Song Sung Blue
A Neil Diamond tribute act gets a sweet treat of a movie thanks to Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, in a film that follows a Milwaukee married couple as they rise to fame with a real-life band called Lightning and Thunder.
What we said: “Here is a startlingly strange, undeniably entertaining true-life story from the heartland of American showbusiness; a lovable crowdpleaser whose feelgood flavour won’t prepare you for the way the plot repeatedly and savagely twists like an unsafe fairground ride.” Read the full review
Hamnet
Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley captivate in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s myth-making novel, an audacious Shakespearean tragedy that powerfully reimagines the agonising loss of a child as the source of Hamlet’s grand stage drama.
What we said: “It is an unselfconsciously beguiling performance from Buckley, who gives every look and smile a piercing significance.” Read the full review
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
A murderous Clockwork Orangey gang take on the zombies in this gruesome and energised fourquel, the finest of the 28 franchise by a blood-curdling mile.
What we said: “Fiennes’s dance to Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast is basically one of the most extraordinary moments of his career. At the screening I attended, we were on our feet, looking for a speaker bin to headbang into.” Read the full review
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Fierce, urgent docufiction in which director Kaouther Ben Hania reconstructs the killing of a five-year-old in Gaza using her real voice as she is bombarded by the Israeli army.
What we said: “With startling audacity, Ben Hania has used the real audio recording of Rajab’s heartwrenching voice, while fictionally reconstructing the drama of the emergency responders in their call-centre office, with real people played by actors, talking, shouting and emoting in response to Rajab’s actual voice.” Read the full review
No Other Choice
Sensational state-of-the-nation satire from The Handmaiden and Oldboy director Park Chan-wook, in which an unemployed paper worker hatches a cunning plan to murder his way back into the job market.
What we said: “It starts out like an Ealing comedy-type caper then somehow morphs into something else: a portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the breadwinner crisis.” Read the full review
Primate
There’s a great deal of unpretentious B-movie fun to be had in Johannes Roberts’ brief, brutal and slickly made creature feature, where a pet chimp gone wild makes for a giddy, gory good time.
What we said: “Roberts, who also directed hit shark thriller 47 Metres Down and its superior follow-up, is mostly at his savviest and most ruthlessly efficient here, a confident levelling up for a genre film-maker finding his sweet spot.” Read the full review
Hamlet
Riz Ahmed’s tortured prince drives Aneil Karia’s intelligent and stark retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy, set in the world of a shady family business.
What we said: “It’s an austerely challenging reading and incidentally nothing could be further from the richly empathetic and redemptive approach of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, about the play’s imagined origins.” Read the full review
André Is an Idiot
A riotously funny, painfully honest film about facing death, in which a cancer diagnosis becomes the catalyst for gallows humour, rage and hard-won emotional openness.
What we said: “There are a zillion films – fiction, nonfiction, and everything in between – about people coping with cancer, so kudos to the team behind this one for finding a relatively fresh way to tackle the subject.” Read the full review
Twinless
James Sweeney’s dark, inventive comedy takes an unexpected path, a tightrope-mastering mix of genres and tones that is an incredibly effective film, veering from funny to creepy to devastatingly sad.
What we said: “Sweeney makes his confounding and psychologically complicated film glide. He’s a delicate director but an unsparing writer, displayed most brutally in the character he creates for himself, confronting uncomfortable truths about the specific weirdnesses that can come with being queer.” Read the full review
My Father’s Shadow
British-Nigerian film-maker Akinola Davies Jr makes a strong directorial debut with a subtle and intelligent coming-of-age story set in 1990s Nigeria, a deft and intriguing tale of an absent father briefly reunited with his two young sons.
What we said: “Is absence love? Will we all feel love for someone most intensely when they are overtaken by the ultimate absence of death? This is a rich, heartfelt and rewarding movie.” Read the full review
It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley
Amy Berg’s arresting documentary is a sympathetic, urgent look at a life cut tragically short, delving into the early life and untimely death of the 90s singer-songwriter with extensive contributions from his mother and girlfriends.
What we said: “It was singing at his dad’s memorial service that astonished the congregation and kickstarted Jeff’s career; he was a superb vocalist with a range and delicacy inspired by Nina Simone and Judy Garland.” Read the full review
The President’s Cake
A toughly revealing story of a kid on a mission for Saddam Hussein’s birthday: a nine-year-old is obliged by her school to make a birthday cake for the Iraqi president, and meets a series of vivid characters as she shops for sanctioned ingredients.
What we said: “The film saunters and meanders along, accelerating occasionally to a mad dash for the many scenes in which the children are being chased by grownups. The cake-tasting itself turns out to be an explosively important climax.” Read the full review
Crime 101
The pedal is pressed hard to the metal for this very stylish, high-stakes armed robbery thriller starring Chris Hemsworth and Barry Keoghan– a bracing tale of a master thief that lifts a trick or two from Michael Mann.
What we said: “This is a movie that revs the engine entertainingly and loudly, though it is less convincing when it claims the moral high ground of social comment by perfunctorily showing us LA’s homeless. But overall, it is a highly watchable spectacle, leaving a sizzling streak of rubber on the tarmac.” Read the full review
Man on the Run
A welcome archival delve into Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles era – after the Fab Four fell and Wings took flight – in which McCartney embodies a strange, stylised sense of uncool, and which led to bestselling success.
What we said: “You may find yourself wondering why we are going over this ground again, but it’s an engaging film, and there is always something mesmeric in McCartney’s face: cherubic, and yet sharp and watchful.” Read the full review
Fukushima
A devastating account of disaster and denial in the 2011 nuclear catastrophe, which foregrounds the heroism of the “Fukushima 50” while raising questions about corporate secrecy and nuclear safety.
What we said: “The film plunges us into the awful story moment-by-moment, accompanied by interviews with the chief players of the time – prominently nuclear plant employee Ikuo Izawa, a shift supervisor and de facto leader of the ‘Fukushima 50’ (actually 69 people) who became legendary in Japan and beyond for their self-sacrificial courage.” Read the full review
Wasteman
This Brit prison drama is as lethal and nasty as a sharpened toothbrush, a brutally violent and gripping film that sidesteps the cliches with committed acting and fierce storytelling punch.
What we said: “The scene is an overcrowded jail (filmed in Shepton Mallet) whose ugly savagery and chaos we periodically see through the smartphone screen of someone gleefully filming it.” Read the full review
The Secret Agent
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s brilliant Brazilian drama of an academic on the run in the murderous 1970s, a study of a man attempting to escape corrupt politics in a tremendous, novelistic study of corruption in high and low places.
What we said: “Its visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue, shaggy-dog comedy, gruesome lowlife walk-ons and epically languorous mystery combine to create something special.” Read the full review
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Rose Byrne is tremendous in pitch-black horror-comedy as a therapist – counselled by an impatient Conan O’Brien – being pushed to the edge by the stress of parenting.
What we said: “It’s a scary movie with a heroine shot almost solely in looming closeup – but instead of supernatural apparitions, there are simply the banal problems of childcare and no time to deal with them.” Read the full review
Soul to Soul
Restored 1971 concert film captures Black American stars’ joyous and emotional return to Ghana for a historic independence day show in Accra, featuring electrifying performances from Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and more.
What we said: “The concert and film can be seen now as part of the American Black consciousness debate of the time, which specifically prized the concept of the African motherland and the spiritual importance of returning to the wellspring of Black American inspiration.” Read the full review
Sound of Falling
Told in four different timeframes in the same German farmhouse, Mascha Schilinski’s story of intergenerational angst, national guilt and yearning is powerfully unsettling.
What we said: “Perhaps like Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Schilinski’s film is something like a ghost story or even a folk-horror and there is a clammy unease in every shot as the camera drifts up and away from scenes like a ghost; the soundtrack throbs and groans with ambient disquiet.” Read the full review
The Bride!
Jessie Buckley is electrifying as the frizzy-haired, black-tongued monster’s wife, married to Christian Bale’s lonely creature in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s darkly comic and gleefully bizarre reimagining of the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein.
What we said: “This new monster’s-wife tale is a rackety, violent black comedy with twists of Rocky Horror and extended homages to the top-hat-and-tails sophistication of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.” Read the full review
Everybody to Kenmure Street
Community triumphs in inspiring retelling of 2021 Glasgow protest in a documentary about local people standing their ground against heavy-handed immigration enforcement.
What we said: “In the age of ICE and Maga, and the Trump-inspired nationalist movements in the UK, it’s an amazing story of a community triumph, showing how the nasty little habits of domineering policing can be countered by stubbornly British – and in this case, specifically Scottish – insistence on justice.” Read the full review
The Good Boy
Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough turn nasty in Jan Komasa’s bracingly wicked tale that follows a couple who plan to retrain an delinquent teen with a brutal regimen.
What we said: “It’s a movie that could have been made at any time in the past 50 years, with high-concept provocations and talking points that feel like something from the age of Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange or Ôshima’s Max Mon Amour.” Read the full review
Midwinter Break
Sad, spiky and brilliantly acted portrait of rupture and rapture, with Ciarán Hinds and Lesley Manville starring in Polly Findlay’s barnstorming drama about interpersonal and religious tumult in late middle age.
What we said: “The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.” Read the full review
Dead Man’s Wire
Gus Van Sant calls the shots with surreal true-crime thriller in which Al Pacino, Colman Domingo and Myha’la excel in a gripping take on the events of 1977 when an Indianapolis businessman held his mortgage broker hostage.
What we said: “The personae and performances of Pacino, Domingo and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic nastiness of the affair, and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious.” Read the full review
La Grazia
Paolo Sorrentino rediscovers his voice by working again with actor Toni Servillo, who plays a president looking back on a career of empty rectitude and opens a mighty window on the Italian leader’s despair.
What we said: “It is a dry comedy of grief and regret which wears its dreamy melancholy and ennui like a well-tailored if fussily old-fashioned suit.” Read the full review
Pompei: Below the Clouds
Ghostly yet luminous cinematic mosaic of Naples possesses a real end-of-days quality in Gianfranco Rosi’s utterly distinctive documentary of war, violence, cynicism and the climate crisis in an uneasy city.
What we said: “This is not the traditional sun-drenched southern Italy, not the raucous place of life and love and wine: it is as if the city has been covered in clouds of grey ash – and Naples (and the whole world) is preparing its own Pompeii destiny.” Read the full review
Redoubt
Denis Lavant is unforgettable as an intriguing oddball who is building a public shelter for an obscure disaster in John Skoog’s monochrome film based on an art installation.
What we said: “Lavant’s performance is utterly unique, and he demonstrates his skills on the accordion (which I remember from Leos Carax’s Holy Motors) and what appears to be his ability to hypnotise a chicken.” Read the full review
Two Prosecutors
Sergei Loznitsa’s petrifying portrait of Stalinist insurrection, drawn from a suppressed story by gulag survivor Georgy Demidov, a haunting film that unravels a terrifying parable of bureaucratic evil.
What we said: “The movie, with its slow, extended scenes from single camera positions, mimics the zombie existence of the Soviet state and allows a terrible anxiety to accumulate: it is about a malign bureaucracy which protects and replicates itself by infecting those who challenge it with a bacillus of guilt.” Read the full review
The Magic Faraway Tree
Spruced up adaptation of Enid Blyton’s children’s classic with Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield proves fruitful and boasts lively performances and some sharp gags.
What we said: “The result is a thoroughly likable and sweet-natured family fantasy film for the holidays, with acres of innocent jollity and eccentric quirkiness.” Read the full review
Kim Novak’s Vertigo
An intensely personal interview with the 92-year-old Hollywood star reveals the dizzying demands on Hitchcock’s leading lady and delivers showstopping moments for fans of the golden age of movies.
What we said: “Of course, Novak has something to say about the most germane issue of all: how Hollywood, and society in general, imposes its male views on how a woman should look and behave, a trope famously embodied by Novak in Vertigo.” Read the full review
D Is for Distance
Tender portrait of parents battling for their son’s medication, as film-makers Chris Petit and Emma Matthews fight the NHS’s refusal to supply the medical cannabis that can stop Louis’ epileptic seizures.
What we said: “Petit and Matthews riff and free-associate on the themes of memory, memory-loss and the moving image on video and celluloid, but at the centre of this is an urgent story from their own lives.” Read the full review
The Drama
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s controversial wedding film delivers on its promise, as a woman’s confession on the eve of her nuptials causes uproar in an insouciantly offensive provocation.
What we said: “A Euro-satire of American bourgeois prestige that sets out to discomfit and excruciate in the spirit of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure or Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen.” Read the full review
The Stranger
François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised modern take on the Camus classic passionately honours the original text while bringing a contemporary perspective to its themes of empire and race.
What we said: “Meursault emerges from this movie as the logical or illogical extension of the educated overclass; he is the violent endpoint of imperialism, whose administrators do not, in their cynical hearts, feel troubled with any great compassion.” Read the full review
Father Mother Sister Brother
Delectable triptych with Cate Blanchett and Charlotte Rampling, in which Jim Jarmusch explores the awkwardness and closeness of parents with their grownup children in three slyly comic panels of drama set in the US, Dublin and Paris.
What we said: “You might sit through this film waiting for a crisis or a confrontation: some explosion of temper or passionate demand for honesty. None will arrive. Basically, there is a contentment and calm here, an acceptance and a Zen simplicity that is a cleansing of the moviegoing palate.” Read the full review
Miroirs No 3
There’s a hint of PD James about Christian Petzold’s elegantly unnerving mystery of grief and family dysfunction, a cuckoo in the nest story starring Paula Beer as a depressed pianist.
What we said: “The faint suggestion that the film itself has gone into a kind of shock could have layered the proceedings with something infinitesimally dreamlike and unreal, an atmosphere often to be found in Petzold’s films. What makes this film interesting is that it isn’t heading for a macabre twist or chilling denouement but something positive and even redemptive.” Read the full review
Exit 8
A commuter’s entrapment in an Escher-esque subway station corridor leads to disquieting psychological mystery, a taut, unnerving and rare example of an adaptation that holds close to the video game on which it is based.
What we said: “Is his nightmarish paralysis a parable for expectant-father anxiety? Maybe. But this film doesn’t need a midlife metaphorical reading to be scary. It is crushing just taking place in featureless modern buildings – what Marc Augé called the “non-places” of modernity – whose forms insist on our anonymity and insignificance.” Read the full review
Rose of Nevada
A vanished trawler returns in an uncanny ghost ship story from Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, an enigmatic drama steeped in loss, memory and the unsettling rhythms of coastal life.
What we said: “The movie itself feels to me like a kind of found object, and in this digital age it is vanishingly rare to encounter something that makes you think of the lost physical reality of celluloid whirring through a projector’s old-fashioned metal sprockets.” Read the full review
Ada: My Mother the Architect
Film-maker Yael Melamede presents a fascinating, if inevitably slightly indulgent, account of Ada Karmi-Melamede, the revered Israeli architect, that proves an illuminating profile balancing life and work.
What we said: “Karmi-Melamede is an articulate, quietly energetic figure, answering questions from her daughter which touch (glancingly) upon a painful family split: her family were settled in New York in the 80s where she taught at Columbia University, but she left when she was hurtfully not granted academic tenure by the male-dominated establishment and returned to Israel, leaving her husband and children behind in the United States.” Read the full review
Kokuho
Lee Sang-il’s heartfelt drama is a Cain-and-Abel kabuki epic that spans 50 years. It follows the bond and rivalry between two young men who play female roles in the traditional Japanese art form.
What we said: “The action is elegantly interspersed with kabuki performances, whose titles and stories are summarised in chyron subtitles. Perhaps the most important of these is Sagi Musume or Heron Maiden, about a heron in love with a man who transforms herself into a woman and dances for him until she dies.” Read the full review
Romería
Carla Simón’s gripping pilgrimage tackles Aids, parents and the legacy of secrets as her film follows a young woman in a Spanish coastal city to meet the family of her dead father, who are hiding information about his life and death.
What we said: “Simón has an instinctive and almost miraculous way of just immersing herself within extended freewheeling family scenes – her camera moving unobtrusively in the group, like another teenager at the party, quietly noticing everything.” Read the full review
Our Land
Orban Wallace’s documentary about right-to-roam campaigners offers bacchanalian antics and a heartfelt message instead of big clashes between landowners and campaigners.
What we said: “You can watch this whole film waiting for a flashpoint – a clash between the heroic trespassers and the wicked landowners – but there isn’t one. Perhaps the landowners saw the cameras, and prudently avoided anything of the sort.” Read the full review
The Christophers
Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel are the double act of the year as a reclusive painter and the former art student hired to find his missing masterworks in Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant comedy.
What we said: “Soderbergh’s latest London-set movie is terrifically exhilarating and funny, as bracing as a large vodka and tonic before lunch: fast, literate and funny with a key plot progression elliptically and unsentimentally managed.” Read the full review
Northern Soul: Still Burning
Centred around the Wigan Casino and its amphetamine-fuelled all-nighters, this is a passionate portrait of the legendary underground club scene – a unique cultural moment and its obsessive high-kicking fans
What we said: “It was a fascinating, vernacular youth movement and a kind of regional open secret: a club culture, a zine culture, a music-and-fashion culture which uncynically invented and sustained itself without the need for any svengali figure from London to keep the show on the road.” Read the full review
Obsession
Writer-director Curry Barker follows up $800 YouTube hit Milk & Serial with a frighteningly effective, and head-smashingly gory, cautionary tale in which a wish for true love goes horribly wrong.
What we said: “Obsession is satisfyingly slick proof that Barker knows just what to do when levelling up to a different platform, and while his debut might have been a film designed around a very modern form of horror, this time he’s looking back, his setup using elements of a classic fable and the kind of grabby schlock you’d see in a video store back in the 1980s.” Read the full review
Eagles of the Republic
The third film in Tarik Saleh’s “Cairo trilogy” is a seductive thriller of corruption and compromise in post-Mubarak Egypt, about a washed-up movie star who is bullied into starring in government propaganda.
What we said: “The result is a rackety, despairing, funny film with something of Billy Wilder, or István Szabó’s Mephisto, or Bertolucci’s fascism parable The Conformist.” Read the full review
Hen
Plucky chicken beats the odds in weirdly uplifting survival story from Hungarian director György Pálfi, who coaxes a tour de force from his poultry cast in a parable of animal and human interrelations.
What we said: “How Pálfi manages to pull this off is a cinematic mystery, but it probably has to do with his light tonal touch and his ability to truly empathise with his avian heroine without resorting to anthropomorphic sentimentalism.” Read the full review
Backrooms
The debut from 20-year-old director Kane Parsons examines memory, reality and fear. It is an icily disturbing horror, in which Chiwetel Ejiofor accesses an infinite series of hidden rooms that all feel creepily askew.
What we said: “Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.” Read the full review
Tuner
Playing a piano tuner with super-sensitive hearing, Leo Woodall’s relationship with Dustin Hoffman is a tender highlight in this safe-cracking thriller.
What we said: “What a pair they are; they are a real pleasure to watch in an easy, unforced drama that mixes romcom moments with a relaxed crime thriller. It’s like the Safdie brothers in chill out mode.” Read the full review
Power Ballad
Nick Jonas and Paul Rudd star in a terrific comedy of bromance and betrayal from Irish writer-director John Carney. It brilliantly brings together Rudd’s washed up wedding-singer and Jonas’s insecure ex-boyband superstar.
What we said: Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of show business: the terrible binary of success and failure. Read the full review
