Warmth, empathy and severed fingers in the same film? Scandi noir is back.

This is unquestionably the best Supergirl movie, in a field of two, but it could have aimed for so much more. It never really flies to any great heights but stays at a pleasant cruising altitude.

Spiced up with some wry wit, cool music moments (Foals, Fontaines DC), a memorable cameo from Mathieu Amalric, and a touching-sexy use of Anaïs Nin erotica, this one’s a real keeper.

By stripping away anything even remotely extraneous, [Chiarella's] achieved a palpable sense of gothic anguish. And by casting his leads so perfectly, he’s also made one of the most touching romances of the year.

Popping off with primary colours and phallic imagery, I Want Your Sex isn’t quite as explosive as Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy and could have used a tighter edit, but it’s still a real good time.

The Birthday Party is too languorously paced to keep the tension levels high and a ridiculous, biology-defying third-act twist doesn’t help. Still, there’s just enough chills here for anyone who prefers their trauma to come with a rural French flavour.

The message of finding balance between analogue and digital, old-school toys and tech, may seem woolly to some. But balance feels like the solution to this 21st century parental quandary – and maybe to Hollywood’s legacy sequel problem: play to your old strengths, but have timely purpose in doing so. Toy Story 5 strikes that balance nicely.

An icebound travelogue and haunting photo essay, given voice by a lovely electronic score from Dan Deacon, Time and Water is an often dispiriting but at times transcendent look at the death of an Icelandic glacier, and the ways we process loss.

Bold, brutal yet surprisingly sensitive, it’s about as far away from Errol Flynn’s Technicolor tights or Kevin Costner’s mullet as you can imagine.

There’s not a great deal that’s new here, though the idea of the zombies rapidly evolving with the aid of fungi-like mucus and an ant colony’s hive communication is well deployed. But what makes Colony a fun night out is how well the mayhem is staged.

Revered Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki adheres to the concept of ‘Ma’, or intentional emptiness. Likewise, Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s equal-parts effervescent and unsettling third feature, Rose, sings with thoughtful silence and enriching stillness.

Kreutzer threads a fine needle through difficult material in a film that, even if it occasionally pulls its punches, will niggle on in your mind.

Not a flat-out fizzer but definitely nowhere near the ludicrously high standards he’s set for himself, Steven Spielberg’s return to sci-fi goes down as a mid-tier entry in his personal canon – albeit one elevated by Emily Blunt and a couple of the type of nuts action sequences that few others could pull off.

Perhaps it was too much to hope that we’d have a little bit of food for thought as well as the eye candy on display, but this will still wile away a dull evening very pleasantly.

This is a real return to form from Wilde, who finds her Booksmart groove again after the misstep of Don’t Worry Darling. Cue it up and get the neighbours round. Or not.

Enzo is a haunting reminder of what it is to be young – a fitting epitaph to a filmmaker who understood young people better than most.

At a slight 71 minutes, it nevertheless manages to be an engaging misadventure with a wanderlust spirit, replete with a jolly voiceover narration from Jacek Zubiel, constantly reminding us life is one big joke.

Where other reboots lean into dour origin stories, this one is as brightly coloured as a bowl of e-numbered breakfast cereal.

Wigon executes the bloody splurges with flair but fails to build up to them with stakes or tension.

Ultimately, Carney has constructed a crowd-pleasing wedding band of a movie, but a high-quality one, with a strong lead singer and solid backing. And who doesn’t want to celebrate good times? Come on.

Backrooms is hard not to recommend as a genuinely surreal horror experience. It has shades of the two Davids, Lynch and Cronenberg, but with its horrifically rendered malformations, both architectural and organic, it also feels like a commentary on the risible rise of AI slop art.

Pressure is less of a traditional war flick than a satisfying chamber piece about how people use and communicate information when the stakes are sky high and groupthink is kicking in.

Its urge to find beauty in the wreckage of war has a forced quality, a romanticism at odds with this grim world. Still, with LGBTQ+ stories so rare in the filmography of World War I, it’s a rare and welcome perspective – as well as another showcase for a gifted young filmmaker.

Full Phil is a 70-minute short story of a film with a few good jokes, some touching moments, and two Hollywood stars really going there (Stewart’s food consumption is heroic). It’s fun but, like Mr Creosote’s mint, only wafer thin.

It’s a striking debut from writer-director Maria Martinez Bayona with a fearless performance from Hall, as Claire rebels against convention and reflects on her life.

Director László Nemes (Son of Saul) returns to World War II to force two real-life foes – French Resistance chief Jean Moulin and Nazi interrogator Klaus Barbie – into a grim dance macabre in this elegant and viscerally intense wartime thriller.

Zvyagintsev has made another remarkable film full of moral clarity that will get up the nose of all the right people. He may just be the greatest Russian filmmaker since Tarkovsky, and he’s definitely the ballsiest.

The Romanian filmmaker has tackled similar themes before, most recently in 2022’s Transylvanian xenophobia drama R.M.N., but it’s extra punchy to see him casting a steely glance at a society other than his own. His latest is another chilly but gripping effort, that surges from cosy to traumatic in a heartbeat.

The storytelling doesn’t quite live up to the craft and performances.

Overall, though, this is a timely drama from a director with a growing canon of eloquent humanist work – a melancholy torch song to the stories that play out beneath our changing skylines.

Nemes paints a film of ugly truths bathed in stunning cinematography. The grading is soft and feels nostalgic, a gentle visual treatment for a tragic story suppled with emotion. But no matter how beautiful the images are, they never linger quite long enough to completely stick the landing.

Bitter Christmas finds the Spaniard at his most raw and introspective – looking inwards and not entirely enjoying what he finds.

Alicia MacDonald’s Finding Emily is a charming and heartfelt romcom that explores what happens when the ‘what if?’ goes too far.

A strange beast, then: great when it’s being Predator or Tremors; rotten when it turns into Prometheus.

Unfortunately, it's not beating the allegations that it’s little more than a few episodes of the scrapped season 4 of The Mandalorian rolled into one disappointing movie.

The Beloved is a fabulous film about filmmaking, and an astute and hard-hitting one about family dynamics. It’s also a great argument that the two should be kept apart at all times.

There is life in this film, even if it is buried under a very woolly coat.

There is something watchable about this melodrama in which shocking events force others into being, and in which Huppert is delightfully rude to everyone in a clever way as this literary fraud plays out.

At heart, it is about the importance of nurturing relationships, an ode to decent people doing the best they can for others.

It’s a great adventure story, and Dower’s ebullient doc captures the exhilaration of following it on the news at the time. Perhaps it’s time Piccard embarked on another one of his quixotic expeditions.

It’s a bold tilt into magical realism, but the effect is never jarring – rather, it’s a moving capstone to a film which argues that the act of remembering is itself a form of magic.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta horror-comedy and a whip-smart entertainment industry satire. Still, on a deeper level, in a hole at the bottom of its lake, is a hard-won sexual awakening.

Fatherland is an elegant, engrossing film; chilly at times, but also poignant as repressed feelings finally bubble to the surface. This is another expansive, enriching work from a modern master.

Perhaps it isn’t such a terrible thing to remind us that this is, essentially, just a dark exercise in genre: a romcom gone horribly, upsettingly wrong. In this sense – and we suspect Barker would take this as a huge compliment – Obsession is the worst date movie imaginable.

In the mood for two hours of relentless fights, gory kills, clichéd McGuffins and unmemorable characters, all served up in a weightless CG environment? Mortal Kombat II punches a hole in all those boxes.

Apart from the confetti-cannon finale, this isn’t the hackneyed stereoscopic where things burst through the screen, but an immersive front row and on-stage spot at Billie Eilish’s 2025 world tour.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is one of those nice surprises, a so-called legacy sequel made with love and executed with flair. Think Top Gun: Maverick with better hats.

The photography is spectacular. Petit and his crew have abseiled, crawled and waded through the darkness to chart the earth’s shadowy recesses.

The timelines fuzzy (it’s difficult to discern when she actually left movies behind) and other personal details are scant, but what shines through is the obvious affection between interviewer and subject. It’s a rapport that engenders an engrossing, conversational tribute to a mostly unsung great.

A woolly family caper with a nostalgic flavour, The Sheep Detectives conjures flattering comparisons with Babe.

Finding positive manifestations for mass groups of men marching through cities in identical clothing is no mean feat, but you’ll walk away from Ultras with a new understanding of a misunderstood phenomenon.

Generic, sure, but gripping enough, Apex has located a corner of God’s own country where the devil reigns.

No one expected this long-delayed piece of Michael Jackson pop-aganda to lay bare the man behind the myths and myriad controversies in forensic style. And yet… this soft-ball character study of the King of Pop only doubles down on the former, while completely ignoring the latter, hitting all the usual dreary biopic beats along the way.

Admittedly, the dialogue could be sharper – a few too many zingers zonk out – but Normal goes about its carnage with such sincerity, it’s impossible to resist.

Newcomer Abraham Wapler as video artist Seb and Zinedine Soualem’s high-school teacher Abdel are standouts in the likeable ensemble, but the Adèle timeline, a sepia-tinged coming-of-age tale with a backdrop of characters to put Madame Tussauds to shame, is the film’s heartbeat. It’s a great excuse to revisit this gilded age in French history.

The film’s final moments mix compassion and vengeance to create something genuinely surprising, and if Cronin ultimately pulls a few punches in his body count, chances are you’ll be too traumatised by all the gore to notice.

A film about the unknowability of grief ends up feeling a little too unknowable itself.

Eerie yet entertaining, it’s Jenkin’s most accessible film so far, while remaining anchored to his core Cornish principles.

It’s not going to win any awards, but it’ll sure make an excellent in-flight movie – ideally en route to Italy.

The movie is more of an anxiety dream than a full-fledged nightmare, and the more typically unsettling imagery...feel perfunctory.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s also never, as Lori grudgingly notes about Julian’s work, uninteresting. And in this cultural moment, that’s an authentic win.

While it would be interesting to see a film about a woman trying to break kabuki’s glass ceiling, part of Kokuho’s charm is that it celebrates the art form as it is, not as it might be. It’s a wonderful demystification of a mysterious art form.

It’s a light diversion rather than a symphonic masterpiece, but it’s still pleasantly in-tune entertainment.

There are a few laughs, and the first third is compellingly tense, largely due to the anticipation of the ‘thing’ dropping. Aside from Daniel Pemberton’s excellent, pins and needles score, the movie lacks rhythm. Yes, it got me thinking – but mainly about its shortcomings.

It’s not deep but it’s made with love and it hits the spot.

Inspired by true events, it’s a story of fruitless obsession ​that Werner Herzog must be kicking himself for not discovering first.

In his documentary-cum-video essay Orwell: 2+2=5, director Raoul Peck juxtaposes the British writer’s words with a flood of the same distressing images inundating our social media feeds, from Ukraine to Gaza, South America to the United States.

An early twist means that the bloodletting develops a repetitive feel, and there are unfortunate parallels with the recent Ready or Not 2, but the wincing and guilty laughs never quite dry up. Cult status may await.

The Magic Faraway Tree isn’t on Wonka’s level, let alone Paddington 2’s – two other Farnaby joint – and the aesthetic is occasionally a bit CBBC, despite the bucolic settings and intricate sets. But with the cracking cast, thoughtful message and the odd rollicking adventure, it’s a fun family movie that’ll finally give you permission to switch off the wifi.

Sorrentino explores these heavyweight themes with his usual wit and high style – as well as a standout soundtrack of haunting classic cues and Eurodance bangers. Surreal, comedic touches also prick the pomposity of La Grazia’s cloistered world.

What makes Splitsville stand out? Simply put, it’s goddamn hilarious.

It’s lifted by some very convincing performances.

A slow cinema treat, Two Prosecutors rewards patience, with endless waiting rooms and antechambers both a limbo state and a last-chance saloon for Kornyev. It’s a haunting, mesmerising, pessimistic piece of work.

Director Bienvenu, who also voices helpful robot Mikki in the French version, has crafted a family film that’s offbeat and full of heart.

Weaponising the cinema’s Dolby Atmos into a delivery mechanism for frights is a clever ploy that Undertone never maximises.

Newton is a fun addition as the bubbly Faith, but the game Weaving is MVP again: a sharp finger in the eye of the one percent. This is a broader sequel, though, that only has more of the same for her to do. It’ll pass an evening but it won’t blow your mind.

The symbolism is lightly worn here in a gently observational film that’s underpinned with humanism and compassion.

Cinema isn't just a medium here, it's a healing balm, able to save the Deliriant’s tormented soul by exorcising his darkest impulses and replacing them with moments of sheer filmic wonder.

With Gosling and Hüller to the fore, Lord and Miller have delivered a cosmic adventure with hope in its heart and a twinkle in its eye.

There are no easy answers in this raw but deeply empathetic film.

It’s often enthralling – especially with Murphy at its heart – though rarely explosive.

There’s a lot going on here: you never quite know what Maggie Gyllenhaal is going to throw into the pot next, but it’s always visually exciting and often funny.

Smart storytelling and snappy editing elevate the jokes and enrich the emotions.

A cradle-to-grave portrait of Ann Lee, the founder of the Christian sect known as the Shakers, the film is, at turns, completely stunning and utterly baffling. At its most successful, though, it doesn’t just depict ecclesiastical fervor – it sweeps you up in it.

And that’s the major problem here. When the first Scream hit, it had a ball deconstructing ’80s and ’90s horror movie tropes. Six movies and three decades on, it’s become the very thing it was built to deconstruct, trapped in its own lore and fumbling about for its old smarts. The genre has moved on. Scream needs to get with the times.

As this tight-knit clan frays in the face of this vilification, they listen to one another less and less. And in that sense, it’s very much a story for our times.

If, like Alan Partridge, you believe that Wings were ‘the band The Beatles could have been’, Morgan Neville’s propulsively upbeat music doc is a total treat.

Matthew Robinson’s sloppy screenplay feels like it may have been churned out by AI itself. It’s crammed with leaden exposition and clumsy with hammy dialogue in which everyone over-explains themselves, as if we’re watching it with one eye on our phones.

The class satire, the strongest suit of its Ealing ancestor, is blunter than a burglar’s cosh. The murders should be the juice in this devilish cocktail, especially with Zach Woods, Topher Grace and Ed Harris as the marks. But the deaths are throwaway affairs.

It’s a cliché to say that a film will stay with you long after you leave the cinema. This one could haunt you to the grave.

A blistering take-down of the social media-driven celebrity culture, The Moment combines the anxiety-inducing mayhem of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and the omnishambles clusterfuck of The Thick of It. It works because the satire’s coming from inside the house.

It all makes for a joyous, energetic and inclusive experience – one that will have you singing Elvis on repeat, and demanding more.

Rosebush Pruning is a fabulous feast for the eyes and ears – and those who like their cinema deliriously queer.

Padraic McKinley’s Great Depression gold heist flick has a welcome ’70s vibe and a careworn charm, mostly emanating from the always trusty Ethan Hawke.

It’s refreshing to see a grown-up big-screen thriller this well crafted – and one that cares for its grounded characters and their predicaments. If it comes off the road once or twice, it’s still well worth the ride.

Because the movie’s on-the-fly style is as scruffy as its protagonists, it’s easy to underestimate the intelligence and artistry it takes to make something so silly.

The animation initially looks like something produced on an early Nintendo console, but what it lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in feeling. It makes sense of how a small child sees the world, saturated and magical but not yet subtly detailed.

Wuthering Heights was never written as a traditional romance, rather a tale of obsession, revenge, bitterness and betrayal. Still, it helps if you're made to care about its doomed lovers.