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.