Women Talking imagines female emancipation as an honest, raging, caring experience.

Its plot is riddled with holes and its ending is overcooked, but it’s packed with terrific actors – Toby Jones, Gillian Anderson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, even Robert Duvall – and achieves the light chill of a Christmas ghost story. Not one Poe would have been proud to write, but perhaps the sort of thing he’d read on holiday.

Chilly, severe, distancing, utterly captivating and made with formidable filmmaking IQ, Tár is a movie very much in the mold of its ever-present central character: world-renowned conductor and fully functioning sociopath Lydia Tár.

Deadwyler shows us the essential truth of being Black in 1950s America: that it was a tightwire, living-on-tenterhooks ordeal. Frighteningly – and this may be Till’s most vital message – it’s a reality that exists even today.

‘The most dangerous thing about Pandora,’ someone muses sagely at one point, ‘is that you grow to love it too much.’ Jim Cameron disagrees. He can’t love this place enough – and it’s infectious. 

In this fun action-thriller, David Harbour’s Santa is less Saint Nick and more John Wick.

It leaves the impression of a eulogy rather than a clear-eyed documentary.

Whether for little kids or very big ones, this Matilda is fantastically fun. Great songs, great performances and plenty of baddies to boo.

As you’d expect from the Mexican master, this is rich with macabre imagination and tiptoes between dreaminess and nightmarishness. In a contest with 2022’s other Pinocchio, Disney’s drab live-action redo, this wins by far more than a nose.

Kids will love its primary-coloured wonderland that teems with weird and wonderful beasts, and only the stoniest-hearted grown-up won’t be moved by its inclusive celebration of family across generations.

Not all heroes wear capes, some wear swimming caps – and The Swimmers is an empowering reminder that it is a human right to live safely, no matter where you come from.

If the storytelling sometimes feels straightforward, it’s more than merited by its captivating story and powerful message.

The film flows like a Joy Division song: moody and ethereal until it escalates into a burst of sonic violence.

Legendary Iranian director Jafar Panahi (Closed Curtain, Taxi Tehran) explores ideas of freedom, and what they mean to two very different couples in No Bears, his latest film about life in the homeland that currently has him cruelly incarcerated.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has more going for it than those MCU B-sides, but it still falls a long way short of recapturing the exhilarating glories of director Ryan Coogler’s 2018 smash hit. The visual and storytelling flaws here are only exacerbated by the seriously unsnappy runtime (they’re really not kidding with the whole ‘forever’ thing).

It’s a winning combo of satire and sleuthing – Succession with police tape – and a perfect slice of high-calorie escapism.

It has a scrappy, throat-grabbing energy and a sincerity that never feels hectoring.

Hunt is a film stuck entirely in fifth, racing from one sudden shootout to another at the expense of the labyrinthine plot.

Okuno’s direction and Monroe’s performance, together, create a simmering anxiety that never really relents, not even when we know the answers to the questions that are consuming Julia: is that man really watching me and, if so, what does he want from me?

It’s an astonishingly assured and emotionally engrossing debut. Grisi’s background as an award-winning photographer is evident in the composition of every shot, almost any one of which could hang on the wall of a gallery wall. Yet his narrative focus is always on Virginio and Sisa, whose expressions of intimacy and love are largely non-verbal yet deeply felt.

For an evening in, it’s reliable entertainment. That’s thanks mainly to Stranger Things’ charismatic Millie Bobby Brown, whose charming, brilliant and surprisingly fighty sleuth steps out from the shadows of her more famous brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill), in a sparky story of young feminists socking it to corrupt 19th century gents and bent coppers.

By leaning into those relatable complexities, Causeway will offer plenty for fans of thoughtful, quality dramas that touch on humanity, trauma, connection and the kindness of strangers.

The non-judgmental message – that there are endless routes to finding love and that no one owns the map – may not be revolutionary, but Jemima Khan’s modern, personal spin on the concept gives it a likeable new freshness.

Cregger plays brilliantly with your expectations throughout. The characters constantly make the wrong choices – peeking round dark corners, going back to check out a noise – but those choices don’t go in the usual directions. Cregger isn’t smug or sly about that. He isn’t winking at the audience. He’s using your horror knowledge against you by rarely giving you what the genre has conditioned you to anticipate.

The situation in Myanmar remains tense and ethnic cleansing continues, yet Snow Hnin finds grace notes of optimism to offset the bitterness of the film’s backdrop. It makes Midwives a thoughtful, empathetic and powerful insight into the region – and its women.

Few of the laughs land, either.

Variously throughout the film, close-ups of hands stroking marble, bodies or linking fingers try their best to create a sense of visual intimacy that the script fundamentally lacks. In its absence, all that’s left is a run-of-the-mill queer story with one dimension.

It swings with aplomb from moments of tenderness and lightness to tragedy and cruelty.

It’s a quiet tragedy that’s rendered close to uplifting by its gentle grace and compassion.

It’s just got enough fresh ideas, laughs (mostly intentional) and queasy jump scares to make for a raucous Friday night at the movies.

Yes, he is at times hard to watch. But Fraser makes The Whale a deeply empathic and touching experience.

However slight the recorded romantic history of a well-known female author is, you can be sure it will become a key part of her biopic. Joining the trend now is this account of the life of Emily Brontë, which spends a chunk of its time on a romance that may not have happened. It’s well played and well written, but it’s an odd addition to a story that is remarkable even without invention: studios need to start letting spinsters be spinsters.

It may not be the sharpest satire, but Barlow and Senes have a heap of wicked fun wielding the blunt trauma as Sissy takes a wild stab at everything from influencer culture and wellness voodoo, to body image crises and backstabbing (literally) so-called friend circles.

Cramming Amsterdam’s myriad subplots and political angles into a coherent two hours ultimately proves beyond Russell. But tight narrative isn’t really what fuels the writer-director. He’s more about arming electric performers with offbeat, talky scenes and catching the lightning that sparks in a bottle. And the bottle here is full to the brim.

Redmayne is up there with Richard Attenborough in 10 Rillington Place as a terrifyingly mundane embodiment of evil.

History nerds will note the strenuous efforts to capture the realities of the conflict, but the film’s use of smart Spielbergian grace notes to share its emotional truths is a real strength, too.

Smile is overall a solid horror, a fine way to make yourself scream at the cinema screen, but within it there are enough moments of horrible invention to make Finn a director to keep an eye on. There may be bigger, freakier surprises in store.

Occasionally flummoxed by the scale of the period canvas, [Dunham] slathers too many somewhat shapeless scenes in Carter Burwell’s incessantly cheery a capella score, and gets stuck in a plodding pace that makes the movie seem longer than it actually is. The flaws though, don’t stop us getting caught up in Catherine’s world, and it’s refreshing to encounter a medieval story which eschews savagery for a humane generosity sure to spur many useful parent-child conversations.

Athena’s dystopian view of our present day, showing a collapsing world with black-and-white mentalities, selfishly motivated, and with a desperate underclass left angry and adrift, feels like an urgent message. Anyone who loves their cinema to be spectacular, immersive and a rollercoaster ride will soak it up.

With so many firsts, a film might buckle under the avalanche of the accompanying expectations. Thankfully, Bros is so belly-achingly funny, sharply observant and wryly self-aware that it can more than withstand such a crushing weight.

This is some flu: it plunges us into a deeply strange and unsettling version of reality. It’s undeniably confusing, but it leaves you with a powerful, if imprecise, feeling of a society that’s sick from something far worse than a passing virus.

The powerhouse denouement is a staggering insight into how colonial legacies continues to affect lives today.

The Woman King is a story of sisterhood and racial identity that deserves to pack in the crowds. About time, indeed.

While the tartness and wit is missing to elevate this anywhere near the romantic-comedy canon, the overall vibe is so cosy and frothy, you’d need a heart of steel to hate it.

Playwright-turned-fillmaker Florian Zeller continues his one-man war on the world’s tear ducts with another hard-hitting portrait of domestic life in extremis.

For all its freedom to reimagine her life and rescue her from cultural victimhood, Blonde is just a bit too willing to chuck her overboard and watch her flounder.

Sluggishly paced, stodgily scripted and curiously edited, it’s not so much a bullet ballet as a creaky dance across an abandoned saloon.

Even by the writer-director’s standards of naturalistic, middle-class restraint, it’s a ruminative experience that borders on slow-going. But The Eternal Daughter is also an ode to mothers and daughters that will leave a few teary messes in the stalls, and it’s beautifully acted by Tilda Swinton in not one, but two roles.

Burdened with an underwritten part, the curiously flavourless Styles struggles to match Pugh for intensity as husband and wife fly at each other – one’s ambition at risk from the other’s intuition – and the couple’s chemistry fizzles out. It’s a crucial flaw in a film that needs to sell us at least one thing that feels real in its world of artifice.

The Score doesn’t always strike the right notes, but it has its high points thanks to a simple, rewarding romantic arc.

What makes it work so well, aside from a rollickingly funny but never smirky McDonagh script that arms every member of its small ensemble with killer moments, is the reuniting of In Bruges’s two leads, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

It encapsulates the power of a community to protect the environment.

Kormákur creates some effective jump scares and considerable suspense as the lion stalks its prey with blood-chilling growls one minute and deadly silence the next. The CGI budget can’t always quite match his ambition, however, and perhaps as a result, his timing sometimes seems off.

A fitting tribute to a life well lived in spite of the overwhelming odds stacked against her, it is surely a sign of a remarkable woman that we are left wanting more.

Think of it as if it’s an adaptation of good Austen fan fiction. It might not have the quality of the real deal, but it has plenty of the same charms.

The Forgiven takes the harder road, and actually proves more engrossing and haunting in retrospect than when you’re actually watching it. In an era of instant gratification, that, for all the film’s evident flaws, is still worth chin-stroking respect.

Capably directed by debut filmmaker Lee Haven Jones, The Feast won’t challenge Midsommar for the modern folk-horror crown. Like a Welshophone episode of Inside No.9 stretched to feature length, it’s more of a sinister little snack than a full-blown feast.

The future of the murder-mystery looks bright with movies as bold and boundary-breaking as this.

Every scene is shot in Pine Ridge, and the cast is entirely comprised of first-time actors from that community – and it’s these factors that really give the film a raw authenticity rarely found in film depictions of reservation life.

Sick of Myself is, for all the dark themes and unsettling imagery, deeply watchable – a perfectly executed black comedy accompanied by humorously viscious counter-culture commentary that cannot be overlooked.

A little over-extended – it has its origins in a festival short – and only partially successful in developing the bizarre, humanising bond between filmmaker and subject, as well as suggesting the moral quagmire of Melbourne’s social underbelly, it’s nevertheless memorable for its spasmodic moments of sublimely black humour.

Aided by a forceful performance from relative newcomer Midthunder, this Predator movie is full of surprises and that makes its alien monster actually scary again.

What’s missing is a bit of heart to make you care, or at least, a sense of knowing how to wrap it up quickly enough, and smartly enough, for it not to matter if you don’t. An amped-up Friday night audience might have fun with Bullet Train once, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to ride it again.

If you’re able to look past the police’s bizarre inaction, Mully’s implausibly excellent driving skills and the schmaltzy score, there are moments of fun to be had.

The screenplay offers limited room for character development – Akilla arrives pretty much fully formed – and what we’re left with is an uneven puzzle, eye-catching in pieces but not entirely convincing when put together.

Notre-Dame on Fire is really good at conveying an iconic building’s place in a nation’s soul, and the grief that its potential loss can provoke. Most of its symbolism is well-earned and resonant.

You can appreciate the effort, but this falls just short of doing justice to the emotional stakes and claustrophobic terror of the traumatic events themselves.

Selected readings from novels and short stories are imaginatively visualised, and the final sequences are profoundly moving. Vonnegut would have been proud of the finished film, although he did not live to see it.

But what comes before [the ending] is so overflowing with ideas – about the erasure of Black culture, our relationship with past traumas, and the underseen side of the moviemaking business – and so brimming with visual flair, it puts most other blockbusters in the shade. Spend two hours watching it and a couple more unpacking it – with or without that know-it-all mate.

Where the Crawdads Sing is more aesthetic than film. The dresses are summery and cute, Kya’s cottage is shabby chic and everyone has perfectly tousled hair, at all times. But trying to find anything deeper than interior design inspiration in this film is a futile exercise.

Are we watching Mrs Harris Goes to Paris for realistic narrative unpredictability or to see Lesley Manville wear stunning Dior recreations in an idealised dramedy about class? For much of this film’s target audience, the answer to that question is the latter and their expectations will be met. The rest will find Manville’s reliable magnificence more than enough to sustain their interest.

Joyfully, it shows no interest in brooding and simply throws its all into being as absurdly fun as possible. It’s one of the most enjoyable movies of the year so far and easily the streamer’s best action film yet.

It’s a testament to the deftness and love with which Brian and Charles is made that its sweetness never becomes saccharine, and the eccentricity never feels forced. The result is a total delight – the surprise package of the year.

The odd duff fight scene aside, Waititi is so good at this stuff, and he directs it all like a circus master eager to keep the entertainment coming.

Short on plot, long on silliness, the return of the little yellow troublemakers is a fun but fleeting helium high.

It’s an unabashed celebration of a maverick talent, with all the highlights you’d expect from an extraordinary career.

Tigers is a vivid, chastening look inside the ruthless promised land that is top-level sport.

The narrative is unadventurously straightforward, and anyone looking for any neat twists or wrinkles will be disappointed; the spectral nature of Finney’s allies could have made for a neat final-act reveal. But the performances are uniformly strong, with McGraw stealing scenes and Hawke exercising his dark side so effectively that, after this and Moon Knight, he’ll leave you in no doubt of his flair for villainy.

Beating with a wild and restless energy, the film’s fearsome but ferociously beautiful heart marks the emergence of a rare and remarkable talent.

Despite impeccable performances from its talented cast, we never get to know the characters intimately enough to connect.

A monument to Australia's thriving music scene, it will have you whooping with joy one minute, then fighting back the tears the next.

Ultimately it's a tribute to a woman well-loved, and to the family who will never forget her, even if they slip slowly away from her mind.

Excellent writing by Katy Brand leaves plenty of room for both light-hearted humour and deeply personal moments, with Thompson bringing her A-game and newcomer McCormack matching her. They’re a captivating, unlikely duo.

For Pixar, which must surely have a Woody western in mind, it’s a wake-up call. Let’s hope they’re soon back on more fertile ground, because Lightyear feels like that horrible moment when you broke a much-loved toy.

It’s to the 1993 original what The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was to Raiders.

This enjoyably mean-spirited black comedy set in a grand country house will have you wondering who your real friends are – and what they really think of you.

If, though, you’re looking for a more probing look at the man behind the balls of fire, or a pan back to place him in a broader context, Coen’s rockumentary will fall just a little short of satisfying.

From Certain Women to First Cow, Reichardt has delivered some deep and powerful storytelling, and seeing her commit more fully to her lighter side is both refreshing and slightly frustrating by comparison. Still, Showing Up is an amiable watch that has something to say about power dynamics, the art world and our relationship with animals – who are used for all their symbolic worth.

The hackneyed thieves-with-a-heart-of-gold trope is reinvigorated by the sharpness of the writing and Song’s Basset Hound charms. While Broker occasionally gets close to cloying, especially in its neat ending and jaunty score, Koreeda keeps it the right side of cutesy. It’s best enjoyed as a modern-day fairy tale – only, one where the abandoned baby sparks nothing but enchantment.

For those masters of small-scale vérité social dramas, it’s such a bracing sensation to see them tiptoeing into genre terrain, you’ll forgive the fact that the villains are two-dimensional and that the ending is jarringly abrupt.

Vaguely redolent of Salvador, only slowed right down to a walking pace, or The Passenger without its seductive sense of place (and Jack Nicholson), The Stars At Noon is a mercurial thing and, as an unsuccessful Denis film, a rare one too.

Every trick and technique here, from ingenious match cuts, to split screens and even comic-book cells, works to soup up the storytelling.

Wei is magnetic as the would-be killer who uses her patchy Korean as an additional smokescreen to manoeuvre behind. She ties the detective in knots, a shapeshifter whose true nature is beguilingly unclear.

Whatever your favourite side to the limitlessly faceted David Bowie, this magnificently mind-bending film serves it up in a 140-minute career-spanning opus that races by in a snap of the fingers. It’s almost as extraordinary as the man himself.

Abbasi offered a brilliantly leftfield perspective on immigration and otherness with his 2018 debut Border, and his follow-up takes no prisoners in his critique of Iranian society’s built-in misogyny and fake piety.

There’s more than enough here to hope that Cronenberg still has a masterpiece or two yet to be emerge from within.

A romantic fantasia set in Istanbul, George Miller’s mystical confection operates like the genie at its heart: it’s full of visual sleight-of-hand and boasts plenty of storytelling power, but soon disappears from your mind in a puff of smoke.

Kreutzer has her own style of revisionist feminist history, and aided by Krieps’s bold and brilliant turn, it’s riveting stuff.