Christopher Machell

Quietly raging, The Assistant is a bleakly precise study of complicity in workplace abuse.

While Binoche is reliably magnetic and the fitfully pretty visuals match a ripped-from-the-headlines script, Who You Think I Am’s pot never quite comes to the boil.

For fans of Mack’s juxtapositions of natural and synthetic imagery and of her fascination with repetition and patterns, The Grand Bizarre is surely the artist’s most accomplished work.

Aside from the film’s more immediate pleasures, what is perhaps most intriguing about Why Don’t You Just Die! is Sokolov’s almost visible attempt to find his own voice: among this melange of film-school influences, it’s undoubtedly there, though perhaps it hasn’t quite formed yet.

Sea Fever proves better in concept than in execution, let down by a second act of fumbled editing and slackened tension.

A visceral, Atwoodian journey, The Other Lamb is as much an examination of narcissism and the existing structures of gendered power as it is of the limits of faith.

Fire Will Come is of an enigmatic and poetic cinema, borne of fierce, barely-contained vision.

A work of astonishing aesthetic beauty, made up of static compositions and use of chiaroscuro that recalls the Dutch masters.

By situating the film in the context of domestic abuse, Whannel avoids cliché by evoking the way that distressed women are routinely treated as irrational and disreputable – a theme carried through to the film’s inspired conclusion.

Read as a loose adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Little Joe is a gripping and visually striking satire of essentialist maternal instinct and the contemporary anxiety of wellbeing.

This version of Emma. is unlikely to win any accolades for invention. Indeed the 1996 film Clueless arguably remains the most exciting version of Austen’s novel. Nevertheless, de Wilde’s version is a confident and lively translation of Austen’s wit on to the screen.

One of Birds of Prey’s great pleasures is that it tells a Gotham story without having to tell the Gotham story: the adventures of Harley Quinn and associates are not at the centre of some grand narrative, and they are all the better for it.

Queen & Slim is consciously political – powerfully so – but it is simple human survival that drives the two protagonists.

To the Ends of the Earth is a light, airy and fun journey with flashes of poetry.

The Rise of Skywalker offers us nothing but toadying supplication to the worst aspects of fan culture. There is no story to tell here, no characters to care about, no ideas to explore. The film is pure construct, a box built for its own sake, at long last opened with excruciating listlessness, revealing nothing but its own vapid emptiness.

In all this, there is an implicit if undeveloped criticism of the way that power and capital are so often the spoils of posturing masculine insecurity.

The Cave is a raw, urgent film about one of the great humanitarian crimes of our times, made all the starker for the utter lack of a global response.

With The Irishman, Scorsese offers us his first truly autumnal film – a picture about age’s slow, inevitable decline. There are the signature dolly shots, the period pop music, the bursts of brutality, but there is also a frail melancholy we have rarely glimpsed in even his statelier films.

In giving rope to Bannon and hoping that he’ll hang himself, we’re instead forced to watch him fashion a lasso and play at being John Wayne, with Morris seemingly powerless to stop him.

Memory certainly makes a good go of it, weaving together industrial production history with its mythic, pulp and artistic inspirations. The disparate strands of Alien’s origins have never quite been connected like this in a popular documentary, but billing this as the “untold story” of Scott’s film is a bit of a stretch.

Subsumed by the bigger picture, the plot resurfaces at the end to utterly devastating effect. Only a film with the epic sweep of So Long, My Son could pull off such a narrative feat so beautifully.

Saint Maud is the dive into obsession, isolation and urban deprivation that you need right now.

From five years-worth of footage, al-Kateab constructs a narrative of astonishing humanity, clarity and urgency, capturing a global outrage from the perspective of the human and individual.

As both director and performer, Waititi is on top form.

This is pop-punk filmmaking – vibrant, disposable, and shallow. Still, it’s difficult to care about the nutritional content of your confectionary when it tastes this sweet.

The Temple’s antics are a hilarious middle finger to the establishment, while, their stand against hypocrisy and the Evangelical Right’s blatantly theocratic mission to take control of the levers of power feels vital.

If there is any real complaint to be levelled at Color Out of Space, it’s that it has more ideas than it knows what to do with.

Despite its lunkish, ludicrous – and frankly cynical – qualities, this entry retains much of the appeal of previous entries.