Detailing the cold shoulders offered to a young woman after she becomes pregnant in 1960s France, the film works evocative period detail in with implicit warnings against contemporary backsliding on reproductive rights. The relentless clockwork of human biology lends it an awful tension. The actors give in to no cheap options.

A bracingly original, notably creepy film that leaves you brooding on its knotty messages.

My Old Ass sensitively and sweetly negotiates coming-of-age themes, first love, wistful summer recollections and wise-cracking dialogue.

Tung, an occasional actor who has won seven Hong Kong Golden Horse awards for his choreography, brings poignancy and authenticity to the thrills and spills.

At 72 minutes, Playground falls shy of feature length, yet it atones with a sickening sense of dread and pinpoint emotional accuracy. The performances that Wandel coaxes out of her young cast are remarkable and often painful to behold.

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.

A grim thrill rounded off with a chilling last shot.

It is not unreasonable to wonder if Mission: Impossible is moving into its Spy Who Loved Me phase. After all, Tom Cruise and the series itself are more than a decade older than, respectively, Roger Moore and the Bond Cinematic Universe at the time of that film. Have we reached cosy pastiche? Is it now all just one big guffaw? On balance, no. The exhaustingly titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is certainly aware of its own occasional ridiculousness.

This is often a difficult film to watch. The subject’s physical frailty is palpable, and his resistance to even the least intrusive advice is infuriating. The atmosphere of fug, filth and peril is suffocating. But Chambers selects the footage cunningly to always allow whispers of charm to filter through the stubbornness.

Pitched somewhere between folk horror, ecological revenge and scathing class critique, The Feast is at its best during the elegantly atmospheric, nervy first hour, as cinematographer Bjørn Ståle Bratberg picks out ominous details.

An exciting and often powerful piece of mainstream film-making that allows its heroes to emerge as normal people who make everyday mistakes. Highly recommended.

Harrison Jr is frazzled and electric; Russell is wounded and circumspect. The audacious drama is matched by musical cues from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score and a wildly impressive collection of tunes, running from A$AP to SZA.

It’s all very superficial, but carried off with impeccable style.

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.

A perfect late-summer diversion.

A small film about great matters.

For all the gloom, this is a lovely, heartfelt creation from the Oscar-winning animator.

Energy does not buzz around this film, but it swells with decency, humanity and quiet bravery.

The directors do good work in conjuring up a remote era and teasing out still extant racial tensions. One does, however, end up yearning to hear a little more about how the legal team went about their work. A good complaint to have.

A film that is no less thrilling for its sober rigour.

This is an uncomfortable film, but one that sweeps you along in its momentum.

Director McLeod — another of Lee’s fellow students — has fun with contradictory accounts, tall tales and faulty memories in a film that pulls the rug just as effectively as its subject and inscrutable star do.

A penetrating picture of big city loneliness. [14 Mar 1995, p.10]

Horrible, silly, reprehensible, enormously good fun.

So joyous and inventive is each scene that it proves easy to disregard the ambling lack of plot.

Veiel structures his film with grace and guile.

The latest film from the Dardenne brothers, a heart-rending tale of misused immigrants in contemporary Belgium, arrives just two weeks after Frank Berry’s Aisha pondered similar misfortunes in Ireland. Both are roughly in the social-realist mode, but the tone and the perspectives are quite different.

White Riot is here both to educate and to serve the nostalgists.

La Cocina makes watching The Bear feel like listening to Enya in a garden centre.

A fine yarn that arcs towards a memorable denouement.

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

Between Kurtz and Stigter – a Dutch journalist who authored Atlas Of An Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 – no stone is left unturned.

Colin Farrell’s central turn, a lovely, soulful study of melancholy, is one of his best performances to date.

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.

The Creator sticks to a strong, pulpy narrative that never lets up in pace. There are vast action sequences and intimate, scruffy fight scenes. The film is, however, as memorable for its cinematic texture as its twists and turns.

A lively, coming-of-age fable featuring Rockwell’s family – including wife and former Fresh Prince star Karyn Parsons, daughter Lana and son Nico – Sweet Thing has been described by Tarantino as one of the most powerful new films to emerge in years. It’s certainly memorable.

Following on from Harry Wootliff’s infertility romance, Only You, this confirms the British writer-director as an unmissable talent.

By the time we finally see the leading lady, La Panthère des Neiges – as the film was called at home – has long since privileged the journey over the destination.

Nothing Fancy is a rare documentary one would wish longer. The contemporary Kennedy is marvellous company: awkward, intelligent, amusing, realistic about mortality.

Working from a script composed of real-life testimonies and dramatised with youthful verve and extravagant flights of fancy, the director’s follow-up to the exquisite Pinocchio is a true adventure.

It’s not exactly a world you would want to live in but Jumbo, nonetheless, is awash with a sympathetic visual aesthetic that gives us some sense of where the odd passion springs from. It needs a strong actor to compete with that madness, and Merlant does not disappoint.

Dunne’s script, co-written with Malcolm Campbell, packs too much plot in its final 10 minutes, but it hits the emotional beats with gusto throughout. It was, when it was shot two years ago, an effective comment on an absurd crisis. Sadly, it is still that.

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.

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.

Already established as a wizard with buried irony, Pugh politely steals the film with a witty performance that makes sense of even the silliest moments.

The result is neither as sentimental nor as moving – if those adjectives can be separated – as the director’s more personal 20th century films. It does, however, feel complete in itself. Cleanly shot. Immaculately performed. And, no, you probably don’t need to know Spielberg from Carlsberg to have a good time.

Whispered myths about periods and cleanliness coalesce into a perfect accidental riposte to Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

The monkey conceit is a success on several levels. It presses home that sense of Williams being an agent of chaos in any environment.

Cinematographer Matias Penachino opts for a wistful aesthetic, one that complements Bernal’s quieter moments in this irresistible drama.

Not everyone will approve of the big swing here. But few will resist the richness and fullness of [Arnold's] characterisation.

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, the debut feature from the writer and director Pat Boonnitipat, is a warm, witty tear-jerker improbably rooted in elder exploitation.

A gentle, complex film that will pay rewatching.

This is a Terrifier movie: everything is bigger and scarier, including the psychological damage.

Stanfield and Peck movingly channel their late subject against the sweep of history: “The total man does not live one experience.”

Though not quite as extravagantly imaginative as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time or Wolf Children, the eighth feature from Mamoru Hosada marries dazzling spectacle, high-octane action and social commentary.

The Caméra d’Or-winner Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq’s affecting quasi-autobiographical drama is sweetly reminiscent of Céline Sciamma’s childcentric will-o’-the-wisps Petite Maman and My Life as a Courgette.

Bentley, whose father and grandfather rode, has done an exemplary job in recreating that world.

A series of indelible images coalesce into a powerful chronicle of institutional abuse and racial inequality.

The picture doesn’t reach out and grab you. It doesn’t fling viscera in your face. It hangs around outside your house, half hidden in shadow, and gradually insinuates malaise. So, no, not comfort food.

The cool, often static shots and unhurried editing are characteristic of a school of documentary film-making that allows the viewer complete freedom to shuffle significances. There is a beauty in the empty precision.

Archival footage of King, including a lively interview with Merv Griffin, allows the late activist to talk us through his rise to prominence. Whatever is on those sealed tapes, there’s no quibbling with his charisma or his humanity. Pollard’s questioning, vital chronicle is a fitting tribute.

Flow needs to make no specific points about human misuse of the planet. Its generalised sense of environmental dread reminds of something we all know and constantly pretend to forget.

Peter Bebjak’s disciplined film is forever reminding us of arbitrary cruelties and absurd outrages.

Lawrence Michael Levine’s blisteringly original, provocative, often hilarious screenplay lurches between familiar tropes – “I saw the way you were looking at her!” – and jagged edges. It’ll keep you guessing long after the credits roll.

The Nicolas Cage renaissance rages on and this unsettling Ozpoiltation thriller provides a perfect sandbox for “Nicolas Cage”, the actor who enjoys a good metatextual jape.

See How They Run is not quite so self-regarding as Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, but See How They Run is a delightful, shamelessly affectionate deconstruction of ChristieLand that outstays not a second of its welcome.

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.

There’s nary a dull moment – nor a dull character – in this gripping history.

As the band explains in this excellent documentary from Frank Marshall (whose odd career has taken in Arachnophobia, Congo and Alive), it took them five months to go from obscurity in Australia to careering about swinging London with The Beatles.

An engagingly offbeat meditation on the human need for affection and companionship. [08 May 1998, p.13]

Made within the communities it satirises, I Blame Society thrives on its own crotchety energy.

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.

For all that emotional content, Amanda is a pleasingly unsentimental film, never more so than in its understanding of children.

We salute the costume and continuity departments (Betty Austin) on Iris’s consistently bloody frills as she runs, fights and reasons for her “life”. We are with her every step of the way.

Blue Road is most memorable for its crisply edited evocation of unlikely triumph.

More than 100 artists contributed to the homeschool green screen and rough-hewn post-Minecraft animation. The anarchic and imaginative world-building around Batman’s hood is impressive.

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

Though it doesn’t have the complexity of Zodiac or the resonance of The Social Network, this may be Fincher’s sleekest and most uncomplicatedly entertaining film of the current century.

Just when you think the folk-horror vogue is all played out, along comes Aislinn Clarke’s textured delve into Celtic mythology and intergenerational trauma.

Every beautiful frame casts a spell.

The film is at its best when incorporating text from the play with oddly appropriate gameplay.

This handsome Nordic demi-western, inspired by real events and adapted from Ida Jessen’s 2020 novel, The Captain and Ann Barbara, is powered along by Mikkelsen’s rugged charisma and various rustic and maggoty scene partners, including the married runaway serfs Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin, quietly expressive) and Johannes (Morten Hee Andersen), and the self-possessed Romani orphan Anmai Mus (Hagberg Melina).

At the heart of Pillion, a very English class of reasonableness brushes against an equally English interest in hierarchical kink. Nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but doesn’t it play terrible havoc with the knees.

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.

Murray and Watts make something genuinely touching of Iris’s quest to discover what prompted the writer to end it all.

Extravagant horrors and psychological torments ensue. James Vandewater’s edits and Karim Hussain’s phantasmagoric visuals add to the anxiety and chaos.

With the cinematographer David Gallego, the sound designer Olivier Dandré and a superb ensemble cast, Nyoni has crafted indelible tableaux, powered by dark survivors’ humour, blistering originality and retaliatory fury.

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.

Page’s closeness to the material grafts a fascinating biographical dimension to this intimate drama. The story may lack conflict and clout. But it’s great to see Page back on the big screen.

Arjona brings heat to an undeveloped character. Powell, who manages to wring a moment of magnetism from iPhone notes, inevitably steals the show.

Dumb, fun, and definitely not for the acrophobic. See it. Then go argue plot points with people on the internet.

Fair Play was acquired by Netflix following a bidding war at Sundance. It’s a fitting home for Chloe Domont’s debut feature, which pivots around a star-making turn from Bridgerton’s Dynevor, with a keen line in eroticised gaslighting that will sit nicely beside three seasons of stalker soap, You. Brian McOmber’s angular score adds to the anxiety.

In common with LeMond’s career, during which the interloping Yank won over spectators and rivals alike, The Last Rider proves a charm offensive.

Pierre, who replaced John Boyega after the latter’s controversial departure, is a convincing and charismatic action hero. The supporting cast, particularly Robb, Emory Cohen, and Johnson, make for good company. The film’s cinematographer, David Gallego, does some nifty footwork around a thrilling Mexican standoff. Worth the wait.

The script carefully draws details from the gospels as it journeys towards an ending that is miraculous in every sense.

This meandering, mysterious 164-minute meditation on French imperialism is not for everyone.

A humane work devised by serious minds.

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.