable, moving grandeur. [11 Jun 1999, p.13]

A compelling and hopeful insight into the turbulence leading up to the 2021 coup.

There remains a warmth and goofiness in Lehtinen’s performance that harks back to Napoleon Dynamite as much as it recalls such similarly themed bro pics as High Fidelity and Clerks. It’s enough to restore one’s faith in the near-extinct subgenre once known as the teen comedy.

Here is a film clawed up from the damp soil and smeared imaginatively across the screen. It is unlikely to be confused with Wild Mountain Thyme.

Nobody with a sense for contemplative cinema will be left unsatisfied by Notturno.

Joshua James Richards’s poetic cinematography – allowing in sunsets that drag us back to the America of John Ford – contributes to the queasy sense that redemption can come from landscape. Those sorts of conflicts are everywhere in a film that is quietly at war with itself throughout.

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.

There is a lot to like here, not least Ray Winstone’s Papa Bear. The forests are Skittle-coloured. The set pieces are wild and kinetic. But it is Banderas’s star power that saves the day.

More analysis of the films would have enriched this entertaining chronicle, but it remains a rollicking account of the most important movie partnership since Powell and Pressburger.

James Watkins’s version easily justifies its independent existence, however. Four first-rate performances find new energies in the story. The shift in nationalities adds other interesting angles.

Having honed their film-making through endless online pastiches, the directors know just how to time the stomach-jolting jump scares. There is forever a hand ready to grab your unsuspecting ankle.

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.

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

Pritz collaborates commendably and sensitively with his subjects.

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.