A thrilling picture. But also a sobering one.

This riveting film is a sad coda to one of cinema's most fruitful partnerships. [30 Oct 1992, p.12]

Even the greatest general will lose some control when marching an entire division over hostile highlands. But, far from feeling indulgent, the picture is positively economical in the way it addresses so many ideas – sociological, cultural, historical – while forwarding its rattling, viscera-soaked yarn.

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.

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

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

More than a few critics have suggested the film ends up losing the run of itself, but few would deny that it remains indecently entertaining up to the last frame. Odd, special, important.

There’s plenty of razzle dazzle here but little that passes for oomph.

The Kraffts, who first bonded over their love of Mount Etna, remain as committed to the cause of understanding volcanic hazards and triggers as they are to one another. Their story makes for this year’s best documentary to date, and a film that demands to be seen on the largest possible screen.

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.

A triumvirate of superb performances and the warmth of Maryam Touzani and Nabil Ayouch’s screenplay offset the clumsier tropes. Virginie Surdej’s cinematography bathes daylit scenes in golden light to match the thread Halim uses on his petroleum-blue creation.

The most anxious Jewish comedy since the Coen brothers visited Jobian trauma on Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man stars Carol Kane as an adult bat-mitzvah student. This alone would justify the admission price, but there’s more.

This is a wonderful comedy that savours its remote environment while keeping its subjects at the centre of the story. There are always new ways of telling the era’s most unavoidable sad stories. Not to be missed.

The visuals are as wildly original as the script, which was co-written by Docter, Kemp Powers, and Mike Jones.

Sing Sing itself does us all good while delivering a compendium of engaging personal dramas. Domingo rules over all like the most benign of creative deities.

Turning Red remains a charming film that will win friends and trigger worthwhile conversations. The right sort of feel-good.

Watching anonymous child after anonymous child arrive for treatment makes for grim and frustrating viewing. We want to know who these kids are, but the film does not. It’s the very antithesis of how hospital drama – narrational or otherwise – are supposed to function.

Pritz collaborates commendably and sensitively with his subjects.

The Lighthouse stands as a monument to two titanic performances. Pattinson’s easy naturalism curdles into something unnerving and evil here, while Dafoe goes full German Expressionist villain with the biggest screen performance since Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

Occasionally frustrating, but worth getting frustrated about.

What we have here is a humanist matrix that spins calculations in good and ill from all sides. And then it is something else. The film looks to be heading to a place of reassuring compromise when it dramatically veers into something tonally and emotionally distinct.

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

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.

Janet Planet plays a little like a memory piece from an unknown future – the assembled past life of an adult who, as a child, grasped only a bare majority of the tensions unfolding about her. A lovely, flawed idyll.

A truly extraordinary trick has been pulled off: Under the Skin manages to foster empathy with an entity as isolated from human experience as an avalanche or a weather system. Such achievements tend to allow films to be classed as masterpieces. That word may not be too weighty for Glazer’s towering curio.

The director of Stranger by the Lake returns to the deadpan, sexually unstable working-class environs that have shaped many of his previous films with this pleasingly confounding tale of displaced characters and desires.

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.

We end up with a philosophical comedy that is not afraid to aim the odd joke below the belt or, as resolution looms, to give in to sentimentality. It’s a little bit Capra. It’s also a little bit Beckett.