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Hollywood reporter critics pick the best films of 2022.

A tragicomic Irish fable about male solitude, a twisty South Korean neo-noir, a tempestuous study in abuse of power, a dreamy cannibal romance and a quietly searing remembrance of father-daughter time are among the year’s standouts.

By David Rooney , Jon Frosch , Lovia Gyarkye , Sheri Linden December 16, 2022 6:15am

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As usual, most of the highlights premiered in the glittering showcases of Cannes and Venice, both of which clocked strong editions. But one by one, the year’s most anticipated prestige releases disappointed, at least in my admittedly sometimes minority opinion.

Despite its fine ensemble work, I found Sarah Polley’s Women Talking too circuitous in its arguments about sexual predation and trauma to build much dramatic vitality. Relating memories of his parents’ separation and his early sparks as a fledgling filmmaker, Steven Spielberg applies a manicured gloss to a messy family breakdown, which made me feel a nagging detachment from The Fabelmans , one of the first times a Michelle Williams performance has left me cold. Likewise, Olivia Colman’s turn in Sam Mendes’ nostalgia-infused but empty Empire of Light , which is four or five different movies all struggling to settle on a tone.

Almost all those films have plenty of impassioned admirers, so go ahead and disagree. In the meantime, read on for my best of 2022 , followed by the picks of Jon Frosch, Lovia Gyarkye and Sheri Linden. — DAVID ROONEY

1. The Banshees of Inisherin Lifting a title from the archives of his early writing but apparently little else of that abandoned project, Martin McDonagh created his most emotionally resonant work, a wry exploration of Irish isolation played out as a two-man civil war. The flawless ensemble is headed by the director’s In Bruges leads, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, in a melancholy duet about a lifelong friendship abruptly broken that’s darkly hilarious until its graceful swerve into pathos.

2. Decision to Leave On its elegant surface, Park Chan-wook’s masterful romantic thriller might subdue the erotic charge of his last feature, The Handmaiden . But this intoxicating encounter between an insomniac detective and an enigmatic murder suspect — played with smoldering conflict by the magnetic Park Hae-il and Tang Wei, respectively — bristles with sensuality and yearning, fusing the seductive currents of cool neo-noir with the stormy peaks of great melodrama.

4. Aftersun In terms of tangible plot incident, relatively little happens in Charlotte Wells’ stunning memory piece. A woman in her early 30s contemplates a summer vacation on the Turkish coast with her father 20 years earlier, when she was on the brink of self-discovery and he was not quite hiding a heavy veil of melancholy. But the drama’s illuminating intimacy, observed with tenderness and precision, is powerfully affecting, as are the subtly revealing performances of a heartbreaking Paul Mescal and the gifted young Frankie Corio.

5. Bones and All It seems inconceivable that the gory odyssey of two young cannibal lovers drifting across 1980s Middle America could be one of the lushest romantic experiences on any screen this year. But Luca Guadagnino finds the pulsing, horror-drenched heart in this dark, poetic dream of a movie, and via the exquisitely tough but fragile performances of Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet, he compresses a world of liberation, life-changing connection and crushing loss into one heady summer.

7. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed With sensitivity, suspense and as much narrative urgency as any fiction feature in 2022, Laura Poitras’ probing documentary takes a candid look at the life on the edge of photographer Nan Goldin, at the gritty immediacy of her art capturing American subcultures and the passionate commitment of her activism, helping to bring down the Big Pharma monolith that had so scarred her family.

8. Armageddon Time James Gray’s most personal film revisits his childhood in 1980s Queens for a family remembrance steeped in corrosive regret, a mournful reflection on white privilege in an America shaped by the rise of Reagan and Trump. Banks Repeta’s emotionally alert performance as the director’s stand-in is flanked by incisive work from Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway as the liberal parents whose blind spots amplify his failings toward his Black friend, imbued with raw hurt by Jaylin Webb. Anthony Hopkins bring restraint, wisdom and a deep vein of sorrow to the boy’s loving grandfather.

10. The Quiet Girl There were countless more ambitious films this year but few that so unerringly and satisfyingly achieve everything they set out to do as Colm Bairéad’s gentle Irish-language drama about a neglected child sent to stay one transformative summer with distant relatives whose kindness is not dimmed by their pain. Led by a gorgeously intuitive performance from newcomer Catherine Clinch, this is an absolute jewel, deceptively modest but overflowing with delicate feeling.

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): After Yang ; Close ; Corsage ; Great Freedom ; Happening ; Montana Story ; No Bears ; Nope; Prey ; Saint Omer

Jon Frosch’s Top 10

1. Tár 2. One Fine Morning 3. Armageddon Time 4. The Cathedral 5. Happening 6. Bones and All 7. The Inspection 8. Saint Omer 9. Benediction 10. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Lovia Gyarkye’s Top 10

1. Saint Omer   2. Lingui, the Sacred Bonds   3. Aftersun   4. Everything Everywhere All at Once     5. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed 6. The Eternal Daughter   7. Free Chol Soo Lee   8. Decision to Leave 9. Riotsville, USA   10. Tár 

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Anaïs in Love ; Descendant ; Funny Pages ; The Inspection ; Katrina Babies ; Marcel the Shell with Shoes On ; The Menu ; Return to Seoul ; Smile ; Soft & Quiet

Sheri Linden’s Top 10

1. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed 2. EO 3. Tár 4. The Cathedral 5. Murina 6. Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blues   7. The Eternal Daughter 8. Aftersun 9. Armageddon Time 10. Dos Estaciones

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): All That Breathes ; The Banshees of Inisherin ; Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio ; Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power ; One Fine Morning ; The Quiet Girl ; Return to Seoul ; Three Minutes: A Lengthening ; Till ; Women Talking

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The 50 Best Movies of 2022, According to 165 Critics from Around the World

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We’re in the clubhouse turn of the awards season honoring the best movies of 2022. So it’s worth looking back on what  IndieWire’s critics survey of 165 film writers  picked as the 50 best movies of 2022 back in December, before the Oscar race had fully taken shape.

Read the full Top 50 list below.

The critics polled, hailing from North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, for a truly global perspective, were in astonishing agreement about their love of “TÁR.” Not only did they vote it as the best film of 2022, they gave it top honors for Best Director (Todd Field), Best Performance (Cate Blanchett), and Best Screenplay (Field). “TÁR” did receive six Academy Awards nominations, but its best chance for a prize remains Blanchett herself. She won the Golden Globe and BAFTA, but overall the film was more popular with critics groups than the organizations with voting bodies more similar to the Oscars. Likewise, the film that placed at number two on the Top 50 list, “Aftersun,” received Oscars recognition only in the Best Actor category for Paul Mescal — it also topped the  list of the best films of 2022  chosen by IndieWire’s own critics. (Two of the films in the Top 10 here, “Decision to Leave” and “NOPE,” did not receive any Oscar nominations at all.)

“The Banshees of Inisherin,” which placed third, is still a major contender for Colin Farrell in the Best Actor race. He was awarded that prize by the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics, and, in the musical or comedy category, the Golden Globes.

It’s impossible not to recognize the momentum being gathered by the number four pick on IndieWire’s critics survey: “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It gained an early foothold in the race when it won Best Feature way back at the Gotham Awards on November 28. Since then, the accolades have piled up for lead actress Michelle Yeoh (from the National Board of Review and the Golden Globes) and supporting actor Ke Huy Quan (from Critics Choice, Golden Globes, and numerous critics associations, as well as a Gotham Award himself). But the film has been awarded the top prize by many groups: the Critics Choice Movie Awards, the Directors Guild of America (for directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), and  the Producers Guild. The last of these might be most telling for its Best Picture chances  at the Oscars because the top prize at the PGA Awards has gone on to win Best Picture 23 of the last 33 Academy Awards.

“Everything Everywhere” scored a particularly robust triumph at the Screen Actors Guid Awards February 26, winning Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), as well as Outstanding Cast, the SAGs’ version of Best Picture.

Other Oscar nominees for best picture in the Top 50 of IndieWire’s list include “The Fabelmans” at number five, “Top Gun: Maverick” at number nine, “Triangle of Sadness” at number 15, “Elvis” at 16, and “Women Talking” at 18. “Avatar: The Way of Water” clocked in at 30, and surging nominee “All Quiet on the Western Front” appeared at 32.

Here’s the full critics survey list.

With editorial contributions from Christian Zilko and Samantha Bergeson. 

50. “Jackass Forever”

Director: Jeff Tremaine

Cast: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Dave England, Wee Man Danger Ehren, Preston Lacy, Rachel Wolfson

Accolades: Winner of Best Kiss (for Seth McInerey and a snake) at the MTV Movie & TV Awards

Read IndieWire’s Review : Despite its new failures and familiar assortment of dud stunts (Wee-Man being launched onto a pile of metal is a pretty lame payoff to that musical chairs gag), “Jackass Forever” inevitably benefits from a stronger emotional undertow than any of the series’ previous films. It’s always been kind of beautiful to see these guys act like they’re going to live forever. Haunted by the absence of lost friends and facing a pandemic-fueled world that forces us all to confront with death on a daily basis, “Jackass Forever” is all the more powerful because it was made by — and for — people who know that they won’t. —David Ehrlich

49. “Three Thousand Years of Longing”

Director: George Miller

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba

Read IndieWire’s Review : A bittersweet modern fairy tale from one of cinema’s most bombastic virtuosos, George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing” might have some reservations about the 21st century — the movie often wrestles with the impact that science and technology might have on our ancient sense of wonder — but at the bottom of this tightly bottled epic sits a question that should resonate especially hard with people who have spent too many of the last 3,000 days stuck inside their homes with nothing but “content” to keep them company: Are stories enough to satisfy our lives? “Three Thousand Years of Longing” finds that even the most ancient tales can prove illuminating about those things if they’re told with enough gusto, but also that it’s so much easier for us to see ourselves in those stories if we have someone to share them with. —David Ehrlich

48. “The Woman King”

Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood

Cast: Viola Davis, Lashana Lynch, Thuso Mbedu, John Boyega, Sheila Atim, Hero Fiennes Tiffin

Accolades: African American Film Critics Circle top film of 2022

Read IndieWire’s Review : “The Woman King,” while based on a lesser-known segment of West African history during a decidedly fraught time in history, makes for a hell of a time at the movies, a seemingly “niche” topic with great appeal, the sort of battle-heavy feature that will likely engender plenty of hoots and hollers. And if it seems a bit Hollywood-ized, complete with glossy twists and a touch of the soap operatic to boot, perhaps that’s part of what makes it so special. You’ve never seen a movie about this that looks, well, so funnily familiar. If that’s what it took to get made, so be it. In this climate, in this world, stories like this are too precious and special to stay hidden. Bring them into the light. —Kate Erbland

47. “Corsage”

Director: Marie Kreutzer

Cast: Vicky Krieps, Colin Morgan, Ivana Urban

Accolades: Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard winner Best Performance (for Vicky Krieps); London Film Festival winner of Best Film

Read IndieWire’s Review : Spanning the birth of Mozart in 1756 to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War, the golden age of Vienna was — to paraphrase Darlene Madison Cox — an important and exciting time. Yet the Empress Elisabeth of “Corsage” isn’t feeling it. During that time, Europe’s second city of culture — it was never Paris — housed Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Strauss, Klimt, and Freud. And, though Beethoven died a decade before her birth, “Für Elise” sure hits different when it accompanies one of Elisabeth’s breakdowns. Although “Corsage” makes a worthy attempt to recast Elisabeth as independent of her constraints, its final note leaves it feeling a little too much like its own sort of requiem. —Adam Solomons

46. “Fire of Love”

Director: Sara Dosa

Cast: Miranda July, Katia Krafft, Maurice Krafft

Accolades: Sundance Film Festival winner of Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award (Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput); Atlanta Film Critics’ Circle winner of Best Documentary; Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards nominee for Best Documentary Feature and Best Director

Read IndieWire’s Review : At an economical 90-minute running time, “Fire of Love” packs a visual and emotional wallop, with enough close-ups on erupting volcanoes — one, at a point, is called “a bathtub with a hole in it, sowing death all around” — to leave you slack-jawed, terrified, and awe-inspired. “Fire of Love” allows you to contemplate life lived at the edge of the abyss, at the precipice of spewing lava and 1200-degree Celsius heat. It’s that pyroclastic connection that brings together twin flames Katia (who calls herself the “bird”) and Maurice (him, the “elephant seal”), who met on a park bench in 1966, got married, and saved up enough cash to honeymoon in Stromboli, an island off the north coast of Sicily that’s home to three active volcanoes. This is a quintessentially French story about French people, which means it’s filled with plenty of French pop tunes and, visible or not, references to French New Wave cinema (there’s a “Jules and Jim”-ness to their love affair with volcanoes, and a Jacques Cousteau quirkiness to the edit). Ultimately, “Fire of Love” acquires a ticking-clock, lump-in-the-throat inevitability as we inch closer to the ’90s, and to the seething mountain in Japan that would eventually claim the Kraffts’ lives. —Ryan Lattanzio

45. “Moonage Daydream”

Director: Brett Morgen

Cast: David Bowie

Accolades: Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards nominee for Best Documentary Feature

Read IndieWire’s Review : As musical documentaries go, it’s more ambitious than anything you’re likely to witness for quite some time. The film is as much an expression of Bowie’s voice as it is an expression of Morgen’s; it plays like the director’s own search for meaning, filtered through the life of an artist he clearly respects, and who he has the opportunity to reconstruct using unprecedented access from the Bowie estate. Of course, the fact that “Moonage Daydream” is both “authorized” by Bowie’s family and made from a reverential point of view means that it skirts around anything resembling controversy. However, while such a viewpoint may have yielded a more hagiographic portrait had Morgen taken a more conventional approach, the result here is stereophonic immersion and kaleidoscopic imagery geared towards seating audiences at specific points in time. These moments are, at once, distinctly “of” their respective eras, and yet temporally connected to absolutely everything else. —Siddhant Adlakha

44. “The Northman”

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe

Read IndieWire’s Review : It’s not like this movie is a punishing chore; it’s not like Eggers doesn’t want multiplex audiences to like it. And they will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is. In a movie era that’s been defined by compromise, “The Northman” rides into theaters with the fury of a valkyrie — it’s the rare studio epic that would sooner die than submit to modern precepts of how it should be told. While so many people in the industry are scrambling to change their fates, Eggers reminds us just how awesome it can feel to conquer them. —David Ehrlich

43. “Bardo”

Director: Alejandro González Inárritu

Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid

Accolades: Venice Film Festival winner UNIMED Award

Read IndieWire’s Review : With “Bardo,” Iñárritu delivers a cartoonishly indulgent film about the fact that he makes cartoonishly indulgent films — a rootless epic about a rootless man who’s been unmoored by his own self-doubt. It’s a midlife crisis meta-comedy that channels everyone from Federico Fellini to Emir Kusturica in the service of its carnivalesque self-parody. “Bardo” is hardly the first Iñárritu film to argue that “life is nothing but a series of senseless events and idiotic images,” nor even the first of them to do so on purpose, but it is the first of them to use that notion as a starting point rather than a grand reveal. Iñárritu still feels lost by the end of its three-hour running time, but that doesn’t mean “Bardo” isn’t a step in the right direction. —David Ehrlich

42. “Turning Red”

Director: Domee Shi

Cast: Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Hyein Park, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Orion Lee, Wai Ching Ho, Tristan Allerick Chen, James Hong

Read IndieWire’s Review : Pixas has never shied away from the tough stuff — there are entire generations of kids who have being guided through the cold terror of nothing less than death, world-wide destruction, and even the afterlife through the animation giant’s charming productions — but Domee Shi’s instant classic “Turning Red” marks the first time Pixar has gone all-in on perhaps the scariest, funniest, weirdest thing of all: puberty.

The film sets a course for what a modern Pixar film can (and should) look like, sound like, and obsess over. The lessons are of the usual sort — how to be true to yourself, how to honor your family and friends, the value of culture in all its forms, the need to find humor — but they are rendered fresh and new, with “Turning Red” turning in one of Pixar’s best films not just about the pain of life, but the very joy of it, too. —Kate Erbland

41. “Descendant”

Director: Margaret Brown

Accolades: Sundance Film Festival winner of U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision; Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards nominee for Best Documentary Feature, Best Historical Documentary, and Best Director

Read IndieWire’s Review : How best should we remember the dead? The critical African American history retold in Margaret Brown’s imperative film, “Descendant,” an unblinking investigation combining local stories with “Erin Brockovich” flair, seeks to answer that question. Because for the many Black folks living in Africatown, Alabama, where the last slave ship made landfall, remembering is what they do best. —Robert Daniels

40. “Il Buco”

Director: Michelangelo Frammartino

Cast: Nicola Lanza, Antonio Lanza, Leonardo Larocca

Accolades: Venice Film Festival winner of FEDIC Award for Best Film and La Pellicola d’Oro Best Camera Operator (for Luca Massa) with Special Jury Prize for writer-director Michelangelo Frammartino; Brussels International Film Festival Jury Award for Directors’ Week; European Film Awards’ European Sound winner

Read IndieWire’s Review : As the shepherd makes his way toward one kind of underworld, so too do the spelunkers, exploring the sprawling subterranean landscape in a series of golden-hued chiaroscuro compositions. To engage with this film on its own terms is to welcome this kind of exploration of the natural sublime. When Frammartino tries his hand at narrative, he does so on his own oblique terms, tracking a soccer ball kicked about by a pair of distant explorers that, like the promise of Chekhov’s gun, is destined to go off into the abyss below. —Ben Croll

39. “The Batman”

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoe Kravitz, Colin Farrell, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, Andy Serkis

Accolades: Atlanta Film Critics Circle winner of Best Score; Grammy Award nomination for Best Score Soundtrack in a Motion Picture;  People’s Choice Award nomination for The Movie of 2022

Read IndieWire’s Review :  In the burnt orange underworld of Gotham — as in “The Batman” itself — good and bad are as inextricable from each other as the different genres that define their terms, and the film’s hard-earned flares of light are only so capable of pointing the way forward because of how vividly they’re painted against the darkness that surrounds them. Forged from the embers of previous Batman movies despite never indulging in the kind of meta-commentary that has defined so many recent mega-sequels, Reeves’ effort may be too overstuffed and underwritten to succeed on its merits as either a Bruce Wayne story or a blockbuster noir, but there’s something ineffably beautiful to how “The Batman” smelts its many separate components into a new kind of superhero movie. —David Ehrlich

38. “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”

Director: Rian Johnson

Cast: Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Janelle Monaé, Kate Hudson, Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Madelyn Clinea

Accolades: Atlanta Film Critics Circle winner of Best Ensemble Cast and Best Supporting Actress (for Monaé)

Read IndieWire’s Review : To say much more about the plot would be silly, as it would both spoil a film that is at its very best when it’s misdirecting and redirecting and constantly turning in and out of itself (like a glass onion, there are so many layers to peel, though the answer itself is really quite clear) and detract from the joy of seeing a well-honed mystery like this one unpacked in increasingly bright ways. Fans of the first “Knives Out” will find plenty of the same elements to love, though Johnson has studiously worked to ensure that “Glass Onion” stands alone, both because of its self-contained story and the filmmaker’s resistance to repeating his old tricks. —Kate Erbland

37. “Nanny”

Director: Nikyatu Jusu

Cast: Anna Diop, Michelle Monaghan, Sinqua Walls, Morgan Spector

Accolades: Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival; Palm Springs’ Directors to Watch; Future/Now winner at Montclair Film Festival

Read IndieWire’s Review : As Aisha, Diop is gifted with a full meal of a role, and she easily embodies all the different Aishas we meet over the course of the film. But which one is the real one? Which one is the ghost? Jusu’s script, while prone to meandering through its second act, delivers a powerful punch as the film ratchets toward its inevitable conclusion. The first-time filmmaker may be attempting to fit too many ideas into one sleek package, but that doesn’t mitigate the truth of “Nanny”: All of it haunts. —Kate Erbland

36. “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”

Director: Jane Schoenbrun

Cast: Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers

Accolades: IndieWire Critics’ Poll 2021: Best Films Opening in 2022; Future/Now Special Jury Prize for Visionary Filmmaking at Montclair Film Festival

Read IndieWire’s Review : Schoenbrun never traffics in easy explanations of what’s happening, and even mentioning that things grow stranger as the film unfolds isn’t precisely true. The circumstances Casey finds herself in are unsettling, but they’re also human: She’s looking for connection, and the potential cost of that quest hovers inside every frame of Schoenbrun’s fascinating feature. Even the more shocking twists of “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” are rooted in reality, both online and off. —Kate Erbland

35. “No Bears”

Director: Jafar Panahi

Cast: Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani

Accolades: Venice Film Festival winner of Special Jury Prize for Jafar Panahi and nominated for Golden Lion for Best Film

Read IndieWire’s Review : The humane light that Panahi strives to use on even his most oppressive characters belies a sharp awareness of the power lines and misinformation that color an atmosphere where no one is easy around telling the truth. In one gorgeous scene, an old man that he encounters en route to a specific destination tells him to come in and have tea first. They can go on together afterwards, says the old man, which is better for safety reasons as there are bears out there. Later, when they separate, Panahi asks about the bears. “There are no bears. This is nonsense. Stories are made up to scare us,” replies his companion, in a remark significant enough to be the title of the film. It’s an obscure yet bold statement, one that encourages us to mind the fearful stories we choose to heed. —Sophie Monks Kaufman

34. “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”

Director: Dean Fleischer-Camp

Cast: Jenny Slate, Lesley Stahl, Isabella Rossellini

Accolades: Independent Spirit Awards nominee for Best Editing; Golden Globes nominee for Best Motion Picture Animated; LA Film Critics Association Awards nominee for Best Animated Feature; NYFCC winner of Best Animated Feature; SXSW Film Festival nominee for audience award in Festival Favorites category

Read IndieWire’s Review : As Marcel shuffles through his missing family’s rooms and wonders about his absent neighbors, it’s impossible not to reflect back on the last few months of human existence. The world has known so much loss in 2020 and 2021, and while the grief of Marcel and Nana Connie would always be pronounced — Slate and Camp bring such texture and care to them — these days, it feels even more rich. Yes, again, we’re still talking about a movie about stop-motion shells. Soon, you will be, too. —Kate Erbland

33. “Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood”

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Jack Black, Milo Coy, Lee Eddy

Accolades: Cahiers du Cinema nominee of Top 10 Film Award, placing in seventh; SXSW Film Festival nominee for Audience Award in Headliners program

Read IndieWire’s Review : “Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood” introduces itself as a fantastical adventure about a Houston fourth-grader who’s plucked out of school for a confidential NASA mission in the spring of 1969 (those wacky scientists accidentally built the lunar module too small for an adult), but Richard Linklater’s first animated feature since “A Scanner Darkly” isn’t really a story about a kid who secretly paved the way for Neil Armstrong, or even a story about a kid who had any special interest in the stars above. In fact, this semi-autobiographical sketch isn’t really a story at all so much as a sweetly effervescent string of Kodachrome memories from the filmmaker’s own childhood — the childhood of someone who was born in a place without any sense of yesterday, and came of age at a time that was obsessed with tomorrow. —David Ehrlich

32. “All Quiet on the Western Front”

Director: Edward Berger

Cast: Daniel Brühl, Daniel Marc Dreifuss, Malte Grunert, Clive Barker, Marc Toberoff, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell

Accolades: Golden Globes nominee for Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language

Read IndieWire’s Review : “All Quiet” was one of the works targeted by Nazi book-burnings, and this new film is an attempt to reclaim the novel as an essential work of German culture. It’s coming from inside the house, so to speak, and there is a certain Teutonic seriousness to the filmmaking as well as the subject matter. Just as polished but not quite as flashy as Sam Mendes’ “1917,” the film displays a similar level of commitment to historical detail, but presents its elaborately staged battlefield scenes in a relatively more plain spoken style. —Katie Rife

31. “Three Minutes: A Lengthening”

Director: Bianca Stigter

Cast: Helena Bonham Carter (Narrator)

Read IndieWire’s Review : “Three Minutes” still demonstrates how that footage, which must have seemed so insignificant at the time, now stands as an invaluable document and a humbling memorial. Beyond that, it’s a reminder of what a magical medium film is — how unique it is in its ability to capture so many moments and so much life. The narration quotes a 1930s Kodachrome advert which boasts that film brings back memories in a way that nothing else can. It’s corny, but it may well be true. —Nicholas Barber

30. “Avatar: The Way of Water”

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Kate Winslet

Accolades: Golden Globes nominee for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director – Motion Picture for James Cameron, LA Film Critics Association Awards winner of Best Production Design

Read IndieWire’s Review : Cameron has always treated story as a direct extension of the spectacle required to bring it to life, but the anthropocenic relationship between narrative and technology was a bit uneven in the first “Avatar,” which obscured the old behind the veil of the new where his previous films had better allowed them to intertwine. An out-of-body theatrical experience that makes its predecessor feel like a glorified proof-of-concept, “Avatar: The Way of Water” is such a staggering improvement over the original because its spectacle doesn’t have to compensate for its story; in vintage Cameron fashion, the movie’s spectacle is what allows its story to be told so well. —David Ehrlich

29. “X”

Director: Ti West

Cast: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Martin Henderson, Owen Campbell, Stephen Ure, Scott Mescudi

Accolades: SXSW Film Festival nominee for Audience Award in Midnighters; HCA Award nominee for Best Actress (for Mia Goth), Best Horror, Best Indie Film

Read IndieWire’s Review : The renegade intensity of Ti West’s “X,” another homage by the “House of the Devil” writer-director to independent cinema’s past, and his first horror film in over a decade, is his willingness to ask: What if a slasher, but with porn? That genre bending — in a rollicking, wicked dark horror comedy about intrepid filmmakers just barely scraping by, the fetishization of youth, and how the weight of aging into a sexless marriage can lead to mayhem — brings the spirit of the rule-breaking 1970s moviemaking back to modern audiences. While West isn’t always operating on the same levels as his influences, his signature flair for tension through simmering slow-burn pacing remains unparalleled. —Robert Daniels

28. “Kimi”

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Zoë Kravitz, Rita Wilson, India de Beaufort, Emily Kuroda, Byron Bowers, Derek DelGaudio, Betsy Brantley

Accolades: Hollywood Critics Association TV Awards nominee for Best Streaming Movie

Read IndieWire’s Review : A surveillance thriller for an age when everyone knows they’re being spied upon at all times — even, perhaps, by the same device on which they’re watching it — Steven Soderbergh’s “Kimi” is a simple but satisfying genre exercise that uses its agoraphobic heroine to ask what people are supposed to do with their paranoia now that virtually everything is out in the open. —David Ehrlich

27. “In Front of Your Face”

Director: Hong Sang-soo

Cast: Lee Hye-young, Cho Yun-hee, Kwon Hae-hyo

Accolades: IndieWire Critics’ Poll 2021: Best Films Opening in 2022

“On the Beach at Night Alone” director Hong Sang-soo comes back to the big screen with the mysterious and darkly intimate tale of a former actress who returns home to Seoul, where her hazy but palpably regretful past blooms into an artful consideration of expression and isolation. Lee has received extensive praise for her starring performance, her first for Hong. —Alison Foreman 

26. “Hit the Road”

Director: Panah Panahi

Cast: Pantea Panahiha, Mohammad Hassan Madjooni, Rayan Sarlak

Accolades: Cannes Film Festival Golden Camera nominee; IndieWire Cirtics’ Poll nominee for Best Films Opening in 2022; London Film Festival winner in Official Competition for Best Film; SF International Film Festival winner for Golden Gate Award of Best New Director (for Panah Panahi)

Read IndieWire’s Review : A family road trip movie in which we never quite know where the film is heading (and are often lied to about why), “Hit the Road” may be set amid the winding desert highways and gorgeous emerald valleys of northwestern Iran, but Panah Panahi’s miraculous debut is fueled by the growing suspicion that its characters have taken a major detour away from our mortal coil at some point along the way. —David Ehrlich

25. “After Yang”

Director: Kogonada

Cast: Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Justin H. Min, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, Haley Lu Richardson

Accolades: Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard nominee, Gotham Awards Best Screenplay nominee and Outstanding Lead Performance nomination for Colin Farrell, Sundance Film Festival win for Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film prize

Read IndieWire’s Review : Both a perfect complement to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Klara and the Sun,” and an ideal alternative to the emotional brutality of Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.,” “After Yang” is a movie that seems like it was made by and for the sort of people who struggle to be present with their partners and children, but eagerly re-watch home videos of them whenever they’re alone. At the same time, the power of this story is also dependent on a refusal to downplay the positive role that digital technology can have when it comes to forging human bonds. —David Ehrlich

24. “Vortex”

Director: Gaspar Noé

Cast: Dario Argento, Francoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz

Accolades: Festival du Nouveau Cinema audience award winner for Best Film, San Sebastian International Film Fetsival winner for Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Prize

Read IndieWire’s Review : Gaspar Noé is the kind of mad scientist filmmaker whose very name invites expectations of provocative experimentation. “Vortex,” which clocks in at 142 minutes and spends almost all of them in split screen, would appear to be consistent with that trend. Yet this quiet, slow-burn look at an elderly couple suffering from dementia and other ailments is a grounded, emotional variation of “Amour,” as well as the the most sensitive and accessible work from a filmmaker for whom those descriptors rarely apply. —Eric Kohn

23. “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”

Directors: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, and more

Cast: Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann

Accolades: Golden Globes nominee for Best Motion Picture – Animated, Best Original Song for “Ciao Papa,” and Best Original Score; LA Film Critics Association Awards win for Best Animation

Read IndieWire’s Review : “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” reimagines the classic fantasy tale through the most beautifully-made stop-motion animation in years, a powerful and life-affirming father-and-son story about acceptance and love in the face of pain, misery, and fascism, and the filmmaker’s love of monsters in what is easily his best film in a decade. —Rafael Motamayor

22. “Return to Seoul”

Director: Davy Chou

Cast: Ji-Min Park, Oh Kwang-rok, Guka Han, Kim Sun-young

Accolades: Cannes Film Festival nominee for Un Certain Regard award (for Davy Chou); Hamptons International Film Festival audience award for Best Narrative Feature

Read IndieWire’s Review : Few movies have ever been more perfectly in tune with their protagonists than Davy Chou’s jagged, restless, and rivetingly unpredictable “Return to Seoul,” a shark-like adoption drama that its 25-year-old heroine wears like an extra layer of skin or sharp cartilage. The film spans eight years over the course of two hours, but you can feel its bristly texture and self-possessed violence from the disorienting first scenes. —David Ehrlich

21. “Happening”

Director: Audrey Diwan

Cast: Anamaria Vartolomei, Kacey Mottet Klein, Luàna Bajrami

Accolades: BAFTA Best Director nomination; César Ward win for Most Promising Actress (for Anamaria Vartolomei); Gotham Awards winner for Best International Feature; IndieWire Critics’ Poll 2021 nominee for Best Films Opening in 2022; Venice Film Festival Golden Lion win for Best Film

Read IndieWire’s Review : Based on a memoir by Annie Ernaux, “Happening” is an authentic and earnest work, and though it declines to polemicize, it is inarguably pro-choice. That it played at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the top prize, in the wake of renewed threats to reproductive freedoms around the world made it feel all the more urgent — but there’s no didacticism here, just one woman’s true story. —Natalia Winkelman

20. “Bones and All”

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, David Gordon Green, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland

Accolades: Venice Film Festival awarded Silver Lion for Best Director and the Marcello Mastroianni Award to Russell

Read IndieWire’s Review : Blood pours across gothic mahogany in rooms lined with chintzy floral wallpaper and ’80s tchotchkes, made better still by the film’s stunning sound design. Some scenes bring detached cannibalistic chomping, others have crescendoing winds across American plains. The soundtrack, largely period appropriate and featuring Duran Duran and Kiss, is perfectly utilized throughout. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s track for the film, “(You Made it Feel Like) Home,” punches through, in awful harmony with the haunting tragedy of the film itself. —Leila Latif

19. “Living”

Director: Oliver Hermanus

Cast: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp

Accolades: Winner of Best Production Design at the British Independent Film Awards; Best Lead Performance awarded to Nighy by Los Angeles Film Critics Association

Read IndieWire’s Review : For his part, Nighy is predictably affecting in the lead role of Mr. Williams, a widowed civil servant so calcified by grief that his younger employees assume that he’s actually incapable of human feeling; if they’re terrified of him in a way that no one ever was of Shimura’s version, it might be owed to the fact that Williams already speaks in the ghoulish whisper of a spirit communicating from beyond the grave. —David Ehrlich

18. “Women Talking”

Director: Sarah Polley

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, Frances McDormand, Ben Whishaw

Accolades: Awarded Best Ensemble by the National Board of Review and the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards

Read IndieWire’s Review : Adapted from Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name with fierce intellect, immense force, and a visionary sense of how to remap the world as we know it along more compassionate (matriarchal) lines, Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” never feels like it’s just 104 minutes of bonneted fundamentalists chatting in a barn, even though — with a few memorable, and sometimes very funny exceptions — that’s exactly what it is. Toews’ book could easily have been made into a play, but every widescreen frame of Polley’s film will make you glad that it wasn’t. She infuses this truth-inspired tale with a gripping multi-generational sweep from the very first line, which puts the violence in the rear-view mirror and begins the hard work of keeping it there. —David Ehrlich

17. “Saint Omer”

Director: Alice Diop

Cast: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanga

Accolades: Winner of the Grand Jury Prize, Luigi De Laurentiis Award for a Debut Film, and more at the Venice Film Festival; winner of the Louis Delluc Prize

Read IndieWire’s Review : There is a tradition of humanizing killers that is rarely afforded to Black women in the movies. For Truman Capote’s seminal non-fiction novel, “In Cold Blood” from 1959, he befriended two death-row prisoners guilty of shooting dead a family in Kansas, and turned the resulting conversations into a journalistic doorstop of a book as compelling and detailed as any work of fiction. What made the book so haunting was Capote’s refusal to be daunted by the monstrousness of what the two men had done.

With “Saint Omer,” Diop shows an equally unflinching gaze, yet while Capote examined his subjects with a clinical detachment, the filmmaker distinguishes herself here by daring to empathize with her own. Not with her crime, but with the temporary insanity that afflicted a brilliant, marginalized Senegalese immigrant to Paris. —Sophie Monks Kaufman

16. “Elvis”

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge

Accolades: Winner of Best Film, Best Direction, Best Lead Actor (for Butler), Best Supporting Actress (for DeJonge) and more at the AACTA Awards; Top Soundtrack at the American Music Awards; Butler awarded Drama Movie Star of 2022 at the People’s Choice Awards 

Read IndieWire’s Review : Butler’s immaculate Presley imitation would be the best thing about this movie even if it stopped at mimicry, but the actor does more than just nail Presley’s singing voice and stage presence; he also manages to defy them, slipping free of iconography and giving the film an opportunity to create a new emotional context for a man who’s been frozen in time since before Luhrmann’s target audience was born. —David Ehrlich

15. “Triangle of Sadness”

Director: Ruben Östlund

Cast: Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean, Dolly de Leon, Zlatko Burić, Iris Berben, Vicki Berlin, Henrik Dorsin, Jean-Christophe Folly, Amanda Walker, Oliver Ford Davies, Sunnyi Melles, Woody Harrelson

Accolades: Winner of the Palme d’Or and AFCAE Art House Cinema Award at Cannes; winner of Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (for Zlatko Burić) at the European Film Awards; awarded Best Supporting Performer (for Dolly de Leon) by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assocation

Read IndieWire’s Review : It starts, as all movies should, in the world of high-end male modeling. A muted and dangerously almost-smart Derek Zoolander type who Harris Dickinson plays to perfection, the 25-year-old Carl is reaching the geriatric stage of his career, and the anxiety over his economic future is starting to make his eight-pack look two abs short. A merciful society would simply euthanize Carl rather than make him suffer the slow indignity of losing Instagram followers — and spare us the unpleasantness of having to look upon this hideous creature for another 145 minutes — but the fashion industry is not so kind. Instead, Carl finds himself without a seat at his supermodel girlfriend Yaya’s latest runway show (she’s played by Charlbi Dean), and then haggling with her, exhaustingly, over the dinner bill later that night.

These opening scenes contain occasional glimpses of the impish wit that Östlund has long deployed against male insecurities, and he still loves to watch men squirm their way through pained surrenders of gendered power. On the strength of its staging alone, one bit in which Carl and Yaya fling money at each other while arguing across the opposite sides of a closing elevator door almost manages to generate the same friction that makes Östlund’s previous work so wonderfully itchy. —David Ehrlich

14. “The Eternal Daughter”

Director: Joanna Hogg

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Joseph Mydell, Carly-Sophia Davies

Accolades: Nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice

Read IndieWire’s Review : An elegantly slender phantom of a film that channels a spooky hotel’s worth of gothic horror tropes into the heartrending story of a woman trying to see her own ghost, “The Eternal Daughter” finds Hogg returning to the haunted corridors of her personal experience — and, unexpectedly, to the fictional version of herself that she invented to walk through them. Yes, Julie Hart is back, with Tilda Swinton taking over the role that her daughter originated in “The Souvenir” (that was set in the ’80s, this in the present day). —David Ehrlich

13. “Benediction”

Director: Terence Davies

Cast: Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeremy Irvine, Calam Lynch, Tom Blyth, Kate Phillips, Geraldine James, Gemma Jones, Ben Daniels

Accolades: Winner of Best Film Opening in 2022 from the IndieWire Critics’ Poll 2021; awarded Best Screenplay at the San Sebastián International Film Festival

Read IndieWire’s Review : With “Benediction” — another spectacular and terribly sad biopic about a poet cursed with the ability to express a private agony they could never escape — Davies has once again made a film that feels like the work of someone flaying their soul onscreen. Last time it was Emily Dickinson who provided the prism through which Davies could refract his own wants and wounds, and here it’s the English poet Siegfried Sassoon, an openly but resentfully gay man desperate for a peace of mind he only knew how to look for in other people. Davies has more in common with Sassoon than Dickinson — their lives even overlapped for a time — but viewers don’t have to know a single thing about the director’s work to sense his wounds bleeding through Sassoon’s aching story. This is a film that trembles with a need for redemption that never comes, and the urgency of that search is palpable enough that you can feel it first-hand, even if “Benediction” is never particularly clear about the nature of the redemption it’s hoping to find. —David Ehrlich

12. “EO”

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Cast: Sandra Drzymalska, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Isabelle Huppert

Accolades: Awarded Cannes’ Jury Prize and Cannes Soundtrack Award; winner of Best Original Score and the European University Film Award at the European Film Awards; and more

Read IndieWire’s Review : Told through the eyes of a modest donkey — often literally — Skolimowski’s madcap, visually experimental “remake” of Robert Bresson’s 1966 black-and-white drama “Au Hasard Balthazar” has plenty of nods to his compatriot classmates and little to do with Skolimowski’s previous films. The titular donkey, onomatopoeically named (it is “Hi-Han” in France), is freed from a circus in central Poland and briefly becomes a hardcore “ultra” fan at a local soccer team, before being whisked away for more adventures, taking in the vastness of life along the way. Eo even meets Isabelle Huppert, a privilege any living being can look back on their years proudly for. (In Cannes’s answer to a Marvel cameo, the gasp Huppert’s appearance produced at last night’s press screening is one for the ages.) —Adam Solomons

11. “Crimes of the Future”

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman

Accolades: Awarded Best Direction in a Feature Film by the Directors’ Guild of Canada

Read IndieWire’s Review: What Cronenberg neglected to specify is that those imagined audience members — as implausible as the crowds who supposedly fled in panic when the Lumière brothers aimed a train at them — would be stampeding up the aisles in response to tragedy, and not gore.

Don’t get me wrong, “Crimes of the Future” is Cronenberg to the core, complete with its fair share of authorial flourishes (the moaning organic bed that its characters sleep in is a five-alarm nightmare unto itself) and slogans (“surgery is the new sex”). At the same time, however, this hazy and weirdly hopeful meditation on the macro-relationship between organic life and synthetic matter ties into his more wholly satisfying gross-out classics because of how it pushes beyond them. —David Ehrlich

10. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”

Director: Laura Poitras

Accolades: Winner of the Golden Lion and Smithers Foundation Award at Venice Film Festival; awarded the Freedom of Expression Award by the National Board of Review; and more

Read IndieWire’s Review : That  title . Even before it screened, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” cast a shiver across the Venice Film Festival competition, sounding more like a line from a Yeats poem than the latest documentary from the director of “CITIZENFOUR.” The big news: the film lives up to it. Already a robust director, Laura Poitras has leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is about the life and art of Nan Goldin and how this led her to found P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy group targeting the Sackler family for manufacturing and distributing OxyContin, a deeply addictive drug that has exacerbated the opioid crisis. It is about the bonds of community, the dangers of repression, and how art and politics are the same thing. —Sophie Monks Kaufman

9. “Top Gun: Maverick”

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Cast: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer

Accolades: Awarded Best Film by the National Board of Review; winner of Action Movie of 2022 at the People’s Choice Awards

Read IndieWire’s Review : Watching Cruise pilot a fighter jet 200 feet above the floor of Death Valley, corkscrew another one through Washington’s Cascade Mountains, and give one of the most vulnerable performances of his career while sustaining so many G-forces that you can practically see him going Clear in real-time, you realize — more lucidly than ever before — that this wild-eyed lunatic makes movies like his life depends on it. Because it does, and not for the first time.

But if “Maverick” can’t quite match “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” for sheer kineticism and well-orchestrated awe, this long-delayed sequel does more to clarify what that means than anything Cruise has ever made. And the reason for that is simple: Tom Cruise is Maverick, and Maverick is Tom Cruise. —David Ehrlich

8. “RRR”

Director: S. S. Rajamouli

Cast: N. T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, Shriya Saran, Samuthirakani, Ray Stevenson, Alison Doody, Olivia Morris

Accolades: Winner of the Spotlight Award at the Hollywood Critics Association Awards; winner of Best International Film at the Saturn Awards

Read IndieWire’s Review : S.S. Rajamouli’s “RRR” is a dazzling work of historical fiction — emphasis on the “fiction” — that makes the moving image feel intimate and enormous all at once. A pulsating period action drama, it outshines even the director’s record-smashing “Baahubali” movies (viewers familiar with them probably won’t know what to expect here) thanks to its mix of naked sincerity, unapologetic machismo, and balls-to-the-wall action craftsmanship. The film is playing on over a thousand screens in North America, and watching it with a packed audience familiar with Telugu-language cinema is likely to yield one of the noisiest and most raucous theatrical experiences imaginable. Plenty of recent releases have been hailed as “the return of cinema” post-pandemic, but “RRR” stands apart as an unabashed return to everything that makes the cinematic experience great, all at once. —Siddhant Adlakha

7. “Nope”

Director: Jordan Peele

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Keith David

Accolades: Winner of Best Supporting Actress (for Keke Palmer) at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards; winner of Best Science Fiction Film at the Saturn Awards

Read IndieWire’s Review : The only sci-fi movie that might scare and delight Guy Debord and Ed Wood to the same degree, “Nope” offers a giddy throwback to the days of little green men and hubcap U.F.O.s that hopes to revitalize those classic tropes for audiences who’ve seen too much bloodshed on their own screens to believe in Hollywood’s “bad miracles.” It’s a tractor beam of a movie pointed at people who’ve watched 9/11 happen so many times on network TV that it’s lost any literal meaning; who’ve scrolled past body cam snuff films in between Dril tweets; who’ve become accustomed to rubbernecking at American life from inside the wreckage. —David Ehrlich

6. “Decision to Leave”

Director: Park Chan-wook

Cast: Tang Wei, Park Hae-il

Accolades: Winner of Best Director at Cannes; winner of Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Music, Best Director, Best Actor (for Park Hae-il), Best Actress (for Tang Wei), Best Screenplay, and the Popular Star Award (for Go Kyung-pyo) at the Blue Dragon Film Awards; and more

Read IndieWire’s Review : Here’s a sentence I never expected to write: The most romantic movie of the year (so far) is a police procedural. Then again, I wasn’t aware that “Oldboy” director Park Chan-wook — whose operatic revenge melodramas have given way to a series of ravishingly baroque Hitchcockian love stories about the various “perversities” that might bind two wayward souls together — was making a detective thriller. In that case, the heart-stirring potential of the Korean auteur’s new detective saga would have been as obvious as the identity of its killer.

It’s a good thing, then, that “Decision to Leave” isn’t a whodunnit — as you’ll be able to discern from the pathetic effort its protagonist makes to solve his latest case. In fact, Park’s funny, playful, and increasingly poignant crime thriller is less interested in what Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) knows about his suspect than in how he feels about her. —David Ehrlich

5. “The Fabelmans”

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Judd Hirsch

Accolades: Awarded Best Director and Best Breakthrough Performance (for LaBelle) by the National Board of Review; and more

Read IndieWire’s Review : Has any divorce had a more profound impact on the American imagination than the one between Steven Spielberg’s parents? It was the breakup that launched a million blockbusters. That made daddy issues into a spectacle all their own. That led directly to “E.T.,” “Catch Me if You Can,” and the last scene of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” while also paving the way toward any number of iconic films about the meltdown of the nuclear family — which any multiplex would tell you was the middle class’ defining crisis of the 20th century.

And so it stands to reason that “The Fabelmans,” in which Spielberg finally addresses his parents’ divorce head-on — and in exacting autobiographical detail, every shot a memory — would feel like our story as much as it does his own. I’d say this playful yet nakedly personal coming-of-auteur epic was trying to split the difference between memoir and crowdpleaser, but it seems even more determined to reconcile the two: What else would Steven Spielberg’s ultimate divorce movie be about if not the hope for some kind of reconciliation? —David Ehrlich

4. “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Director: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong, Harry Shum Jr., Jenny Slate

Accolades: Winner of Best Feature and Best Supporting Performance (for Ke Huy Quan) at the Gotham Independent Film Awards; awarded the Best Actress (for Yeoh) by the National Board of Review; and more

Read IndieWire’s Review : Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are. It’s a machine powered by the greatest performance that Michelle Yeoh has ever given, pumped full of the zaniest martial arts battles that Stephen Chow has never shot, and soaked through with the kind of “anything goes” spirit that’s only supposed to be on TV these days.

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is as overstuffed as its title implies, even more juvenile than its pedigree suggests, and so creatively unbound from the minute it starts that it makes Daniels’ previous efforts seem like they were made with Bressonian restraint by comparison (for context, their last feature was a sweet fable starring Harry Potter as an explosively farting corpse). It’s a movie that I saw twice just to make sure I hadn’t completely hallucinated it the first time around, and one that I will soon be seeing a third time for the same reason. I don’t ever expect to understand how it was (or got) made, but I already know that it works. And I know that it works because my impulse to pick on its imperfections and wonder how it might’ve been different eventually forfeits to the utter miracle of its existence. —David Ehrlich

3. “The Banshees of Inisherin”

Director: Martin McDonagh

Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan

Accolades: Awarded the Golden Osella for Best Screenplay and Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice; winner of Best Actor (for Farrell), Best Supporting Actor (for Gleeson), and Best Original Screenplay by the National Board of Review; and more

Read IndieWire’s Review : “The Banshees of Inisherin” often feels more like a Martin McDonagh play — perhaps the abandoned play of the same name that he first conceived as the conclusion of his “Aran Islands Trilogy” — which might help to explain the stony confidence of his direction and the steady focus with which he follows this story to the mournful finale promised by its title (Sheila Flitton is hilarious as banshee incarnate Mrs. McCormick, an old crone so happy to cosplay as death itself that she might as well hobble around Inisherin with a scythe in her hands). If the film never feels the least bit limited by its scope or location, that’s because the Galway Bay lends it an impossibly gorgeous backdrop, replete with rolling green hills and ravishing ocean views on all sides. It’s the perfect fairy tale idyll for the harps and glockenspiels of Carter Burwell’s ominous score to subvert. —David Ehrlich

2. “Aftersun”

Director: Charlotte Wells

Cast: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio

Accolades: Awarded the French Touch Prize of the Jury at Cannes; winner of Best Directorial Debut by the Natonal Board of Review; winner of Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Music Supervision, and the Douglas Hickox Award at the British Independent Film Awards; and more

Read IndieWire’s Review : A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun” isn’t just an honest movie about the way that we remember the people we’ve lost — fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once — it’s also a heart-stopping act of remembering unto itself. Here, in the span of an oblique but tender story that feels small enough to fit on an instant photo (or squeeze into the LCD screen of an old camcorder), Wells creates a film that gradually echoes far beyond its frames. By the time it reaches fever pitch with the greatest Freddie Mercury needle drop this side of “Wayne’s World,” “Aftersun” has begun to shudder with the crushing weight of all that we can’t leave behind, and all that we may not have known to take with us in the first place. —David Ehrlich

1. “TÁR”

Director: Todd Field

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner

Accolades: Blanchett awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice; winner of Best Screenplay at the Gotham Independent Film Awards; winner of Best Film and Best Actress (for Blanchett) with the New York Film Critics Circle; winner of Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress (for Blanchett), and Best Screenplay by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; winner of Best Director with the Boston Society of Film Critics; and more

Read IndieWire’s Review : “TÁR” is so much more than the Great American Movie about “cancel culture” — a phrase that it humiliates with every movement — but this dense and difficult portrait of a female conductor’s fall from grace also demands to be seen through that singular lens from its very first shot. Todd Field’s thrilling, deceptively austere third film exalts in grabbing the electrified fence of digital-age discourse with both hands and daring us to hold onto it for 158 minutes in the hopes that we might ultimately start to feel like we’re shocking ourselves. —David Ehrlich

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The Best Movies of 2022

By Richard Brody

There is no end to the making of lists, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy reading them as much as I like making them. There’s a polemical side to criticism that finds a crystalline form in lists, but contentiousness isn’t their only value. For starters, lists are mnemonic, gathering things to remember, and also judgmental, asserting what’s worth remembering. That’s why I don’t limit myself to a Top Ten but stretch the list to fit as many films as I’m moved to include. The essential idea that guides me in criticism is that the world of movies is far bigger than the run of widely publicized releases. At year’s end, I compile the movies that imposed themselves on memory and which (even if their subjects are grim or their tones are severe) have provided enduring pleasures and illuminations.

This year, it’s all the more important to offer a widely inclusive list, because a wide range of American filmmakers have caught up with the inescapable phenomenon of the recent past: the resurgence of openly anti-democratic forces and brazenly hate-driven ideologies, the crisis of illegitimate rule, the menace of authoritarianism, the potential end of even our current debilitated American democracy. The phenomenon is certainly not limited to the United States, and filmmakers from around the world have long been confronting it in their own countries bravely, insightfully, and ingeniously. For years, many of the best American filmmakers have been making films of political outrage, with the unsurprising likes of Spike Lee , Jim Jarmusch , and Frederick Wiseman at the forefront, and such younger filmmakers as Jordan Peele , Garrett Bradley , and Eliza Hittman joining them. This year offers a shift in the cinematic paradigm by way of a host of memorable movies; there’s something new and extraordinary in the air, and it has precisely to do with history and memory—and, most powerfully, their intersection.

The ways in which the best American filmmakers are contending with the past reflect and resist the falsifications, denials, and suppressions of history that are integral to the right wing’s political agenda of miseducation. The past is the battleground on which the contest for American power is being fought. It’s a battle not for the American soul but for the choice between soul and soullessness, between a living democracy and the zombie one that has been envisioned in recent years in such movies as “ The Dead Don’t Die ,” “ Monrovia, Indiana ,” and “ Us .” For current filmmakers, the turn to the past is no retreat from present-day conflicts but a crucial, targeted, and deep-rooted contention with them—a diagnosis and an intervention. Their films expose the foundation, the substructures, the underlying abuses and sedimented forms of power that are manifested in today’s politics.

Walter Benjamin, in his final completed work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” from 1940, written in France after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, recognized the connection between history and political emergency. “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” he wrote. He acknowledged that turning to the past can be a present-tense political struggle, on the premise that “ even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” The lies being foisted on students in many states about Southern race relations and the Confederacy defile the experience of those who endured enslavement and Jim Crow, just as the prevalence of neo-Nazi ideology in the current-day Republican Party and amid media and social-media moguls is an offense to the victims of Nazism and those who lost their lives in the battle to defeat Nazi Germany.

This year, Peele, in “Nope,” connected the history of movies to the perpetuations of grand-scale evils; James Gray, in “Armageddon Time,” intertwined a childhood story of white privilege with the arrogant rise of the Trump family; David O. Russell, in “Amsterdam,” portrayed a trio of the First World War’s insulted and injured as they resist a Depression-era right-wing coup; Chinonye Chukwu, in “Till,” revealed the intimate heroism behind the creation of a historic moment; and Ricky D’Ambrose, in “The Cathedral,” working on a minuscule budget, dramatized the inseparability of family conflict and aesthetic education from the political crises of their time. All of these directors are taking part in the ongoing culture war over what stories of American life get taught. They’re taking up cinematic arms against nostalgia, cliché, and myth—against the notion that there’s one story to tell, and against grotesquely oversimplified ways of telling it. They don’t fall into the trap of mere topicality but devise distinctive and individual forms for the recuperation of history, for manifesting the ceaseless life of the past. And, as Great Britain backslides into its own imperial myths, British filmmakers such as Terence Davies and Joanna Hogg delved into the country’s actual past, with thrilling blends of confrontation and imagination.

The turn to history also reflects the outrageousness of the time: the seemingly overwhelming challenge of capturing, in the present tense, the open rise of American fascism amid the aftershocks of the COVID pandemic. In this moment, it’s worth consulting the movies of filmmakers working under censorious regimes, where pointing a camera in the street is a dangerous act of defiance, and also a maneuver in the culture war. In Iran, for example, such directors as Jafar Panahi (who’s currently imprisoned) and his son, Panah, film present-day stories on location, encapsulating a vast span of their country’s social crises by way of local and intimate dramas.

Such directors are keenly aware of the threat that their films may not be screened, or may become unavailable, and that movies from around the world are stringently blocked, too. In the U.S., the official censorship of films is rarely an issue; instead, the menace is one borne of commercial imperatives. Classic films risk getting swallowed up contractually: companies get bought, rights expire, and, whereas some movies slip away through the business model of planned scarcity , others vanish out of mere indifference. New films are pinched between the shift toward streaming (which favors serial TV over movies) and the effects of the pandemic, which has sharply cut into moviegoing habits, especially among older viewers of art-house films—as seen in the box-office failure of most of the late-year batch of Oscar-type releases. Slipping from limited theatrical release to rapid engulfment in an oceanic streaming domain, many movies of great merit remain nominally available but leave hardly a trace of their presence. Here, too, Panahi’s 2015 film, “ Taxi ,” with its depiction of the director’s own dealings with a friendly bootlegger of banned, self-burned DVDs, offers wise counsel for keeping ample lists: because it’s imperative to watch what you can when you can, as soon as you can.

With this bio-pic of the First World War poet and memoirist Siegfried Sassoon, Terence Davies creates a tautly controlled, scathing, yet often exuberant vision of creative fury, lost love, the cruel repression of queer lives, and the devastation of war. Its historical scope and personal passion are both enormous.

Jordan Peele’s cinema-centric science-fiction film is a superspectacle about the creation of superspectacles, a fantasy about the irrepressible reality of history, a metaphysical vision of the material world of the image—and a giddily imaginative, symbolically powerful thriller.

James Gray tracks the epicenter of American political pathology to his native borough of Queens in this quasi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, set in 1980, in which a middle-class Jewish family faces the chill winds of history—and in which the Trump family figures prominently.

Working clandestinely in Iran with the threat of arrest hanging over his head, Jafar Panahi plays himself in this wry, enraged metafictional tale about the prospect of exile and the insidious oppression of religious authorities, one that’s centered on his visit to a border town in order to tele-direct a film across the border in Turkey.

A radio journalist and a sports agent are haunted by the past, and by current-day social conflicts, in Claire Denis’s emotionally bruising romantic melodrama, which delivers fierce dialectical battles in an abrupt, pugnacious style.

A family’s car trip through rural Iran is shadowed by danger and strained by imminent separation in the first feature by Panah Panahi (Jafar’s son), which features one of the great antic, and poignant, child performances of recent years.

The traumas of the First World War (again), the rise of Fascism in Europe, and the true story of a failed right-wing coup against a Democratic President provide the historical framework for David O. Russell’s effervescent yet embittered comedic drama of friendship, romance, accidental heroism, and the American way of hatred.

The real-life story of a Senegalese woman in France who was charged with the killing of her young child—and of the French filmmaker Alice Diop’s own effort to document the case—is the premise of this fiction feature by Diop, who confronts the political and personal implications of the events.

Joanna Hogg’s wildly imaginative and meticulously crafted sequel to her two “ Souvenir ” films unfolds the sentimental and cinematic journey of a middle-aged filmmaker and her elderly mother, stars Tilda Swinton in both roles, and includes a ghost.

Ricky D’Ambrose’s second feature—an autobiography in familial and historical cataclysms, a coming-of-age story in visual whispers of beauty—is an original kind of personal film, which embraces a mighty scope on an intimate scale.

This historical drama of the lynching of Emmett Till, in Mississippi, in 1955, is centered on the heroic effort of Mamie Till-Mobley, his mother, to publicize the killing and inspire resistance to the Jim Crow laws and practices that gave rise to it. The movie’s director, Chinonye Chukwu, develops a distinctive aesthetic that befits the subject.

Olivia Wilde’s fanatically detailed, emotionally off-kilter reconstruction of a nineteen-fifties planned community and its charismatic leader gives rise to a wild genre mashup and an incisive aesthetic critique.

Shown at festivals in 2019 but unreleased in the U.S. until this year, Lou Ye’s vision of spies versus spies, in the milieu of theatre, in internationalized Shanghai, under Japanese occupation, at the outset of the Second World War, is a dazzlingly complex thriller and a sharp allegory of current-day efforts to make art under a repressive regime.

The South Korean director Hong Sangsoo builds his dialogue-centered dramas around his performers, and this calmly ferocious fiction of a long-retired actress’s reckoning with mortality and art stars the acclaimed actress Lee Hye-young, who herself had been absent from movies for many years.

Richard Linklater’s quasi-autobiographical animated fantasy, about a fourth grader who’s recruited by NASA , re-creates family life in 1969, in the suburbs of Houston, in loving yet critical detail.

The filmmaker Chase Joynt’s rediscovery of an academic archive of interviews with gender-nonconforming subjects, conducted from 1957 to 1960, gives rise to a passionate and insightful view of trans lives, then and now, by way of reënactments and discussions with the reënactors.

The Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid furiously dramatizes a dissident Israeli filmmaker’s mind-bending confrontation with his past, and with the country’s current politics, during a trip to a remote village to present a film.

Another of the three films by Hong released in the U.S. this year, and also starring Lee, this is the ironic tale of a brusque, impetuous writer who stops writing and decides to try moviemaking.

The passion of Elegance Bratton’s quasi-autobiographical drama—about a twenty-five-year-old Black and gay man who, to escape homelessness, joins the Marines and endures persecution in basic training—transforms his realistic style into a bearing of witness.

Sophia Tolstoy is the only onscreen character in the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s one-woman drama, which relies on the artifice of on-camera monologues to get at the politics of domestic life and the power struggles embedded in the history of art.

The hidden racist background of a small New England liberal-arts college returns with a metaphysical force in Mariama Diallo’s harrowing first feature, which expands its historical scope daringly far.

This drama, directed by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, about a movie cast and crew working under the stress of their pandemic bubble in rural Portugal, is the most original fictional film to date about the age of COVID , not least because of its day-by-day chronological structure, which runs backward.

Rebeca Huntt’s first feature is a documentary self-portrait, in which she discovers that her parents’ lives and her Manhattan upbringing are inseparable from local and global political currents and finds that on-camera interviews with family members are fraught with unresolved conflicts.

Ougie Pak’s tense drama of artistic myths and realities, about a South Korean theatre company rehearsing a production of “Agamemnon” in a rented house in Greece, is centered on a young actress who endures emotional abuse from a charismatic male director.

This historical action-fantasy (the title stands for “Rise Roar Revolt”), directed by S. S. Rajamouli, imagines the encounter and shared combat, in the nineteen-twenties, of two real-life Indian revolutionary leaders, with results that are as phantasmagorical as they are melodramatic.

The third new film of Hong’s to be released in 2022 is a romantic drama of an astonishing spareness, about a young South Korean man who follows his girlfriend to Germany. What emerges are irreconcilable differences between parents and children, and a grim over-all vision of generational conflict.

The destiny of members of a Chinese theatre troupe, from the nineteen-twenties and the Second World War to the Cultural Revolution—and even into the afterlife—is showcased, with wry theatrical artifice, in Qiu Jiongjiong’s allusive approach to the history of twentieth-century China.

In the octogenarian Jerzy Skolimowski’s audacious remake of Robert Bresson’s 1966 classic, “ Au Hasard Balthazar ,” a donkey’s journeys through Poland and Italy provide a diagnostic cross-section of human cruelty and compassion.

Margaret Brown’s documentary traces the discovery, in Mobile, Alabama, of the submerged wreckage of the last-known ship that brought captive Africans to the United States, in 1860, and the town’s enduring legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow-era exclusions and discriminations.

The clever, tender, quietly melancholy feature-length expansion of the Web series by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer Camp is a metafictional blend of animation and live action, in which Camp (playing himself) encounters the living shell (voiced by Slate) and decides to make a film about him. ♦

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Justin Chang pairs the best movies of 2022, and picks 'No Bears' as his favorite

Justin Chang

Critic Justin Chang's picks for the best movies of 2022 include (clockwise, from top left): The Eternal Daughter, Crimes of the Future, EO, Tár, Decision to Leave and No Bears. A24, Neon, Festival de Cannes, Focus Features, MUBI, TIFF hide caption

Critic Justin Chang's picks for the best movies of 2022 include (clockwise, from top left): The Eternal Daughter, Crimes of the Future, EO, Tár, Decision to Leave and No Bears.

It was a terrific year for movies but also, in some ways, a dispiriting one. Sure, blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick and the just-released Avatar: The Way of Water brought audiences back to theaters in droves, but romantic comedies and grown-up dramas had more than the usual trouble finding audiences. Some of the movies on my year-end list passed quickly and quietly through theaters. Some are still in theaters, and a few will open more widely in 2023. Whether on the big screen or at home, I hope you'll take the time to seek them out.

Here are my 11 favorite movies of 2022, some of which I've paired thematically, though my No. 1 choice stands alone:

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi plays a version of himself in No Bears. TIFF hide caption

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi plays a version of himself in No Bears.

The brilliant Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi plays a version of himself, also named Jafar Panahi, who's spending several days in a remote village, where he becomes embroiled in a tense local drama. It's a fierce critique of small-town traditionalism and religious dogma. But while this is an angry and ultimately devastating movie, it's also a surprisingly playful and inventive one. Here I should note that Panahi, a longtime thorn in the side of the Iranian government, was recently imprisoned. No Bears itself is a powerful act of protest, and one of his very best movies.

Aftersun and The Eternal Daughter

Tilda Swinton plays two characters, a mother and a daughter, in The Eternal Daughter. A24 hide caption

Tilda Swinton plays two characters, a mother and a daughter, in The Eternal Daughter.

Two deeply moving parent-child stories, drawn from their filmmakers' real-life experiences. Aftersun , an achingly sad memory piece from the Scottish director Charlotte Wells, features pitch-perfect performances from Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio as a father and daughter trying to connect on a summer holiday — a journey that builds to an ending of startling emotional force. The Eternal Daughter , the English filmmaker Joanna Hogg's sly riff on the haunted-house movie, stars Tilda Swinton in two roles, a mother and daughter — but this spooky-sad ghost story never feels gimmicky.

Tár and Benediction

Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned conductor in the film Tár. Courtesy of Focus Features hide caption

Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned conductor in the film Tár.

Two portraits of queer artists — one fictional, the other real — operating in different eras, different spheres of influence and with dramatically different moral codes and perspectives. Todd Field' s mesmerizing, much-acclaimed drama Tár stars a never-better Cate Blanchett as a famous classical conductor whose life is gradually consumed by scandal. You've probably heard less about Benediction , Terence Davies ' barbed, tender and finally wretching film about the English poet and World War I veteran Siegfried Sassoon , magnificently played by Jack Lowden.

Decision to Leave and Kimi

Park Hae-il plays a homicide detective and Tang Wei is the femme fatale he's investigating in Decision to Leave . MUBI hide caption

Park Hae-il plays a homicide detective and Tang Wei is the femme fatale he's investigating in Decision to Leave .

Decision to Leave , a grandly entertaining murder mystery from the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook , stars Park Hae-il as a homicide detective and Tang Wei as the femme fatale he's investigating. It's an elaborate romantic riff on the classic Vertigo , which makes it a nice match for the year's other first-rate Hitchcockian thriller, Kimi . Steven Soderbergh 's taut and exhilarating genre piece is basically Rear Window for the age of Alexa, starring a terrific Zoë Kravitz as a COVID-cautious shut-in turned amateur sleuth.

Crimes of the Future and One Fine Morning

Kristen Stewart (left) is a fan of the surgery Léa Seydoux performs in Crimes of the Future . Neon hide caption

Kristen Stewart (left) is a fan of the surgery Léa Seydoux performs in Crimes of the Future .

A Léa Seydoux double bill: Crimes of the Future is David Cronenberg 's grim dystopian shocker set in a time when surgery has become an artistic and sometimes recreational pursuit. Like a lot of Cronenberg movies, it's not for the faint of heart, though it does touch the heart and the mind in eerily provocative ways. There's no public surgery to speak of in Mia Hansen-Løve's One Fine Morning , just scene after beautifully observed scene in which a single mom struggles to take care of her ailing father while opening herself up to the possibility of new love.

EO and Nope

The donkey's eyes seem to take the measure of modern life in Jerzy Skolimowski's film, EO . Festival de Cannes hide caption

The donkey's eyes seem to take the measure of modern life in Jerzy Skolimowski's film, EO .

A heartrending story about a donkey making its way through a cruel and unforgiving world, EO is a tribute of sorts to the classic 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar , but the great Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski approaches his four-legged subject with a formal and emotional brilliance all his own. As it happens, the systemic exploitation of animals is also a significant thematic thread in Nope , Jordan Peele 's completely original and wonderfully subversive sci-fi horror Western, which has a lot to say about an entertainment industry that reduces all living experience to big-budget spectacle. Like every movie on my list, it's one I recommend with an unequivocal yes.

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The best movies and tv of 2022, picked for you by npr critics.

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The best movies of 2022 (so far) — and how to watch them

From great blockbusters to a mockumentary about a talking inch-high shell.

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The year is half over, believe it or not. But while studios often hold their most prestigious releases for the second half of the year, 2022 has already served up a feast of cinema worth seeing — if you know where to look. From blockbusters to microbudget indies, documentaries about political issues to a mockumentary about a tiny talking shell, here are the 21 best movies of 2022 ... so far.

21. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing

Rory Kennedy’s enraging documentary traces the events that led to two crashes of the Boeing 737 Max planes and the deaths of hundreds of people. Boeing’s slide from a well-respected company built on trust and attention to detail to one that hid the truth to satisfy the demands of profit is familiar, but terrifying nonetheless. And Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is an exceptionally strong exposé, one with a clear thesis, a powerful, direct argument to make, and implications that extend far beyond just Boeing.

How to watch it: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is streaming on Netflix .

20. Crimes of the Future

Horror master David Cronenberg’s latest, Crimes of the Future , is certainly one of the weirdest (and maybe queasiest) movies of the year so far. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, and Scott Speedman, it’s a tale set in a dystopian future, when pervasive microplastics and a world that leans on synthetic materials have prompted new directions in human evolution. With bodies evolving as-yet-unseen organs, surgery becomes a public performance art. Societal factions form around different ideas about where humanity should go. Somehow it’s all wrapped up in an oddly sweet package, with human connection at its heart.

How to watch it: Crimes of the Future is playing in theaters.

19. Top Gun: Maverick

In a film set 35 years after Top Gun , Tom Cruise returns as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, no longer a bright young whippersnapper but still the best flyboy around. He’s called back to the elite Top Gun program to train a group of fresh-faced pilots for a daring mission, but while there he has to confront both his past with old flame Penny (Jennifer Connelly) and his own mortality. Top Gun: Maverick is almost unprecedented in its class, a nostalgia sequel that doesn’t feel like a cheap IP cash grab. Instead, it brings Maverick’s story full circle in a satisfying manner that adds depth and dimension to its predecessor, but still tells a story that’s all its own.

How to watch it: Top Gun: Maverick is playing in theaters.

18. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack star in this two-hander, a heartfelt comedy about a 60-something widow who hires a sex worker to — well, she’s not really sure what, but she knows she can’t go on the way she’s living. They meet in a hotel and slowly reveal themselves to one another, developing a friendship that has implications for them both. Directed by Sophie Hyde and written by Katy Brand, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a sexually frank and good-natured movie about trying to come to terms with yourself, your history, and your body, and Thompson and McCormack give subtle, generous performances.

How to watch it: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is streaming on Hulu .

17. The Batman

The Batman might be the moodiest and broodiest of the tales of the caped crusader — no small feat when you’re competing with the Dark Knight series — but it’s also one of the most innovative. This time, Batman returns to his roots as a detective, and director Matt Reeves places him in the middle of an old-fashioned noir, with the rain and shady lighting and twisty mystery that requires. The Batman is also a story about the morality and futility of revenge, and about a character who lives in a state of constant struggle between the two. The Batman is a slow burn, but its climax is a banger.

How to watch it: The Batman is streaming on HBO Max and available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.

16. Navalny

Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, survived an assassination attempt in August 2020. (Putin is so threatened by Navalny that he refuses to speak his name in public.) Daniel Roher’s Navalny follows the opposition leader through the events following that poisoning, and in particular the investigation that Navalny and his team at the Anti-Corruption Foundation launched into the attempt on his life. Much of the documentary is dedicated to observing and exploring that investigation, with Navalny speaking straight to the camera in interviews about his beliefs and work (including his controversial willingness to align with some far-right groups in opposing Putin’s regime). And there’s a scene involving a phone call that is worth the price of admission, making this thriller a must-see in our political moment.

How to watch it: Navalny is streaming on HBO Max .

15. The Fallout

Of the crop of more recent films about school shootings, Megan Park’s film The Fallout , which is as much a teen drama as a movie “about” a shooting, may be the best. Soon after the film starts, shots ring out; of course, the teens know exactly what’s happening. They have been participating in active shooter drills since grade school. They know about the Parkland kids, about what happened at Sandy Hook. They are getting shoved into a narrative they know all too well. Vada (Jenna Ortega) is in the bathroom when it happens, and she takes refuge with Mia (Maddie Ziegler) and Quinton (Niles Fitch). The violence occurs off-screen, while the trio huddles in a stall, trying to turn invisible as the unthinkable happens outside. But, they survive. The film’s focus isn’t on why it happened. Instead, the teens spend the movie asking why they survived, and how they can live in their altered reality.

How to watch it: The Fallout is streaming on HBO Max .

14. Cha Cha Real Smooth

Andrew (Cooper Raiff, who also wrote and directed the film) is a recent Tulane graduate who has moved back home to New Jersey while figuring out his next step. He meets Domino (Dakota Johnson), a single mother more than 10 years his senior who’s raising a teenager on the autism spectrum named Lola (Vanessa Burghardt). Andrew and Domino start to form a friendship that will teach them both something about themselves. And if that sounds like standard twee fare, rest assured — Raiff and Johnson’s performances turn it into something irresistible and lovely.

How to watch it: Cha Cha Real Smooth is playing in theaters and streaming on Apple TV+.

13. The Pink Cloud

Onscreen text at the beginning of The Pink Cloud tells us the film was written in 2017 and shot in 2019, which feels like an odd announcement to make to your audience. The reasons become almost immediately clear. In the story, a rosy pink cloud suddenly rolls across Earth, and if you breathe it in, you die. So everyone is instantly quarantined with whomever they happened to be with at the moment the cloud arrived. That means Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça), who met only the day before and spent the night together, are now stuck together indefinitely. The pink cloud hovers over the world for years, and Giovana and Yago slowly experience the stages we’re familiar with now: certainty that it will be over soon, rage, exhaustion, fear, weariness. The Pink Cloud is haunting and riveting in the best way, acutely diagnosing a mental state that will feel startlingly familiar. And in a strange way, it’s a little encouraging. We’ve been isolated, but we’re not alone.

How to watch it: The Pink Cloud is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.

12. The Northman

The Northman is a bone-crunching Viking epic from detail-obsessed director Robert Eggers , based on the legend of Amleth, from which Shakespeare adapted Hamlet’s story. It stars an extremely ripped Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth alongside Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe, and Björk. Eggers, who co-wrote the film with the Icelandic poet Sjón, had historians of Icelandic and Viking history on speed-dial throughout production, and the result is an extraordinarily detailed reproduction not just of the Vikings’ world, but also their way of thinking. If you can extract a modern message from The Northman — that “toxic masculinity” has been destroying men for literal eons, that women have been granted limited agency to push back — it’s really not the point of this retelling of a much-retold tale. Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as if it’s tapping into something in the back of our minds that we’ve always known but half forgotten.

How to watch it: The Northman is streaming on Peacock and available to purchase on digital platforms.

11. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

The genre-defying, subtly unnerving We’re All Going to the World’s Fair captures the experience of the internet through the eyes of a lonely, isolated teenager. Casey (Anna Cobb) becomes immersed in an online horror challenge, one in which players complete a series of tasks (chants, rituals, and so on) and then experience some kind of transformation. She makes an unusual online connection that could be benign or could be menacing — how can Casey really tell? Director Jane Schoenbrun keeps us on our toes, too, and in so doing questions how we exist online, and why.

How to watch it: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.

10. Everything Everywhere All At Once

Everything Everywhere All At Once functions as a pretty good summary of the film, which is a big-hearted, hilarious, boldly sentimental tale of a mother and a daughter just trying to love one another. Also, it’s about the multiverse. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is stuck in her life, running a laundromat with a hapless husband (Ke Huy Quan) and trying to reach out to her acerbic daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Plus, they’re being audited by the IRS. But when she stumbles into a mind-boggling discovery — that she must save all the universes from imminent destruction — things get weird. It’s absurd and wild and wonderful, and will probably make you cry.

How to watch it: Everything Everywhere All At Once is playing in theaters and available to purchase on digital platforms.

9. Benediction

Terence Davies’s last film, A Quiet Passion , centered on the poet Emily Dickinson; in Benediction , Davies turns to a different poet, Siegfried Sassoon (a terrific Jack Lowden). Benediction — which means “blessing” — spends most of its time on Sassoon’s passionate but thwarted relationships with several different men, after which he eventually married a woman. The whole story is framed by Sassoon’s late-in-life conversion to Catholicism, amid his soured marriage and his son’s derision. There is no happy-go-lucky ending here, only the sense that an ineffable longing we have, to know and be known, is so precious and rare that most of us never find its fulfillment here on Earth. But the film’s title lays bare its aims: to offer words of blessing over a man who never quite found the love he craved and, yet, kept looking.

How to watch it: Benediction is playing in theaters.

8. Jackass Forever

You want me to explain the inclusion of Jackass Forever on this list? Well, have you seen it? I have , and discovered it was as cathartic, unhinged, and weirdly good-hearted as any of its predecessors. Yes, it’s a movie about (mostly) dudes doing really stupid things together, and that’s what makes it great. Jackass Forever is the first of the films to add a new cast, because Johnny Knoxville and his long-suffering pals are hovering around 50 these days. They’re a lot more brittle than they were in the 1990s. And the new members are delighted to be in the movie we used to watch ! Who can blame them? They have taken on a high, low calling: to be the fools who prostrate themselves across a pile of mousetraps or take an enormous belly flop for the camera, for us.

How to watch it: Jackass Forever is streaming on Paramount+ and available to rent or buy on digital platforms.

7. Happening

Set in France in the 1960s, Happening is the story of Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) and the abortion she can’t legally attain. Anne is a talented student from a middle-class family who hopes her literature studies will be the key to a long and satisfying career. But when she discovers she’s pregnant, she is left without guidance and, seemingly, in a world full of potential minefields. Happening ’s narrative power comes from how it evokes the profound loneliness that Anne feels, unable to speak to her friends, family, or doctors about what to do next. It’s brutal in spots, but especially vital to watch right now.

How to watch it: Happening is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.

6. Friends and Strangers

Friends and Strangers feels a little bit like a throwback to the indie mumblecore movement of the aughts , but with a distinctive and slightly absurdist Australian twist. Alice (Emma Diaz) finds herself on a perhaps ill-advised camping trip with Ray (Fergus Wilson), with whom she doesn’t really have any chemistry. Soon, out of nowhere, we’re following Ray through some misadventures of his own. Set in and around Sydney, but spotlighting the ways human relationships languidly unfold on the terrain, it’s a little bit about the inherent silliness of what we call “civilization,” and also about how often we live our lives in a state of perpetual missed connections.

How to watch it: Friends and Strangers is streaming on Mubi .

5. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

The summer’s funniest movie might be Marcel the Shell With Shoes On , based on short films that Jenny Slate (who voices Marcel) and Dean Fleischer-Camp (who directs the film) made for YouTube over a decade ago. Slate and Fleischer-Camp were married in 2012; they’ve since split up, and in a somewhat remarkable fashion, explored that experience obliquely in this feature. The protagonist, Marcel, is a 1-inch-high shell (with sneakers) who lives in an Airbnb rented by a newly single filmmaker named Dean, who decides to make a documentary about his tiny new pal. It’s hilarious and extremely sweet, and also somehow skirts the edge of over-sentimentality with aplomb — a feel-good movie that’s not like anything you’ve seen before.

How to watch it: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is playing in theaters.

4. The Worst Person in the World

One of 2021’s breakout festival favorites was The Worst Person in the World , about four years in the life of 20-something Julie (Renate Reinsve), which was finally released in the US early this year. Like many young people, Julie realizes in university that she doesn’t want to be a neuroscientist; she wants to be an artist. So she blows up her life and starts over, winding up in a relationship with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). That’s just the beginning. The Worst Person in the World tells Julie’s story in 12 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue — she is the main character in her own story, one that she’s writing as she’s living it. It’s a film about navigating life as a millennial, trying to figure out what love is like, what work is for, and whether you’re following your heart or whether you’re just, well, the worst person in the world.

How to watch it: The Worst Person in the World is available to stream on Hulu and to rent or purchase on digital platforms.

3. Petite Maman

Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma returns with a much smaller-scale but no less affecting film. Young Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), whose beloved grandmother has just passed away, is helping her parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne) clean out the now-empty home where her mother grew up. Nelly is close to both of her parents, but is especially concerned about her mother. She longs to have one more day to spend with her grandmother. One day, in the woods, she meets a girl named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), and the two forge a friendship that might be the fulfillment of her fears and wishes. Petite Maman is a pithy, gemlike film, clocking in at only 72 minutes and as pristine and poignant a reflection on the bonds that tie us to one another across time and generations as one can imagine.

How to watch it: Petite Maman is playing in theaters and available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.

Donbass was selected by Ukraine as its entry for the 2019 Oscars, but the Academy didn’t nominate it. Then it seemed to disappear, at least in the US. But in 2022, with the name “Donbass” (sometimes rendered “Donbas”) — the region in eastern Ukraine that has been the seat of pro-Putin, pro-Russian unrest since 2014 — newly recognizable to American audiences, it finally made it to the US. Set in the mid-2010s, Donbass is a festival of absurdism in 13 vignettes of a region gone haywire, falling apart in the mess of conflict and deceit that has sprung up in the fighting between pro-Russian separatists, backed by Putin’s government, and Ukrainian government forces. In the way that The Wire unpacked something vital about the layered mess of American cities, Donbass digs with the grimmest of grins into a conflict that has been going on for a long time. The question isn’t what the fix is; it’s whether we’ll ever stop thinking it’s an easy one.

How to watch it: Donbass is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.

1. After Yang

In the near future, you can purchase a “techno sapien” — a humanoid robot — as a companion. Jake (Colin Farrell, who is terrific) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) bought a refurbished model named Yang to befriend their daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), in part to help her learn about her country of origin, China. But now Yang is malfunctioning, and Jake is desperate to figure out how to bring him back. Directed by Kogonada ( Columbus ), After Yang moves slowly and quietly and then comes in like a tidal wave, exploring grief and love and memory with aching poignance.

How to watch it: After Yang is streaming on Showtime and available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.

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Movie reviews: 60 of the best films of 2022

Must-watch new releases include Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and The Silent Twins

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1. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

2. the silent twins, 3. charlotte, 4. lady chatterley’s lover, 5. glass onion: a knives out mystery, 6. matilda the musical, 7. bones and all, 8. aftersun, 9. the menu, 10. armageddon time, 11. no bears, 12. a bunch of amateurs, 14. causeway, 15. the wonder, 16. barbarian, 17. the banshees of inisherin, 18. the good nurse, 20. all quiet on the western front, 21. nothing compares, 22. catherine called birdy, 23. moonage daydream, 24. see how they run, 25. the forgiven, 26. official competition, 28. mr malcolm’s list, 29. my old school, 30. fisherman’s friends: one and all, 33. thirteen lives, 34. the duke, 35. hit the road, 36. notre-dame on fire, 37. she will, 38. mcenroe, 39. the railway children return, 40. thor: love and thunder, 41. turning red, 42. boiling point, 43. top gun: maverick, 44. licorice pizza, 45. belfast, 47. minions: the rise of gru, 48. the batman, 50. parallel mothers, 52. the eyes of tammy faye, 53. operation mincemeat, 54. apollo 10½: a space age childhood, 55. the northman, 56. true things, 57. the outfit, 58. good luck to you, leo grande, 59. playground.

Guillermo del Toro had apparently spent “his whole professional life” yearning to adapt Carlo Collodi’s famous tale for the screen, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . Now he has finally produced this wonderfully dark stop-motion animation. As you might expect of the director of Pan’s Labyrinth , his Pinocchio is low on sugary sentiment. He has set it against the “glowering backdrop” of Mussolini-era Italy, and it works brilliantly. The “formidable” cast of voice actors includes Tilda Swinton as the “benign wood sprite” who awakens Pinocchio, and Ewan McGregor as the talking cricket. Pinocchio himself is voiced by the young British actor Gregory Mann, and is nothing like the “cherubic” puppet of the 1940 film. This Pinocchio is a bratty, rebellious “handful”; and it means that when he finally succumbs to “filial love”, it’s genuinely touching. The film is worth seeing, but “if I recommended it as fun for all the family, I’d expect my nose to sprout by another inch or two”. This is a Pinocchio strictly “for grown-ups”.

Actually, I’d expect children with a bit of “grit” to get a lot out of this, said Danny Leigh in the FT . Yes, it’s “sorrowful”, and it looks seriously at loss and fatherhood, but it’s never “ponderous”, and the story “zips and thrills” along, aided by some “wonderfully inventive” animation. Beautiful and unusual, the film “harkens back to the good old days of tough-love family flicks, with a lot of tears and huge emotional payoffs”, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post . Pinocchio may be “100% unabashed lumber” – so woody he’d “vanish on my living room floor” – but he is still “the most endearing animated on-screen fella since Paddington”.

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This “heartfelt, absorbing” drama tells the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, identical twin daughters of Barbadian immigrants who grew up in a white community in Wales, and who became known as the silent twins because they only communicated with each other, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Played as adults by Tamara Lawrance and Letitia Wright, the sisters were “effectively abandoned by the school and care systems”. They wrote reams of poems and stories, and had a novel self published, before being committed to Broadmoor in 1981 for arson and theft. Their story has been adapted before, but this version, by the Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska, uses stop-motion puppet animation to depict “the strangeness and loneliness of their imaginings”, and also looks “subtly” at the role that race and gender may have played in the way they were “written off”. It’s a “disturbing” film, “but also tender and sad”.

The Silent Twins: the true story behind new film

The film is “overlong”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , but it is lovely to look at, and the twins’ “often distressing” tale is “fabulously well-told”. Some aspects work better than others, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph – Wright has a “nice line in Diana-esque sidelong glances”, and the script “wisely has the girls communicate in plain English”, rather than in the rapid-fire mix of English and Barbadian slang that they used. But the leads “chew and slurp at their consonants”, which becomes “wearing”, and the mystery at the heart of their story – why they withdrew in the first place – is never quite plumbed. This leaves the viewer “peeping confusedly” into the twins’ “sealed-off world”, without understanding why they shut themselves up inside it.

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This “sombre and haunting” animation describes the life of Charlotte Salomon, the Jewish-German artist who was killed at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 26, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Salomon (voiced by Keira Knightley) is best known for her “semi-autobiographical masterwork”, Life? or Theatre? , a collection of 769 paintings that is sometimes described as the first graphic novel. We first meet her in 1933, when she is studying art in Berlin; she “listens dutifully” to her “stuffy professors” while nurturing her own “impressionistic” style. But “signs of dread are everywhere” – staff greet each other with “lazy Sieg Heils” – and she eventually flees to the French Riviera, where she is captured. Like other “cartoons for grown-ups”, such as Flee and Waltz with Bashir , this is a “serious meditation on politically motivated violence”, and it mostly works well.

Charlotte clearly “wants to bring Salomon’s aesthetic to life with the warm homage of its own animation”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , but the “basic, child-friendly visuals” never do justice to her compositions, and the film feels “cocooned” in its own prettiness. And while the cast is full of “big names” – including Jim Broadbent, Sophie Okonedo and Helen McCrory (in her last screen role) – the sheer number of famous voices ends up feeling like “cameo overkill”. For an account of “an unconventional artist, the animation is disappointingly conventional”, agreed John Nugent in Empire . Even so, the film makes for “an emotional, humane viewing experience”, and should satisfy, and inform, the young audience it’s made for.

“If you’re of my generation, I expect your first encounter with D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the (well-thumbed) book passed around school, and then maybe Ken Russell’s full-frontal, hut-shaking, 1993 TV adaptation,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Netflix’s film seems more in keeping with Lawrence’s “alternative title for the novel, Tenderness”: it is more of a “gentle, affecting, immersive love story than a sex story” – though it does fit in “plenty of sex”. Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, it stars Emma Corrin as Constance Chatterley, the young aristocrat who is ground down by the cruelty of her husband (Matthew Duckett), and who falls for Mellors (Jack O’Connell), the gruff gamekeeper. The themes of the novel – class inequities, industrialisation, “sex as natural rather than shameful” – are all addressed, “but delicately so”, and while the film “won’t set the world alight”, the story is “quietly yet rather beautifully told”.

Corrin and O’Connell are “splendid” as the lovers, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail ; but it’s a pity that the novel’s jagged edges have been sanded down. “Mellors is less a piece of rough than a piece of semi-smooth”, who reads Joyce and has been “brutally cuckolded” himself. Constance, meanwhile, is depicted as such a fervent “champion of the working man”, she’s “practically Angela Rayner”, which doesn’t convince. Still, there have been worse adaptations, and it is unusually “lovely to look at”. It’s all very “tasteful and nice”, said Tomiwa Owolade in The New Statesman , with its “tender voice-overs” and a soft-lit scene in which the lovers dance naked in the rain. But it has no “erotic build-up”, and none of the book’s seductive darkness. In the end, it seems a bit “pointless”.

A rumour has been “doing the rounds” that Glass Onion isn’t as good as Knives Out , said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . Well, that rumour is “cobblers”: Glass Onion is complex, intelligent and “outrageously funny”. Daniel Craig returns as detective Benoit Blanc, with a new crime to solve, “in a different location, among a different set of A-list faces”. Proceedings kick off when a tech billionaire (Edward Norton) invites some friends to his Greek island home to play a murder-mystery game. The story plods a bit at first, but when the twists kick in, it becomes “edge-of-the-seat stuff”.

If you ask me, Glass Onion is better than the first film, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Sure, it’s “preposterous”, but it’s properly entertaining: watching Craig parade about in a variety of “outrageous leisure-themed outfits” is a particular “joy”. The film is “crafted with guile”, said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker . But the characters are just too unlikeable; in the end, you don’t care who kills who, which leaves the movie feeling “curiously thin and cold to the touch”.

When Netflix paid $500m for the rights to Roald Dahl’s works, “plenty thought it had overpaid”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . But on the strength of Matilda the Musical , it looks like a “shrewd” investment. Adapted from the West End hit, and featuring Tim Minchin’s music, the film could have had a “constraining theatrical feel”; but director Matthew Warchus imbues the story, about a child prodigy with telekinetic powers, with “a whole new energy”. Irish newcomer Alisha Weir is a wonderful Matilda, and it all adds up to an “exuberant joy”.

It struck me as a bit “shrill and stage-schooly”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday ; but there are plenty of compensations, not least Emma Thompson, who is “unquestionably brilliant” – and all but unrecognisable – as the vast and fearsome Miss Trunchbull. The trouble is that while it captures the darkness of Dahl, it lacks some of the author’s lightness, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture . I wish the film had paid attention to what Matilda tells Miss Honey in the book: “Children are not so serious as grown-ups and they love to laugh.” Viewers will laugh, but some moments are so “disturbing”, they “may scream and cry, too”.

“Anyone who travels the roads of America must sooner or later confront the question of what to eat,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times . For the “footloose young lovers” in Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All , it “is more a matter of ‘who’”: Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) are cannibals, who murder to sate their appetites. Yet this is “less a horror movie than an outlaw romance in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde ”, and though it is a bit ridiculous, it’s also “curiously touching”.

“Friends whose opinions I trust have gone gaga” for this film, said Danny Leigh in the FT , but it left me if not cold, then lukewarm. Russell is “excellent”, but Chalamet doesn’t really convince as a drifter capable of driving a pick-up truck, and Mark Rylance really hams it up as a veteran cannibal “huffing at the air like a macabre Oxo advert”. It may not be for everyone, but I found it “the strangest, most bewitching movie of the year”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . There are “grisly sights” (lots of “bloodied snouts” and “cadavers buzzed by flies”), but this misfit love story – “by turns dreamy, sad, bloody and repulsive” – could become a new generation’s Sid and Nancy.

The Scottish director Charlotte Wells’s “astonishing feature debut” is “a portrait of paternal love, its protean nature and the lingering impact it leaves on adult life”, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Set in the late 1990s, the drama focuses on Calum (Paul Mescal), a father who has taken his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) on holiday to a low-budget Turkish resort. The film is largely made up of “sun-kissed vignettes” depicting holiday fun, but bubbling beneath the surface is “something much deeper and more difficult”: it turns out that Calum has been largely absent from his daughter’s life, and the pair are “burdened” by an urgent need to reconnect. Added to that is the hint of something darker: Calum does not explain how he broke his arm; there is bruising on his body; and though he clearly loves his daughter, there is an un-telegraphed ambiguity to his feelings. The “real kicker”, however, is that the narrative is intercut with scenes in which the adult Sophie, who now has a child of her own, constantly replays this holiday in her mind.

The film “ripples and shimmers like a swimming pool of mystery”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Wells never forces the pace, nor labours the point. “With remarkable confidence”, she just lets the drama unspool like a “haunting and deceptively simple” short story. The result is outstanding, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent – a film that is gentle and contemplative, yet feels as though it is teetering on the edge of a cliff. We don’t know why this shared time has become so important to Sophie; and she doesn’t learn her father’s secrets. This is a film that “leaves behind a deep feeling of want, and it’s one of the most powerful emotions you’ll find in any cinema this year”.

A darkly misanthropic fable about pompous foodie snobs, The Menu is “a wicked treat”, said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal . The film is set in an ultra-exclusive restaurant on a private island, accessible only by boat and without mobile phone coverage; ruling over it with an iron spatula is a scowling martinet known simply as Chef (Ralph Fiennes). The dozen diners include a highfalutin restaurant critic (Janet McTeer), a fading movie star (John Leguizamo) and an obsessive foodie (Nicholas Hoult). His companion – played by the “superb” Anya Taylor-Joy – is the only diner who is bored by the pretentiousness of it all, which creates friction between her, her date and the supremely sinister Chef. The characterisation is a bit too broad, and the plot doesn’t entirely stand up to scrutiny – but if you like your comedy “as black as squid ink”, there’s plenty to enjoy.

With each of the diners getting their just desserts, you could describe it as a grown-up, haute cuisine take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph , with Fiennes as the Willy Wonka character who despises the kind of people who would pay absurd prices for his elaborate grub. It adds up to a comic thriller of “rare and mouthwatering fiendishness”: director Mark Mylod builds the tension masterfully, while having a good deal of fun with culinary pomposity. With targets ranging from tax havens to performance art, I found the satire rather scattershot, said Nick Hilton in The Independent . But Fiennes – who plays Chef half as a Michelin-starred maestro, half as a cult leader – is mesmerising, as is Taylor-Joy. Both have “such an otherworldly magnetism that, frankly, I’d be content to watch them read a menu”.

Set in a Jewish family in Queen’s, New York, as the Reagan era looms, James Gray’s new film is a “moving” autobiographical drama with a “lot to say”, said Paul Whitington in the Irish Independent . Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) is an artistic 11-year-old who befriends Johnny (Jaylin Webb), one of the few black children at his inner-city school. The pair both have ambitions, but they get into various scrapes, and eventually Paul’s parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) decide to move him to a local private school that has Donald Trump’s father as one of its main benefactors. Paul had already noticed that teachers treat him and Johnny differently; now the gap between them grows even wider.

The film is evocatively shot, but not everything here rings true, said Geoffrey Macnab in The i Paper . The family are portrayed as struggling: Paul’s father is a disappointed and sometimes violent man; his mother is a frazzled homemaker. Yet with the help of Paul’s wise old grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) they are able to send him to an expensive bastion of white privilege. What gives the film its resonance is Repeta’s “fierce, unsentimental” performance. This is a child who is slowly realising that “he is the beneficiary of a system that routinely gives him the benefit of the doubt”, said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post , and this begins to “chafe against what he’s been told about his own Jewish heritage of survival against oppressive odds”. Gray’s exploration of his own “budding awareness of injustice” can slip “into self-congratulation”, but overall this is a “disarmingly honest” film about love and loyalty, and “how identity morphs from one generation to the next”.

With Iranian women rising up against their country’s oppressive regime, this is a good time to watch No Bears , said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian – starring, and directed by, the recently jailed Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi. In the film, he plays “Jafar Panahi”, a film director who has been banned from making films or from leaving Iran, who nevertheless decides to shoot a film in a Turkish town just over the border. Panahi delegates the “hands-on direction” to his assistant Reza (Reza Heydari), while watching proceedings over Skype from a rented room in a nearby Iranian village. There, he falls foul of village chiefs, who accuse him of taking an incriminating photo of a young woman who is about to undergo an arranged marriage, a photograph he insists does not exist. The “meta-fiction” at the heart of No Bears can feel a bit “emotionally obtuse”, but don’t be put off: this is a film of real intelligence and “moral seriousness”.

No Bears is shot through with “wider political resonances”, said Mark Kermode in The Observer , but it’s also “a piercingly self-aware portrait of an artist”. It is remarkable that “despite all that he has faced”, Panahi has “the wit and humility” to question his art with such “candour and self-deprecation”. That Panahi was able to make a film at all is astonishing, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator , let alone a film that is as funny, engrossing and thought-provoking as No Bears . The more you think about it, the more it reveals about “lives made small by restrictions that can and do result in tragedy”. Daring and brave, it is partly about the power of film; it is also “great cinema”.

Documentary

The members of the Bradford Movie Makers club have been making “virtually zero-budget films with rickety production values” since 1932, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian . Kim Hopkins’s “warm and rather wonderful” documentary about them “finds comedy in their idiosyncratic passion, without ever being mean or mocking”. In the club’s heyday, it had a waiting list of several years; today, it is on its uppers. Its numbers are dwindling, and it is five years behind on the rent for its crumbling clubhouse. Still, “some big personalities” remain, including Colin, a retired carpenter in his 80s whose wife lives in a dementia care home; and Phil, the club’s “enfant terrible”, a “sweary” fortysomething “lad” who makes short films with titles such as The Haunted Turnip . There are funny moments, but this is a thoughtful film that has “unexpectedly deep things” to say about “camaraderie, community and male friendship”.

A Bunch of Amateurs celebrates a “certain kind of Englishness” – eccentric, passionate and “engagingly daft”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . As the documentary unfolds, it becomes clear that there is no mushy ending in store: the films produced by the club’s members will not get much of an audience, and “in truth don’t deserve one”. But that’s not the point: its members are “amateurs in the original sense of the word, making films for the love of the process”. The club is a lifeline for them, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman . The “very act of making and screening films” offers them “much-needed respite from their everyday troubles”. Still, Hopkins’s attempts to turn the club’s precarious future into a comment on the state of the film industry feels “a little strained”.

“Not much happens” in Living , Kazuo Ishiguro’s “impeccably written” new film, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail ; but what doesn’t happen “doesn’t happen exquisitely”. Set in 1950s London and directed by Oliver Hermanus, it stars Bill Nighy as Mr Williams, a “stiffly venerable” bureaucrat who spends his days processing planning applications for London’s County Council. A widower, he is a “benignly authoritative presence” in the office and “a politely tolerated one” at the home he shares in Esher with his stolid son and daughter-in-law. When he learns that he has terminal cancer, however, he resolves to add “colour to his monochrome existence”: he skips work, forms a platonic but “faintly scandalous friendship” with an ex-employee (played “delightfully” by Aimee Lou Wood), and champions the efforts of a group of East End mums to build a children’s playground on a bomb site. Living is not exhilarating, but it’s beautiful in its melancholy way, “and Nighy is simply superb”.

This is one of those rare films that “may actually inspire you to live differently and, perhaps, do something of value before it’s too late”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . A remake of the great Japanese film Ikiru (1952), it is as “heartbreakingly tender” as the original, and “asks the same question – what makes a life meaningful? – but this time with Englishness, bowler hats, the sweet trolley at Fortnum’s and Bill Nighy”. Really, “what more could you want?” Everything “comes together” in Living , said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times : “the delicious ache” of Ishiguro’s script; Jamie Ramsay’s lovely, “desaturated cinematography”; and, above all, Nighy. As an actor, he is as reliable “as an old umbrella”. Here, he has “a chance to unfurl fully” in a role worthy of his talents.

“ Causeway is an excellent, moving, determinedly low-key slice of US indie cinema” that could easily have slipped under the radar were it not for the presence of Jennifer Lawrence, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph . She stars as Lynsey, an engineer for the US military who moves back in with her mother in New Orleans, having narrowly missed being blown up in Afghanistan by a bomb that claimed the life of one of her comrades. Dosed up on medication and struggling with a “drastic case” of PTSD, Lynsey drifts through her hometown “with a sense of futility and woozy disconnectedness”. When she meets James (Brian Tyree Henry), a mechanic who lost a leg in an accident a few years earlier, these two “broken people” bond, and the film “gently ignites”. This is a “spare, sensitive and unadorned” film, and it’s well worth seeing.

Lawrence has wasted almost a decade on “soulless blockbusters” and “arthouse misfires”, said Kevin Maher in The Times ; so it’s a joy to see her finally produce “the kind of restrained, internalised performance” that made her name in the 2010 indie film, Winter’s Bone . But she is nearly outshone by her co-star, who imbues his character with “humour, compassion and hangdog dignity”, and grounds the film in gravitas. Causeway is superbly acted, agreed A.O. Scott in The New York Times , but once James and Lynsey are brought together, the film seems unsure “what to do with them”. The “symmetry of their physical and psychological wounds” feels far too “neatly arranged” to be credible, and while Henry and Lawrence do what they can, they can’t quite “bring the script’s static and fuzzy ideas about pain, alienation and the need for connection” to life.

Florence Pugh is “terrific” in this period drama set in Ireland in 1862, just a few years after the Great Famine, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday . She plays Lib, an English nurse sent to a remote village to observe an 11-year-old girl (an “impressive” Kíla Lord Cassidy), who is reported to have lived for four months without eating. Lib suspects this “miracle” is a con, perpetrated by the child’s family, and resolves to uncover the truth, aided by a sharp-witted journalist played by Tom Burke. The story is unappealingly framed: it starts and ends in a modern-day film studio. But the rest is well done and there are some fine performances. A word of warning, though: The Wonder is so darkly shot that “anyone watching on Netflix will need the living room lights off and the curtains drawn” to have a clue what’s going on.

Adapted from Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel, it is an “arrestingly strange” and “distinctively literary tale of innocence, horror and imperial guilt”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Without Pugh’s “sensuality, passion and human sympathy”, the film could have teetered “under the weight of its contrivances”; but thanks to the “pure force” of her performance, it works. The cast is “stellar” and the cinematography “striking”, but I found it frustratingly lacking in nuance, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times . “Every plot progression and twist” – from the big reveal to the ludicrous denouement – is so heightened, it makes “the average telenovela look like Bicycle Thieves”. Unless “you are absolutely fine with weapons-grade melodrama”, I’d steer clear.

Barbarian is a “playful” horror film that uses “one of the minor pitfalls of modern life” as a “satisfying plot hook”, said Ed Potton in The Times . Georgina Campbell plays Tess, a documentary researcher who arrives in a “down-at-heel” neighbourhood of Detroit one night for a job interview, only to find that the Airbnb she’d booked has been rented to someone else on a different app. That person is Keith (Bill Skarsgård), who comes across as a “nice guy” equally puzzled by the situation. Tess is wary even so, but she lets her guard down when they share a bottle of wine and bond over their passion for music. Soon, however, she discovers that the house is harbouring a horrifying secret. Often “gleefully scary”, this is an “inventive tale that’s full of disarming twists and #MeToo undertones”, and it makes evocative use of Detroit’s “abandoned buildings and sense of decay”.

This low-budget production has done “excellent business at the US box office – and deservedly so”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail : it’s smart, scary and at some points “very funny”. It’s just a pity that the plot gets less credible as the film goes on. Still, it’s “done with tremendous swagger”, and “those few good laughs make the chills even chillier”. I’d say that it is only “competently made”, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian : it feels “curiously flat”, and its echoes of horrors such as Don’t Breathe and The People Under the Stairs are not flattering. It’s also frustrating to watch Campbell, “an actor of clear intelligence”, glumly navigate “a character of deep stupidity”: she starts the film as a “smart and careful woman”, and ends it as a “maddeningly dim-witted” one.

Comedy-drama

Tragedy and comedy are “perfectly paired” in this “deliciously melancholy” new film from Martin McDonagh, said Mark Kermode in The Observer . The Banshees of Inisherin reunites the director with the stars of his 2008 debut, In Bruges : Colin Farrell plays Pádraic, a dairy farmer on the fictional island of Inisherin, who pops into his best friend’s house one afternoon in 1923, as the Irish Civil War is raging distantly on the mainland, to find that Colm (Brendan Gleeson) has no interest in coming to the pub. In fact, Colm has no interest in being friends anymore. “Depressed by a sense of time slipping away”, and determined to spend his remaining years composing fiddle music of lasting value, he has decided to rid himself of Pádraic’s “aimless” chatter. And silly though his resolution seems to other islanders, Colm is taking it deadly seriously: when Pádraic tries to persuade him to rethink, Colm threatens to cut off one of his own fingers whenever Pádraic speaks to him. The film swings “between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking”; and the cast is “note-perfect”.

This sad and startling film is my favourite of the year so far, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . The characters have real depth; the dialogue is “exquisitely crafted”; the score is “glorious”. And while McDonagh has come under fire for peddling Irish stereotypes, the only flaw I can detect is “in the dentistry department”: I suspect “the smiles of the rural Irish 100 years ago were rather more peat-brown than pearly-white”. The Banshees of Inisherin is, by my reckoning, “a perfectly formed piece”, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Consistently witty and visually ravishing, it is “unafraid to ask serious questions about life as it is, and should be, lived”. It is, in short, a work of “proper art”.

This Netflix thriller is based on the real-life case of Charles Cullen, a New Jersey nurse who was arrested in 2003 having apparently killed hundreds of patients, said Edward Porter in The Sunday Times . He is played by Eddie Redmayne, who proves he is “more than able to conjure up a desiccated, quietly creepy” murderer; while Jessica Chastain “adds humanity” as Amy Loughren, a struggling nurse and single mother who bonds with Cullen when he starts working at her hospital, but eventually plays a key role in bringing him down, as it becomes clear that he has been covertly administering lethal overdoses. The film is essentially a report on the administrative flaws that allowed Cullen to work in a series of hospitals without detection for so long: and while it’s a little “grey and plodding in its style”, the two lead performances make it well worth watching.

Directed by the Danish film-maker Tobias Lindholm, this is one of those films that “operates at a low temperature, simmering its ingredients until the final reel”, said James Mottram in the Radio Times . There are some “terrifying moments”, but anyone “looking for a scary serial killer movie, in true Silence of the Lambs style”, would do better to sit it out. Still, “as a character study of a disturbed mind”, the film “pushes all the right buttons”. The Good Nurse is entertaining enough, said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post . But ultimately, it’s “the kind of dime-a-dozen true-crime tale that typically goes straight to streaming”. I was left wondering why two such talented actors “thought something this slight, this weightless, this forgettable was ever worth their time”.

Emily Brontë died in 1848 at the age of 30 with just one novel to her name, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . “But that novel was Wuthering Heights .” And this “beguiling film” imagines what might have inspired her to write it. Written and directed by Frances O’Connor, it offers a speculative, even mischievous, take on the author’s life, about which precious little is known. We begin at the end, with Emily (Emma Mackey) on her death bed and her sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) aghast at the contents of her novel, but astounded by its merit. “How did you write it?” she demands – and we are whisked back in time to find out. Emily, we learn, is considered the “weird one” of the Brontë girls; a loner who pours her thoughts into her stories. When her clergyman father (Adrian Dunbar) takes on an attractive new curate (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), she isn’t impressed, but her cynicism slowly turns to love. The film is “handsome-looking”, beautifully acted, and the script is “superb”.

What a “daring and ravishing” film this is, agreed Deborah Ross in The Spectator . It’s a period drama that takes liberties, but “there’s no Billie Eilish on the soundtrack or breaking of the fourth wall or jokey intertitles, which is a mighty relief”. Aspects of the plot may sound “insane” – at one point, Emily tries opium; at another she is sent to retrieve her brother from a pub, and returns drunk herself. (What? “Emily Brontë, drunk! And high!”) But within the film’s “internal logic”, it all makes sense. Mackey is on splendid form here, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . But the film is based on the simple premise that “being on Team Emily means sticking the boot into her sisters”. Yet the Brontës were team players. “Why is that not a story worth telling?”

Erich Maria Remarque’s classic 1929 anti-war novel has been adapted for the big screen twice before, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian ; but this is the first German-language version – and the result is a “powerful, eloquent” and “conscientiously impassioned” film, well worth seeing. Felix Kammerer plays Paul, a German teenager who enlists with his schoolfriends in a burst of patriotic fervour towards the end of the First World War. He is anticipating “an easy, swaggering march into Paris”; instead, he finds himself mired “in a nightmare of bloodshed and chaos”. Meanwhile, in a parallel plot (not in the book) a real-life German politician, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), is trying to negotiate an armistice. The film is “a substantial, serious work, acted with urgency and focus”, with battle scenes that seamlessly combine CGI with live action.

All Quiet on the Western Front is “reminiscent of a darker, much tougher 1917” , said Kevin Maher in The Times . The set pieces are spectacular, but they are humanised by “incidental details” – the soldiers learn, for instance, that “shoving their hands down their trousers keeps their trigger fingers warm”. Some images linger long after the film is over: “a mutilated body hanging in the woods like something from Goya’s Disasters of War ”, a battlefield of charging soldiers so suddenly perforated by Allied machine guns “that a faint pink mist, made of tiny droplets of blood, fills the air”. “See it on the biggest screen possible. Then watch it again on Netflix.” There are moments when the film resembles a preposterously beautiful PlayStation game, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph . But its evocation of war ends up connecting “where it truly matters: in the gut”.

“It’s been 263,000 hours and 10,960 days – give or take – since Sinéad O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live ,” said Leslie Felperin in the FT . The Irish singer’s 1992 protest against clerical abuse in the Catholic Church nearly wrecked her career – not that she “gave much of a toss”, as becomes clear in this “rousing” documentary.

Director Kathryn Ferguson pieces together the pop star’s life through archive footage and interviews, including with O’Connor herself; the picture that gradually emerges is of an inveterate rebel whose refusal to be bossed around began when she shaved her head early in her career, in defiance of her record company.

The film works as a study of O’Connor’s “complex character”; but what a pity that Prince’s estate refused to give the film-makers permission to use her unforgettable 1990 cover of his song Nothing Compares 2 U .

Lena Dunham, creator of the cult HBO comedy-drama Girls , is “perhaps not the first name you would think of to adapt and direct a period film set in medieval England”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer . But this teen comedy, based on the 1994 novel by Karen Cushman, is a “peppy, irreverent” triumph.

Bella Ramsey plays Lady Catherine, a bird-loving 14-year-old (hence her nickname, Birdy), who finds herself in a sticky situation when her “charming but feckless” father (Andrew Scott) fritters away the family fortune. His solution is to marry Catherine off to a “title-hungry gentleman of means”; the trouble is, Catherine likes her life as it is – so she sets about scaring off her suitors with “every unsavoury trick” she can conjure.

Ramsey excelled as a “poised” child-queen in Game of Thrones , but here she brings welcome mischief to her role; and Dunham directs with “liberal use of goats, geese and chaotic energy”. The film has a “refreshingly forthright approach to everything from puberty to the status of 13th century women”, and it’s a “delight”.

“David Bowie was a rock star like no other,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail , so it’s fitting that Moonage Daydream is a truly “singular documentary”, ostensibly about his life, but more a journey through his “relentlessly mercurial mind”.

Writer and director Brett Morgen was granted rare access to “every nook and cranny” of Bowie’s archive, and has made excellent use of all that material: one of the “primary joys” of this film is “how little [of it] we’ve seen before”.

This “immersive, trippy, hurtling, throbbing” film takes us as close to knowing Bowie “as an actual person as we are ever going to get”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Morgen covers his life from “cradle to grave”, but not in the usual way: there are no talking heads or clichéd graphics, for instance. Instead, excerpts from interviews allow Bowie essentially to narrate the film himself, while his music – remixed by his long-time producer Tony Visconti – provides the lushest of soundtracks.

No one has ever managed to make a film of The Mousetrap , said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , and for one very simple reason: Agatha Christie insisted there should be no film adaptation until six months after the play closed – which, of course, it never has. Using that very stipulation as a motive for murder, a crafty team have come up with the next best thing: a “delightfully absurd” whodunnit about the play itself. It’s set in 1953: the cast is celebrating the play’s 100th performance when a telegram arrives from Christie saying she cannot join the party, but has sent a big cake instead. Sure enough, within ten minutes someone is dead. The film bounces with a sense of fun worthy of Tom Stoppard – whose name, in a running joke, is given to the detective (Sam Rockwell). The suspects include a glamorous impresario (Ruth Wilson), a dandyish playwright (David Oyelowo) and a furtive producer (Reece Shearsmith). With a seam of pure English silliness, this is a “whizzy fairground ride in theatreland, powered entirely by the thought of a literary icon spinning in her grave”.

See How They Run is “as sweet and light as a fondant fancy”, said Clarisse Loughrey on The Independent . It’s the kind of ensemble film that plays like a tennis match, with the cast skilfully lobbing one-liners at each other and giving knowing winks to the camera. But the real joy is the rapport between the investigating plods, said Ian Freer in Empire . Rockwell brings “grizzled, Walter Matthau-type charm” to the cynical inspector; Saoirse Ronan is even better as an over-eager WPC star-struck by the suspects. Combining farce, backstage drama, crime potboiler and police procedural, this is a “fast, funny and frequently stylish” movie steeped in the atmosphere of 1950s London.

If you “like your humour wickedly dark, bordering on the unpleasant”, then “ The Forgiven could be the film for you”, said Kate Muir in the Daily Mail .

Ralph Fiennes plays David, a high-functioning English alcoholic driving his American wife Jo (Jessica Chastain) to a swanky party at a castle in Morocco. The couple are arguing as usual when a teenage boy “suddenly appears in their headlights and is killed on impact”. They’re on a dark rural road, so they stash the boy’s body in the back of the car, and press on to the castle, which is owned by an “outrageous” couple (Matt Smith and Caleb Landry Jones).

Adapted from a novel by Lawrence Osborne, this is a watchable film that makes good use of its attractive Moroccan settings, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday . The story, though, is “lacking in tension”, and director John Michael McDonagh, who made The Guard (2001) and the “brilliant” Calvary (2014), can’t decide whether his “first priority is to amuse or serve up something meaty and moralistic”. By the time he’s made up his mind, “it’s almost too late”.

You do “have to do your own moralising” with this film, which is “always a drag”, agreed Deborah Ross in The Spectator . But there are reasons to see The Forgiven : Fiennes and Chastain are both “terrific”, and it’s a “compelling” tale, even if human nature doesn’t come out of it at all well.

Films that satirise the film industry itself are, in my experience, “seldom funny – or even fun”, said Leslie Felperin in the FT . Yet this “irresistibly silly” Spanish comedy manages to be both, thanks in part to Penélope Cruz, who brings both comic and dramatic flair to the role of Lola, a maverick film director hired by a “dilettante squillionaire” to make an art film that will be his legacy. This film is to be about two estranged brothers and, in order to pit two real-life opposites against one another, Lola casts a “high-minded, classically trained Argentine import” (Oscar Martínez) as one of the brothers, and a “swaggering Spaniard” (Antonio Banderas) as the other. During rehearsals, the film’s two leading men “grow to loathe one another” as Cruz puts them through their paces. Directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat “keep the comedy deadpan” to create a film that has the pleasing feel of “an old-school screwball comedy, albeit one with very dark edges”.

Official Competition certainly has a “top-notch” cast, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday . But despite their “best endeavours”, I can’t see this film having mass appeal. It seems to have been “made for the slightly smug, aren’t-we-cool film-festival crowd”. Well then, I guess I must be among them, because I loved this “Spanish-language gem”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph . Martínez and Banderas are “splendid”as the warring leads, while Cruz, “who’s never looked more divine”, really “nails” it as the “visionary nutcase” director. The film’s set pieces will make you roar with laughter, and the whole thing is brilliantly finessed. “Smart comedy is already a rarity; smart comedy that looks this good is a once-in-a-blue-moon event.”

For years, blockbuster films have been posing questions such as “How would Spider-Man cope with PTSD?” and “How would Buzz Lightyear process personal and professional failure?”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . So there’s a “Zen-like release” in watching one that “ponders nothing more onerous than ‘who would win in a fight between Idris Elba and a marauding big cat?’”

In Beast , Elba plays a widowed doctor seeking to reconnect with his teenage daughters (Iyana Halley and Leah Jeffries) by taking them to their late mother’s birthplace in South Africa. He has amends to make – and “his own conscience to salve” – as their marriage fell apart just as she was becoming ill with cancer. Then a “huge, drooling” lion attacks, and keeps attacking, and Elba’s “appealingly fallible hero” finds himself fighting for his family’s survival,“not just figuratively, but also in a more pressing, oh-dear-we’re-about-to-be-eaten sense”. The resulting “man-versus-animal death-match” provides a “grippingly efficient thrill-ride”, whose “93 minutes seem to pass in around 15”.

I am not sure “whether this was ever intended to be a serious film”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Perhaps it doesn’t matter. It is fun, in a “shlocky, gory, silly way”; it has perfectly decent CGI, it zips along, and it will delight anyone who’s yearned to see Elba “wrestle a lion and then punch it full in the face” – “not my dream especially, but each to their own”. Beast doesn’t go “anywhere you can’t predict from the trailer”, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian , but the pace rarely slackens, and it’s “directed – by Baltasar Kormákur – with more flair than one often gets from such material”. It’s a “B-movie”, to be sure, but one that’s “bringing its A-game”.

Adapted by Suzanne Allain from her own novel, this “engagingly silly and self-aware comedy” is a “romantic Regency romp in the diverse, postcolonial ‘alt-history’ universe popularised by Bridgerton ”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Our heroine is Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton), “a highly strung young woman” hunting for a husband in fashionable London society, who learns that the city’s most eligible bachelor, the Hon. Jeremy Malcolm (Sope Dirisu), has a “secret list” of attributes that he is looking for in a bride.

When Julia fails to meet these requirements, she decides to seek retribution, by asking her best friend, a penniless clergyman’s daughter (Freida Pinto), to ensnare Malcolm “by faking the ten comely attributes from his list”. Malcolm falls for the conspiracy and is soon entranced – as is an ex-cavalry officer (Theo James), a man “so tight-trousered his fly button will surely have someone’s eye out”. This is “good-natured entertainment” that clearly has no ambitions other than to amuse, and in that, it succeeds quite nicely.

It didn’t amuse me much, said Kevin Maher in The Times . So lightweight as to be “almost meaningless”, the film has just one redeeming feature: Ashton, whose “stellar” performance just about keeps the show on the road. Pinto and Dirisu, by contrast, seem to have set their “charisma phasers” to “power-save mode”. The film does feel slightly “paint-by-numbers”, said Dulcie Pearce in The Sun . The set-up scenes are “painfully long and unfunny”; the script is “plodding”; and though the “costumes and finery” are nice to look at, you will soon find yourself yearning for Mr Darcy.

This “impish and riveting” documentary recounts the stranger-than-fiction case of the man who called himself Brandon Lee, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . In 1993, a curly-haired “teen” enrolled at a Glasgow school under audaciously false pretences: he was, in fact, a 30-year-old man who had decided to pretend to be 16 so that he could resit his exams and get into medical school. When the scheme came to light in 1995, Lee became a “minor media sensation”, but he has become publicity-shy in recent years, so director Jono McLeod – who was one of his schoolmates – devises a “cunning compromise” here: an audio confession from Lee that is lip-synched by the actor Alan Cumming, and interspersed with interviews and re-enactments of key moments. The film initially “bubbles along entertainingly”. Later, though, it becomes genuinely “unnerving” as it deals with the most “awkward” part of the story: Lee’s on-stage kiss with a teenage girl in a school play.

Even if you’re familiar with Lee’s story, as I was, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator , you’ll wonder as you watch this documentary: “How could they not know? He could drive a car! He liked Chardonnay! He introduced his classmates to retro music!” The film doesn’t have all the answers – there’s clearly something “disturbed” going on here that is never fully plumbed – but you’ll “enjoy the ride” anyway.

Considering how “deeply weird” Lee’s behaviour was, I found My Old School “oddly heart-warming”, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman . McLeod adopts an appealingly “bemused” tone throughout; and while Lee is shown to be a “slippery character”, the film is no hit job. Rather, “it’s an expertly crafted tale of deception”, told “with a playfulness that is eminently watchable”.

“Break out the pea coats, chunky sweaters and bushy beards, for Fisherman’s Friends is back,” said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday . “Yes, three years after the unexpectedly successful film put the Cornish village of Port Isaac on the cinematic map, and reminded us all that sea shanties are rather wonderful as long as there aren’t too many of them”, the team has returned with a sequel that picks up about a year after the 2019 movie left off. The shanty-singing band have now stormed the UK charts, and are learning that “fame, modest fortune and life on the road” can take a toll. Singer Jim (James Purefoy) is having an especially rough time of it, hitting the bottle as he grapples with the death of his father. This is “lightweight, late-summer fun”, packed with “broad comedy” and “high drama”, but it’s also “surprisingly emotional”, and it’s buoyed by Purefoy’s “nomination-grabbingly good” performance (“yes, seriously”). “As sequels go, me ol’ hearties, it’s terrific.”

It didn’t do it for me, said Wendy Ide in The Observer . Rather than tell one story well, it “weaves drunkenly between themes”: bereavement, substance abuse and male mental health all crop up, and the film even saunters into “the murky waters of the woke debate”. Subplots are used as mere glue to “tack together the Cornish tourist board-approved shots of cornflower-blue waters and cloudless skies”. There is also “far more rousing close-harmony singing than anybody really needs to hear in their lifetime”.

This is a nice-looking, “well-made film” held together by a “very likeable cast”, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian . But it’s wearyingly predictable, and has a rather “factory-made” flavour. I’m afraid this franchise feels to me “like it’s hit the rocks”.

Nope is “a film that does for open skies what Jaws did for the beach, and The Wicker Man for Hebridean getaways”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . It’s the third feature from Jordan Peele, director of the psychological horror smash hit Get Out ; and like that movie, it’s an entertaining thriller with a “rich and troubling substance bubbling underneath”.

Daniel Kaluuya stars as the taciturn OJ, who, along with his more gregarious sister (Keke Palmer), trains horses on a ranch in southern California for use in films and TV. When we meet them, they’re dealing with the mysterious death of their father, killed by a small object that has dropped from the sky. Nope “treats us to all the tricks from the flying saucer canon” – false alarms, “teasing peeks” – while remaining “excitingly fresh”.

It’s one of the movie events of the year, “if not the decade”, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . A “playful riff on our obsession with UFOs, Nope blurs sci-fi, horror and cowboy movie tropes, while finding the time to explore racism, climate change and 1990s sitcoms”. It’s also a deeply weird film that is “likely to invade your dreams”.

The special effects aren’t bad, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , but as a whole the film is “painfully slow, overburdened with plot and not exactly awash with the sort of performances to make you pleased you bought a ticket”. I’m afraid “it’s a big ‘nope’ from me”.

Prequels make “my heart sink”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer : all too often they’re used just to “squeeze a little more juice out of an already dead and desiccated franchise”. Prey , however, which revives the Predator series for a seventh outing, “is different”. For one thing, it’s set 300 years before the earlier films, on the Great Plains of North America, where Comanche life is presented in rich, authentic detail. Our heroine is Naru (Amber Midthunder), a warrior whose prodigious survival skills are put to the test when an alien creature starts killing everything in its path. To director Dan Trachtenberg’s credit, the film “stays true to the essence” of the 1987 original – it’s “stylishly violent, stickily graphic” and “impossibly tense” – while also succeeding “as a self-contained entity”.

I was impressed by this addition to the franchise, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian . “It feels genuinely new to see a genre film of this scale” anchored by an Indigenous American cast. This is not just a victory of representation; it also ensures that a story “we’ve seen a few too many times before” is told in an interestingly fresh way. It’s just a shame that the film, which is beautifully shot, and has some “intricate, well choreographed” action sequences, is going straight to Disney+.

What I liked about this “audacious action flick” is that it reinforces the forgotten value of “dramatic jeopardy”, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Its characters are seen “in actual danger of harm, injury or even death, rather than just punching stuff repeatedly for two hours while wearing a superhero costume”. Of course Midthunder’s stellar performance helps too; in a few short scenes, she conveys so much about Naru that when the “great big bloody predator” swoops to get her, we “really care”.

We all remember the events of 2018, when 12 boys and their football coach were trapped in a flooded cave network in Thailand, and were rescued – after 18 days – by an international team of cave divers led by two “plucky Brits”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. What we may not know is the detail; what it felt like to be trapped underground, or to dive underwater into darkness.

Now, thanks to Ron Howard’s new film, we do. This is a dramatisation “that works on just about every level”: it’s thrillingly paced, “culturally sensitive” and beautifully acted. Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell play the two British divers, and though neither are British, they pull it off brilliantly: Mortensen captures the “British blokey bolshiness” of ex-firefighter Richard Stanton, while Farrell is “quietly perfect” as IT consultant Jonathan Volanthen. The film is coming to Amazon Prime, but its “exceptional” underwater photography makes it well worth seeing on a big screen.

When he’s on form, Howard makes “warm-hearted, decent and diligent” films characterised by a kind of “Centrist Dad” level-headedness, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . And this “compulsively watchable” dramatisation is him at his best. The diving sequences are so tense you’ll be “sympathetically shrinking in your seat”; and wisely, Stanton and Volanthen are not depicted as “saviours swooping in from lands afar”, but as gruff hobbyists who clash with each other as well as with the Thai rescue team.

The film is certainly compelling, said Edward Porter in The Sunday Times, but to me it lacks the “dramatic flair” of Howard’s previous true-life disaster movie Apollo 13 . Viewers might do better to seek out The Rescue , a riveting 2021 documentary about the same events.

I could probably watch this old-fashioned comedy caper “all day every day for the rest of my life,”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Directed by the late Roger Michell (of Notting Hill fame), it recounts the notorious theft of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in 1961, and stars Jim Broadbent as Kempton Bunton, the idealistic taxi driver from Newcastle who claimed to have committed this audacious crime.

The film is “wonderfully funny”, but “thoughtful and tender” too; if you don’t find Bunton – the “ordinary fella prompted to do an extraordinary thing” – wholly “loveable” from the off, I’ll “refund your ticket”.

This warm and witty film has the “zing of a classic Ealing caper”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . Broadbent and Helen Mirren, who plays Bunton’s wife, have rarely been better. And while the film is unafraid to “go broad – one stirring sequence is scored to the hymn Jerusalem, for goodness’ sake” – it touches on serious themes (about how, for instance, institutions should serve the people who fund them); and its subtlety “often catches you off guard”.

There are moments when it ladles on the “working-class nobility” a bit thick, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail : we see Bunton standing up against racism, and being sacked as a taxi driver for waiving a war veteran’s fare; but Broadbent “keeps it real at every turn, and manages a passable Geordie accent to boot”, while Mirren, who does frumpy and downtrodden as well as she does elegant hauteur, is a “superb foil”.

Although she is often exasperated by her “placard-waving husband”, we never doubt the depth of their love. For what proved to be his swansong, Michell has given us a truly “lovely film”.

For my money, “the best release of the week by far” is this Iranian film by debut director Panah Panahi – the son of the recently jailed filmmaker Jafar Panahi, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . It follows a family of four who are driving to the Turkish border, because the elder son (Amin Simiar) needs to flee the country. We presume that it is for political reasons, but “really, those reasons don’t matter”. This is a film about families; the profound love that holds them together, and the ways they can fall apart. The film has a “strong undercurrent of sadness”, but it is a “charmer. I was hooked from the opening scene, in which the irresistibly cute but unstoppably naughty” younger son (Rayan Sarlak) “mischievously hides his father’s mobile phone down his pants”.

Sarlak is one of the most “believably annoying” kids you’ll ever meet on screen, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , but Pantea Panahiha is “wonderful” too as his mother, “forever silently asking herself whether they’ve reached the point of no return”. The film could “have had the gloom of a Stygian ferry ride”; instead it “pulsates with vivacity”. Hit the Road is a “miraculously accessible piece of entertainment” about people who “stay brave” even as they are “drowning”.

Most of the action takes place within the confines of the car, a private space that can be an “island of freedom” in the director’s home country, said Christina Newland in The i Paper ; but Panahi punctures “his closer camera work with some stunning wide shots of the landscape nearby”. It’s a wonderful, life-affirming film; what a crying shame, then, that it has not yet been shown in Iran.

The words “dramatic reconstruction” can be a bit of a dampener, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times , but “I’d defy anyone” not to be gripped by “this spectacular minute-by-minute reconstruction of the blaze that engulfed Paris’s iconic cathedral” on 15 April 2019. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud ( The Name of the Rose ), it captures the efforts of French firefighters to contain the inferno that nearly razed Notre Dame to the ground, combining dramatic recreation with archive footage, digital effects and amateur video. The result is a “documentary/thriller/disaster movie” mashup that doesn’t entirely pull it off; but if you do get the chance to see it on an Imax screen, take it.

It’s still unclear how the fire broke out at Notre Dame, said Phil de Semlyen on Time Out ; and Annaud wisely “hedges his bets” on this mystery “by showing us both a workman’s rogue ciggie and an electrical short”. The film comes into its own when the “almost demonic” inferno, raging at up to 1,300°C, starts “melting scaffolding and pouring molten lead” through the mouths of the cathedral’s gargoyles. And yet alongside this drama, there are some “surprisingly funny” moments. “The church is 800 years old,” notes a bystander at one point. “We should call your mother,” replies his wife.

The film rather revels in the disaster, said Wendy Ide in The Observer , but it does capture the fire’s “daunting rage”, to often “eyebrow-scorching effect”. What we don’t really get is a “sense of emotional engagement with key characters”, partly because so many of them are “concealed behind breathing apparatus”. In its place, there “are contrived scenes in which newbie firefighters share gum, and moments of pure cheese involving an adorable moppet and a prayer candle”.

Directed by the artist Charlotte Colbert, She Will sits “somewhere between a feminist revenge horror and an arthouse psychodrama”, said Ed Potton in The Times . Alice Krige plays Veronica, a faded film star, who travels to a country house retreat in the Highlands to recover from a double mastectomy. She’s hoping that it will be a peaceful idyll; instead, it teems with self-help groupies who are in thrall to the house’s flamboyant artist-in-residence (played by Rupert Everett). He likes to pee against trees and says things like, “Don’t draw the landscape, let the landscape draw you”. To escape all this, Veronica retires to her quarters, but she soon starts to sense the presence of spirits that haunt the local forest – the site of 18th century witch-burnings – and which help her wreak vengeance on a director (Malcolm McDowell) who abused her in her youth.

Krige’s “thrillingly intense” performance is the “lightning rod at the core” of this “viscerally atmospheric” drama, said Mark Kermode in The Observer . She grounds its “hallucinogenic visuals in the terra firma of past tragedies and modern traumas”. Not everything lands – some of the tonal shifts feel abrupt, and the plot can be wilfully obscure – but “these are minor imperfections” in what is a satisfyingly “chilling tale of buried secrets and dreamy vengeance”. Executive produced by Dario Argento, the film wants to be an “artfully lurid” feminist horror freak-out, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman ; unfortunately, I found it “laughably bad”, with a “dramatically inert” script and tiresome use of “a generic Scottish setting as an off-the-peg signifier of folkloric dread”.

Decent sports documentaries are “ten a penny”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer , but ones that really delve into “the psychology of their subject” are rare. This film, about the tennis maverick John McEnroe, is one of these rarities. Using archive material, interviews and often “unwieldy” graphics, it explores “the experience of being a phenomenon and a hate figure for a kid who was barely out of his teens” when he exploded onto the tennis scene in 1977. The result is an excellent film that deserves to find “an audience far beyond just fans of the game itself”.

This portrait of the enfant terrible of tennis is “refreshingly free of the sycophancy that drags down” most sports docs, said Ed Potton in The Times . Its appreciation for McEnroe is clear, but “tempered with an awareness of his flaws”. Among the interviewees are McEnroe’s greatest rival Björn Borg, “whose early retirement McEnroe calls an ‘absolute f***ing tragedy’”; Keith Richards, “one of several celebrity mates” who appear; and McEnroe’s second wife, Patty Smyth, who suggests that he is on the autism spectrum. “There’s only one star, though, and he’s candid, insightful and hugely likeable.”

As a result, many of the film’s most eye-opening comments come from McEnroe himself, said Raphael Abraham in the Financial Times . (“Thirty-seven psychologists and psychiatrists didn’t help,” he snarls at one point.) Still, there are omissions: the film doesn’t delve deeply enough into McEnroe’s “technical brilliance” to satisfy the “tennis nerds”, and perhaps tellingly, we hear nothing at all from his first wife, Tatum O’Neal, or his nemesis, Jimmy Connors.

“Fifty-two years after setting the high watermark for ineffably wholesome family entertainment, the railway children are back,” said Kevin Maher in The Times . “And they haven’t changed a bit.” Yes, the era has shifted from 1905 – when the book and Lionel Jeffries’ much-loved 1970 film were both set – to 1944, but the characters are “reassuringly familiar”: three earnest siblings fond of outdoorsy japes find themselves evacuated from Salford to a village in Yorkshire. There, they are taken in by headteacher Annie (Sheridan Smith) and her mother Bobbie, who was the oldest of the original trio and is once again played by Jenny Agutter. There are attempts to make it more relevant to a modern audience – the siblings befriend a black GI (Kenneth Aikens) who has run away from his US army base to escape its violent racism – but the film’s appeal lies in its “unapologetic embrace” of old-fashioned storytelling. “Pixar and Marvel devotees will possibly be repulsed, but how could you not love conker fights, piggybacks on the common and a race-to-the-train finale?”

The young cast “give it their all”, and it’s a “nostalgic joy” to see Agutter return as a “distinctly glamorous grandmother”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. But alas, she is not on screen for all that long, and none of the actors can save the film from its “slightly opportunistic, made-for-television air”. Those who, like me, regard the 1970 film with “unalloyed affection” will be nervous about this sequel, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . But they shouldn’t worry: the film doesn’t quite capture the original’s “charm and innocence”, but it “makes sumptuous use” of many of the same locations, and is a “lovely celebration of an England and a brand of Englishness” that still lingers.

Taika Waititi has done it, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times : he’s made “not just the best Marvel movie” to date, “but a bona fide camp comedy classic”, brimming with “gaudy” pleasures. The film, which is the fourth standalone Thor movie in the now 29-strong Marvel franchise, begins with a “helpful recap” that explains how the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) picked himself up and transformed his “bad bod to a god bod” following the death of “just about everyone he ever knew”. But though his pecs are now sharp, all is not well: Thor’s beloved ex (Natalie Portman) has cancer, and a “bald creep” played by Christian Bale is plotting to murder every god in the realm. The plot is “the usual lunatic babble” we’ve come to expect from Marvel, but the story unfolds with such wit and brio, who cares? This is just the kind of “silly summer movie we didn’t know we needed”.

Steady on, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . This “intergalactic space adventure has a bitty first half”, and isn’t a patch on the last Marvel movie that Waititi directed, 2017’s Thor Ragnarok , which is widely deemed “one of the best superhero romps ever made”. Still, fans of the genre will find a “whole lot to love” here, including some memorable performances. Look out in particular for Russell Crowe, who plays Zeus as “a cheesily Greek pansexual” with an accent straight out of Mamma Mia! . I enjoyed the film immensely, said Ed Potton in The Times . It’s true that it lacks the “irreverent zing” of Ragnarok , but it “bursts with surreal spectacle” and “Pythonesque silliness”. The “twinkly script” is genuinely funny, and though Waititi has been made to churn out the mandatory CGI battle sequences, he manages to give even them some emotional depth.

“It’s hard to know what’s more impressive about the latest Pixar film,” said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph , “its boundless artistry, ingenuity and loopy comic verve, or the mere fact that the studio got away with making it.” Directed by Domee Shi, this Disney+ animation looks squarely at female puberty, “with all the distinct bodily changes” it entails. Its heroine is Mei, a 13-year-old from Toronto (“winningly voiced” by Rosalie Chiang), who wakes up one day to find she’s turned into a giant red panda. Hearing her cry out in the bathroom, Mei’s mother (Sandra Oh) assumes she’s got her period and asks enigmatically outside the door, “Did the red peony bloom?” In fact, Mei has developed a “secret family trait”: at moments of “heightened emotion”, she becomes a bear. From there, the film explores the onset of Mei’s puberty sensitively and playfully, as she strives to bring her “furry alter ego” under control in time for her to attend a concert by her favourite boy band.

Turning Red deserves credit “for finding comically direct ways to address the biological and emotional awkwardness of female adolescence in a family film”, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman . Usually, it’s a topic relegated to horror. But once Mei has learnt to control her panda self, the film doesn’t seem to know where to go, and it ends up feeling lazy and familiar.

“Yes, there’s a formula at work here” and the dialogue can be a bit trite, said Kevin Maher in The Times . “But who doesn’t enjoy an exquisitely manipulated cry?” With a premise like this, the film could have been “awful and preachy, like a woke revamp of Disney’s actual 1946 public information cartoon, The Story of Menstruation ”. In fact, it is “ingenious and light, and deeply lovely”.

I realise it’s early days, but “if a more stressful film” than Boiling Point comes along this year, “I would be most surprised”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Filmed in a single continuous take, it stars that “powerhouse” of an actor Stephen Graham as Andy, the head chef and part-owner of a hot London restaurant. Andy’s staff “respect and like him”, but we can see something “broken” about him, “and are on it, asking ourselves: ‘Can he hold it together, or will he implode? That water bottle he is always clutching. Is it water?’”

Jangling with nervous energy, Andy tries to get on with his work, but his customers don’t help: there’s a racist table, a trio of influencers who insist on ordering off-menu, a woman with a severe nut allergy (“hello, Chekhov’s gun”), and a poisonous celebrity chef (Jason Flemyng) who demands a ramekin of za’atar to go with his risotto; it’s “98% there”, he tells the chef. With an improvised feel, the film is as “tense as a thriller”.

It’s to director Philip Barantini’s credit that I frequently forgot I was watching a one-shot film , said Mark Kermode in The Observer . It is “utterly immersive, conjuring the raw experience of an inexorably accelerating panic attack”. But like the 2015 German thriller Victoria , which was also filmed in one take, this is “first and foremost a gripping and gritty drama”.

Graham is superb as a man on the edge, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , but there is “great, frazzled acting” from the supporting cast too, especially Vinette Robinson, who plays an overburdened sous-chef. The one off-note is the ending, which tries to make a “hard-hitting impact” but doesn’t quite succeed. That aside, this is a brilliant film that exerts a remorseless grip.

The original Top Gun propelled Tom Cruise from “a heart-throb to a household name”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . With this “absurdly entertaining” late sequel, we have possibly the “Cruisiest” film to date. Within moments of the opening credits, Maverick – Cruise’s charismatic fictional fighter pilot – is recalled to his “old Top Gun stomping ground” to train a new generation of aviators who have assembled for a deadly mission: the neutralisation of a uranium enrichment plant in an unspecified location overseas. Among the youngsters is Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s friend Goose, who died in the first film. For my money, this is the best studio action movie since 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road ; it is also “Dad Cinema at its eye-crinkling apogee – all rugged wistfulness and rough-and-tumble comradeship”, interspersed with flight sequences “so preposterously exciting” that they seem to invert the cinema “through 180 degrees”.

This film isn’t short of “rock’n’roll fighter-pilot action”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian , but weirdly, it has none of the original’s “homoerotic tension”. “Where, oh where, is the towel round-the-waist, semi-nude locker-room intensity between the guys?” Weirder still, it’s even “less progressive on gender issues” than the 1986 blockbuster, which did at least put a woman in charge (Kelly McGillis’s civilian instructor).

It’s true, the female roles here are pretty thankless, said Clarisse Loughrey on The Independent , but the film is so “damned fun” you forget to care. Director Joseph Kosinski has made “the kind of edge-of-your-seat, fist-pumping spectacular that can unite an entire room full of strangers sitting in the dark, and leave them with a wistful tear in their eye” to boot.

Licorice Pizza is the “metaphorical shot in the arm we all need right now, to go with the real one”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . Paul Thomas Anderson’s “irresistible” film brims with “effervescent charm” and “belly laughs”; “I cherished every minute of it.” Set in California in 1973, the film is a “boy-meets-girl-at-high-school” tale, but the twist is that only one of the lovers is at school. That’s 15-year-old Gary (Cooper Hoffman), a child actor who falls for a 25-year-old photographer’s assistant, Alana (Alana Haim) when she visits his school to take the pupils’ pictures.

Shot on rich and grainy 35mm film, Licorice Pizza “does a superb job” of recreating 1970s Los Angeles, said Geoffrey Macnab in The i Paper . Hoffman has the same “shambling charm and force of personality” as his father, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, while Haim – better known as a musician – brings an ingratiating spikiness to her role as the “(slightly) older woman who can’t quite believe she is falling for a teenager”. The narrative style is “deliberately rambling”, with the story unfolding in loosely joined episodes, but the result is so subversive and funny that you forgive its “shaggy-dog approach to storytelling”.

I’m afraid I found the episodic structure rather “gruelling”, said Kevin Maher in The Times . Anderson is “far too gifted to make a stinker”, but the film isn’t a patch on his better films, such as There Will Be Blood and The Master . While the love story is meant to be “adorable, cute and cuddly”, to me it seemed contrived. Alana articulates one of the film’s central flaws when she asks her sister: “Is it weird that I hang out with Gary and his 15-year-old friends?” The answer, as the characters are presented here, is: “yes”.

“Kenneth Branagh has made a masterpiece,” said Kevin Maher in The Times . Belfast , set in the city in 1969, is a “deeply soulful portrait of a family in peril”, inspired by Branagh’s own childhood: his family fled to Reading that year, when he was nine. The film stars Jude Hill as Buddy, a Protestant growing up in a “warm and garrulous family”, whose carefree childhood is shattered when a “loyalist mob” rampages through their peaceful, largely Protestant community, “smashing windows and screaming: ‘Catholics out!”’ A loyalist enforcer then demands that Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan) either “join the Catholic-bashing or face terrifying retribution”, setting the stage for a coming-of-age drama that, though not without cliché, is overlaid with dread and “an expectation of physical conflict”. Highlights of the film include a “hugely charismatic turn” from Dornan, and Haris Zambarloukos’s mostly black-and-white cinematography, which manages “to out- Roma Roma in frame after frame of meticulously lit gob-smackers”.

The film does tip into the nostalgic: at times it feels like a mash-up of Cinema Paradiso and Hope and Glory , said Deborah Ross in The Spectator – but it’s so “heartfelt, warm and authentic” that you forgive it. I welled up at least three times; plus there are some very funny lines, many of them delivered by Buddy’s grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds). “For some people, perhaps, the seam of sentimentality that runs through the picture might be too much,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . “But it will take a stony heart not to embrace it.” The film has a “wonderful” score by Van Morrison and – an added bonus – it is relatively short, at just over an hour and a half.

“Have you ever looked a cow in the eye?” If you watch Andrea Arnold’s documentary, “you certainly will”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent . Shot over four years on a dairy farm in Kent, this surprisingly gripping, largely wordless film allocates much of its 94-minute runtime to a Holstein-Friesian called Luma. We watch her give birth. We watch her chew cud. We watch her get “hooked up to a milking machine, its nozzles splayed out like the heads of hungry leeches” – and then “we watch those processes again. More birth; more milk.” The film is “grimy and unvarnished”; it captures the “banal cruelty” inflicted on dairy cows – but there are moments of poetry, too: “at one point, Arnold even catches Luma gazing dreamily up towards the stars”.

“This is certainly not the first film to make the point that industrial farming and animal welfare are uneasy bedfellows,” said Wendy Ide in The Observer . Yet this “important” documentary “encourages an intimacy and emotional connection with its bovine subject that is rarely achieved elsewhere”. Shots have a “handheld urgency, the lens positioned at udder and eye level”; tellingly, it’s a good 45 minutes before we “even glimpse a blade of grass”. It’s a bleak film, and a challenging one, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Why would I watch a cow for 94 minutes? “What does this cow do that’s so interesting?” But you end up caring, and the finale, when it comes, is hard to bear. The trouble is, vegans already know about industrial dairy farming, and the rest won’t seek out this film, because they prefer to look away. All I can say is that the “next time I went to put milk in my tea, I did feel Luma’s big eyes upon me. So it is absolutely haunting in that way.”

“There has already been one prequel to the Despicable Me series [ Minions , 2015]”, and it proved so popular we now have another, said Edward Porter in The Sunday Times . To judge by the laughter at the “child-packed” screening I went to, this addition to the franchise hits the mark with its intended audience. The film picks up soon after Minions left off, in 1976, when the would-be supervillain Gru is 11 years old (yet still voiced by Steve Carell) and just getting to know his little yellow stooges, the Minions (voiced, the lot of them, by Pierre Coffin). When a gang of hardened criminals known as the Vicious 6 oust their leader, Gru spies an opportunity, and plots to become their kingpin. The storyline is a bit “shaky”, but the film is redeemed by its “scattershot comedy” and immense “sense of fun”.

It has what the Despicable Me films do best, said Wendy Ide in The Observer : lots of silliness, “madcap, looney-tunes energy”, and a “big, wet raspberry blown in the face of sophistication”. There’s “not a whole lot that is new” here; the film is a “near-relentless barrage of sight gags, puns and effervescent cartoon violence”, and the result is “exhausting” but “extremely funny”.

“Some think that the Minions concept has run out of steam”, said Ed Potton in The Times . This film has enough “vim, wit and invention” to suggest otherwise. Even the characters’ names are amusingly inventive: we meet Jean-Clawed, for instance, a criminal with a lobster claw for a hand, and Nun-Chuck, a nunchuck-wielding nun. Gru’s “dastardly ambition”, meanwhile, proves “weirdly touching”: here is a kid “who really wants to be good at being bad”.

Since 1989, five live-action Batmen have “slunk in and out” of our cinemas, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph – so you might wonder if a sixth could offer anything new. But for this latest instalment, director Matt Reeves has done something fresh and surprising: The Batman is less a superhero movie than a “sinuous” detective thriller with the plotting of a film noir.

We meet the young reclusive Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) when his “Gotham Project” still mainly involves combating muggers and assisting a local police detective (Jeffrey Wright) in the decaying city. But that changes when the two find Gotham’s mayor battered to death with a coded message beside him. It’s from the Riddler (Paul Dano), a villain who in this film is given chilling plausibility.

The acting is superb, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . Pattinson’s Wayne is spoilt and immature, but also intelligent, and full of self-doubt: “Basically, Hamlet in a balaclava.” Zoë Kravitz is glorious as Catwoman, while Dano delivers a performance that is “breathtakingly” intense and nuanced. It’s one of the most audacious films of the year: I was amused, entertained, intoxicated and shocked.

To add to the pleasure, this “darkly splendid” movie looks like a work of art, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times , with “an enveloping mixture of roasted colours and noirish shadows”. And the action set pieces are thrillingly executed, said Christina Newland in The i Paper – among them a roaring car chase down a steamy, orange-lit highway at night. There’s some clunky over-explaining in the second half, but with its intriguing plot and hero fraught with contradictions, it should be one of the year’s “blow-your-hair-back” hits.

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic isn’t “as much of a trip” as his 2001 musical Moulin Rouge! , but “it’s never less than stimulating” to look at, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail – “a spectacle as much as a story”, with plenty of the director’s flourishes, including tricksy editing, split screen and slow-mo. Austin Butler assumes the title role, while Tom Hanks, in a fat suit and acres of prosthetic jowl, is scarcely recognisable as Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s overbearing manager.

The film covers most of Presley’s life, from his rise to fame in the mid 1950s to his death in 1977: we see him recording those early songs in Memphis; making movies; enlisting in the US army; meeting his future wife Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge); and finally, overweight and unhappy during his lengthy Vegas residency. The story will be familiar to many, but the film offers “a lively reminder” of an extraordinary life.

The trouble is, it’s less a film about Elvis than a “159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis ”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . It feels like a “relentless, frantically flashy montage”, simultaneously “epic and negligible” with “no variation of pace”.

The film has nothing profound to say about Presley’s character or music; it “retrofits” him with liberal sensitivities, skirts over the less savoury aspects of his life, and barely hints at the “failure and suffering”. Even in the “Fat Elvis” years, we only ever see “a decorous hint of flab”, and there’s no sight of the “yucky burger binges or the adult diapers”.

The film is oddly shallow, agreed Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Butler is a “charismatic” Elvis, but “we never get to look into his soul”; he’s just a “simple fella who wants to sing the music he loves”. Still, the film does “fizz along”, and though it’s very long, it’s never dull.

“With most films, you know exactly what you’ll be getting within the first ten minutes,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Not so with Parallel Mothers : a “delicious and beautifully styled” drama from the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Penélope Cruz stars as Janis, a photographer who has a fling with a forensic anthropologist called Arturo (Israel Elejalde). She gets pregnant, and when Arturo stands by his wife, who has cancer, she decides to raise the baby alone. In hospital, Janis meets Ana (a “terrific” Milena Smit), a teenager whose circumstances are even more complicated, and whose life becomes intertwined with hers. Alongside this domestic drama runs a second plot strand, concerning Janis’s desire to have Arturo exhume the mass grave where her grandfather was buried in the Spanish Civil War. The narrative is twisty and full of surprises, but “it all adds up to an immensely rich, satisfying whole”.

In less skilful hands, said Wendy Ide in The Observer , the film’s “dual focus, which pulls us backwards and forwards” through time, might have been unwieldy. But Almodóvar “makes a light-footed dance of it”, expertly weaving together the story’s many threads. Above all, it’s Cruz who sets the tone “with a performance that radiates warmth”; she has surely “never been better”. Cruz certainly brings “incontestable, blazing life” to the film , said Edward Porter in The Sunday Times , but I found its handling of the history clumsy. Liberals in Spain are pushing to “disinter the crimes of the Franco years, an agenda fiercely opposed by right-wing populists”; in “doing his bit” for the cause, Almodóvar has extended the range of his work, but created a “slightly uneven film”.

A marriage of “dazzling spectacle, high-octane action and social commentary”, this animated film from Japan received a 14-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times . The story revolves around Suzu, a 17-year-old high school student who’s unremarkable but for her extraordinary singing voice – which she can’t bring herself to use in public. At school, she isn’t a big hitter socially, until she signs up to “U”, a virtual world “pitched somewhere between Instagram and The Fifth Element ” that allows its users to live as idealised avatars.

In this metaverse, Suzu is reborn as Belle, “a pink-haired, singing beauty” who becomes an overnight sensation. The film’s best scenes are not the “riotous tableaux” that play under her J-pop ballads, however, but “the blushmaking adolescent exchanges, the family concerns”, and even, in a late plot twist, a powerful (but delicately handled) dramatisation of childhood abuse.

This finely observed, gorgeously animated sci-fi fairy tale is one of director Mamoru Hosoda’s best to date, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . Long “enthralled by abstract digital spaces”, he has created here a twinkling metaverse that “overawes you through sheer volume of lunatic detail”. And though the plot owes much to Beauty and the Beast , the film’s exploration of “our online-offline double lives” is entirely fresh.

Belle ’s central message is a powerful one, said Simran Hans in The Observer – that the closer our online personas capture who we really are, “the more powerful” they become. All in all, this is anime to swell the heart.

“Ours is not a country – and thank heavens for it – in which a company called Praise The Lord Television could ever grow into a mighty broadcasting network,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail . Yet in the US, PTL was once the fourth-biggest TV network behind NBC, ABC and CBS. This “unexpectedly moving” biopic tells the story of the couple behind PTL, Tammy Faye Bakker (Oscar winner Jessica Chastain) and her preacher husband Jim (Andrew Garfield). “An evangelical Barbie and Ken,” they started from the bottom with a puppet show, and gradually gained a cult TV following, convincing viewers that “the more they gave, the more God would love them”. But their “gaudy temple came crashing down” in 1987, when it emerged that Jim “had been misappropriating funds, even using some to pay off a church secretary who alleged he had raped her”.

This is without a doubt “Chastain’s movie”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . Her Tammy Faye is an “inflatable doll of grotesque, martyred femininity”. With a “chirpy, aw-shucks manner” and a tan “the colour of a basted turkey”, she’s a fake “through and through” – like one of Roy Lichtenstein’s pop-art pin-ups “blown up so large you can see the dots”. Chastain is on “fabulous” high-octane form here, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , and well matched by Garfield; but it’s all a bit “one-note” with the “constant smiling and ‘God told me he wants...’”. And no amount of brilliant hair and make-up can make up for the shortcomings of the script. Tammy Faye is portrayed as a woman who was “seemingly blind” to the wrongdoings around her – and that’s a pity, because “the wrongdoings are what made the Bakkers interesting”.

This tale of wartime derring-do is the sort of film to watch “with your dad on a Sunday afternoon, before or after Ice Cold in Alex ”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Based on a book by Ben Macintyre, it recounts a British operation to conceal the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen star as the two intelligence officers who led the mission, which involved obtaining the corpse of a Welsh man, putting it into the uniform of a Royal Marine, loading it with bogus “top secret” papers about a planned invasion of Greece, and dropping it in the Mediterranean. Directed by John Madden ( Shakespeare in Love , The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ), and starring not one but two Mr Darcys, the film is well performed and “highly enjoyable”.

This is a well crafted, “handsomely mounted” film, which painstakingly recreates the look and feel of wartime London, said Geoffrey Macnab in The i Paper . The acting, too, is “heartfelt and strong”; aside from the two leads, we also have Simon Russell Beale as Churchill, Johnny Flynn as the young naval officer Ian Fleming (“a few years away from writing his first Bond novels”), and Kelly Macdonald, who features in a romantic subplot. “What the film lacks, though, is any real sense of dramatic upheaval or surprise.” In essence, this is the story of an “elaborate prank”, and once the officers have dropped the decoy body into the sea, they have little to do but “wait for the Nazis to take the bait”.

Madden had a huge amount to cover in a two-hour film, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph , and the pacing is a little off, with drowsy sections in the middle, a rushed third act and an awful lot of exposition along the way. It’s a pity: it’s watchable, but could have been done better.

Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped animation, set in 1969, is a low-key but “evocative” story of childhood loosely inspired by the writer-director’s own, said John Nugent in Empire . It is narrated by Jack Black as the adult version of protagonist Stanley (Milo Coy), a dreamer who lives in the suburbs of Houston, and whose father is employed in an admin job at Nasa. Like everyone else, Stanley is obsessed with the forthcoming Apollo 11 Moon mission , but in his account of that year, there was another, secret Moon landing days before it, a test run for which Nasa agents recruited him as the astronaut. The reason: they’d “built the lunar module a little too small”, meaning that only a child could fit inside it. The rotoscope technique involves tracing over live-action film footage, and results in a “strange, hyperreal aesthetic” which is well suited to this film’s blending of reality and fantasy.

With “shrewd storytelling judgement”, Linklater makes Stanley’s “lucid dream” only a small part of what is otherwise an “overwhelmingly real”, but more or less plotless, account of a 1960s childhood, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . His memories of the era are “curated with passionate connoisseurship” – “the ice-cream flavours, the TV shows, the drive-in movies, the schoolyard games, the parents, the eccentric grandparents, the theme park rides, the neighbours, the prank phone calls”.

Linklater has made some “dire” films since Boyhood , his 2014 “masterpiece”, said Kevin Maher in The Times , but Apollo 10½ is a triumphant return to form. Rich with observational detail and saturated in “loving” references to the music, movies and television of the period, “it feels as significant an American memoir as Little House on the Prairie ”.

“You should really put in some kind of training before submitting yourself to this Viking Braveheart ,” said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . An adaptation of the Norse folk tale that inspired Hamlet , the film is “a beast” – a “grunting, howling, gore-soaked tangle of blood, muscle and vengeance” that is both “incredibly violent and magisterially strange”. The tale revolves around Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), a prince who, as a boy, watched his uncle (Claes Bang) murder his father before carrying off his mother (Nicole Kidman) and seizing the throne. Amleth flees overseas but returns to the kingdom as an adult, transformed by the intervening years into a hulking Viking “berserker” with a “heart of cold fire” that is now bent on revenge. “The film feels not so much shot and edited as dropped from the sky by ravens and beaten into shape in a smithy.” I loved it.

The Northman has been proclaimed a “masterpiece”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , but I can’t see why. “Yes, it looks magnificent”, but there’s little more than “muscle and machismo” to Skarsgård’s role – and how this film “escaped with only a 15 certificate is beyond me”.

It is violent, said Kevin Maher in The Times , but it is also rather silly. Director Robert Eggers ( The Witch , The Lighthouse ) takes his “Scandinavian beefcakes” so seriously, there are moments when the film lapses into “risible camp”. “Sleep well, night blade,” was the line that got me giggling, and after that, it was hard to stop. Other inadvertently funny bits are Amleth’s romance with a “sassy slave” played by Anya Taylor-Joy, and the cast’s sing-songy accents. The film is a one-note fiasco, a “foam-flecked depiction of cartoon machismo” from a director who should have known better.

The British writer-director Harry Wootliff’s “well-liked” 2018 debut Only You centred on a couple experiencing fertility problems, said Leslie Felperin in the FT . Her second feature, the “woozy, intoxicating” True Things , adapted from a novel by Deborah Kay Davies, charts a rather more troubled relationship, involving a “destructive erotic obsession”.

Kate (Ruth Wilson) is a middle-class benefits officer with “a barely hidden wild streak”. She is dissatisfied with life and already in trouble for persistent lateness at Margate’s job centre when one of her clients, a “sexy bit of rough” with a prison record (Tom Burke) asks her out for lunch. Within hours, they’re having sex in a car park. She refers to this nameless man as “the Blond”, and is soon mad about him. But it seems the hunger is all hers and, with terrible inevitability, he starts taking advantage of her infatuation.

For Kate, the romance is a “delusion” and an “addiction”, and there is an “element of insanity about it – “nightmares, hallucinations, clawing open an abyss”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph . “The cinematography nudges us boldly to the brink with rain on the lens”, and the editing becomes “fragmentary”. But throughout, what really “rivets” is Wilson’s performance. Kate is a mess, yet Wilson succeeds in making her peculiarly relatable.

Burke is good too, skilfully lending the Blond an air of “old-world romanticism”, said Clarisse Loughrey on The Independent . But the problem with the film is that he is still too obviously a cad, making it hard for us to identify with Kate. And though there are intriguing hints that her obsession is a rebellion against the social expectations she faces as a woman in her 30s, this idea remains underexplored.

“If, like me, you’re a fan of old-timey gangster flicks, this twisty, enjoyable new film starring Mark Rylance is probably going to scratch that itch,” said Christina Newland in The i Paper . The film is set in 1950s Chicago and features “warring mobs, shoot-outs, rats and double-crosses galore”. The action itself is limited to one location: a tailor’s shop in which Rylance, known to customers as “English”, plies his trade. A former Savile Row cutter, he now makes suits for local gangsters.

Film review: Phantom of the Open

When Richie (Dylan O’Brien), the son of mob boss Roy (Simon Russell Beale), appears in the shop one night, bleeding from a gunshot wound, English is caught in the middle of a gang war that turns his shop into a temporary mob HQ. The script is superb, and while the visuals are bland and some of the cast a little uneven, the story is “sure to keep viewers enthralled”.

“You can wait for a great Mark Rylance performance all year long and then – like double-decker buses – two come along,” said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . The actor was “sublime” as an amateur golfer in last month’s The Phantom of the Open , and he’s “mesmerising” in this crime thriller, too. From the first few frames, as we watch him “brew a pot of tea, oil his shears and begin cutting fabric”, you can tell the role was “tailor-made” for him.

Yes, Rylance is on “quietly compelling” form, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday , but his performance doesn’t save this play-like film from its many flaws. For one thing, the plot twists “struggle to convince”; for another, there are simply “too many British actors playing American”. Debut director Graham Moore’s “single-set thriller” is a “brave experiment”, but sadly it’s one that “doesn’t altogether work”.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande has been much hyped “as the film in which Emma Thompson gets her kit off”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. But before the actress lets her “dressing gown slip” in this “amusing, revealing and really quite sexy” film, there is an awful lot of talking – so much so that at times, it feels more like a “single-set stage play” than a movie.

Thompson plays Nancy, a widowed former RE teacher who never had good sex with her husband, and so decides to pay Leo (Daryl McCormack), a handsome Irish escort, to supply it. The film mainly takes place in the hotel room where they meet. Some of it stretches credibility, but Thompson is a such “class act” that it’s “definitely worth a peek”.

Written by comedian Katy Brand, “this is a riveting film and an important one”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Older women are usually cinema’s “least developed characters”, and it’s “practically unheard of” to see one strip off, let alone list the various sexual positions she’d like to try.

There is “genuine chemistry” between the leads, and some “wonderfully comedic moments”, such as when Nancy says that she’s resigned to never having an orgasm. “It’s not a Fabergé egg, Nancy,” Leo replies. “People have them every day.”

I’m afraid I wasn’t greatly charmed, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times . Yes, the film celebrates “sexagenarian sexuality”, but it’s a bit too proud of its “supposed braveness”, and the characters are all rather familiar. Nancy is the “sort of handbaggy Silly Billy” that Thompson could play in a coma, while Leo is “absurdly decent, articulate, understanding and patient” – qualities that “few humans outside the New Testament” show in such abundance.

Playground “captures exactly what it feels like to be seven years old and starting a new school, which is another way of saying it’s the most panic-attack-inducing film of the year”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph . Many of the events it depicts are “fairly ordinary”; the Belgian film’s power lies in Maya Vanderbeque’s “heart-lurchingly plausible” central performance as Nora, a troubled new pupil who must learn to negotiate school life.

Vanderbeque acts with “the kind of pristine psychological integrity that would make Daniel Day-Lewis drop his cobbling kit”, and director Laura Wandel capitalises on this by making the film mainly from the child’s point of view – so that older pupils “loom” up before her, grown-ups are little more than “disembodied legs”, and the din of the schoolyard resembles that of a “war zone”. Owing to a “brief, appropriately frightening moment of child-on-child violence”, Playground has a 15 rating, which is a pity as younger audiences would surely benefit from watching “such a striking depiction of pre-teen life”.

“Sometimes cinema is at its most potent and engrossing when it’s stripped down to the essentials,” said Wendy Ide in The Observer . This “uncomfortably powerful” film is a case in point: at little over an hour in length, with lithe, handheld camerawork and no score, it takes a “piercingly insightful” look at the “semi-feral pack dynamic of childhood”, without labouring the point.

The “Hobbesian, tooth-and-nail universe of the playground” has seldom been portrayed “so indelibly”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times . Occasionally, Nora turns to adults for help, but the film shows she’s on her own; as its French title ( Un Monde ) suggests, school is “a world unto itself. A beautiful film.”

“All men really are the same” in this Wicker Man- style folk horror film from Alex Garland, said Mark Kermode in The Observer . Garland, the author of The Beach , who also directed the intriguing sci-fi oddity Ex Machina , has concocted “a playfully twisted affair” set deep in the English countryside. The excellent Jessie Buckley plays Harper, the survivor of an abusive relationship who escapes to a “dream country house” to recover. The house is owned by Geoffrey, a “Tim Nice-But-Dim” character, who like all the men in the village – from the smarmy vicar to the unsympathetic police officer – is played by one actor, Rory Kinnear, “deftly” slipping between identities. The plot takes a sinister turn when a menacing figure appears to Harper in a deserted railway tunnel. As the film proceeds, Garland “throws caution to the wind” and unleashes horror upon gruesome horror.

Men wants “to be a social thriller for the ages; a Get Out for women”, said Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard . “It almost succeeds.” But at exactly the point where “it should begin to be unbearably tense, it begins to unravel”. It’s unclear whether all the male characters are figments of Harper’s imagination, or whether they represent a real threat. Either way, the film doesn’t really do justice to the “horrible realities” of violent misogyny.

It never quite makes sense of its “startling central conceit”, agreed Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . Kinnear’s multifaceted performance is “unnerving and outrageous”, but there are also moments of “not-entirely-intentional silliness” here: Men almost feels like an episode of The League of Gentlemen without the jokes. The actors, though, are very good, and there’s much to enjoy “as the movie builds to its freaky finale”.

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The best movies of 2022 so far, according to Rotten Tomatoes

There have been some corkers this year

Is 2022 a vintage year for movies? It certainly feels like it, especially as far as critical responses go.

There's been a lot to enjoy in 2022 thus far. So much so, in fact, that The Batman , which boasts a rather impressive Rotten Tomatoes rating of 85%, finds itself all the way down at Number 58 on Rotten Tomatoes' round-up of the best movies of 2022. Well, so far anyway.

With so many great movies to choose from, we thought we’d showcase the top 10. You can find the full list here but, in our round-up, we've chosen not to include documentaries (we’ll round them up separately at a later date). So here, without further ado, are the 10 best movies of the year so far, according to Rotten Tomatoes. 

10. Everything Everywhere All At Once 

2022 might have been the year of Marvel’s Doctor Strange heading into the Multiverse of Madness , but it’s another trip into a multiverse that has been wowing critics – and one with a much-smaller budget. 

The movie follows Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn Quan Wang, a tired and unhappy laundromat owner who somehow discovers that it is she and she alone who can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led. 

A sprawling mass at 140 minutes, there is so much going on here, with madcap comedy, science fiction, fantasy, martial arts and animation all hurled into the same melting pot, but it all hangs together somehow. 

9. Lingui, The Sacred Bonds

Beaten to the Palme d'Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival by striking horror Titane , this tough drama hails from Chad. 

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The movie is the story of Amina, a devout Muslim whose live is torn apart when Maria, her 15-year-old daughter, tells her she is pregnant and wants to abort the child. Abortion is banned in Chad and the two face a battle that may well be already lost. Critics praised its power and elegance as it told an upsetting tale with real empathy.

8. Great Freedom

This time we’re in post-World War II Europe for another hard-hitting drama and the story of Hans. 

Despite its liberation from Nazi rule, freedom does not include freedom of love in 1950s and 1960s Germany and Hans, a gay Jewish man, is sentenced to time in an Austrian prison for violating anti-homosexuality laws. Once inside, he begins a strange and unlikely friendship with Viktor, his deeply homophobic cellmate. An offbeat indie drama, but an utterly compelling one, as critics attested.

7. Top Gun: Maverick

While it’s fair to say that Tom Cruise’s long-awaited return to the cockpit was one of 2022’s most-anticipated movies, nobody saw reviews like this coming. Every poster for the film is a sea of five-star ratings, including TechRadar’s review , which gave it maximum points. 

Top Gun: Maverick sees Cruise return to play the supremely gifted, but cocky Peter "Maverick" Mitchell. We meet him 36 years after the original movie and Maverick has avoided promotion in order to keep flying. Now grounded after an outrageous display of ego, Maverick’s old rival, Iceman – now an admiral – reassigns him to TOPGUN as an instructor to train a group of elite pilots for a mission of unprecedented difficulty. Among the rookies are the son of his former friend Goose, ensuring this mission is off to a difficult start before it's even begun.

Reviewers have been knocked out by the movie’s spectacle and action-sequences, all the while stressing the need to see it on the biggest screen possible . We couldn’t agree more.

6. Hellbender

One for those among you with a taste for horror . Set in Upstate New York, the movie focuses on Izzy and her mother, who live off the grid in the mountains. 

Izzy’s mother, who is never named, has told her daughter she is ill and must not go near people or their nearby town, not even for supplies. Instead, the two spend their time studying magic and making metal music. But, after a chance encounter with another teenager causes her to uncover a connection between her family and witchcraft, Izzy begins to unpick everything.

Tense and bloody, Hellbender was praised for being ambitious and achieving things way beyond its tiny budget. 

5. The Innocents

A fine science-fiction tradition is dusted off for this Norwegian drama, which boasts a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 97% . 

In the bright light of a Norwegian summer, four children become fast friends during the holidays. Away from the prying eyes of teachers and their parents, they discover they have hidden powers. While exploring their newfound abilities, their lives change completely, and, as you expect, things get rather dark...

Critics acknowledged that this is a well-known story structure, but praised the passion and commitment of the young cast and the film’s pacing and new take on things. 

4. The Duke

Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent lead this comedy-drama, which proved to be the final act for much-acclaimed British director Roger Michell. 

The movie retold the real-life cast of Kempton Bunton, a 60-year-old man who stole Francisco Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. After making off with the hugely valuable painting, Bunton then sent ransom notes saying that he would return the painting on condition that the government invested more in care for the elderly.

Charming and tremendously warm, Broadbent’s Bunton and Mirren, who plays his wife Dorothy, are both at the top of their game here. 

3. Jujutsu Kaisen 0: The Movie 

The year’s finest anime and a feature-length version of Gege Akutami's hugely popular manga series, this movie has a mighty 98% rating on the reviews aggregator.  

The narrative follows Yuta Okkotsu, a high school student who suddenly gains control of an extremely powerful dark spirit, something that gets enrolled in the Tokyo Prefectural Jujutsu High School, where he is overseen by Jujutsu Sorcerers to help him control his power. But, what they really want to do is keep an eye on him…

2. Happening

A searing French drama set at the start of the 1960s, this movie is an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s much-acclaimed novel, L'événement. 

We follow Anne, a young student who is progressing well academically and planning her career. After discovering she is pregnant, Anne’s grades begin to slip and her life choices begin to shrink, forcing her to confront the shame and pain of an abortion, something that comes with the risk of a prison sentence. 

The reviews for this movie have been wall to wall high-praise, with star Anamaria Vartolomei tipped for the biggest of things off the back of it. As you might gather from the subject matter, it's a harrowing watch at times, but beautifully and gracefully put together. 

1. Playground

Movies with 100% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes do not come around all that often, but the debut from writer-director Laura Wandel is one such movie. 

The definition of an intimate drama, this Belgian outing tracks Nora, a shy seven-year-old who is struggling to fit in at a new school. As she slowly tries to make friends, she notices her brother Abel, who is a few years older than her, being horrendous bullying. He doesn’t defend himself, nor does he want her to tell their father about it. 

Coming in at only 72 minutes, the film is a difficult watch, with the camera rarely leaving Nora’s side and giving this drama a truly unique perspective. Maybe not a film for a Friday night treat, but with a 100% rating, it’s a movie everyone should seek out. 

Tom Goodwyn was formerly TechRadar's Senior Entertainment Editor. He's now a freelancer writing about TV shows, documentaries and movies across streaming services, theaters and beyond. Based in East London, he loves nothing more than spending all day in a movie theater, well, he did before he had two small children… 

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The 10 Best Films of 2022

An unforgettable year of cinema by newcomers and old masters alike

Even as the movie industry continues to recover from the pandemic’s debilitating effects, the ongoing story of film is not about loss of quality. This was a year filled with cinematic delights from every part of the world, with first-time filmmakers doing everything they could to shock audiences, and old masters delving into their darkest reminiscences for indelible works of memoir. I remain concerned by the fact that most of my favorite 2022 films didn’t come from major Hollywood studios—an industry that once prided itself on producing a breadth of stories currently seems too focused on the biggest and loudest—but this was still an unforgettable year.

10. Murina (directed by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović)

A razor-sharp debut from the Croatian filmmaker Kusijanović, Murina is a domestic drama set on the stunning shores of the Adriatic. It’s centered on an inscrutable teenager, Julija (Gracija Filipović), who’s a whiz at spearfishing for eels but a destabilizing presence in her household, clashing with both her father and mother as she yearns for more independence. Hope arrives in the form of the businessman Javier (Cliff Curtis), who is looking to buy her father’s land, and Kusijanović adeptly dials up the tension as Julija flirts with Javier in an effort to be whisked away from her provincial existence. The film looks gorgeous, its taut plot is perfectly structured, and the lead performance (another debut) is remarkable—it’s a gripping hit that you can recommend to anyone.

9. Nope (Jordan Peele)

With every film Peele directs, his storytelling ambitions grow, and he has not lost any willingness to take risks with the budgets he’s given and tell stories about the kinds of characters Hollywood rarely puts on-screen. This would be refreshing in any period, but it’s particularly bracing in 2022, when major studios have drifted away from originality. Nope courses with anger and confusion over how people see and process terrible things. Yes, it’s about a ragtag bunch of film-industry castoffs chasing a UFO around the California mountains with cameras, but it’s a horror film that manages to cleverly interrogate the genre without sacrificing the thrills.

8. After Yang (Kogonada)

I have a major weakness for small-scale science fiction, tales of robots exploring higher consciousness, and the work of Colin Farrell (who was also incredible in The Banshees of Inisherin this year). So After Yang was practically made for me, yet still, the director Kogonada’s second feature exceeded my expectations, finding new life in the familiar tale of a malfunctioning android. Buoyed by Kogonada’s whisper-quiet storytelling sensibility, After Yang delves into a future that’s neither dystopian nor utopian, in which a family is shattered by the loss of Yang (Justin H. Min), who is both a nanny and an artificial son of sorts to Jake ( Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith). The emotional revelations build slowly but land with a thunderclap. (It also has the single best opening-credit sequence of any 2022 film.)

7. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun)

A film that feels like it crawled out of some dark corner of the internet, Schoenbrun’s debut narrative feature is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen about the experience of being too online—of clicking one page too deep or watching one video too many. It’s a quiet but still brain-curdling and frightening contemporary folktale about a lonely teenager named Casey (Anna Cobb), who embarks on an inscrutable viral phenomenon called the World’s Fair Challenge. Through Casey’s laptop footage and videos of other “players” around the world, Schoenbrun documents the way a virtual experiment can take on terrifying weight and drive users to unravel in unpredictable ways. In a year of great debuts, Schoenbrun’s is the best.

6. Armageddon Time (James Gray)

Armageddon Time is a haunted, melancholy vision of the recent past from one of America’s great directors, whose last two wonderful features took him deep into the rainforest and beyond the rings of Neptune . Here, Gray returns to the outer boroughs of New York City, of which he might as well be the cinematic poet laureate, and uncorks some of his most bittersweet memories of adolescence. Armageddon Time follows a rebellious Jewish sixth grader named Paul (Banks Repeta), an artistic kid who lives to disappoint his middle-class Queens family. So much of the film is constructed from sharp little vignettes of recollection, such as Paul ordering Chinese food in the middle of his mother’s bland dinner, but it builds to something more ominous—a warning about the rising climate of political greed in the 1980s, and the speed with which high-minded liberal ideals can crumble in the face of it.

5. The Northman (Robert Eggers)

I would not thrive in Viking times—if someone launched a spear at me in battle, I likely could not catch it mid-air and chuck it back, as the warrior-prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) does in Eggers’s rip-roaring adventure. But the power of The Northman lies in how remarkably real its muscular action sequences feel, and in how deeply invested I was in the legendary tale of a Viking prince stripped of his throne and sent on a lifelong mission of revenge. Eggers’s prior films ( The Witch and The Lighthouse ) blended verisimilitude and nightmarish magic, and The Northman accomplishes that on a blockbuster scale, making an ancient story of revenge (one that helped inspire Shakespeare’s Hamlet ) feel fresh.

4. Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller)

The first film from the Australian legend Miller since his Oscar-winning Mad Max: Fury Road , Three Thousand Years of Longing came and went this summer with barely any attention at the box office, but it’s ready to be discovered by a bigger audience. The story pitch is strange, for sure: A buttoned-up professor (Tilda Swinton) accidentally summons a sensuous genie (Idris Elba) to her hotel room and persists in learning about his very dramatic, millennia-long life, only to fall in love with him along the way. But Miller’s film succeeds because the chemistry between its two leads feels lived in despite the fantasy atmosphere, and the stories that Elba’s djinn unfurls are wildly different in tone, jumping from violent palace intrigue to swooning romance to bizarre comedy. It builds to a finale that actually has something to say about the buzzing anxiety of modern life; leave it to Miller to find new angles of our strange modern condition decades into his career.

3. The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)

When I first heard that Spielberg was making a semi-autobiographical film about his adolescence, I expected soaring memories of his filmmaking sparking to life—and The Fabelmans, which follows young “Sammy” and his family, has plenty of that. His sisters dress up as toilet-paper mummies and charge the camera, he makes a war film that offers the first glimpse of maximalist Hollywood pathos, and he uncovers an ingenious way of depicting gunshots in his teenage cowboy flick by poking holes in the tape. But what’s so striking about The Fabelmans is its bitter honesty—about Spielberg’s parents’ divorce, his role in it, and the way his filmmaking obsession shaped the course of their lives. It’s a stark work—wrapped up in the entertaining package he always provides.

2. The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)

A stunning semi-sequel to her two Souvenir films, The Eternal Daughter once again sees the British director Hogg plumb her life for a story that blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction. The Souvenir (parts one and two) focuses on her younger days as a film student, but The Eternal Daughter is a ghost story of sorts, about a filmmaker (Tilda Swinton) who goes to a hotel in an old English estate with her aging mother (also played by Swinton) and discovers that they’re the only guests there. The estate has some family significance and stirs up old memories, as well as some more plainly supernatural visions. But the most spectacular sight is Swinton acting across from herself, fleshing out a family dynamic through whispers, glances, and awkward dinner-table chat.

1. Tár (Todd Field)

To know Lydia Tár is not to love her, exactly, but the mercurial conductor is impossible to stop thinking about. Field’s film, his first in 16 years, introduces us to a fictional celebrity at the top of the classical-music world, who, when we meet her, is lecturing a Lincoln Center audience about her total command of tempo. Tár ends with her in quite a different scenario, and the route it charts for her downfall is remarkable and unpredictable, unwinding this tightly strung powerhouse and marveling at how her life falls apart. This is the most commanding piece of cinema I’ve seen this year by far—one that demands that the audience pay attention to the corners of every frame while it showcases an unforgettable performance from Blanchett. Even in a year of involving and wonderful cinematic surprises, it was destined to be my No. 1.

Honorable mentions: Top Gun: Maverick , Barbarian , The Banshees of Inisherin , Decision to Leave , RRR , Babylon , Return to Seoul , Aftersun , All the Beauty and the Bloodshed , Crimes of the Future

IMDb Charts

Imdb top 250 movies.

1. The Shawshank Redemption

2. The Godfather

3. The Dark Knight

4. The Godfather Part II

5. 12 Angry Men

6. Schindler's List

7. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

8. Pulp Fiction

9. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

10. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

11. Forrest Gump

12. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

13. Fight Club

14. Inception

15. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

16. The Matrix

17. Goodfellas

18. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

20. Dune: Part Two

21. Interstellar

22. It's a Wonderful Life

23. Seven Samurai

24. The Silence of the Lambs

25. Saving Private Ryan

26. City of God

27. Life Is Beautiful

28. The Green Mile

29. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

30. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

31. Back to the Future

32. Spirited Away

33. The Pianist

34. Parasite

36. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

37. Gladiator

38. The Lion King

39. Léon: The Professional

40. The Departed

41. American History X

42. Whiplash

43. The Prestige

44. Grave of the Fireflies

45. Harakiri

46. The Usual Suspects

47. Casablanca

48. The Intouchables

49. Cinema Paradiso

50. Modern Times

51. Rear Window

52. Once Upon a Time in the West

54. City Lights

55. Django Unchained

56. Apocalypse Now

57. Memento

58. 12th Fail

60. Raiders of the Lost Ark

61. The Lives of Others

62. Sunset Blvd.

63. Paths of Glory

64. Avengers: Infinity War

65. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

66. Witness for the Prosecution

67. The Shining

68. The Great Dictator

70. Inglourious Basterds

71. The Dark Knight Rises

72. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

73. American Beauty

76. Amadeus

77. Toy Story

78. Das Boot

79. Avengers: Endgame

80. Braveheart

82. Princess Mononoke

83. Good Will Hunting

84. Your Name.

85. Once Upon a Time in America

86. High and Low

87. 3 Idiots

88. Singin' in the Rain

89. Capernaum

90. Requiem for a Dream

91. Come and See

92. Toy Story 3

93. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi

94. Oppenheimer

95. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

96. The Hunt

97. 2001: A Space Odyssey

98. Reservoir Dogs

100. Lawrence of Arabia

101. The Apartment

102. North by Northwest

103. Incendies

104. Citizen Kane

105. Vertigo

107. Double Indemnity

108. Scarface

109. Amélie

110. Full Metal Jacket

112. A Clockwork Orange

114. To Kill a Mockingbird

115. The Sting

116. A Separation

117. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

118. Die Hard

119. Metropolis

120. Like Stars on Earth

121. Snatch

122. Hamilton

123. L.A. Confidential

125. Bicycle Thieves

126. Taxi Driver

127. Downfall

128. Dangal

129. For a Few Dollars More

130. Batman Begins

131. The Wolf of Wall Street

132. Some Like It Hot

133. Green Book

134. The Kid

135. The Father

136. Judgment at Nuremberg

137. All About Eve

138. The Truman Show

139. Top Gun: Maverick

140. Shutter Island

141. There Will Be Blood

142. Casino

143. Jurassic Park

145. The Sixth Sense

146. Pan's Labyrinth

147. Unforgiven

148. No Country for Old Men

149. A Beautiful Mind

150. The Thing

151. Kill Bill: Vol. 1

152. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

153. Yojimbo

154. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

155. The Great Escape

156. Finding Nemo

157. Rashomon

158. Prisoners

159. Howl's Moving Castle

160. The Elephant Man

161. Chinatown

162. Dial M for Murder

163. Gone with the Wind

164. V for Vendetta

165. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

166. The Secret in Their Eyes

167. Inside Out

168. Raging Bull

169. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

170. Trainspotting

171. The Bridge on the River Kwai

173. Spider-Man: No Way Home

175. Catch Me If You Can

176. Warrior

177. Godzilla Minus One

178. Gran Torino

179. My Neighbor Totoro

180. Million Dollar Baby

181. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

182. Children of Heaven

183. 12 Years a Slave

184. Blade Runner

185. Before Sunrise

186. Ben-Hur

187. Barry Lyndon

188. The Grand Budapest Hotel

189. Gone Girl

190. Hacksaw Ridge

191. The Gold Rush

192. Memories of Murder

193. In the Name of the Father

194. Dead Poets Society

195. Wild Tales

196. Mad Max: Fury Road

197. The Deer Hunter

198. The General

199. On the Waterfront

200. Monsters, Inc.

201. Sherlock Jr.

202. The Third Man

203. The Wages of Fear

205. How to Train Your Dragon

206. Wild Strawberries

207. Mary and Max

208. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

209. Ratatouille

210. Ford v Ferrari

211. Tokyo Story

212. The Big Lebowski

214. The Seventh Seal

217. Spotlight

218. Hotel Rwanda

219. The Terminator

220. Platoon

221. The Passion of Joan of Arc

222. La haine

223. Before Sunset

224. The Best Years of Our Lives

225. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

226. The Exorcist

228. Network

229. Jai Bhim

230. Stand by Me

231. The Wizard of Oz

232. The Incredibles

233. Hachi: A Dog's Tale

234. The Handmaiden

235. Into the Wild

236. My Father and My Son

237. The Sound of Music

238. To Be or Not to Be

239. The Grapes of Wrath

240. The Battle of Algiers

241. Groundhog Day

242. Amores Perros

243. Rebecca

244. The Iron Giant

245. Cool Hand Luke

246. The Help

247. It Happened One Night

248. Aladdin

249. Dances with Wolves

250. Paris, Texas

The Top Rated Movie list only includes feature films.

• Shorts, TV movies, and documentaries are not included
• The list is ranked by a formula which includes the number of ratings each movie received from users, and value of ratings received from regular users
• To be included on the list, a movie must receive ratings from at least 25000 users

More to explore

Top box office (us), most popular movies, top rated english movies, most popular tv shows, top 250 tv shows, lowest rated movies, most popular celebs.

• by Brent Lang
• Variety - Film News

• by Adam B. Vary

• by Peter Bradshaw
• The Guardian - Film News

Top Rated Movies by Genre

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Streaming on Max: The 22 Absolute Best Movies to Watch

Here are some highly rated films to check out, plus a look at what to watch in April.

Wonka is now streaming.

Wondering what you should watch on the Max streaming service ?

Max  replaced HBO Max last year and streams a variety of titles, including Warner Bros. movies like Dune and HBO originals like Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off. Below, you'll find a batch of can't-miss films on the streamer, plus a look at new releases for this month. (If you're still trying to figure out if Max is for you, skim  our review of the Warner Bros. Discovery streaming service ).

New releases for April

Note:  These descriptions are taken from official websites for the films and lightly edited for style.

• The Harry Potter franchise (2001-2011):  Fantasy. The first entry, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, tells the story of a boy who embarks on the adventure of a lifetime when he's invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
• Lost in Translation (2003): Comedy-drama. It centers on two Americans in Tokyo -- a movie star in town to shoot a whiskey commercial and a young woman tagging along with her workaholic photographer husband.
• The Social Network (2010): Drama. It's a story about the founders of the social-networking website, Facebook.
• The Zone of Interest (2023):  Drama. The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
• Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part One (2024):  Superhero. Reality needs saving from an unstoppable antimatter armageddon, and the combined might of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern and hundreds of Super Heroes from multiple Earths might be able to save it.

Read more:   Best TV Shows to Watch on Max

The best movies to watch

The films below consist of notable new releases and blockbusters, HBO and Max originals and Warner Bros. films made exclusively for Max . All score around 65 or higher on Metacritic.

Wonka (2023)

Dune's Timothée Chalamet stars in this prequel to Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and it's a total treat. With new and familiar tunes, a committed cast and oodles and oodles of whimsy, the film allows audiences to get to know a young Willy Wonka with giraffe-sized ambition and undeniable chocolate-making skill. It's a quirky, comforting flick from Paddington director Paul King that you'll absolutely want on your plate.

Barbie (2023)

Unless you've been living in Barbie Land (or another place that isn't the real world), chances are you're very familiar with this pink-coated comedy already. The flick -- Warner Bros.' highest-grossing global release of all time -- brings a long list of stars together for a hilarious and heartfelt adventure. Greta Gerwig directs, Margot Robbie plays the titular role, and Ryan Gosling belts out an incredible power ballad as Ken.

Father of the Bride (2022)

Max's Father of the Bride introduces a Cuban American family that includes patriarch Billy, a traditional guy who struggles to digest surprising news from his eldest daughter: She's met a guy, and she wants to marry and move away with him. The third film adaptation of a 1949 novel of the same name by Edward Streeter, the movie is an enjoyable iteration that includes stars like Andy Garcia and singer Gloria Estefan.

8-Bit Christmas (2021)

A playful comedy set in the '80s, 8-Bit Christmas follows the story of a young Jake Doyle, a dedicated 10-year-old who desperately seeks a Nintendo. The film is delightfully narrated by Neil Patrick Harris, an older Jake reminiscing on his past quest to secure the gaming console. Yes, there's a Christmas backdrop to the story, but Jake's unyielding commitment to his mission, and what he learns along the way, make this cheery feature a must-watch even after the holiday season. 

Let Them All Talk (2020)

Meryl Streep playing an eccentric author in a Steven Soderbergh comedy. What more do you need to know? If you do want to know more: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Hughes (Streep) is struggling to finish her next book, chased by her literary agent (Gemma Chan). She boards a cruise ship with old friends, who inspired her best-known work. Tensions are strong. It looks great -- Soderbergh uses crisp, natural light -- and most of the dialogue is improvised. See how Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen, Lucas Hedges and the rest of the impeccable cast have fun with that.

Priscilla (2023)

Like A24 movies? Currently, new A24 releases wind up on Max, which means you'll eventually be able to take in buzzy flicks like The Iron Claw and the forthcoming title Civil War. For now, you may want to check out Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, about the relationship between her and Elvis Presley. Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi star in the stylish flick, which tells things from Priscilla's point of view.

The Color Purple (2023)

This movie musical version of The Color Purple is adapted from Alice Walker's 1982 novel and the Broadway play. Set in the early 1900s, it tells the story of Celie, a Black woman living in the South who faces multiple hardships but is able to find strength in the bonds in her life. The cast includes Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson, Colman Domingo, Halle Bailey and Danielle Brooks, who received a 2023 Oscar nomination for her role as Celie's daughter-in-law, Sofia.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Avatar: The Way of Water reintroduced audiences to James Cameron's film franchise after 13 years and won an Oscar for best visual effects. The sequel centers on the Sully family -- Jake, Neytiri and their kids -- and is brimming with adventure and heart. It'll be  at least a couple of years  until Avatar 3 arrives, but you can pass the time by rewatching this on Max.

Kimi (2022)

Steven Soderbergh directs this engaging tech thriller set during the COVID-19 pandemic. Angela, a Seattle tech worker played by a neon blue-haired Zoë Kravitz, has agoraphobia, a fear that prevents her from making it past the front door of her apartment. But when she uncovers an unsettling recording while doing her job, she's pushed to make the leap. Kimi is a stylish thriller complete with eye-catching cinematography, a solid score and a protagonist you'll be rooting for.

The Fallout (2022)

After a shooting occurs at her high school, 16-year-old Vada Cavell must navigate friendships, school and her relationship with her family. The Fallout skillfully approaches serious subject matter with realistic dialogue and compassion for its characters. With strong performances from stars Jenna Ortega, as Vada, and Maddie Ziegler, as her new friend Mia Reed, the feature will keep you glued to the screen for the entirety of its 90-minute runtime.

Dune (2021)

Remember 2021, when Warner Bros. movies hit HBO Max on the same day they premiered in theaters? That exciting period may be over, but at least we'll always have the memory of watching Denis Villeneuve's stunning sci-fi epic Dune at home. If you've never seen the film or need to brush up on what "the spice" is before Part Two, stream Dune now.

King Richard (2021)

King Richard is a feel-good biopic about the father of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams. The film winds back the clock to before the sisters became household names, giving us a glimpse of their upbringing in Compton and time spent practicing on run-down courts with their father, Richard Williams (Will Smith). Convinced his daughters are going to be successful, Richard works tirelessly to get their star potential noticed by professional coaches. A complicated man with a tremendous personality, Richard is fascinating to get to know, and his unwavering belief in Venus and Serena is inspiring. 

In the Heights (2021)

In the Heights  stars Anthony Ramos (whom you might recognize as John Laurens in Hamilton) playing Usnavi, a bodega owner struggling to keep his business afloat while a heatwave strikes Washington Heights. Secretly in love with his neighbor Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who dreams of getting out of the salon and out of the neighborhood, Usnavi serves the people of Washington Heights with a whole lot of love, lottery tickets and cafe con leche. Between the choreographed twirls and fireworks, In the Heights is an examination of wealth disparity, immigration, classism and the importance of culture.

Son of Monarchs (2020)

A rare (nowadays) 90-minute film, American Mexican drama Son of Monarchs will stay with you long after the end credits roll. This deep character study follows two brothers who are changed in markedly different ways by the trauma they suffered in childhood. This story, folding in magical realism, follows how they move forward in life -- the butterfly metaphors are strong, with biologist Mendel returning to his hometown surrounded by majestic monarch butterfly forests.

Bad Education (2019)

Based on a magazine article by journalist Robert Kolker, this tale about a public school embezzlement scandal and the student journalists who broke the news is captivating from start to finish. Allison Janney and Hugh Jackman are great in their roles as the school officials who took part in the scheme. The drama also won the 2020 Emmy award for Outstanding Television Movie. 

The Menu (2022)

A dinner at an exclusive restaurant turns from something to savor to something to survive in this shocking horror satire. Viewers learn about the privileged guests dining at Hawthorne as Ralph Fiennes' experienced chef unveils his fateful menu. Find your seat for this delectable experience, which also stars Anya Taylor-Joy.

No Sudden Move (2021)

A movie from Steven Soderbergh, the great director behind Erin Brockovich, Ocean's Eleven and, more recently, Logan Lucky? Twists, thrills and desperate characters populate this crime thriller set in 1950s Detroit. When a seemingly simple job gets out of hand, a group of criminals must work together to uncover what's really going on. Take in the incredible cast: Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, David Harbour, Jon Hamm and Amy Seimetz. While the plot can be a little convoluted and some won't be able to get past the fish-eye lens cinematography, Soderbergh's sense of humor and immersive direction make this crime caper an entertaining night in.

Documentary

All That Breathes (2022)

This captivating documentary is filled with images that will stick with you. It centers on two brothers in New Delhi who run a bird hospital dedicated to black kites -- birds of prey that are a staple of the sky. It was a contender for best documentary feature at the 2023 Oscars.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off (2022)

Tune into this HBO doc for the gravity-defying skateboard stunts, a time capsule of the '80s skateboarding scene, and a version of Hawk you've probably never seen. We get to know the renowned athlete as a lanky, stubborn but determined kid who adopted his own skateboarding style. Hawk's persistence is something to marvel at, along with all the stunning skateboard moves this film packs in. Hang on for a memorable ride.

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021)

This film about beloved author, chef and globe-traveling TV host Anthony Bourdain comes from documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville, who also directed 2018's Won't You Be My Neighbor? and the Oscar-winning film Twenty Feet from Stardom. In interviews with people who knew Bourdain, like his friends, former partners and longtime colleagues, the doc tracks his career path, relationships and personal struggles. Bourdain fans and those less acquainted with the star will likely appreciate this two-hour look at his life.

The Batman (2022)

Robert Pattinson steps out as Batman in this superhero flick directed by Matt Reeves. The movie takes place in a perpetually gray and rain-soaked Gotham City, where Bruce Wayne starts to seek out a murderer with an affinity for riddles. Along the way, he meets Catwoman, played by a swaggering Zoë Kravitz. Great scene-setting and storytelling make this a satisfying dark mystery. 

The Suicide Squad (2021)

Over-the-top violence abounds in this DC film about supervillains who agree to help the US government in exchange for some time off their prison sentences. Their mission is to destroy something alluded to as Project Starfish, harbored in the fictional island country of Corto Maltese. With a notable cast that includes Margot Robbie, Idris Elba and John Cena, 2021's The Suicide Squad is a wickedly entertaining, darkly funny bloodbath that differs from what you usually see in superhero movies. (Peacemaker, a spinoff TV series, is also available on Max.)

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8 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.

• Share full article

By The New York Times

CRITIC’S PICK

For this tennis-pro triad, it’s love, set, match.

‘Challengers’

The highly-anticipated latest from the director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me by Your Name”) follows three tennis pros as they shift between lovers, friends and foes. It stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.

From our review:

All three leads in “Challengers” are very appealing, and each brings emotional and psychological nuance to the story, whatever the characters’ current configuration. They’re also just fun to look at, and part of the pleasure of this movie is watching pretty people in states of undress restlessly circling one another, muscles tensed and desiring gazes ricocheting. Guadagnino knows this; he’s in his wheelhouse here, and you can feel his delight in his actors.

In theaters. Read the full review .

Critic’s Pick

A series of powerful vignettes.

‘terrestrial verses’.

Tehranians interact with various cultural officials in their everyday life — finding the right uniform for a daughter’s school ceremony, applying for a job or a drivers license, registering a son’s name — and must navigate the restraints of authoritarian bureaucracy.

Because each vignette is no more than a few minutes long and consists of Kafkaesque conversations that border on the absurd, “Terrestrial Verses” operates with a cumulative effect. It’s death by a thousand pinpricks, a succession of small indignities. Each seemingly simple task is not just saddled with procedural irritations — forms to fill out, appointments to attend, banal questions to answer — but with fear. Suppose your answer to a routine query could incriminate you or there’s no way to prove to an official that you aren’t lying. How would you live your life?

B(oredom). D(etachment). S(tagnation). M(alaise).

‘the feeling that the time for doing something has passed’.

This deadpan sex comedy directed, written by and starring Joanna Arnow in her debut feature follows a woman as she’s dominated both at work and in various B.D.S.M. relationships, none of which seem to bring her fulfillment.

Arnow films her own nude body with the kind of frankness that is called brave because she wants to be more confrontational than arousing. She’s so visible that it takes a beat to remember that someone can be physically exposed and emotionally opaque.

A tear-jerker that’s unusually understated.

‘nowhere special’.

A terminally-ill single father (James Norton) searches for the right adoptive parents to care for his son (Daniel Lamont) after he dies.

After being admonished by a snotty rich client because of slow work, John, taking the adage “you only live once” to heart, eggs the fellow’s house. It’s one of the few moments when the movie deigns to deliver a conventional satisfaction. But the mostly low-key mode of “Nowhere Special” is the right one. Norton is spectacular, but little Lamont delivers one of those uncanny performances that doesn’t seem like acting, and makes you feel for the kid almost as much as his onscreen parent does.

Another Cronenberg progeny with unsettling in her DNA.

In Caitlin Cronenberg’s feature debut, ecological collapse leads Canada to reduce its population by calling on citizens to volunteer for euthanasia. One well-off family discovers that the choice might not be so voluntary.

“Humane” is a thought experiment sprung to bloody life, a cross between the trolley problem and dystopian extinction nightmares. Set in the very near future, it tries to tackle a cascade of ethical questions. Who counts as valuable? What does it mean to be good? If humans wreck the earth, what will we do to survive? Do we even deserve it?

Perfect for arachnophobia exposure therapy.

After a venomous spider escapes from its owner’s care and begins rapidly reproducing, the residents of a low-income housing block must face off against these eight-legged menaces.

There are no fresh ideas in the French creepy-crawler “Infested,” yet this first feature from Sébastien Vanicek scurries forward with such pep and purpose that its shortcomings are easily forgivable. Add a handful of eager young actors, a sociopolitical slam and a claustrophobic location swarming with venomous spiders and you’ll be hunting for the DEET long before the credits roll.

Watch on Shudder . Read the full review .

Your standard musician biopic, but make it spiritual.

‘unsung hero’.

Based on a real family of musicians who have five Grammy Awards between them, this faith-based drama follows a tight-knit clan as they move from Australia to Nashville, and find success in recording Christian music.

Viewer beware: Between the uplift and the cringe, this movie may cause whiplash. Joel Smallbone plays his own father, David, who faces financial and reputational ruin after booking a big concert and failing to pack the house. He resettles the family in the United States, but no job materializes. His pep-talking spouse, Helen (Daisy Betts), and their beatific children pull up bootstraps and practically whistle while they work, but it’s not enough.

A boyish action flick starring a boy named Boy.

‘boy kills world’.

Blood begets more blood when a victim of an attack that left him deaf and mute seeks revenge on the perpetrators.

At least give it up for the stunt crew on “Boy Kills World,” a boneheaded action movie that gives some exceedingly fit performers — its hard-body star Bill Skarsgard very much included — a chance to flaunt their physical skills. To judge from all the grunting, the straining muscles and cascading sweat, Skarsgard, along with a few of his nimble co-stars and an army of stunt performers, puts in serious work to try to make the relentless bashing and smashing, flailing and dying look good. Too bad the filmmakers were incapable of doing the same.

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell speak about how “Anyone but You” beat the rom-com odds. Here are their takeaways after the film , debuting on Netflix, went from box office miss to runaway hit.

The vampire ballerina in the new movie “Abigail” has a long pop culture lineage . She and her sisters are obsessed, tormented and likely to cause harm.

In a joint interview, the actors Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough discuss “Under the Bridge,” their new true-crime series  based on a teenager’s brutal killing in British Columbia.

The movie “Civil War” has tapped into a dark set of national angst . In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters say they fear the country’s divides may lead to actual, not just rhetorical, battles.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, top gun: maverick.

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In “Top Gun: Maverick,” the breathless, gravity and logic-defying “ Top Gun ” sequel that somehow makes all the sense in the world despite landing more than three decades after the late Tony Scott ’s original, an admiral refers to Tom Cruise ’s navy aviator Pete Mitchell—call sign “ Maverick ”—as “the fastest man alive.” It’s a chuckle-inducing scene that recalls one in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” when Alec Baldwin ’s high-ranking Alan Hunley deems Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, “the living manifestation of destiny.” In neither of these instances are Cruise’s co-stars exclusively referring to his make-believe screen personas. They are also (or rather, primarily) talking about the ongoing legacy of Cruise the actor himself. 

Truth be told, our fearless and ever-handsome action hero earns both appraisals with a generous side of applause, being one of the precious remnants of bona-fide movie superstardoms of yore, a slowly dwindling they-don’t-make-'em-like-they-used-to notion of immortality these days. Indeed, Cruise’s consistent commitment to Hollywood showmanship—along with the insane levels of physical craft he unfailingly puts on the table by insisting to do his own stunts—I would argue, deserves the same level of high-brow respect usually reserved for the fully-method sorts such as Daniel Day-Lewis . Even if you somehow overlook the fact that Cruise is one of our most gifted and versatile dramatic and comedic actors with the likes of “ Born on the Fourth of July ,” “ Magnolia ,” “ Tropic Thunder ,” and “ Collateral ” under his belt, you will never forget why you show up to a Tom Cruise movie, thanks in large part to his aforesaid enduring dedication. How many other household names and faces can claim to guarantee “a singular movie event” these days and deliver each time, without exceptions?

In that regard, you will be right at home with “Top Gun: Maverick,” director Joseph Kosinski ’s witty adrenaline booster that allows its leading producer to be exactly what he is—a star—while upping the emotional and dramatic stakes of its predecessor with a healthy (but not overdone) dose of nostalgia. After a title card that explains what “Top Gun” is—the identical one that introduced us to the world of crème-de-la-crème Navy pilots in 1986—we find Maverick in a role on the fringes of the US Navy, working as an undaunted test pilot against the familiar backdrop of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone.” You won’t be surprised that soon enough, he gets called on a one-last-job type of mission as a teacher to a group of recent Top Gun graduates. Their assignment is just as obscure and politically cuckoo as it was in the first movie. There is an unnamed enemy—let’s called it Russia because it’s probably Russia—some targets that need to be destroyed, a flight plan that sounds nuts, and a scheme that will require all successful Top Gun recruits to fly at dangerously low altitudes. But can it be done?

It’s a long shot, if the details of the operation—explained to the aviator hopefuls in a rather “It can’t be done” style reminiscent of “ Mission: Impossible ”—are any indication. But you will be surprised that more appealing than the prospect of the bonkers mission here is the human drama that co-scribes Ehren Kruger , Eric Warren Singer , and Christopher McQuarrie spin from a story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks . For starters, the group of potential recruits include Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw ( Miles Teller , terrific), the son of the dearly departed “Goose,” whose accidental death still haunts Maverick as much as it does the rest of us. And if Rooster’s understandable distaste of him wasn’t enough (despite Maverick’s protective instincts towards him), there are skeptics of Maverick’s credentials— Jon Hamm ’s Cyclone, for instance, can’t understand why Maverick’s foe-turned-friend Iceman ( Val Kilmer , returning with a tearjerker of a part) insists on him as the teacher of the mission. Further complicating the matters is Maverick’s on-and-off romance with Penny Benjamin (a bewitching Jennifer Connelly ), a new character that was prominently name-checked in the original movie, as some will recall. What an entanglement through which one is tasked to defend their nation and celebrate a certain brand of American pride ...

In a different package, all the brouhaha jingoism and proud fist-shaking seen in “Top Gun: Maverick” could have been borderline insufferable. But fortunately Kosinski—whose underseen and underrated “Only The Brave” will hopefully find a second life now—seems to understand exactly what kind of movie he is asked to navigate. In his hands, the tone of “Maverick” strikes a fine balance between good-humored vanity and half-serious self-deprecation, complete with plenty of quotable zingers and emotional moments that catch one off-guard.

In some sense, what this movie takes most seriously are concepts like friendship, loyalty, romance, and okay, bromance. Everything else that surrounds those notions—like patriotic egotism—feels like playful winks and embellishments towards fashioning an old-school action movie. And because this mode is clearly shared by the entirety of the cast—from a memorable Ed Harris that begs for more screen time to the always great Glen Powell as the alluringly overconfident “ Hangman ,” Greg Tarzan Davis as “Coyote,” Jay Ellis as “ Payback ,” Danny Ramirez as “Fanboy,” Monica Barbaro as “ Phoenix ,” and Lewis Pullman as “Bob”—“Top Gun: Maverick” runs fully on its enthralling on-screen harmony at times. For evidence, look no further than the intense, fiery chemistry between Connelly and Cruise throughout—it’s genuinely sexy stuff—and (in a nostalgic nod to the original), a rather sensual beach football sequence, shot with crimson hues and suggestive shadows by Claudio Miranda . 

Still, the action sequences—all the low-altitude flights, airborne dogfights as well as Cruise on a motorcycle donned in his original Top Gun leather jacket—are likewise the breathtaking stars of “Maverick,” often accompanied by Harold Faltermeyer ’s celebratory original score (aided by cues from Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe ). Reportedly, all the flying scenes—a pair of which are pure hell-yes moments for Cruise—were shot in actual U.S. Navy F/A-18s, for which the cast had to be trained for during a mind-boggling process. The authentic work that went into every frame generously shows. As the jets cut through the atmosphere and brush their target soils in close-shave movements—all coherently edited by Eddie Hamilton —the sensation they generate feels miraculous and worthy of the biggest screen one can possibly find. Equally worthy of that big screen is the emotional strokes of “Maverick” that pack an unexpected punch. Sure, you might be prepared for a second sky-dance with “Maverick,” but perhaps not one that might require a tissue or two in its final stretch.

Available in theaters May 27th. 

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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Film credits.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some strong language.

131 minutes

Tom Cruise as Captain Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell

Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw

Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin

Jon Hamm as Vice Admiral Cyclone

Glen Powell as Hangman

Lewis Pullman as Bob

Charles Parnell as Warlock

Bashir Salahuddin as Coleman

Monica Barbaro as Phoenix

Jay Ellis as Payback

Danny Ramirez as Fanboy

Greg Tarzan Davis as Coyote

Ed Harris as Rear Admiral

Val Kilmer as Admiral Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky

Manny Jacinto as Fritz

• Joseph Kosinski

Writer (based on characters created by)

• Jack Epps Jr.

Writer (story by)

• Peter Craig
• Justin Marks
• Ehren Kruger
• Eric Warren Singer
• Christopher McQuarrie

Cinematographer

• Claudio Miranda
• Chris Lebenzon
• Eddie Hamilton
• Lorne Balfe
• Harold Faltermeyer
• Hans Zimmer

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Screen Rant

Is this 2022 thriller really liam neeson's worst movie in his 46-year acting history.

Liam Neeson has starred in many action thrillers such as Taken and The Grey, but not all of them have been quite up to par with his career-best films.

• Neeson's 2022 film, Blacklight, has an 11% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it his worst-rated movie among critics.
• Despite the low critic score, the audience score for Blacklight is high at 82%, indicating strong viewer interest and positive feedback.
• While Blacklight is rated poorly by critics, it's not Neeson's worst film. The Other Man (2008) arguably holds that title as one of his lowest-rated movies.

A Liam Neeson thriller from 2022 is considered the worst movie of his illustrious acting career on Rotten Tomatoes. Since making his film debut in the 1978 drama Pilgrim's Progress , Neeson has become one of the most recognizable leading actors on the planet. Neeson's most notable films expand across all genres , including the action thriller Taken (2008), the romantic comedy classic Love, Actually (2003), the first Star Wars prequel movie Star Wars: Episode I -The Phantom Menace (1999), and of course, Steven Speilberg's harrowing Best Picture winner Schindler's List (1993), which earned Neeson his first and only Oscar nomination.

Neeson's celebrated action films have cemented him as a main figurehead of the genre alongside actors such as Jason Statham and Tom Cruise. Neeson has made several career changes throughout his acting career, shifting seamlessly between virtually all genres, which has made him one of the most versatile actors working today . Neeson recently reprised his iconic role as Qui-Gon Jinn in an episode of Disney's highly anticipated Obi-Wan Kenobi series and also made a surprise cameo as himself in the fourth and final season of the acclaimed FX series Atlanta . Neeson was also a major part of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy , playing Bruce Wayne's early mentor Ducard / Ra's al Ghul.

Blacklight Is Liam Neeson's "Worst" Movie On Rotten Tomatoes

Blacklight has just an 11% critic score on rotten tomatoes and a 27 metascore..

Neeson certainly has a notable pool of poorly rated films in his filmography, which consists of more than 140 movies and television series across his 46-year career.

Despite having a high audience score on Rotten Tomatoes of 82%, Liam Neeson's 2022 action thriller Blacklight is the worst-rated movie of his career among critics. Blacklight has just an 11% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 27 Metascore. The disparity between the audience score of 82% and the critic score of 11% for Blacklight is alarming, which raises the question of whether Blacklight truly is the worst movie of Neeson's career. Blacklight is also currently trending on Hulu, indicating that there is more positive feedback and genuine interest among viewers than movie critics. It does, however, have just a 1.9 rating on Letterboxd .

Neeson certainly has a notable pool of poorly rated films in his filmography, which consists of more than 140 movies and television series across his 46-year career. Some of his other poorly rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes include his most recent ones, with 2022's Marlowe and Memory , which both came out in the same year as Blacklight , both receiving critic scores below 30%. Taken 3 (2014) and The Nut Job (2014) are not too far off from Blacklight's 11% either, with both earning a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 13%. Neeson makes so many movies on a consistent basis that it's no surprise some of them turn out to be duds.

Pamela Anderson's New Movie With Liam Neeson Is What Her Career's Needed For 28 Years

Why blacklight's reviews are so bad, critics have grown tired of neeson's repetitive action movies.

The consensus among critics is that Blacklight is virtually unwatchable, while audiences are much more forgiving and supportive of the Neeson film overall.

The massive gap between Blacklight's critic score and audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is the largest one of Neeson's career. The consensus among critics is that Blacklight is virtually unwatchable, while audiences are much more forgiving and supportive of the Neeson film overall. Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times described Blacklight as, " The kind of low-wattage, paint-by-numbers thriller that usually signifies a perilous turn toward the action purgatory that is cheap, direct-to-nowhere fare ." Barry Hertz of the Globe and Mail wrote, "Y ou will walk away... with many, many, many questions. The first one being: Can I please have my money and 107 minutes back? "

From looking over many of the top critic's reviews of Blacklight , the common thread between them is a shared frustration with Neeson seemingly settling with another uninspired action flick . Neeson has demonstrated just how profound and talented of an actor he can be, and many critics would rather watch him be challenged once again as the lead in a great story rather than continue to cash in on the success of his previous action hits like Taken and The Grey . Even if most critics' frustrations with Neeson's career choices nowadays fuel their reviews of his repetitive thrillers, it's evident that his fans are still enjoying them.

Liam Neeson Rules Out Qui-Gon Jinn's Live-Action Star Wars Return - But There's Still A Way He Could Be Back

Why blacklight is not liam neeson's worst movie, neeson's worst movie is arguably the other man (2008).

The Other Man was torn apart by critics and audiences alike, critiquing the film's waste of a great and talented cast with a convoluted plot and confusing pace caused by poor editing.

Despite most critics disliking Blacklight , it's not truly the worst movie of his career, even if it is somewhat a copy-and-paste of his previous action hits. Neeson's worst movie is arguably The Other Man (2008) , a mystery thriller that stars him alongside Antonio Banderas and Laura Linney. Written and directed by Richard Eyre ( Notes on a Scandal , Iris ), The Other Man was torn apart by critics and audiences alike, critiquing the film's waste of a great and talented cast with a convoluted plot and confusing pace caused by poor editing. As a whole, The Other Man is universally one of, if not the, worst Liam Neeson movie, although Blacklight is not far from it.

Liam Neeson stars in this 2022 Thriller and Action film directed by Mark Williams. Neeson plays Travis Block, a Fixer utilized by the FBI to bring in one of their undercover agents. Things aren't exactly what they seem and a conspiracy unravels.

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What Is the Best Streaming Service for You? How to Choose

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The best streaming service is the one that fits within your budget. With dozens of streaming services, varying subscription models, trial periods and add-ons, today’s array of streamers makes TV anything but simple.

Though many of them are less than a decade old, streaming services are a part of millions of Americans’ lives. U.S. households have an average of 4.1 subscriptions to streaming video or direct-to-consumer TV services, according to a 2023 survey by Leichtman Research Group. And consumers spend on average $61 per month on streaming services, according to the 2024 Digital Media Trends Report by Deloitte's Center for Technology, Media & Telecommunications.

Meanwhile, cable packages from some of the largest TV providers — including Cox, Spectrum and Xfinity — run $20 to about $150 per month, according to CableTV.com, a TV and internet affiliate site.

The Deloitte report found almost half of consumers would cut their favorite subscription if the monthly price increased by $5. And a 2024 Forbes Home survey found 48% of subscribers pay for streaming services they rarely use.

You may be looking to lower your internet bills , slim down what you pay for streaming or add a new service. Here’s how to fit streaming services into your budget, tips on choosing and a look at prices for major streaming services.

What is the best streaming service?

Assessing your content consumption is a good place to start. Are you primarily a movie watcher? Do you enjoy bingeing the latest TV series? Or maybe you turn to sports first.

You’ll also want to think about whether it makes sense to find a streamer that combines multiple genres — like movies, TV and sports — together in one package versus buying each on a separate platform.

If the quantity of films and television shows is your goal, Amazon’s streaming service, Prime Video, boasts "a vast library of content," according to CableTV.com. And Disney+ may just be the best streaming service for families, given its mountain of kid and family-friendly content.

If you’re measuring quality of content based on which streaming service has won the most awards, Max (formerly named HBO Max) and HBO picked up more Emmy Awards than any other platform at the ceremony this year, according to The Hollywood Reporter, an entertainment trade publication.

How do streaming services fit into your budget?

While personal preferences, quantity and quality of content all factor into the decision-making process, so does your budget. Which streaming service can you afford and how does it fit your budget?

One helpful strategy is to examine your budget using the 50/30/20 method . This means that 50% of your take-home pay goes toward things you need, like housing and food, 30% for wants and 20% for savings and debt paydown. Streaming services make up part of the 30% category.

Depending on other wants, like eating out, traveling or shopping, what funds are left in this bracket for you to spend on entertainment? Analyzing your priorities in the wants category will help you decide which streaming services fit your budget.

You can also look for ways to cut back on wants by tracking spending, setting savings goals and seeing if there are any current offers for streaming services that might benefit you.

If you are already a credit card user , you may be able to earn cash back or bonus points on streaming services. While it may not be worth opening a credit card just for this benefit, it can be a nice addition to current budget strategies.

How much do streaming services cost?

If you’re looking for the cheapest streaming service, that’ll be Peacock, which starts at $5.99 per month. If you’re looking for the most expensive streamer from the list below, that would be FuboTV’s Premier plan at $99.99 per month. But what about all the other streamers in between? Read more about the overall cost of each major streaming service, and click through for more-detailed pricing and programming notes.

How much is Netflix a month?

Netflix costs $6.99 to $22.99 per month, depending on your subscription plan. The service offers three plans.

Netflix has cracked down on password sharing. It now states that accounts are meant to be shared only with people living in the same household. However, customers can purchase an extra member slot at $7.99 per month to share their account with someone not living in their household.

How much is YouTube TV?

YouTubeTV costs $72.99 per month for its base plan, thought new subscribers can often take advantage of lower promotional rates.

It offers two options beyond the base plan. The Spanish Plan includes 30 Spanish channels. If you’re interested in just a few networks and don’t want to commit to the basic plan, YouTubeTV also has the option to pick and choose which networks you want to pay for.

How much is Hulu?

Hulu’s plan with ads costs $7.99 per month, while its ad-free plan costs $17.99 per month. With the ad-supported plan, you can pay annually for a discount.

It also offers live TV bundles ranging from $75.99 to $89.99 per month, depending on channel options and ads.

Notably, Hulu offers several add-on options. If you have an eligible Hulu plan, you can add on options such as Max, Cinemax, and Paramount+ with Showtime, among others.

How much is Disney+?

Disney+ costs $7.99 per month with ads. The ad-free plan is $13.99 per month, or $139.99 annually.

Disney+ offers users different package deals to bundle services, such as combining Disney+ with ESPN+ and Hulu. Bundled options range from $9.99 to $24.99 per month.

How much is Max?

Max with ads costs $9.99 per month. For ad-free viewing, users can choose from two packages priced at $15.99 per month and $19.99 per month. The upgraded ad-free package includes 4K Ultra HD video and more streaming and downloadable options.

You can also add on a sports bundle for an additional $9.99 per month, granting access to NHL, NBA and MLB games, among others.

How much is Apple TV+?

Apple TV+ costs $9.99 per month after a free seven-day trial.

The streaming service also offers several plans under Apple One that bundle access to Apple TV+ with other Apple services, such as Apple Music , Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness and Apple News. Apple One plans range in price from $19.95 to $37.95. 

How much is Peacock?

Peacock costs $5.99 to $11.99 per month, depending on your service. Peacock Premium, which includes ads, costs $5.99 per month. Peacock Premium Plus, which doesn’t have ads, costs $11.99 per month. Both can be paid annually to get a discounted cost.

How much is Prime Video?

If you already have an Amazon Prime subscription for $14.99 per month, you have access to some of the streaming options on Prime Video. Amazon Prime Video by itself costs $8.99 per month.

Now that Amazon has begun adding commercials to Prime Video shows and movies, you’ll need to pay an additional $2.99 a month if you want to watch ad free.

How much is Sling TV?

Sling TV offers two plans: Sling Orange comes with more than 30 channels and costs $40 per month, with half off the first month sometimes offered.

Sling Blue pricing and channel access depends on where you live, with higher prices in major metropolitan areas.

How much is Fubo TV?

Fubo TV , which focuses on live sports, offers plans ranging from $32.99 per month to $99.99 per month.

There are four plans to choose from: Pro, Elite, Premier and Latino. The number of channels each plan offers depends on your ZIP code and local offerings; you can enter your ZIP code here to learn more. Most plans, except for the Latino plan, offer access to more than 150 channels.

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48 best Mother's day gifts in 2024

The best Mother's Day gifts are thoughtful, useful products in your mom's everyday life. Perhaps it's a customized apron for cooking, a calming diffuser, or a comfy pair of socks. Below, we've collected a list of our favorite gift ideas for Mother's Day, to show your mom how much you care. 

For more affordable gift ideas, check out our guide to the best cheap Mother's Day gifts , which are all under $25. And if you're going the classic route with flowers, make sure to consult our guide to the best flower delivery services . 

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